Chapter 2459

2459 - Nightmare

The place is a barren desert of death and sand.

It is unknown whether the color of the sand here is dark gray by nature or because of the thick clouds above, and it cannot be determined whether the air here is heavy and unbreathable by nature or because of the abundance of gases and dust emanating from the corpses… It is unknown whether this is truly sand, or remains that have decomposed over countless years.

Amidst that suffocating and dark atmosphere, if one looked closely, they would see something moving… They would see a human wearing a black shirt and short pants charging forward at a run with a calm expression on his face, stepping on scattered corpse remains and crushing skulls with the sole of his foot as if he were doing it for sport!

[I didn't know you were this good at stealth…] Mortix's voice echoed in Caesar's head, [Since I've known you, you've been a military commander who doesn't carry out espionage and assassination missions, and always stands in the most exposed spot on the battlefield… Now this is impressive!]

"Before I was a military commander, I was a hunter and a cook." Caesar chuckled.

He was sent daily, as a child, to the Inner Beast Region on strange missions, such as fetching certain eggs for dinner or bringing a specific bird's wing for lunch. If he hadn't learned basic skills like stealth, he wouldn't have survived to this day…

…And of course, he wears a ring that swallows his aura and the sounds he makes, and another that makes Soul Sense avoid him as a side assistance.

[Alright… slow down now.] Mortix's voice reappeared, [Approach that hill carefully, you'll find what we want behind it.]

"Hmm?" Caesar was surprised, for he sensed no danger, nor did he feel anything strange… This didn't match the scene he was picturing in his head.

But he slowed down and began climbing the sandy hill on all fours slowly, careful not to cause a collapse in the loose soil, slowing down more and more as he approached the top… then he stopped… and only raised his eyes above it, narrowed with cautious excitement.

Then slowly, he began to open them in shock, in terror.

A massive circular array appeared before him, carved directly into the ground, its lines deep and wide as if they were defensive trenches, but those trenches were not empty—they were filled with viscous blood that could be walked upon, and in the midst of that blood, a large number of small skulls could be seen floating on the surface, and what was hidden beneath was even greater.

That array was composed of several overlapping circles surrounding one another, all carved in the same shape, and between each circle and the next were small, closely spaced symbols extending continuously around the circumference, while at the center occupied a five-pointed star with sharp points, from which thin lines of engravings branched out until they connected to the edges of the array, as if the entire circle had been built around that five-pointed star.

And in the exact center of the star, there was a person.

He was standing in midair, his arms pulled upward and his legs pulled downward as if bound by invisible ropes, his hair pulled back and his head raised toward the sky, exposing the full length of his neck in a strained position… But what drew the eye most was not all of this, but the fact that he was conscious; his eyes were filled with pure terror, and his mouth was open wide in a long scream that came from him without stopping, a soundless scream, and it was unknown how long he had been screaming until his vocal cords had torn.

Around him circled several transparent fiery beings.

“…..!” Caesar stopped breathing when he spotted those things, when he sensed them.

They were not ghosts like the ones he had seen in the city or anywhere before; they had no green bodies tending toward transparency, they had no faces or traces of torture or killing wounds, and they were not real bodies either.

They were creatures with unstable forms, made of transparent, drifting tongues of fire that moved constantly within their bodies… if these could even be called bodies, as the other side of the Array could be seen through them. But whenever one of them moved, it left behind a faint glow in the air, and its extremities would momentarily dissipate into threads of transparent fire that burned through space for an instant before gathering together again.

Those creatures continued to move around the person at the center in regular circular paths, sometimes approaching him until they nearly touched him, then retreating again, while thin luminous threads extended from their bodies and connected to the star beneath him.

Then—

One of the fiery creatures entered the human's body and disappeared inside him.

"……….!!!!" The bound human's eyes widened further and his pupils vanished backward, then he began to bleed profusely; his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears—everything began to bleed heavily. Then the pores of his skin opened and thick blood started pouring out of them, dripping onto the center of the circle in a sight that made the skin crawl. In one moment his entire body turned red, and in another his blood was completely drained and he turned into something resembling a dried corpse… but the strange thing was that his silent screaming did not stop.

One of the fiery creatures touched the back of his neck again.

His body, which had been completely drained of all blood and other fluids and turned into a mummy, began to recover, swelling back to its normal state, and all the blood flowed onto the ground for the star to absorb, and he returned to looking like a normal human again.

…Then the process repeated.

With every touch to the body of that human suspended in the air, he would recover, but one could also see his body convulsing violently and his silent scream intensifying with each touch… and his eyes, rapidly, losing any trace of intelligence.

Those terrified, pleading eyes were no longer the eyes of a human thinking of escape, nor the eyes of someone thinking of a way to negotiate or ease the pain as any human's reaction should be… they were closer to the eyes of a pig or horse being tortured; it only wants the torment to end… it wants to die.

And clearly he was drawing very close to that wish, but…

With every touch from those transparent fiery creatures, and with every convulsion his body made, life was breathed back into him and pulled him away from death once more, one step back.

Just one step.

"…..!!!" Caesar's lips began to tremble as he watched that nightmarish scene.

[Don't you dare move.] Mortix advised, [You don't want those standing at the borders of the Array to see you.]

"....?" Caesar quickly turned to look outside the giant Array.