(Time-Stilled World, 31 Kilometers from Entry Point, Ashen Grassland Ridge)
The group had grown noticeably quieter ever since they encountered the trail of the tainted human.
Patricia, once playful and flirtatious, now walked in grim silence with her dagger drawn and held low, as the usual sway in her step was replaced by caution.
Karl flinched at every gust of wind, nearly stumbling more than once as he struggled to keep pace without tripping over his own feet, the tension in his shoulders betraying his rising anxiety.
The others were no more at ease, each gripping a mana stone in one hand to absorb a steady stream of clean mana, while their dominant hand remained coiled around the hilt of a weapon, ready to strike at a moment's notice.
Their formation remained loosely aligned, spread just far enough to allow freedom of movement, while still holding together with enough caution.
Even the air seemed heavier now, pressing down on them with a strange, suffocating weight, as if something unseen was trailing them just beyond the edge of perception.
The trail they'd been following for nearly eight kilometers had remained disturbingly consistent, twisted human footprints, each paired with a palm print, until, all of a sudden, it stopped without explanation.
"The hell?" Raiden muttered, slowing to a halt as he studied the abrupt end of the trail with narrowed eyes.
Before him stretched a low-lying ridge, shallow and oddly symmetrical, resembling a grassy swell formed by some forgotten upheaval of the earth.
Yet unlike the endless plains that they had passed thus far, this particular stretch stood out distinctly.
The usual gray, metallic grass had disappeared entirely, replaced by a dense spread of thorned flowers—hundreds of them, that were short-stemmed and pale, with fat, bulbous heads that swayed unnaturally in the still, windless air.
The soil beneath them was coarse and pebbled, absorbing their footsteps without leaving any impressions behind, which could likely explain the sudden disappearance of the trail.
"The trail ends here," Raiden said grimly as he crouched, brushing his fingers across the unmarked ground, before rising once more and sweeping his gaze across the flower coated ridge.
"There are no more prints past this point."
He glanced over his shoulder, eyes sharpening as they swept across the terrain.
"Be cautious. There are quite a lot of blind spots someone could use to ambush us from around here," he warned, as the group immediately shifted into high alert, each member adjusting their stance, their feet planting more deliberately while their eyes flicked toward every potential vantage point.
Something about this patch of land gnawed at their instincts.
It felt like a trap laid in plain sight.
As assassins, they knew better than most as to what made a perfect kill zone, and this was it!
If they absolutely had to ambush someone in the wide open of these grasslands, this patch of land was the perfect spot.
Here, one had limited room for movement, as the thorny terrain made it harder to fight or escape, while the surrounding lowland ridges could help conceal a threat until it was too late, making it the perfect spot for ambush.
[Absolute Vision]
Leo cycled mana through his body with practiced control, activating [Absolute Vision] as a faint image of his surroundings popped in his mind.
At first, he scanned the ridge out of habit, searching for hidden enemies or concealed weapons. But what he perceived next did not align with anything he had expected.
[Absolute Vision] was a technique built on mana imagery, a perception-based skill that used microscopic pulses of mana to scan the surroundings and then feed that information directly into the user's brain as a reconstructed image.
Back in normal space, this information came in high resolution. Every crack in the pavement, every glint of a sword, every subtle shift in muscle tension, all of it appeared crisp and clear, bordering on high-definition.
But here, within the Time-Stilled World, the information came back distorted.
The landscape around him blurred and bled together, like a wet painting left out in the rain.
The vision wasn't blacked out or fully blinded, but it felt as though the feedback his brain was receiving had been corrupted, as if a thousand mismatched signals were being slammed into his senses all at once.
It was like trying to study a landscape through a lens that had five thousand flashlights pointed directly into it, as it appeared too bright, too inconsistent, and painfully oversaturated.
On the surface, nothing looked unusual to the naked eye. The thorny flowers swayed gently, the ash-laced wind carried on, and the dull terrain stretched outward like always.
But through [Absolute Vision], the world became something else entirely.
Every blade of grass, every twisted flower, even the smallest patches of moss, pulsed with such concentrated mana that they eclipsed the stone he was holding in his palm.
The very soil beneath his feet had veins of glowing energy running through it, like this entire patch of land was not natural terrain, but a sealed mana battery disguised as a field.
And where there should have been gradients and balance, there was only saturation.
He tried to isolate a few regions of low interference, hoping to identify paths of mana free passage, but even those came back as noisy outlines, broken by bursts of uncontrolled radiance.
Leo narrowed his eyes slightly, adjusting his stance and reducing the amount of mana he circulated into the skill, attempting to dull the feedback.
However, no matter how he tried to map the area around him, the end result remained the same, as [Absolute Vision] failed to provide him with a clean and usable image.
'This place... it isn't just rich in mana. It's flooded with it. It's contaminated everything living inside this world, including the blades of grass growing here.
Like, how the fuck does the grass at my feet have more mana stored in it than the stone in my hand?'
Leo wondered, his grip tightening ever so slightly around the mana stone, as a chill crawled up his spine, not from fear, but from the growing sense that this world operated on rules no one had prepared him for.
'Just where the fuck did I agree to come?'