Hide kept walking, but his pace slowed slightly as the realization fully bloomed in his mind.
'Anchors.'
He replayed the battles in the black citadel. The Ossian skeletons that guarded the courtyards, the terrifying Wolfthralls. They didn't have lungs or blood. They were powered by dense, pulsing points of crystallized dark mana.
Which of course was controlled by the Lesser Calamity Lord. To whom this talent actually belonged.
The anchors he realized were the literal cores of the Calamity Beasts.
When the Lesser Calamity Lord had built its army, it hadn't resurrected the dead. It had forged physical bodies out of dark mana, and then placed beast cores inside them to act as the engines, giving them life and driving their feral instincts.
If he used his dark mana to form a faceless manifest—a Phantom Court knight or beast—and placed an E-Rank core inside it as an anchor, the construct would essentially become an E-Rank beast under his absolute command.
