The atmosphere around them grew more suffocating with every passing second.
What had already been heavy air became painfully thin, forcing the soldiers to draw deeper breaths just to keep themselves steady.
Their vision began to blur at the edges, and several of them staggered as though the forest itself were interfering with their senses.
Above the canopy, the mysterious mage watched their struggle before suddenly bursting into laughter, the sound carrying unnaturally through the trees.
Javier steadied his breathing and focused on the disturbance in the mana surrounding them.
“It’s him. He’s disturbing the mana around us and thinning the air.”
Hans reacted immediately.
His posture lowered as several knives slipped between his fingers, and with a sharp movement of his hand, mana wrapped around every blade.
Mana Control, Flying Blades.
Threefold Speed.
The knives vanished from sight.
They crossed the distance so quickly that no one saw them travel through the air.
One moment they were between Hans’s fingers, and the next they had already pierced through the mysterious mage’s body.
The figure jerked violently before losing its balance on the flying broom and falling through the canopy.
Jason and Aveline moved the instant the mage came within reach.
“Mana Enhancement. Dragon Slash!”
Mana surged through Jason’s arms and into his massive axe as he twisted his body and swung with everything he had.
The blade tore through the falling mage with tremendous force, splitting the body cleanly in two before both halves crashed onto the forest floor.
Before anyone could approach, Alice stepped forward and extended one hand toward the remains.
“Mana Control, Summoning. Gluttony.”
Dark mana gathered across the ground and expanded into an enormous black mass.
A gigantic slime emerged from the summoning, its body shifting and trembling as a mouth lined with thousands of razor-sharp teeth split open across its surface.
Gluttony lunged forward and swallowed both halves of the mage’s body in a single bite before its mouth sealed shut.
Silence returned to the forest.
The soldiers remained where they were, weapons still raised as they stared at the enormous black slime.
No one seemed willing to believe that something capable of controlling Elyra and disturbing their mana could have been killed so easily.
“Is he… dead?” one of the guards finally asked.
No one answered.
Then a scream tore through the silence.
“AAAAHHHH!”
Everyone spun around.
A guard staggered away from the others, both hands clutching his throat.
His body convulsed violently as his mouth opened wider and wider, far beyond what should have been physically possible.
Blood spilled down his chin while something moved beneath the skin of his neck, forcing its way upward from inside his body.
“What’s happening to him?!”
The guard tried to scream again, but only a wet choking sound escaped.
His jaw stretched until the flesh around his mouth began to tear, and before anyone could reach him, pale fingers suddenly pushed through from inside his throat.
His eyes widened.
The fingers forced his mouth farther apart.
Then a hand emerged.
The guard’s jaw tore open as blood splattered across the ground.
His body collapsed lifelessly, but whatever had been inside him continued forcing itself outward.
Another hand appeared, followed by a pale head and a long, unnatural body that slowly crawled from what remained of the guard.
No one moved.
The creature that emerged was roughly humanoid, yet almost nothing about it could be mistaken for human. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Grayish-white scales covered its pale body like the skin of a serpent, while six eyes moved independently across its head, three facing forward and another three positioned behind.
Four long arms extended from its torso, each ending in a hand with seven narrow fingers, while a heavy tail dragged slowly across the blood-soaked ground behind it.
Its mouth opened slightly.
A long tongue slipped between its lips, its surface covered in small, sharp red spines.
Beneath the creature’s pale scales, black veins pulsed and twisted continuously, moving beneath the skin as though something alive were crawling through them.
The soldiers froze.
The pressure radiating from the creature descended upon them before anyone could even understand what they were looking at.
It was thick and oppressive, carrying the same sickening presence Javier had once felt from high-level Devil Mana.
Several soldiers covered their mouths as nausea twisted through their stomachs, while others struggled to keep their weapons steady in trembling hands.
A few simply collapsed where they stood, their bodies unable to endure the fear pressing down on them.
Javier remained silent.
His mana detection had already spread toward the creature, carefully tracing the strange flow surrounding its body.
At first, he sensed nothing beyond the overwhelming pressure, but after several seconds his expression shifted.
Something was wrong.
A tiny portion of his mana was disappearing.
The amount was almost insignificant, so small that he might never have noticed it if his attention had been elsewhere, yet the loss continued little by little.
It’s absorbing our mana.
Javier immediately narrowed his perception around the creature.
The longer he studied its mana, the stronger a familiar sensation became until recognition finally struck him.
That mana…
His hand tightened around his sword.
It belongs to the mage we just killed.
The body Hans had pierced, Jason had cut apart, and Alice had fed to Gluttony had never been its real body.
It had only been a vessel.
The creature slowly raised its head.
Its six eyes shifted independently, examining the soldiers surrounding it from several directions at once before its lips gradually stretched into a faint, unnatural smile.
“Haa…”
Its breathing was disturbingly calm.
It lowered its gaze toward its four hands and slowly flexed the seven fingers on each one, almost as though it had only just remembered what its own body felt like.
Then it looked at them.
“…Humans of this era are truly weak.”
Hans’s expression immediately hardened as he read the movement of its lips.
His grip tightened around his knives, his body shifting almost instinctively into an attacking stance, but Javier sensed the change in his emotions before he could move.
Hans was ready to attack.
“Don’t.”
Hans stopped.
He turned toward Javier, his expression tense.
He could not voice the question in his mind, but Javier did not need words to understand him.
Through the mana connecting his senses to Hans, the confusion was clear.
That thing is the mage.
But how?
“I know.” Javier kept his attention on the creature.
“The body we fought earlier was nothing more than a fake.”
Jason’s face changed as he looked from Javier back to the creature.
“Then… this is its true form?” This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Javier did not answer immediately.
His mana detection continued moving around the creature, probing deeper into the flow surrounding it.
Something inside that mana was still changing, and the longer Javier observed it, the more disturbing the truth became.
The creature was not merely absorbing mana from those standing nearby.
It was also drawing in the remnants scattered throughout the battlefield.
The mana left behind by Hans’s Flying Blades, Jason’s Dragon Slash, and Aveline’s attack was slowly disappearing into its body.
Every trace they had released against the mysterious mage was now being consumed.
Javier’s fist tightened.
“So that’s how…”
One of the creature’s six eyes shifted toward him.
Javier immediately felt another faint pull.
A fraction of his mana disappeared again.
Small enough to ignore once, but impossible to mistake now.
It doesn’t even need to touch us.
As long as we’re close enough, it can feed on our mana.
The creature took a slow step forward, and the earth cracked beneath its foot.
Several soldiers instinctively moved backward, but no one dared launch another attack.
Javier could sense it more clearly now.
The creature wasn’t simply absorbing mana.
It was feeding on them.
The mysterious mage had never truly been defeated.
The body they destroyed had only been a shell, a puppet used to conceal whatever this creature truly was.
Worse, every attack they had thrown at that false body had left mana behind for it to consume.
They had believed they were killing it, when in reality they had only been feeding the thing hiding underneath.
Hans tightened his grip around his knives again.
Javier felt the determination rising from him, the instinct to attack before the creature could do anything else, but beneath that determination was an emotion Javier rarely sensed from his brother.
Fear.
Hans was afraid.
Javier slowly raised one hand before Hans could move.
“Don’t attack yet.”
Hans remained still, his knives held tightly between his fingers as he looked toward Javier.
Javier ignored the oppressive weight in the air and continued examining the creature with his mana detection.
There had to be something he could understand: a weakness, a limit to its absorption, anything that would tell him what they were facing.
Yet the deeper he searched, the stranger its mana felt.
There was something ancient within it.
Not merely powerful, but old in a way Javier could not properly measure.
Its mana carried a presence unlike anything he had sensed from another human, as though whatever stood before them had existed long before anyone in their group had even been born.
What exactly are you?
The creature gave him no answer.
It simply stood among the ruined trees and bodies, its four arms hanging loosely at its sides while its long, spine-covered tongue slowly slipped from between its lips.
Six eyes continued watching them from different directions, never blinking at the same time, while the black veins beneath its pale scales pulsed with every fragment of mana it consumed.
It merely watched them in complete silence, patiently waiting to see who would make the next move.
And somehow, that silence was far more terrifying than its laughter.