Chapter 59: Battle in the Mental Domain
Facing Margareta's tearful plea, Niren finally reacted: "You… why go to all this trouble? They were after me, not you. You shouldn't be risking your life…"
"No, it does concern me!" Margareta cried out, her voice raw. "I love you!"
Niren looked as if a mule had kicked him in the head. After a long pause, he replied: "I love you too. That's why I don't want you caught up in this."
Margareta shook her head, tears streaming down her face: "You don't understand anything…"
"What are you trying to say… Ah! Shut up! Shut up! I am not an animal, I am a man!"
Mid-conversation, a sudden, brutal look flashed across Niren's face. The hunter immediately tumbled to the ground, slamming his fists against his own head while seemingly arguing with someone invisible.
"It's the beast-soul! That thing always comes out at night to torture my brother!"
Confronted with Niren's abnormal behavior, Margareta showed no fear. Instead, she quickly moved behind the hunter, where his flailing fists couldn't reach, and embraced him, the motion practiced as if she had done it a hundred times.
This time, however, Niren's reaction was extremely violent. He thrashed about like a giant python. Margareta quickly exhausted her strength and was violently thrown off.
"Quickly, help my brother, Master! Do you have any way to ease his pain?" Margareta cried out to Arthur.
"Of course, I do."
Arthur swung his sword scabbard and gently tapped the back of Niren's head, sending the hunter into a sweet slumber.
"That's your solution? You might have killed him!" Margareta cried out in horror.
"Don't be so dramatic. I am a professional."
Arthur gently straightened Niren's body. He turned to Margareta and instructed: "Go fetch a few sturdy bedsheets from your house. We'll need them for the ritual later. And try not to let anyone see you."
Margareta gave him a skeptical look but quickly turned and dove into the deepening gloom of the woods.
"Sigh, they are truly a family cursed by misfortune."
Arthur sighed under his breath, even as his hands flipped open the Book of Illusions. Knocking someone unconscious with a blow to the back of the head was a high-risk maneuver; a slight misjudgment could cause severe or fatal injury. Arthur had only used just enough force to keep Niren out for a short while.
Therefore, before Margareta returned with the sheets, he needed a safer, more controllable auxiliary measure to prevent Niren from 'rebooting' and immediately grappling with the beast-soul again.
"Found it!"
The rapidly turning pages suddenly stopped. Beneath his fingertip, written in Triss's elegant hand, was the 'Tranquility Spell.'
The casting difficulty of this spell was comparable to the Barrier Spell, but its requirement for raw magical power was almost negligible. Instead, it heavily emphasized the contest in the mental domain. To be precise, the spell's only function was to forcefully establish a mental link with the target and then use superior psychic energy to dissolve the target's aggression.
Compared to the ready-to-use, black-box spells from worlds like The Elder Scrolls, the arcane arts in this world are still in a quite primitive stage. Arthur rubbed his brow, feeling a slight headache.
It wasn't that he couldn't manage it; it was just that psychic communication put a high strain on his mental focus.
"Ugh, urgh!"
Just as Arthur was pondering, Niren's face suddenly became contorted and ferocious again, and the sounds rumbling in his throat were no longer human.
The beast-soul was beginning to gain the upper hand!
"Trying to do a good deed is always such a hassle…"
Grumbling aside, Arthur's hands moved without delay. He completed the construction of the spell model in just a few movements.
The tree leaves, which had been swaying restlessly in the wind, abruptly stopped. A beam of radiant light extended from Arthur's brow, forming a luminous corridor that connected directly to Niren's forehead.
The surrounding scenery warped and stretched, and as if instantaneously crossing an immense distance, Arthur entered a completely new location.
It was a village that looked almost identical to Big Black Tree, yet it was utterly empty.
Strange, why is there no one here?
The moment the thought arose, the ground beneath his feet suddenly turned crimson. Sticky, foul-smelling liquid bubbled up from the soil, rising until it soaked his ankles. Even the moon in the sky was veiled in a red gauze.
The previously desolate village immediately became perverse and bloody.
"Heh, what is this, a mental realm?" Arthur scoffed. This kind of intimidation might scare an ignorant villager, but it offered little novelty to a transmigrator from the information age.
"Awooo!"
As if enraged by Arthur's mockery, a howl suddenly echoed in the distance. A gigantic wolf, nearly two meters tall, leaped out of the forest beyond the village and charged toward Arthur like the wind.
"A fight in the psychic world? Now, this is interesting!"
Arthur was delighted. He had been slightly disappointed to miss the chance to fight the werewolf, but he hadn't expected to make up for it in the mental domain.
He reached for his back but grabbed only air. The gigantic wolf was already upon him.
"Foolish human! To dare trespass into my mental domain, I shall claim your life!"
The colossal wolf grinned fiercely, opening its huge mouth full of stark white fangs to bite down. The rank, hot breath made Arthur involuntarily wrinkle his nose.
Thump!
Arthur's upper body remained still, his expression unchanged. It wasn't until the moment the gigantic wolf's body was fully extended in its lunge that his right foot rose like a cannonball, connecting solidly with the beast's lower jaw.
The wolf was sent spinning by the kick, tumbling through the air like a flaming wheel for a dozen rotations before crashing down, splattering countless viscous blobs of blood-mud.
"Impossible! How can you have so much strength!" It stared intensely at Arthur and roared.
But that was a mistake.
"Narrow-minded!" While the wolf was wasting time arguing, Arthur strode closer, his raised right fist slamming down like a pile driver, driving half the giant beast's muzzle into the muddy ground.
The colossal wolf tried to stand, but Arthur immediately grabbed its ear in a fierce grip. He freed his right hand and hammered furiously at the beast's eyes and nose. The wolf's four paws desperately clawed the ground but couldn't break Arthur's iron clamp. After enduring thirty or forty blows, it managed to dig a deep pit beneath itself, and seizing the moment Arthur lost his footing, it managed to escape.
Strangely, despite suffering such a heavy beating, the colossal wolf showed no fear. There wasn't a trace of a wound on its eyes or nose. Instead, it stared at Arthur and smiled with a chilling coldness:
"Heh heh, there really is someone in this world who can surpass a werewolf in strength."
"But you chose the wrong opponent, and even more so, the wrong battlefield. In my mental domain, no matter how you attack, I will not be harmed."
"Be a good boy and turn into my nourishment, delicious human!"
The colossal wolf crouched low and charged at Arthur once more. As if to prove its words were true, it used the exact same pouncing technique as the last time.
"You stubborn beast. Trying to wear me out, are you?" Arthur laughed mockingly, unhurriedly stepping aside to let the wolf pass, then leaping onto the beast's back. He reformed his hands into hammers and began hammering downward again.
"It's useless! Useless! Useless! You can't kill me!"
The colossal wolf laughed maniacally, galloping through the woods outside the desolate village with Arthur clinging to its back. The fine tree branches whipped at Arthur like lashes, but he just lowered his head and continued to pound.
One strike, two strikes… thirty strikes…
Gradually, the wolf's laughter faded. Its skull, which should have been tougher than steel, began to momentarily distort under Arthur's relentless, powerful hammering.
Although the deformation quickly snapped back into place each time, the light seeping through the bone seams grew brighter and thicker.
It began to struggle violently, yet it couldn't shake off the man's steel-like grip.
It began to scream.
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