Chapter 495 Despair
The blue flower broke into petals and fluttered away from his hands. Each one of the petals miraculously managed to reach the front of the strangers who were all in different positions.
They all froze in place, whether it was involuntary or voluntary even they did not know.
But what they did know at that moment was that…
What stood above them felt like an impenetrable wall, as large as the sky beyond, imposing and bloodthirsty, filling their hearts with palpable despair.
We will die here.
Those four words resurfaced a fear that they thought they had fought all their lives.
And insidiously, the man that stood before them exuded such an ominous and intimidating presence that made them feel hopelessness.
Each of them in their position was overwhelmed by a sense of futility and the belief that this marked the end of their lives, and that made their skin crawl with paralyzing fear.
And as the petals fell on their heads, each of them began to pulp like fireworks bursting from their abdomen.
The wall and roof of the auberge was a pastel work of red, green, and blue.
Instantly, all their presence was gone; not even flesh could be noted of them. Come morning, passersby would think an insane artist had come to vandalize the walls of the auberge.
Then a second later, one more dropped from the sky, sluggishly, looking left and right with widened eyes. His black masking was covering other parts of his face, but his eyes were enough to tell the shock he received upon looking around.
Even he perhaps did not know what happened. He slid down on the wall as he had landed on the edge of the roof, about to break into one of the windows but suddenly froze.
Behind him, impossibly standing on the wall, the dark-haired, enchanting man looked at him with an interesting smile.
"What a stray you are…" Revant said with a silly tone.
He tapped the back of the intruder once, using his index finger, saying, "There you go."
Right away, the intruder felt something change within his body; even he did not know. He couldn't move, nor could he feel anything; his entire body and senses felt numb.
All he could do was see, but what he was seeing was not even registering as any sort of information in his head. In a way, he had suddenly become a living puppet.
"Do you know despair is foundational to sensibility and is the balance between emotional states and the broader spectrum of human perception?"
He closed his eyes, savored the taste of the man's despair.
"Hmm, sweet. I wonder how I didn't know I could do this until now. I feel rejuvenated… like something is coming back to me."
A lively light suddenly entered his eyes, making his face all glitter in the joy of realization.
"If I could eat the despair of so many more people, I could be able to recover my prime much faster than I thought."
He looked at the pastry of colors he had made on the wall. "What a waste they were…"
Then he sighed, "What a waste everything is. This insolent human I have as a master…"
He suddenly went silent as he felt a hand rest on his shoulder, gripping him.
Northern was standing behind him on the wall with his eyes tightly shut and a forced smile hiding the terror behind his face. Even so, the insidious terror still managed to leak.
"What did you say again?"
Revant went pale.
'I didn't see him at all!'
Suddenly, he just heard a shrill block his entire senses; his body went cold, and a suffocating fear crawled over his skin.
The air grew heavy, as if the entire area had been submerged beneath an invisible ocean.
Shadows deepened unnaturally, and a chill that pierced deeper than bone settled across the area.
The atmosphere grew oppressive afterwards, smothering every sound until even the wind seemed to be silenced.
Revant felt his heart race, his throat tightening in primal terror. It was as if an unseen hand had gripped his soul, draining warmth and hope from his very being.
His body trembled involuntarily, sweat beading on his skin despite the cold, his mind struggling to comprehend the sudden and all-consuming presence of nothingness.
Time itself seemed to distort under the weight of a significant release of Northern's Void Aura.
Colors dulled, distances stretched, and the world felt distant and fragile, like it could shatter at any moment.
His instincts screamed at him to flee, yet his limbs refused to move, as if tethered by invisible chains to the vast emptiness around him.
For many within the radius, particularly the auberge and its surroundings, the bartender, the guests that were awake, even Shin flung his eyes wide open from his sleep, Ryan froze unable to move.
It was not the sense of impending death but the sense of oblivion that gnawed at their minds.
It was as though they stood at the edge of an abyss, staring into infinite nothingness, where even the concept of existence itself felt meaningless.
The fear that Northern's aura evoked was not of pain or suffering but of erasure—complete and utter annihilation of their essence.
Around him, the land reacted too. The walls where he stood seemed to groan under the pressure, and insects and small animals that once thrived nearby vanished, sensing what human minds could barely fathom—a force beyond comprehension, a void that hungered for all.
And yet, amid the silent chaos, Northern stood untouched, like the eye of a storm, calm and resolute as his power enveloped the world around him.
"What did I say about proving your worth to me again? It seems you underestimate me greatly, Revant."
Beneath Northern's powerful aura, the fresh Tyrant could not utter a word. He shook, painstakingly fighting the urge to resist, at least force his limbs to move. But it was all futile.
And then he realized that while he had been subjected to the same emotion he deems himself a Tyranny of.
Despair.