If I had talents with this kind of destructive output from the start, that fight might have ended considerably sooner.
The thought moved through Lukas’s mind with the unhurried quality of soone sitting with a realization rather than rushing past it. He turned Lightning Bolt over in his tactical awareness the way he might turn a new weapon over in his hands — assessing range, assessing cost, assessing how it fit against the gaps in what he currently carried. The answer was that it fit well. Very well. The talent operated at a distance and delivered its result instantaneously, without the telegraphing that close-range attacks were always vulnerable to. Against fast targets, against enemies that used mobility as their primary defense, against situations where closing the gap was the most dangerous part of the engagent—
He filed it. Kept thinking.
Movent in his peripheral vision interrupted the process.
Tommy had turned toward the remaining snake corpse.
Lukas noticed the expression first — then spent a brief, genuinely surprised mont confirming that he was reading it correctly. Tommy’s bony face was not architecturally designed to convey a wide range of emotional states, but what was happening in the skeleton giant’s gaze right now was unmistakable. A strange, drawn quality. An attention that had nothing to do with threat assessnt and everything to do with sothing considerably more personal.
If Lukas had to na it, he would have called it hunger.
Could it be that he finds the snake’s bones appetizing?
He turned the possibility over without dismissing it. Astral Bone Vanguard was not a talent that ca with a detailed manual of its subject’s preferences and inner life, and Tommy had never previously demonstrated anything that could be cleanly categorized as desire. But the intelligence was clearly there — not the asured, language-adjacent intelligence of a calm adult, but sothing more imdiate and instinct-driven. The intelligence of sothing young and capable and easily captured by things that appealed to it directly.
A creature like that could absolutely have opinions about bones.
Particularly the bones of a Legendary grade opponent it had just spent a significant amount of effort fighting.
Lukas decided not to interfere with whatever Tommy was processing emotionally and turned his attention back to the more imdiate priority.
The dallion at his chest had resud its insistent vibration — steady and rhythmic, like a hand tugging at a sleeve, carrying the unmistakable quality of sothing that wanted him to move faster than he was currently moving. He acknowledged it the way he acknowledged most forms of external pressure — with awareness and without compliance.
He had learned his lesson about rushing toward unknown signals through unfamiliar caverns. Whatever waited at the other end of the dallion’s pull had been there long enough to still be there. A few more minutes of preparation were not going to change that, and the alternative — moving forward underprepared because an inanimate object had communicated urgency — was the kind of decision that caverns like this one were specifically designed to punish.
He would go. He simply would not go stupidly.
His eyes moved to the serpent’s body.
It had been lying there long enough that the violent, involuntary writhing had mostly stilled — the residual nerve signals running their course and finally going quiet. But the corpse was not entirely dormant. From ti to ti, a thin arc of yellow electricity crackled outward from beneath the scales, surging briefly across the cold flesh and then retreating, the last remnants of the lightning serpent’s internal charge dissipating in small, irregular intervals.
Lukas waited.
He stood at a patient, unhurried distance and simply watched until the intervals between sparks grew longer, then longer still, and finally stopped entirely. The cavern settled back into its baseline silence. The corpse lay still and cold and finally, genuinely inert.
He drew the blood-infused copper sword and got to work.
His expression as he began was one of complete, unselfconscious seriousness — the face of soone who has identified a task, assessed it as necessary, and committed to it without reserving any part of their attention for feeling undignified about what the task actually involves. He was not a butcher. He had no particular training in the systematic processing of a more-than-twenty-foot serpent carcass. What he had was a sword that cut through dense material with unreasonable ease, a reasonable understanding of anatomy from years of fighting things that had it, and the patience to work thodically through a problem that was not going to solve itself.
The blade moved through the thick scaled flesh with a smoothness that continued to be slightly startling every ti he experienced it — parting the material cleanly, eting no aningful resistance, the blood-infused edge finding the natural divisions in the serpent’s structure with an efficiency that felt almost collaborative. The scales separated. The muscle beneath yielded. He worked in sections, moving along the length of the body with deliberate, economical strokes.
Half an hour passed.
At the end of it, the mountain of separated at stood to one side, dense and substantial, carrying the faint residual sll of ozone from the serpent’s electrical nature. On the other side lay the bones — clean, pure white, their surface carrying the faint luminescence of high-quality skeletal material that had been reinforced over years of absorbing the creature’s own lightning.
Lukas looked at the at.
A look of genuine, unguarded hesitation crossed his face.
Can I actually eat all of that alone?
The question was not rhetorical. He looked at the volu, made a rough estimate, and arrived at a number of als that stretched into territory he was not entirely comfortable with. Just considering it — just holding the ntal image of working through that quantity of at by himself — produced a sensation suspiciously close to being already full.
He dismissed the hesitation the way he dismissed most inconvenient feelings.
It doesn’t matter if it takes days. This snake is ending up in my stomach.
The lightning serpent had been a Legendary grade First Sequence creature. Its at would carry nutritional and energetic value that no amount of inconvenient volu should talk him out of. He had fought for it. He had earned it. And leaving a resource of that quality behind because the quantity was daunting was the kind of decision that the version of himself he was trying to beco would look back on with very little patience.
He turned to Tommy.
A brief signal — the particular gesture that Tommy had learned to associate with a specific instruction. Then he extended it, directing the sa signal toward the second Astral Bone Vanguard he summoned into existence beside the first.
Both of them turned toward the pile of white bones with an attention that was, in Tommy’s case at least, several degrees warr than purely functional.
They began assimilating.
Lukas watched for a mont. The snake had not been easy. It had been fast and vicious and had co closer to ending him than he was comfortable dwelling on. But it had also, in the end, given him Lightning Bolt, reinforced Tommy’s fra with Legendary grade material, and provided enough sustenance to sustain him through whatever waited further in the cavern.
For an enemy, that was a fairly generous contribution.
The least he could do was make sure nothing went to waste.
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