Stepping out of the shadows, he pulled on his shroud and enhanced his hearing.
Silence met him.
Satisfied, he stepped forward, allowing the shroud to vanish off his shoulders and walked towards the rubble of a collapsed building just across the street from him.
There, hidden almost completely by the rubble, was the back of a stop sign, its metallic sheen all but glinting for his enhanced eyes.
Stopping next to it, he crouched and wrapped his hand in a part of his tattered cloak, before wiping the gathered dust off its surface to reveal a scuffed red arrow.
Inspecting it, he noted how it had two parts to it. A singular line connected to an arrow pointing right, the connection point between them having a circle drawn around it.
'Forward in the same direction before moving right and continuing straight…' he bit his lip, his mind working to remember the beginning of his Fireteams journey across the ruins. '…Makarov pointed out some monument on the way here, some shrine, that must be what the circle means.'
He was close now, extremely so.
Over the past two weeks of his journey, he had found four out of five of the remaining markers left by his Fireteam, and now this one was the last, hand drawn by Makarov himself from the beginning.
It left him feeling somewhat bittersweet.
They had left as a group of five, but only one of them would be returning back alive.
'Well, hopefully alive.'
He still had the chimera to deal with.
Standing up slowly, he enhanced his sight and began looking. It didn't take long to find the chimera watching him from a tower a few blocks away.
It grinned at him with a too sharp beak, and he noticed a difference within it. It was subtle, almost impossible to sense from such a distance, but its soul…
…It had grown, expanded enough that it could only mean one thing.
Just as Artorias was closing in to his own ascension once again, the chimera had consumed and grown enough over the past two weeks to descend further.
It was on the cusp of becoming a Fiend, and he was not blind to its intentions.
Because he knew how it thought, and he knew how it felt.
They were twisted reflections of each other, two sides of the exact same coin.
In Artorias' mind, there was nothing more disrespectful than using the death of somebody you loathed, somebody you hated with your entire will as a stepping stone to further grow in strength.
It was akin to spitting on their corpse.
That was why the chimera hadn't taken that final step.
It was because it wanted to kill him and then further humiliate him, to show not just Artorias, but itself that it didn't need to achieve an entirely higher Rank just to beat him.
The chimera may have lost their first fight, but it still had its pride. Sometimes, that was more important to a Fallen Spawn than its own life.
Finally turning away from the Terror, his looked up, spying a distant tower with a shadow on its roof. Stepping into the shadows, he appeared above the rest of the world not a moment later.
'I really wouldn't be surprised if the blasted thing knew I was close to ascending as well,' he thought to himself, moving through the rooftop and reaching its edge, his enhanced sight picking through infested streets before finding a shadow that was safe to appear in.
He was stepping out of there only a second later.
With the day having just begun, and the rate at which he was moving, Artorias calculated that he would probably reach the shrine within the next hour or so.
Moving through another shadow, he pulled on his memories of where exactly the shrine was located.
'Ah, it's right at the border of Chiba. I remember seeing the Eastern Garrison from its peak, that bastard is going to attack me there then.'
He felt his pockets as he began to move faster, one jump a minute shortening to three in thirty-seconds.
The horns and hooked claws of the hell hound and Storm Weaver respectively would be invaluable today.
His vision began to narrow as his jumps increased in number and intervals, his enhanced sight straining to keep up as he pushed himself to move faster.
The lightning in his chest sparked to life at his silent command, and suddenly he could see again. If it weren't for the fact that it could make him think quicker, then the sensory overload would have been enough to blind him.
Nonetheless, it hadn't, and he was now left moving at speeds he had only ever tried once before, weeks prior when he had hunted and caught the injured Elaphus Spawn.
Back then, he had moved at a quarter of the speed he was at now, and it had only been through luck and desperation that he had survived relatively safely.
Now though, with his body and sight enhanced, his mind being capable of processing information at a much faster rate and his body no longer held back by a crippled leg and able of reaching faster speeds, he was more akin to a flicker of black shadows that appeared and vanished within an instant through the city.
At the rate he was going, he'd reach the shrine faster than he had initially thought.
He felt an overwhelming urge to let out a maniacal laugh but only stopped himself barely.
He may have been fast, but being loud would only attract something which was faster. That and because in the distance, he was finally beginning to see the shrine.
Gradually, he began to slow his movements down, increasing the time he took in-between his jumps to decrease his bodies movements.
By the time he reached the broken shrine, the world was back to moving sluggishly, the lightning in his chest beginning to relax as he came to a stop.
'That took me nearly ten minutes!'
The thought filled him with glee, until he looked into his soul and saw just how much Spirit Energy the accelerated trip had cost him.
'Nearly half of it is gone…' the amount he had gone through definitely hurt to see, but at least he now had a base estimate of how quickly he could truly go and just how much it would take out of him.
Looking over the ruined shrine, he couldn't help but finding it lacking in size. But for the battle to come, it would hopefully be enough.
Stepping through the shadows at his feet, he appeared on its roof and slipped inside through a small hole.
Finding nothing inside but trashed walls, torn apart flooring and plenty of shadows, he hid himself in the darkness of the ceiling and began to focus on his Soul Core.
'Hopefully the chimera takes its time getting here, I'll need all the Spirit Energy I can get.'
Crouching down as comfortably as he could in the crammed space, he pulled one of the hooked claws of The Storm Weaver out of his pocket and began to wait.
The chimera would be here soon.