Ch.144Turbulence (6)

Nastion leaped between shadows, racing forward. The desperate chase led through alleys, building ruins, and underground. Even Nastion, who could move almost like teleportation between shadows, couldn’t shake off Ortes’s pursuit.

It was a terrible monster. Though it possessed none of the celestial powers a demigod should have, Ortes wielded earthly authority in his hands.

Perhaps the Divine Faith had created the newest god.

Not a ruler of natural principles like lightning, sea, or the underworld, but an artificial overseer fitting this age of human creation. A god of power, holding both the Faith and Blasphemia in one hand.

He couldn’t die here like this. Nastion thought he must inform his comrades in Arguirion about the truth of that extraordinary being.

But finally, it was a dead end. Ortes’s blade pointed into the air. The shadow of the mana conduit under the dim light of the underground passage.

From above it, Nastion emerged, bubbling up.

“You truly are a monster.”

“What are you saying? I look far more human than you do.”

Nastion’s shadow body contracted and expanded repeatedly, reflecting its owner’s confused mental state. The churning fluctuations of the shadow resembled the beating of a heart.

“What separates humans from monsters isn’t appearance, but what’s inside…”

Ortes shrugged once. It was hard to tell if he was speaking sincerely or just stalling for time.

An ally of the mental parasite that finally revealed itself after being driven into the underground passage. Ortes tried to read its identity but couldn’t easily interpret it. It was like text overlapping dozens of times. Too many characters accumulated, making it difficult to read properly.

All he could determine for certain was just a name. Nastion.

‘I have no choice but to stimulate it mentally to draw out a response.’

“Arguirion, right? Was their labor shortage that serious? I didn’t know they’d stoop to working with mental parasites.”

It was a simple question. By process of elimination, only Arguirion would be desperate enough to cooperate with mental parasites.

Nastion seemed to have anticipated this, responding calmly without any emotional escalation.

“And you must be the Great Enemy. What exactly did you do in the Golden Desert?”

“Nothing special. Just struggled to survive, that’s all.”

Both sides knew they were stalling for time, and neither could guess the other’s true intentions. Ortes was waiting to break down the shadow magic Nastion was using to prevent escape, while Nastion was gauging the flow of the mana conduit to complete a spatial magic.

“Survival? You call it survival?”

Even amid this conversation, Nastion felt bewilderment. The ultimate goal of this strange demigod who was now threatening his life was survival?

But thinking about it, the will to survive was the most primal and simple of all desires, making it the most powerful. Wasn’t Nastion himself preparing a terrible move that he would never have considered even hypothetically, all for the sake of survival?

The incantation was ready.

Nastion wrapping his body around the mana conduit and Ortes stabbing the edge of Nastion’s shadow happened simultaneously.

***

The Blasphemia agents, who had been gradually dismantling the power of whatever had occupied the Amimone Magic Tower by cutting off connections between the mana conduits and the mana core, felt an instinctive sense of foreboding.

This was the same kind of intuition as animals sensing natural disasters like typhoons. While animals detect natural disasters through their developed five senses, mages perceive extra-dimensional disasters through their sixth sense that handles mana.

Among the Blasphemia agents, only Niobe fully understood exactly what was happening now.

After all, she had already experienced an extra-dimensional disaster with Ortes in Algoth City days ago.

‘This can’t be happening.’

Although places once infiltrated by extra-dimensional forces are more likely to be disturbed again, the mana core of Amimone Magic Tower was powerful as befitting an official tower. Unless extremely unfortunate—

Niobe realized that the Amimone Magic Tower was now transforming into some kind of monstrous life form targeting people.

The dimensional wall stabilization function provided by the mana core was likely not working at all now. The moment her thoughts reached this conclusion, the space of the mental parasite’s body—the Amimone Magic Tower—began to distort.

The very space of the Amimone Magic Tower, scattered in the air, began to transform. The ripples in the air, which though finely cracked still indicated “inside and outside the tower,” were now writhing and turning into five colors.

It was being contaminated by extra-dimensional forces.

She frantically looked around, searching for her senior—the only person she could rely on in this situation.

But her senior wasn’t there.

Still wearing her disguise, Carisia stopped projecting her beam as she watched Niobe’s lament and somehow improvised response.

It was time to make a decision.

***

The moment he turned his back, I instinctively thrust my high-frequency blade. Though the blade passed through harmlessly—physical attacks apparently didn’t work—that wasn’t important.

Only when he tried to activate his magic could I grasp a clue to his identity. The shadow-like substance forming Nastion’s body was composed of magical formulas.

Whether they created a human consciousness called Nastion through magic, or whether it was magic designed to create artificial intelligence from the beginning, I couldn’t tell.

But since his true nature was magic, I was his natural enemy.

The activated magic engraving drive formula infiltrated his body. Suddenly, the shadow form twisted chaotically.

Nastion’s body, abandoning human shape, transformed into numerous geometric forms. It became a hexahedron, then a dodecahedron, then returned to a flat shadow becoming a triangle, and finally expanded endlessly like a fractal structure.

The shapes get smaller toward the extremities, but the variations are infinite. The more you try to observe, all you see is an endless repetition of shapes. The burden on the brain increases instantly.

My vision blurs momentarily. An emergency signal from my brain seizing up from processing impossible amounts of information. I quickly closed my eyes.

‘Could it be?’

Was that kaleidoscopic display a defense mechanism against my eyes? The emotions I felt from Nastion when I attacked him were confusion and fear. He didn’t have the composure for such a sophisticated counterattack.

Something within Nastion, beyond his own will, counterattacked my assault. Whether an automatic defense system installed by his creator, or a second personality unknown even to Nastion himself.

My blurred vision recovers.

Nastion before my eyes had returned to human form. But not an ordinary person—his entire left arm and part of his left thigh appeared as if they had been devoured by something.

“I cannot die in a place like this. No, I cannot die without informing Arguirion about your information…!”

Behind Nastion’s back, the distortion of space was already rippling. And that rippling was rapidly eroding the surrounding space.

Something like metallic silver cobwebs stretched toward the surrounding space. The silver mana spreading radially grabbed, pulled, and devoured the space.

Nastion threw himself into that space. The high-frequency blade I had thrown pierced through where his heart would be—though it’s probably an organ that no longer exists.

And disappeared beyond the silver abyss.

“Haha, damn it.”

This is bad.

The abyss that swallowed Nastion now began to stretch its cobwebs toward me. I engrave the spatial information of the silver threads encroaching on the surroundings into my brain.

The hunter has vanished, and I’ve become the hunted.

I’d prefer if the monster coming out of the underground passage were just an alligator or vampire.

***

The distorted space was heaving and spewing out extra-dimensional mana. Bizarre mutations were occurring from the soil soaked in ominous mana.

“Aaaaargh!”

“Soil property change! Strong acid! We need earth-attribute mages or those who can alchemize metals with strong corrosion resistance!”

The mental parasite, glancing at the chaos below, pondered the dying message left by Nastion with whom it had momentarily connected.

‘We have failed. We completely, completely misunderstood it. To achieve our cause, I must return and reveal the truth.’

Though it was a declaration of escaping alone, the parasite felt no betrayal toward Nastion. Had the situation been reversed, it would have done the same, and Nastion would have understood. This was a sense of mission that only those who served the Creator could comprehend.

With their disguise already exposed, it didn’t think it could save its life. It only prayed to have the strength to protect the plan prepared by the Creator.

For some reason, the brilliant yet savage beam attacks had ceased after the spatial movement magic was deployed. Perhaps they had run out of mana. The Blasphemia agents were also preoccupied with responding to the extra-dimensional infiltration.

Though two-thirds of the mana conduit connections had been destroyed, enough mana remained to attempt metamorphosis.

The parasite felt joy welling up from deep within. Stalling for time would be good.

But wouldn’t it be even better to completely defeat Ortes?

The parasite’s maniacal laughter became a raging storm that shook Algoth City. The scattered spaces gathered at the mana core. The next stage of the metamorphosis that had been continuously interrupted.

All pieces of space came together. The parasite realized the rising sense of omnipotence, that it no longer needed to use the name “parasite.”

And then it saw two golden eyes staring at it.