Elena sat on the sand with her knees pulled up to her chest and Sora’s shoes in her lap.
Her eyes were on the statue.
Ever since the fog had pulled back, the giant figure had stood tall against the amber sky. The white light flowing along the blade of the sword, the folds of cloth wrapped around the figure’s tilted head... It was all there.
Without realizing it, Elena had put her thumbnail between her teeth.
She was chewing on it.
First her thumb, then her index finger, then her middle finger. As the edges of her nails got rough, she moved on to the next one. Every now and then she turned to look in the direction Sora had gone, then turned back to the statue.
If the Life class Profession she had awakened had been nail care, her mastery would definitely have made progress over mountains and hills that day.
How long had it been since Sora left? Five minutes? Ten minutes? How did time even pass in the Dream Realm?
What if the statue wasn’t a mirage this time? What if the fog came back and they missed this chance?
When Elena felt her pinky nail between her teeth too, she couldn’t take it anymore.
She stood up. She clutched the shoes to her chest.
“Okay. Okay, Ele. You’re just going to go get him. Then the two of you are going to the statue together. That’s all.”
She turned toward the direction Sora had gone.
Bare footprints stretched across the sand. Deep, regular prints, left at equal intervals from one another, carrying the reflection of Sora’s mature mind.
Elena followed them with her eyes. One, two, three...
After about three meters, the prints blurred and vanished.
Elena narrowed her eyes, but she couldn’t see beyond that. Past the point where the prints disappeared, there was only a smooth, untouched surface of sand.
A visibility of three meters fit perfectly with what she had learned at school.
The main rule that determined how far away something could be seen inside the fog was how high your Soul stat was.
The stronger a person’s soul was, the farther they could see inside the fog, and the farther the line separating reality from mirage was pushed. They had taught that at school. But Elena hadn’t expected the distance to be this short.
Three meters.
She took a deep breath and started walking.
About five minutes later, a shape appeared ahead of the prints.
A smile spread across Elena’s face.
“Sora! Where were you, I was just...”
Her voice caught in her throat. Find the original chapter at g.com.
The shoes slipped from her arms and fell onto the sand.
A few meters in front of her was Sora.
He was in the air.
Thin, long spikes that had burst up from the ground had pierced his body from every direction. Each one was several meters long, as thin as a spear, the color of bone, growing sharper toward the tip.
One had gone in through his chest and out through his back. One through his stomach. One through his left thigh, one through his right shoulder. There were more than she could count. Some passed through his body and stretched out into the air behind him, while others had stabbed into bone and stayed there.
And one was in his head.
The spike had gone in at ear level and come out through the top of his skull. Its bloody tip poked out from between the white strands of his hair.
Sora’s body hung on those spikes at a strange angle. Like an insect a collector had pinned in place.
His arms and legs were bent in different directions. Only his left hand was barely touching the ground.
Both of his eyes were open.
One of the pale pink eyes was looking straight at Elena.
The other had rolled up toward the sky. The pupil had half vanished beneath the eyelid, leaving behind only a bloodshot white. As if it were showing what was happening inside his skull.
And his muscles were still twitching.
His fingers stirred in the sand, one knee trembled every now and then, and the veins in his neck were pulsing.
The faint sound of breathing came from his throat.
Elena screamed.
Her voice vanished into the fog without an echo. Her knees gave out and she fell onto the sand. She tried to drag herself backward with her hands, but there was no strength left in her arms.
Right then, the ground shook.
...
A few minutes earlier.
Sora was sitting cross-legged at the edge of the circle.
The sand swimmer hadn’t come back out. It was quiet all around. Only the veils drifting through the air occasionally passed by him with a very faint rustle.
If that thing was hiding under the sand, there had to be a way to draw it out. Throwing a stone, playing dead to leave bait, or...
Sora closed his eyes.
He reached into the depths of his mind, toward that cold, dark thing he had built up over the centuries. Killing intent.
Once, this intent hadn’t been under his control.
When he was first summoned into the sixth world, that is, after being betrayed by the Goddess of Karma and thrown into a corner like garbage, after coming out of sixty-one years of torture in the fifth world and seeing Moira’s contemptuous face, everything that had built up inside him exploded all at once.
That day, he had slaughtered an entire city from end to end. His rage had spilled into the streets, into the houses, and above all into the temples, swallowing every living thing that crossed his path. He didn’t think, he didn’t feel. He just killed.
The one who stopped him was the Elf King.
The king had stood before him in the middle of the blood-soaked city, and before drawing his spirit bow, he had only spoken.
He had sent his voice all the way to the core of Sora’s soul, drowned in a sea of darkness. Then he had taught him how to rein in his killing intent, how to shape it, how to wield it like a weapon.
If it weren’t for the Elf King, Sora would have drowned in his rage in that world, lost his mind, and turned into a monster tearing apart everything he saw. The king had saved him from that fate, and on top of that, had taught him to control his killing intent.
That was one of the real reasons Sora had stood beside the Elf King, the Demon King of that world, and carried out a genocide against humanity.
Now he used that control.
He drew the killing intent out of his mind, compressed it, refined it. He gathered it into a single point, like the tip of a sword. Then he pushed it down through his hands, into the sand, right into the center of the circle, toward the depths of the ground.
Killing intent couldn’t harm a rock, but for any living thing with a soul, it was a deadly weapon.
It would put the souls of the weak-willed into a coma, and it would affect the sanity of those with stronger wills.
He wanted to see whether he would get a reaction.
He did.
The moment the intent reached beneath the sand, the ground exploded.
Dozens of spikes burst out of the sand all at once, from right beneath Sora and all around him. It was like a reflex. Without thinking, without aiming, like the instinctive reaction of a creature that had simply sensed danger and gone on the defensive.
Sora opened his eyes.
His body wanted to move. Centuries of reflexes ordered his muscles to dodge to the side, to leap back, to twist his way out between the spikes.
Unfortunately, his Combat Instincts Blessing wasn’t there. So no matter how good a fighter he was, he couldn’t sense an attack that happened as a reflex before it came.
When the first spike went into his stomach, Sora didn’t even have time to think about that.