Chapter 216: Experts Fight Their Own, Amateurs Fight Others
Veronica was frantic with worry because she cared too much. Seeing that Wayne was unharmed—his torn clothing concealing an uninjured body—she quickly closed her eyes. It wasn’t because she had seen anything inappropriate, but because the succubus in her peripheral vision attracted her attention too much, constantly radiating a deadly allure.
Wayne held the Forgotten One’s severed head and hurled it at the succubus. The instant the head left his hand, its hair extended and coiled around his wrist tightly.
The hair was shaped from the Forgotten One’s chaotic thoughts, which transformed its physical body and made it resemble the inhabitants of the Astral Plane. Case in point: the legendary mage Marshall, the egg peddler.
The Forgotten One’s long hair writhed like a living thing, wrapping around Wayne’s arms. Strands burrowed into his skin and sought to parasitize his flesh, causing his veins to bulge along his arm like writhing earthworms.
He raised his hand, examining the head.
The Forgotten One’s pious facial features blurred. A lump of brain matter was squeezed out of its head, turning into white foam along with the hair and flooding into Wayne’s body. Meanwhile, the headless corpse held Wayne from behind, dissolving into the same white foam and fusing with his skin, clinging to him like glue.
Roar!
Under the succubus’s control, the remaining Forgotten Ones swarmed forward. They all expelled their brains, abandoning their last shreds of reason. Flesh, bones, and organs dissolved, engulfing Wayne’s limbs and torso and wrapping him in a giant white fleshy ball.
“Auston, save me!” Wayne cried out dramatically, then, with a scream, he went silent, his entire face submerged.
Alerted, Veronica rushed to rescue him, faith magic overflowing from her fingertips. Auston didn’t stop her. He impassively watched his daughter charge into the white mass, toying with his antique silver coin without the slightest worry.
When Forgotten Ones succumbed to the Astral Plane and abandoned their last shred of rationality, allowing the void’s knowledge to reshape them, the Ministry of Magic’s research called the process ‘evolution’—an uncontrollable, erroneous evolution.
Knowledge drove the thoughts mad, which then reshaped the life essence, leading to the complete collapse of all semblance of balance—whether in the form of the Silver Cross or the Golden Triangle.