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The Devourers swirled with increasing fervor. They were nearing their target. Vanderberk needed to keep enough distance from them so that they didn't turn on him, but he also had to stay close enough to either see or sense the opponent when they finally revealed it for him.

When they began lunging, he knew that was the cue. He readied one of his most powerful techniques, the helium of his body beginning to bristle like needles with anticipation.

Before he could finally pinpoint where to attack, however, a flash of light cut through the sky, so bright and massive that it seemed to be rending the entirety of the Living Inferno in two.

The beam fell upon the collective of Devourers, making them howl and try to wriggle away--but they were stuck fast, as if being held in place by the light.

And then they began to change.

From their shifting forms that were little more than vague shapes and body parts... into something crystalline. And glowing, as if having absorbed the light into themselves. Legs and bodies became more obvious, more stable. Heads, too. Even faces, though they still did not look human.

And wings. Great crystal wings emerged from their backs.

Vanderberk looked on in disbelief.

The changed Devourers, if they could even be called that anymore, turned on the unchanged ones. They started slashing through them with their rocky, crystalline bodies--with claws and wings and horns and beaks. And their sunken eyes came alive with even more light, shining brilliantly as luminous boxes appeared around the unchanged Devourers, imprisoning them en masse.

Vanderberk was stunned on two fronts. The first because he had never seen something like this before, and the second because he could feel that the Living Inferno itself was shaken. Its desire was always made known to him, and right now, its desire was to flee. To panic.

And yet it was also asking him for permission. Never had the Inferno felt more timid. It was like it was hoping he would protect it. Rescue it, even.

Vanderberk shook the Inferno's fear off. He couldn't let it infect him. And he attacked.

The crystal Devourers had to be subdued. That much was obvious. In an instant, he imprisoned them with pressurized helium coatings. With their movements sealed, they would be much easier to deal with--but apparently not neutralized.

Their eyes still glowed--and they all turned toward him at once.

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Page 3298

Even now, with all the experience he'd acquired using this power, Vanderberk could not rightly say what exactly it was. He had a sense that the things within the Inferno were not as they appeared to be--not sentient beings with minds and wills of their own, at least.

But he knew for certain that they were not illusions, either. That was why his invisibility was so important when using it. If he did not conceal himself, then the Inferno would attempt to devour him, too.

Not that invisibility alone was enough to wholly avoid the Inferno's attention. It just wouldn't go after him while a more obvious target lay in front of it.

And while it might have been wrong to say that the mad, twisted forms that inhabited the Inferno were alive, the Inferno itself undoubtedly had a certain level of sentience. That was why he'd taken to calling it the Living Inferno, after all.

It always made its desires known to him. Its fury. Its hatred. But most importantly, its hunger.

Lozaro called them Devourers, the forms within the Inferno. And the name seemed apt.

"In a sense, you might think of your 'Inferno' as a single-celled organism," Lozaro had said. "And the Devourers, are the constituent parts which allow it to function. Diverse though they may appear, they ultimately all serve one, singular purpose. To feed."

"On what?" he'd asked.

"Whatever you provide."

He just had to be careful that he did not provide himself. For the Living Inferno was relentless. Until its hunger was sated, he would have a very hard time trying to deactivate it.

Here and now, though, Vanderberk was not yet worried. Perhaps the greatest utility of the Inferno was that it could sense things he could not. The Devourers would hunt his prey for him. Very likely, they would even kill his opponent on their own, but even if they didn't, then they would at least be able to point him in the right direction.

Because that was the real trouble with psychics. Their obnoxious tendency to hide. Rarely were they much of a threat once revealed. Most often, however, they did not work alone. He knew that it was therefore quite possible that he was, in truth, fighting multiple opponents, at the moment, and that the psychic was merely concealing the others.

He watched as the Inferno shuddered around him. Streams of Devourers swirled over to his right, their collective forms looking like rivers of mouths, arms, eyes, and teeth--among other barely distinguishable shapes.

He followed their lead.