Chapter 679: The Tricky Tunnel [Part 1]
Northern, for a couple of minutes, unbothered walked deeper into the winding tunnel.
The air was somewhat cold, although he could feel little of it, hidden behind the metallic skin of the Night Terror armor.
Four eyes gleamed viciously, penetrating the darkness with a chilling intensity. This tunnel especially seemed long and twirling; it was almost like he was burrowing his way into the gut of a tenebrous monstrosity of utter darkness.
After a while, he paused and glanced left and right.
'If my calculations are right, I have been walking for the past thirty minutes... and yet, it does not look like there will be any way out soon...'
Northern grimaced, the flaming blue eyes of his visor narrowing in response to his eye movements.
Northern slowly moved closer to the wall, touched its rough and cold surface slightly, and continued to walk further.
He kept going without stopping for a glance. Then after a long and boring stride, he came to another stop and slowly turned back, his four eyes narrowing again.
'I have been walking in circles?'
The surface of the wall, just by looking, all looked like the same details as he walked forward earlier; his eyes had managed to pick up the terrifying details of the wall.
Which was the main reason why he had stopped. But in the wall of the caves, moreover, an artificially built one, what's to say that wasn't how it was engineered?
But there was no way in hell that it would be perfectly crafted, that there wouldn't be a single mishap.
To be more accurate about it, he decided to use his sense of touch, folding in the gloves of the armor. He marked the place he was touching with his sense and walked forward, paying attention to time and his steps.
After he had moved for another thirty minutes, he stopped and dropped his hand.
The helmet of his armor folded into his collar like overlapping plates, leaving only his menacing yet resplendent horns.
Northern's brows furrowed as he mulled over the situation.
'How the hell did I get trapped in an illusion?'
The thought gnawed at him. Chaos Flame was a force of absolute defense, an unyielding shield against any assault on the mind or soul.
It was designed to protect against hexes-direct attacks aimed at warping one's thoughts or corrupting their essence.
But illusions were different.
They were not mere spells to break or curses to dispel. Instead, they bent reality itself, weaving a false world so intricate that the senses couldn't distinguish it from truth.
They didn't attack the mind; they hijacked perception.
Still, illusions shared the same deceptive roots as hexes. They played a game of subtlety, whispering lies into the fabric of reality.
Chaos Flame should have rendered him immune to such trickery-yet here he stood, trapped in one.
Northern sighed and decided to retreat into the Limitless Void. It should be possible for him to use his room as a point of rift creation and emerge from there.
However, the moment Northern attempted to leave, his form blurred like a glitch and he opened his eyes to the cold embrace of the long and winding darkness.
'Huh?'
A frown creased his brows.
He had been cut off from his own soul? How was that even possible? Isn't that like a soul attack?
Northern's eyes darted left and right, unable to piece together the sense of what was going
on.
He breathed and steadied his racing mind.
'It cut me off from my soul... it can't be possible that it attacked my soul; the problem could
be that it is essentially cutting me out of my soul, and that is why this illusion worked in the first place.'
Northern's frown deepened.
What monster could be so strong that he was cut off from the Limitless Void?
'I never saw myself in such a helpless state?'
What was he to do? Keep going forward?
Northern shook his head.
'Isn't that going to be just useless?'
Still, he didn't think there was another choice he had right now. The only thing he could do was move forward.
Northern's eyes glinted with an eerie blue before he vanished in a flicker of motion.
In an instant, his form blurred, tearing through the tunnel like a gale unleashed. The wind howled in protest, walls trembling as his speed carved through the oppressive darkness.
Northern's form streaked through the tunnel, a fleeting shadow swallowed by the oppressive darkness.
At first, his movements were fluid yet discernible, the faint hum of his speed vibrating through the air like a taut string.
The faint blue glow of his eyes cast momentary flashes on the jagged walls, illuminating their coarse texture for only an instant before plunging back into shadow.
The wind that swirled around him grew frantic, shrieking as if struggling to keep up.
Dust and loose stones began to lift from the tunnel floor, caught in the invisible currents trailing his motion.
The air itself seemed to warp, bending in faint waves as though the tunnel could no longer contain his growing momentum.
Each step he took seemed to dissolve into the nex his strides blurring into seamless
movement.
The faint hum intensified into a deep roar, reverberating through the cavern with a force that sent cracks splintering across the stone walls. Loose debris cascaded from above, shattering on the ground like fragile glass.
The walls began to distort as his speed pressed further, their solid forms trembling and bending in his wake.
Time itself seemed to stagger, the flickering shadows on the walls stretching unnaturally long as if the tunnel was struggling to reconcile his presence.
The air became heavy, compressed by the force of his acceleration, yet somehow Northern moved even faster.
The light in his eyes burned brighter, a streak of blue carving through the void.
His motion was no longer linear-it was erratic, unpredictable, as if he moved between the gaps of reality. There was no rhythm to his steps now, only the relentless surge of a force tearing apart the barriers that confined him.
And yet, it was still not enough.
With the same rate at which the walls cracked and distorted, the same ratio at which time itself seemed to shudder and tear apart, everything stubbornly came back together.
The tunnel was like an elastic darkness that no matter how stretched, would snap right back into shape, faster than before.
Northern thought with his ever-increasing speed, he would be able to outrun the illusion. It did not make any sense at first, but now that he saw how faster he could run with every passing second, if he really put his back to it, he acknowledged the possibility in it.
However, it was useless nonetheless.
He clenched his fists, the plates of his armor grinding against each other with a low metallic
screech.
If he continued running, it was only a matter of time until his stamina ran out.
'I have all the power and yet my weakness seems to be something so mundane...'
He hated the thought of it. The void, the chaos, the copycat, and even the Diy, all were terrifying abilities; if he had one conspicuous talent or another that was tied to it, he would
understand.
But to think what would place a time limit on his abilities was merely something he could train daily. His powers devoured his stamina with relentless hunger, gnawing at his reserves
like an insidious parasite.
But what was he to do, stand there and give up? He had to get out of this sudden illusion
somehow.
Northern had never been in an illusion before; he didn't know how they worked, and that was why he did not want to spend another second in this place.
He was completely clueless of what could be the terrifying monster that was weaving this
trickery.
Having no other solution, Northern got ready to continue his relentless race, not against
time, or space, but his own self.
As he was about to shoot off, Northern suddenly paused and looked to his left.
The tunnel rippled. The walls twisted unnaturally, oozing shadow like spilled ink. The darkness was no longer passive; it was alive, watching him.
Northern's Chaos Eyes flared. His vision fractured into overlapping dimensions, peeling back the veil of reality. He saw layers of the tunnel, each one subtly different, but all false.
It seemed the illusion had involuntarily released a weak point in its effort to adjust
something.
'All that tearing, there's no way it will take all of it with so much ease.'
Northern's immense speed had undoubtedly contributed to the reason why it suddenly
reacted.
And thanks to that reaction, Chaos Eyes caught a sight of its true nature.
"I can destroy it," Northern noted to himself with assurance, Void tendrils slithering from his
hands.
But as he reached out, a hollow, bone-chilling quaking resonated through the air, almost like
an eerie laughter. The tendrils struck the walls, only to dissolve into nothingness. The illusion
adapted.