The four of them stood at the edge of the forest, where the trees ended.
Helena had a very irritated look on her face.
She downturned her lips and spat away before looking back at the forest.
Terence stared with tension drawn upon her face.
Northern’s expression was blank; he didn’t particularly feel any kind of emotion.
In fact, he was a little worried that he would be facing a Maelstrom rank monster, and yet there was not an iota of fear in him.
He didn’t know what to think about it.
He just felt empty, almost the same feeling after killing the Corpse Eater in his mansion.
He looked at Raven and summoned a pair of blue hand gloves.
“These have effects against mental attacks. Although I don’t know how long they can hold on, and I plan to collect them back.”
Raven nodded and collected the gloves.
“Thank you.”
A minute later, the gloves sparkled to life, weaving themselves on her hands with white shards of light.
Raven bore into the forest with an indifferent look on her face.
“I do feel somewhat protected.” She glanced to her left, “Thank you, Northern.”
Slam!
Helena slammed her palms together and rubbed them.
“Enough, you guys said you wanted to do this now. I hope you don’t end up regretting it.”
She looked at everyone.
“So, we locate the body of the monster, then make a plan…”
“Are we not supposed to make a plan now for when we do that?” Northern interrupted.
“I’m not a fan of plans. Do you have any?”
Northern lingered for a moment, then shook his head.
“Yeah. Didn’t think so,” Helena retorted. She added, “Just focus on finding the real body.”
The Feral Sage turned her eyes to Raven.
“Or do you have a plan? Although I don’t plan to accept it because your plans are bound to be a trainwreck.”
Raven nodded her head. “I don’t have a plan…yet.”
Helena looked intensively at her for dozens of seconds, then turned to Terence. “My lady…”
Terence chuckled softly. She then looked at Northern and smiled, and looked back at Helena.
“I think we will be fine.”
Helena bowed her head slightly. “Hearing you say that brings so much peace to my heart.”
Northern raised a brow, watching the Feral Sage’s sudden change of attitude and composure every time she addressed the Oracle.
While he did know that she was a priestess, he didn’t know she held so much importance in a ruined land.
After all, everyone was in the same shoes of shit, and one could as much say they’ve been abandoned by Ul or the gods.
But gods are something Northern knew did not really exist in this world… maybe they did, but not in such a concept as he was used to.
He sighed and looked ahead while Helena’s voice pierced through the air.
“We move forward!”
Fearlessly, the cohort—now of four—marched into the forest of Blackwood.
…
For a while, they continued to walk in the forest, all of them protected one way or the other, treading in between the colossal dry woods.
Helena, however, was making sure she wasn’t looking up, but she too, so far, had been good—at least for the past five minutes.
“Perhaps you may not need us to buy you time.”
Northern raised a finger, gesturing for Raven to shut her mouth.
He looked at Helena with slightly narrowed eyes.
“Have you ever entered this place and tried to hunt it with all the members of your cohort protected from its abilities one way or the other?”
Helena thought for a while, then looked at Northern.
“I don’t think so, why do you ask?”
“Because it’s natural for monsters to feel cornered when a group of people who are not subjective to its influence appears, and when it is cornered, its behavioral pattern will definitely change.”
Helena’s eyes stayed on him for a while before she retorted, “That’s a plausible theory, how are you so sure?”
“Well, I spent a lot of time with monsters, and I’ve been hunting with my dad from a very young age.”
She then nodded.
“I see…” She then glanced around the trees. “So, are you saying we shouldn’t expect the usual?”
Northern nodded.
“Yes.” He lingered for a moment and continued, “But either way, I will find the real body.”
Northern paused and closed his eyes… only to open them the next second.
He looked at them.
“What are you guys doing?”
They stood, watching him with curiosity heavily etched across their faces.
“What should we do?” Helena asked.
“I don’t know… anything that won’t distract me,” Northern said abruptly and turned away from them.
He closed his eyes for a while and silenced all distracting thoughts. There were a couple of ways he could go about this.
He could decide to evolve [Soul Eyes]—while the talent ability might not be able to do much now, he was sure another level of it would be unlocked should he evolve it.
But that would cost his precious talent fragments, and right now, he was trying to reach Nomad rank as soon as he could.
The second option was using the [Unseeing Eyes]—this optical ability, however, heavily burdened his mind.
Northern also feared there was bound to be a rebound from using such a formidable ability.
He was practically messing with the strings of reality’s essence.
Undoing someone’s ability was a massive rule-breaking, and there was no way some punishment wouldn’t come from breaking such a rule. freeweɓnvel.com
Who knows if it was kicking in already, and maybe he just could bear it, but finding a Maelstrom rank monster through the weaves of reality was on a different scale—a much more powerful scale.
And the mental burden was just too heavy for him to want to do it all over again.
This thus left him to one last resort.
Name: [Chaos]
Type: Passive
Description: [Chaos is the flow of all existential forces, tamed and untamed alike. You can perceive this chaotic flow]
‘I should be able to sense it more vividly than before…’
Before now, Northern had been perceiving a little hint of it—and it had come to contribute to the growth of his perception and how effective [Soul Eyes] had been.
But he wanted to take it to a whole different level.
He wanted to sense this entire plane from the tip of his feet and fish out the difference.
He was sure that the chaos flow of monsters would be different from that of trees, sands, the air drifters.
Northern’s focus delved deeper and deeper into a disturbing darkness.
Bullets of sweat formed over his face as he couldn’t help but go deeper.
And then, in the nick of time, thousands of ligatures of flames emerged from the depth of darkness.
…It felt…
Chaotic.