Chapter 285: Horrors
Flo used her power of reality to change the floor into some sort of rubbery texture. Everyone slammed into the ground safely. Flo managed to save them. She looked at everyone still bleeding out on the ground, and then she looked up at Aren, who was still attacking the angel.
She knew that Aren would not want to hurt his friends. She could tell that whoever was inside that mind now was not her master, but someone else.
"I have to help," she said, and then looked at all of them. Their current state was very bad. She unleashed her reality power, using it to sustain them. She didn’t know how she would manage to keep them for long. She prayed that Aren would be back to himself soon.
On the other hand, Aren was chasing down the angel. The angel gritted its teeth, enraged.
"No human should be able to stand against me. How dare you, how dare you?" he barked in anger, pulling back his sword to attack. He didn’t believe that any human should be capable of standing against him in any way at all.
He slashed, a powerful cut that ripped space open in one try. It caused the air to tremble, shaking wildly.
The attack alone was able to take down anyone even at level fifty, that was how strong it was, yet Aren looked at the incoming attack and didn’t care. He pulled back his sword and slashed forward. His attack ripped through the air and clashed with the attack midair. An explosion ripped through the air like a violent blast.
Aren shot through the explosion and at the same time shot tendrils through the air. It latched onto the angel. The angel looked at the tendrils and, in anger, ripped them apart, and then flapped its wings, unleashing a massive gust of wind that slammed into Aren, throwing him back down.
Aren summoned a wyvern while he fell, landing on its back and immediately using it to fly upward as fast as he could. He shot into the air toward the angel again. At this point, the angel was tired of playing it simple. He had one simple task, take Lucy away and then leave.
"I have had enough," he growled, and suddenly his divine energy exploded outward with an extreme force that caused the wall to shake and crack. Debris fell from the walls and hit the ground while he flew there. He shut his eyes for a few seconds before gripping the sword in both hands. With one flap of his wings, he ripped through the air like thunder and went for a stab right through Aren.
Aren didn’t move. He simply deployed his shadow form and the blade went right through, but it was infused with divine energy, so despite being a physical attack it still packed a ton of magical punch.
The divine energy burned Aren from inside and he was thrown backwards through the air. He slammed into the wall and left a massive crack there.
The angel didn’t want to allow Aren back to his feet again, so he pointed a finger at the wall and began unleashing blast after blast after blast at the crack, each one slamming in with a loud bang and pushing Aren deeper and deeper into the wall.
When he was done, the angel stood there staring at the wall and breathing heavily, angry that it had taken him this much to handle Aren, but also excited to have finally taken down Aren. Well, that excitement lasted a few minutes, as the next moment shadow tendrils shot from the wall and latched onto the angel.
The angel was stunned to see this, but before he could respond in any way at all, Aren shot out of the wall, Ancient Devourer in hand as he went for a powerful slash at the angel.
"Tch, you fucking bastard," the angel yelled in pure anger before slashing. Both swords met, and the shockwave that ripped through the air after that caused the entire walls to start crumbling. This massive angel statue was now falling apart due to their fight alone.
Large rocks began falling from above. Flo looked up. She was stunned to see the rocks. She had to defend them down there from the falling rocks and ensure that none of them were hurt even more, but what she could do was already reaching the limit. There wasn’t more reality that she could bend and control.
[...]
Inside the shadow’s mind, Aren had made the decision to see his past. His vision went dark and when his eyes opened again, he was standing inside a room. The walls were made of metal and the air was biting. There was a large metal door with a small framed opening that was for him to look out, and a small window that showed the sky outside and the darkness of night.
Aren had no recollection of this place. He had never seen somewhere like this before. He looked around and suddenly spotted a kid that was curled up in the corner. The kid made not a single sound, even his breathing was so low as if he didn’t want to be heard.
This was Nathan, a young Nathan who should definitely not be here.
"That’s me, what the hell is this place and why am I here?" Aren wondered out loud, but the kid could not hear him.
Suddenly there was the sound of a door opening. Aren turned around and saw two men walk in, both of them draped in lab coats and handling some tablets where they jotted things down.
"He seems pretty stable," the one to the right said. He had a sharp face and deep blue eyes, a face that was framed perfectly with his dark brown hair.
"It’s a good thing, we can finally start the experiment. Can’t believe it took that long to finally get his parents out of the way," the one to the left said. He was shorter and had a face that only a mother could love, with a bald spot on his head to make it all worse.
When Aren heard the word parents, his attention was grabbed. He had always been an orphan and never part of a family.
"I had parents that were alive?" Aren muttered. The shock and confusion were evident on his face.
He watched as the two scientists stepped aside for an armed man to walk in and grab the young Nathan. He was pulled out of the room and the door was shut. Aren walked through the walls of the room and followed them as they went farther away through the hallway of this research place.
Soon they arrived at a large testing room. They took Nathan inside and then strapped him to a slanted bed, ensuring that he couldn’t move. Then one of the scientists took a helmet that was connected to several weird-looking cables. They shoved it down on the head of Nathan and strapped it in.
The scientists stepped out of the room and watched through a window at the side, where there were many buttons and levers on the panel in front of them, and from what Aren could tell they were about to test something.
"If what that man said is true, then this kid truly has that power. If we can harness it all, he could become the greatest source of energy, a living, breathing generator with enough energy to power countries," the shorter of the scientists said eagerly.
"I hope it does work. We went through hell to get this kid."
After saying that, he pulled the lever and a huge flow of energy went through the cables and entered the helmet and then right into the head of Nathan. What followed was a scream.
A scream so loud and guttural that it would break the heart of anyone that heard it. Nathan screamed, tears rushing down his eyes like a river without stop, yet the two men stood there unshaken and unbothered. They watched this kid grovel in agony.
Aren looked at Nathan, he looked at himself, and he felt a lump instantly form in his throat as he looked at what was happening. This was him lying there, this was him yelling.
Guilt began to build up in Aren. How could he have forgotten something like this? How could he live a happy life and forget that there was a time that he passed through this?
The horror continued non-stop for half an hour. The veins on Nathan bulged, looking like they would burst at any second. His entire body was drenched in so much sweat that it looked disgusting.
Finally, one of the scientists stopped the process, a disappointed look plastered on his face.
"It was a fail, we didn’t manage to awaken it today," the shorter one said.
"We will keep trying until it works for sure," the second said. They both wrote down a few things on their pad, not a hint of emotion for the kid.