Chapter 450: The Gaze

Music for today: Rok Nardin - Black Sky

https://youtu.be/BByEUiMzEXE

Mid Evening - Late Summer - Year 24 : South of Aerakis, Holy Kingdom

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*WOOOSH* "Finally..." Staring into the mans soul with a greed-lit smile, I whispered, "Now, let's see what you saw..."

The man was shellshocked, his mind in an endlessly looping stutter after his eardrums were ruptured, retinas were bleached, and nerves were incinerated.

It was like watching a computer hitching because of an infinite loop—his neurons firing in a desperate attempt to react, only for one of his numbed senses to echo the scream from the blast moments prior and make it start over.

For a dragon nearly 1500 years old, it was almost pitiful.

Though, I couldn't muster pity for him.

*WOOM* Pulling the rest of my aura down from the upper atmosphere, I focused it into his body, double checking for any tethers before forcing my voice into his mind. "Tell me."

His mind snapped back in an instant, his blinded eyes darting around before conjuring a transformation spell and defensive magic around himself as if to protect himself from the long-past explosion.

But unbeknownst to him, he was essentially cradled in my paw.

*FLASH* My pupils thinned instantly, looking down just in time to see his body balloon into a grotesque mass of muscles, organs, and scales.

Knowing you were to never transform when too close to another dragon, I jumped away with a blast of antimatter.

But it was too late. By the time I could jerk my paws to the side and throw him toward the ground with my aura, some of his vertebrae had already fused to my fur. *cRaCkK*

"AGH-" Feeling his spine get essentially ripped out, he screamed with a gasp the moment the spell finished, his limp lower half swinging him into a tumble as he spread his wings out to stabilize himself.

But while still in the thinner air of the upper atmosphere, we were moving far faster than he realized. *sNaP* Catching the wind at the wrong angle, one of his wings was mangled almost instantly—the membrane tore, the bones snapped, and the muscles connecting it to his back were twisted and shredded.

In the span of a single second, he was reduced from a blinded dragon to a fleshy meteor in such a gruesome fashion it made me wince.

But thankfully, perhaps to his dismay, ancients weren't so easily killed.

*WHIR-WOOSH* Spinning into a nosedive, I lashed my wings inward and blasted through an icy layer of clouds, flaking away the bone fused to my paws as I reached my aura down to catch the poor bastard.

*WOOM* "Don't pass out." I spoke with a hiss, flooding his body with enriched mana in hopes of stabilizing his condition and keeping the chemicals surging through his brain from damaging anything. "You aren't going to die until you empty that mind of yours."

But he had other plans...

Without letting another moment pass, a complex web of neurons fired like a mechanical fuse, and before I could catch it, he spasmed, his blood suddenly frothing in his veins, and sending his trauma-ridden body back into shock.

It was a last-ditch defense. A seemingly programmed suicide reflex.

One I couldn't stop.

But all it did was make me snap. "Tch..." Watching the thread I searched so long for grow taut and strained, I grit my teeth. -Alright then... If that's how you want to play...- Pulling him closer, I gripped his head with my paws. -It may be better to see it myself anyway!-

*FSHHOOOSH* Angling my wings into a steeper dive, I reignited the thrusters on the back of my wings, slicing through the lower cloud layer and silhouetting us with the ethereal glow of the moon, only to catch his skull between my paws and slam it against the combined surface tension of a hundred kilometers of ocean.

*Cr-BOOOOM* Space instantly warped as the ocean surface was plunged beneath itself, the weight of the impact sending echos through the planet as the clouds above were vacuumed toward the surface—crackles of spontaneously forming lightning arcing down to the water with the sudden release of energy.

The man died instantaneously, his mind being atomized before his nerves could even signal pain...

But the death was only physical.

Snapping my eyes back to his mangled body, I used my tail to smash a hole through his chest before ruthlessly ripping out his cracked reserve. -If you thought death was going to be an easier way out, you're sorely mistaken.-

Momentarily bracing myself for the horrid taste, I threw the core in my mouth and swallowed, waiting until it was as close as it could get to my own reserve before shattering it.

Since he wanted to die so badly, I figured I'd get the memories from the source, and see the vision myself.

*Snap* Grabbing his soul with my divinity like the tendrils of a kraken wrapping around a ship, I pulled it in, not to consume it, but to pry it open. -If Grace can do it.. so can I...- *Vwummmm*

Almost immediately, my consciousness warped—old, blurry memories of a frayed and screaming psyche tried to echo through my mind, flooding me with foreign memories like the spread of a virus only to get squashed by a weight billions of times its own.

I wasn't there to see his family, his friends, or even his life.

I wanted to see the thing that changed him.

And sure enough, it was there.

Standing on the ocean surface, digging through the man's memories, I found something with clarity—a raw, guttural, conciousness-warping terror carved into the man's very being.. into his divinity. -Got you...-

But.. as I connected it to my mind, everything froze.

In an instant, my mind went dark...

The vision wasn't an image, scene, or even a thought.. just pressure... Like the thunderous echo of a blackhole in the emptiness of space...

Like.. I was sitting at the center of one...

At the center of an infinite collapse...

*WOOM* Feeling a gut-wrenching chill pass down my spine, I purged the soul from my own with a fear-driven instinct, grabbing the space around myself and twisting it in a defensive panic, only to release the nuclear blast of mana from a vector flipped ocean onto myself.

*VR-KRAKOOM* The blast was so thick with enriched mana, it made my body deform as if melting, but after accelerating my divinity and zipping into the sky with a blast of antimatter, I couldn't have cared less.

My chest was tight—adrenaline was surging through my body like I was sent into fight or flight mode, and my divinity raced faster than it ever had.

I didn't know what happened.. I simply felt.. 'it'... A soul-warping fear that felt like it originated from what felt like a stare.. one that looked at me through the vision.. through time...

Rapidly healing my collapsed lungs, I looked down over the swirling storm of mana I created on the ocean's surface with wide eyes, using my divinity to search for something.. anything that could produce the chilling stare I felt.. not believing it could have come from the vision.

But nothing responded...

The Aesir were still, the Phoenix's state hadn't changed, and even the distant presence of the Leviathan remained unmoved.

The stare.. came from somewhere else... Somewhere.. different...

Feeling the sensation start to settle, my breathing returned—heavy and weathered—the quivering in my paws never settling.

But while it carved a sense of fear into my soul as if by the slash of a dagger, it lit with it a crazed determination.

A drive for power unlike anything I had felt since I watched my mother die eons and a life ago, and a drive for understanding only parallelled by my time lost on a distant moon with my brother.

It was a fear that lit old trauma I believed I had moved past into an uncontrollable mass of emotionless grit.

What I saw was a vision, yes, but nothing about it felt right... It couldn't have been what the cultist had seen.. but I didn't understand what else it could have been... -I need Skuld...- Being the Goddess of Oracles, I believed she would have some insight, so using my divinity like a planet-scanning radar, I searched for her, no longer caring if the Aesir noticed, before darting over the horizon in a streak of raw released energy.

It was a shift everyone with divinity felt, regardless of their position of Delphi, a suffocating chill that descended from my presence like the wind of an impending.. unstoppable frost.

In that moment, Nott, with his emotionlessly crushing presence, returned... A being that gave up everything in the pursuit of knowledge and power.

A being Hera would never let me become again.

*Buzz* Feeling the small, deformed tablet beneath my wing vibrate a chilling sequence, my mind shifted directions.

It was Krystallo's tablet signalling to me—the sequence of vibrations giving me their exact coordinates...

*Vwoop* But after blinking there through the void, rather than finding someone I was going to eviscerate, I was caught by Hera, her wings wrapping around me as she forced my head into her chest.

No words were spoken.. but in that moment, the emotionless chill in my mind wavered.. the mass of unbridled determination flickering.

Slowly, my tense muscles relaxed—bit by painstaking bit—Hera's wings gently tightening, pressing me into a familiar, soothing warmth.

In a blink, the feral drive that had gripped my divinity slowly loosened its claws, allowing the chilling snow storm in my mind to thaw to rain.

Behind Hera's steady embrace stood Krystallo, her eyes wide and anxious, reflecting not fear for herself, but for me. For a moment, the oppressive chill I carried in my aura wavered—caught between the relentless hunger of my past self and the reassuring presence of the two dragons before me.

Before I knew it, my breathing steadied, guided subconsciously by the rhythmic pulse of Hera's heartbeat.

Until eventually.. I managed a slow, trembling sigh... "I'm.. alright."

"No.. you aren't..." Hera whispered softly, her voice showing cracks in her usual composure. "You need.. to calm down..." Her breath carried a quiver. "I don't know what you saw.. but you can't turn yourself into what I just felt..."

Feeling her squeeze even tighter, my body finally stopped trying to resist...

But even as I gave in to the warmth, trying to bring rationality back to the calculations drowning out my thoughts, the fire had already been lit...

I had already caught a glimpse of the sky from the bottom of the well Delphi sat in.. and no matter how much warmth Hera brought my mind.. I'd never be able to purge the vision that carved itself into my soul.

Though, little did I know.. it was enough to keep me from making history repeat itself...

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