The silence stretched in the darkness.
The crawling sounds intensified — close, closer, almost at his feet — before cutting off completely. Silence flooded back in like water filling a hole.
Bone creaking sounds and a baby's small, thin cry quickly replaced the crawling sounds from his back before stopping. Then, silence reigned again.
Suddenly, the sounds of a bus crashing and people screaming could be heard from his left side. Hearing this, Eric's left eye twitched, "The beast has found out this detail about my life." Eric realized that the more he stayed in the darkness, the more his memories would be seen by the beast through the darkness. Normally, Eric would have already attacked, but he had Adrian by his side at this moment; thus, he was restricted.
Eric's eyes slowly started to glow with a pink light as Eric activated his Abyssal Eyes. The shine of his eyes bleeds in the dark. The world became much more readable. He looked around, and the vision wasn't what he expected.
There were small and large, black and blue souls of all shapes and sizes around him; most were in humanoid form. They were still in place and silent, sprawling on the ground. When Eric looked at them, he could also feel their gazes on him.
He looked in every direction, analyzing the situation. They were everywhere, completely circled and surrounded. Eric slowly took his Gravitation Aura, ready to fight.
Their eyes were fixed on him; they were eager to see him in uncertainty, delighted to see him scared, euphoric to see him worried.
"One Lysi Nova Level beast and ten Auri Nova level beasts, with more than fifty Nova level beasts. This is quite troublesome."
The strongest was at the back — farthest from Eric, perfectly still, simply waiting. Its soul was in a different category entirely from the others. Where the smaller ones flickered and surged with hunger, this one burned cold and dense and slow, like an ember buried so deep in ash it had forgotten what air felt like. A king who had sent his soldiers first, not out of caution but out of disinterest.
It sensed Eric's gaze and moved its head slowly to look at Eric with no fear. It sensed that Eric was someone who could challenge him, tension rising between them by the second.
Eric slowly took a step in front of Adrian. That was what triggered every beast. Suddenly, one of the Auri Nova rank beasts behind Eric jumped from the ground, trying to attack Adrian, who was unconscious.
Just when it was about to reach Adrian, a pink bubble appeared and exploded.
BOOM!
The explosion was silent and formless. The beast was blasted off by the explosion, striking the wall of the formation before falling to the ground.
It was dead.
Rank 4 Energy Pathway Aura Technique- Concealed Detonation.
Eric had not wasted a single second the moment he realized that something was wrong, quickly setting many of these bubbles here. These beasts without any Abyssal eyes and instincts couldn't possibly see through the concealment of the energies, falling for it.
The moment one of them dies, the other beasts growl and start to rush in.
Three Auri Nova beasts charged simultaneously — left, right, and behind.
Eric moved forward.
Not back. Not sideways. Directly toward the Lysi Nova at the far end of the formation space, closing the distance between them in long, deliberate strides while the three charging beasts hit the space he had just vacated.
Three detonations. Three soul-flames winked out in his Abyssal Eyes.
Adrian lay untouched in the center of it all. The explosions had moved around him like water around a stone — Eric had spoken to the energies before the fight began, a quiet request rather than a command, asking them to leave one spot alone. The energies had listened. They always listened to him. This was what it meant to walk the Energy Pathway — not just to use the world's energy, but to be on speaking terms with it.
The Lysi Nova beast watched Eric approach.
It didn't charge. It rose slowly from its position at the back of the formation space and moved further away, unhurried, sending a wave of Nova-level beasts forward in its place. A king who had no interest in fighting a soldier's battle. A very acidic scent soon started to emit from the body of the Lysi Nova Fear Crawler.
The Nova level beasts swarmed in from every direction.
Eric stopped moving. His vision changed as his eyes slowly closed; the scene of Eric's parents' funeral appeared in his mind. The smell of the incense in front of his parents' photos and the cold gaze of his relatives on him, A chill ran down Eric's spine as he realized that this was the pulling of his memory by the Lysi Nova Crawler.
While his memories were being pulled, the Nova-level beasts swarmed him. Eric quickly dodged, he ducked, letting one crawler jump from above him as he rolled and did a backflip, and gained some distance. One Auri Nova Fear Crawler near him noticed him, jumped at him from behind, and Eric quickly punched its face, killing it.
Twenty Nova level and three Auri attacked from all directions, making a formation and using their memory pulling ability together, making Eric get lost in his memories again.
Eric was a Lysi Nova; even though so many Crawlers had used their ability, it was still much weaker than the Lysi Nova's ability. But Eric was not an Aura user of the Mind Pathway. He got lost in his memories again.
...
The smell of blood and the passing horns of the vehicles on the road entered Eric's ears. The surroundings were so calm at this moment.
Four-year-old Eric was currently frozen, his knees were buckled as he sat on top of a closed trash bin, his eyes were wide open as he looked down at his hands that were smeared with still-warm blood.
Young Max was standing near him by the trash bin as they both stared at the corpse in front of them, whose head had been crushed by a huge boulder.
This was the corpse of the person who had just saved them from the mafia, which had kidnapped them, yet they killed him.
The reason was in their minds before they killed them, but now, they couldn't think of a single thing.
Amidst the silence, Eric got down from the trash can and stood beside Max, a huge smile on Max's face as he looked at Eric, his cheeks smeared with blood, but the shine in his eyes formed a stark contrast.
"Now, no one can hurt us." Max laughed loudly.
Eric slowly nodded his head as Max caught his right hand with his left hand and started to run forward into the road. The light got closer the closer they got to it. The closer they got to the light, the faster they started to run.
Until the light fully enveloped them, bringing them to the next phase of their lives.
...
Eric's eyes suddenly opened as his brows furrowed. The surrounding Crawlers had pulled their memories to such a level. The earlier pulling of the Lysi Nova Crawler had damaged his world of consciousness and subconsciousness, making their collective strength have such an effect. He looked at the Lysi Nova Crawler across the formation space, getting ready to use his ability, seeing that Eric had gotten out.
"I have to hurry!"
His Gravitational Aura crystalized across both arms — sharp-edged, pink, solid as glass. He activated Repulsion Charge and shot forward, a flash of pink in the absolute dark.
Wherever he passed through, the beasts got crushed and died pitifully, their bodies unidentifiable.
The beasts didn't see him coming. His fist was just about to drive through the Lysi Nova beast completely, but an Auri Nova beast came and stopped him; the impact was clean and total. The creature let out one short screech before its body hit the ground and went still, a dark pool spreading slowly beneath it.
The others stopped as the Lysi Nova beast ran farther in the group, getting ready to use its ability, but Eric snapped his fingers and used Gravitation Press on it, stopping it.
The others didn't charge. They stood in a ring around him, wailing — a sound that had no direction, that came from all of them at once, grief and rage indistinguishable from each other.
None of them moved.
Eric looked down at the dead creature at his feet. He flicked his wrist, shaking the blood from his Aura-coated hand, and crouched slightly to look more closely at what he'd killed.
Humanoid body. Black-blue rough skin, coarse like broken stone. Hands too large for its frame.
Fear Crawlers.
He straightened up. The pieces assembled themselves quickly — the sounds in the dark, the memories being pulled, the way they had circled and waited rather than rushing immediately. It all fits.
Fear Crawlers were Pathway beasts of the Emotion Pathway, bound deeply enough to darkness that most classified them under the Darkness Pathway instead. They lived in groups, feeding on fear the way other beasts fed on flesh. Their innate ability let them reach through darkness into the minds of their prey — finding the most traumatic memories, pulling sounds and sensations from them, playing them back. Breaking their victims down slowly and deliberately, maximizing fear before they finally attacked. They preferred their prey terrified. It made the feeding better.
They were patient hunters.
So was Eric.
A small smile appeared on his face.
The best way to kill a Fear Crawler was the simplest — stay calm. Fear was their weapon and their food simultaneously. Take it away, and they were just beasts in the dark.
At this moment, a dozen of them lunged at Adrian from multiple directions at once.
They hit something invisible and flew back like they had struck a wall, scattered across the formation floor.
Infinite Repulsion — a weaker variation of Eric's full technique, sustained not purely by his Aura but anchored into the gravity of the formation space itself, drawing on the energy around them to maintain itself. It was burning through his reserves, one percent every two seconds, but far slower than the full version would have. It would hold. Long enough.
He turned back to the beasts surrounding him and activated Repulsion Charge again.
What followed was not a fight in any meaningful sense. It was a culling. Every beast that entered his range was crushed or thrown or driven through. The Nova level Fear Crawlers fell in groups, soul-flames guttering out across his Abyssal Eyes like candles in a draft. They were not the problem.
The problem was quieter than the fighting.
Between every strike, between every movement, the darkness kept working. Fragments surfacing without warning — the smell of the kidnapping, the face of the man he and Max had killed, the specific cold of the first time he entered the Meditation Realm. The Fear Crawlers weren't just dying around him; they were pulling at him constantly, disrupting the edges of his focus and Aura control in ways that compounded with every second.
He crushed each fragment as it surfaced. Steady. Methodical.
Whenever the Lysi Nova was about to use its ability, Eric attacked it, ignoring the attacks of the other crawlers and letting them hit him.
Calm was not the absence of fear. Calm was something you chose and kept choosing, one moment at a time.
He kept choosing it.
The Nova level beasts thinned. Then stopped coming.
The formation space went quiet except for his own breathing.
At the far end of the space, the Lysi Nova Fear Crawler's soul-flame burned cold and still in his Abyssal Eyes.
Still waiting. Still watching.
Eric rolled one shoulder and started walking toward it. His steps were slow but filled the beast with immense fear. It finally decided to show courage and stood up slightly, screeching at Eric. More Gravitation Aura appeared on his arms as another layer of Aura was coated on his arms.
...
Adrian's eyes slowly opened.
The air around him felt even colder than before; colder, wrong, and dilapidating, smelling like rotten flesh.
He slowly turned his head.
He was sitting against a ruined building on the hard ground made up of greyish-black soil like that of ash and char. The darkness was still around, but the surroundings were much more visible now. Adrian could see a few meters around him without any problem.
The pressure on his body remained the same invisible weight the realm had placed on him since they arrived. He barely noticed it now. His body had learned to carry it.
An oil lamp made up of animal fat was beside him, bringing him constant warmth.
He slowly shifted, trying to push himself upright, and his hand suddenly slipped against something soft.
He looked down.
A rat. Fat, silver-furred, easily the size of a cat. It stared up at him with small black eyes, whiskers twitching once before it lost interest entirely and scurried back into the dark.
Adrian's whole body flinched back, a short sound escaping his throat before he could stop it.
The rat didn't even look back at him. It seemed disappointed — like it had expected something else from him. Something that didn't move.
Adrian's breathing came fast and shallow as he forced himself to look past where the rat had gone.
There were more of them. Dozens, clustered in the dark a short distance away, gathered around something on the ground. Small wet sounds. Contented sounds.
He realized what he was looking at half a second before he wanted to.
A corpse. Old enough that the rats had been at it for a while, working through what remained of its abdomen with the patient, the unhurried rhythm of animals who knew they wouldn't be interrupted.
Adrian's stomach turned. A disgusting feeling spread in his body, almost making him puke. He took a step back without deciding to, his shoulder hitting the ruined wall behind him.
He tore his eyes away and looked left instead.
He saw Eric slowly walking around a formation.
It took him a moment to recognize it as the same formation they had teleported into. It looked nothing like it now. A massive hole had been torn through the space itself, the air around it still faintly distorted at the edges. A heavy smell of blood reached Adrian even from where he stood.
Eric was dismantling what remained of it piece by piece.
He moved without wasted motion — stopping at intervals to instill his Meditation Aura into the structure, checking something Adrian couldn't see, then inscribing quick symbols into the formation space before striking it once, sharp and precise. Each time, the formation gave way a little further, charms shaking loose from wherever they had been embedded.
Eric collected these charms as they fell.
He examined them briefly — recognition flickering across his face for some, blank unfamiliarity for others — before pressing them against his chest. A small opening rippled into existence there, dark and quiet, and the charms vanished into it one by one.
This was Eric storing these charms in his Domain of Emotions.
Adrian opened his mouth to call out to him.
"We were attacked by a horde of Fear Crawlers." Eric's voice arrived first, calm and even, before Adrian could get a word out. He didn't turn around. He didn't stop working. "I killed them all. There is nothing to worry about for now."
A pause. The strike of his hand against another charm. A soft mechanical click as the formation gave up another piece of itself.
"But there is one problem."
Adrian said nothing. A cold, heavy feeling settled into his chest before Eric even continued.
Eric raised his left hand. Golden light gathered briefly around his fingers as he released his Meditation Aura and attempted to teleport.
Black sparks crackled across the air where the teleportation should have opened. Nothing happened. The sparks died out, leaving only the dark and the smell of blood behind.
"We cannot leave this layer," Eric said, his voice flat and cold in a way Adrian hadn't heard from him before. "I have tried to contact others as well. The same result."
He finally turned to look at Adrian directly.
"And there is no one else here. Not one other person in this entire layer."
Adrian stood frozen for a long time, letting the words settle into him. The only sound left in the formation space was Eric's quiet, methodical work — charm after charm, the soft click of breaking structure, the silence in between.
Eventually, even that stopped.
Eric finished dismantling what remained of the formation, storing the last of the charms and the Fear Crawlers' bodies, which could be used for forging or advancing away into his Domain of Emotion. He turned and walked toward Adrian, unhurried, his steps even on the broken ground.
He stopped in front of him.
"Tell me," Eric said. "What do you think we should do?"
Adrian's body trembled slightly as the question pulled him out of his own head. He lifted his gaze and found Eric already looking at him — calm, steady, waiting.
"I—" Adrian swallowed. "I suggest we wait. For someone to come."
Eric shook his head once.
"That won't work." His voice was plain, not unkind. "We have been here five hours now. Time flows the same in this layer as in any other. If we cannot leave, then others cannot enter either." He paused. "Layer 102 is a well-known hunting ground. If entry were possible, there would already be people here. There are none."
Adrian's throat tightened.
"Even if someone eventually found a way in," Eric continued, "we have no way of knowing how long that would take. We have no food. No way to call for help. Waiting is not a plan. It is simply a delay."
"Then what should we do?" Adrian's voice came out smaller than he wanted it to, his inexperience showing plainly under Eric's even gaze.
Eric raised a hand and pointed into the dark stretching beyond the ruined formation.
"We keep moving. Inaction guarantees nothing but slow failure. If there is a way out, we will not find it standing here." He lowered his hand. "We search. We survive. We adapt as we go."
Adrian's expression twisted — reluctance, fear, the small, useless hope that there might have been an easier answer.
Eric didn't wait for him to agree.
He simply turned and walked toward the darkness, his Aura beginning to dim the world around the formation's edge.
Adrian stood still for a long moment, watching him go.
Then he saw Eric's shape start to blur into the dark ahead — and something in his chest seized.
He ran.
His legs moved before his mind fully caught up, closing the distance until he was at Eric's side, matching his pace, neither of them saying anything else as the formation space disappeared behind them and Layer 102 opened up around them in every direction.