​He turned his black eyes, those infinite, light-devouring voids, sweeping across the silent, butchered battlefield. The absolute stillness of the massacre was profound, broken only by the microscopic hiss of highly concentrated Eitra blood boiling as it met the freezing, toxic air of the wastelands.

​He looked right and left, standing completely motionless, his posture exuding the relaxed elegance of a maestro admiring a silent orchestra. He was not looking with human sight; he was listening to the very fabric of reality, searching for the slightest anomaly in the symphony of death he had just orchestrated.

​A very faint pulse.

​There it was. The terrified, erratic heartbeat of someone desperately clinging to the illusion of survival. It was racing like a dying bird trapped within a cage of ribs, trying to suppress its desperate rhythm beneath the suffocating weight of the piled corpses.

​His smile widened slightly, a microscopic shift of his pale lips.

​He had found the last survivor. It seemed not everyone possessed the sheer willpower and terrifying courage required to smash their own heads against the rocks or tear their own throats out. Some were simply too weak to even choose their own end.

​The young man moved. His steps were deliberate, measured, and sickeningly elegant. He glided over the battlefield, his polished black leather shoes passing inches above the acidic puddles of monstrous blood and the severed human limbs without making a single sound. It was as if gravity itself was too intimidated to pull him down into the muck.

​He stopped before the massive corpse of a decapitated troll abomination. The headless behemoth was a mountain of putrid flesh, its thick, leathery green skin oozing a highly corrosive, foul-smelling gas that melted the very rocks beneath it.

​Beneath the torn, cavernous, and violently opened belly of the dead troll, there was a small young man.

​A novice hunter. He could not have been older than eighteen, likely on his very first field mission outside the protective walls of Elysium. His pristine armor, issued just days ago, was now caked in mud, bile, and gore.

​He had lost his weapon—dropped it the moment the terrifying pressure descended upon the valley—and buried himself completely beneath the abomination’s warm, foul, and pulsating entrails. He was using the beast’s decaying organs as a blanket, trying in vain to hide his physical and Eitral signature from the terrifying aura that had driven a hundred elite veterans to mass suicide.

​He did not possess enough courage to stab a jagged dagger into his own eye like the A-rank veterans, nor the audacity to swallow a high-explosive grenade. He was simply a terrified child playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek with a cosmic horror.

​He trembled violently, his body convulsing as if locked in a continuous, violent seizure. He was crying in absolute silence, biting down so hard on his own tongue to keep from sobbing that warm blood filled his mouth. He had completely lost control of his bodily functions, having urinated and defecated on himself from the overwhelming, primal terror that was currently short-circuiting his entire nervous system.

​The black-eyed young man stopped before the massive, foul-smelling corpse.

​He did not extend his pale, delicate hand to move the thick, muscular body that weighed several tons. He did not utter a spell, nor did he adopt a combat stance.

​Simply standing there, directing his bottomless, void-like gaze toward the corpse, was enough. The air around the troll began to warp and distort. A localized, miniature gravitational force—born not of magic, but of the sheer, oppressive weight of his existence—pressed down on the troll’s body.

​CRUNCH. The sound of massive, tree-trunk-sized ribs snapping under the unseen pressure echoed loudly. The troll’s body split in half with a horrifying, wet tearing sound, its thick skin peeling back like rotten fruit. The heavy entrails were violently pushed aside by the invisible force, rolling away to reveal the terrified novice hunter. He lay there, curled in a fetal position, covered in acidic blood, mud, and his own filth, completely and utterly exposed before the nightmare walking in a tailored suit.

​The young hunter looked up. His body jerked and spasmed uncontrollably, thrashing in the dark mud like a fish violently pulled from the water and thrown onto scorching concrete.

​He tried to scream. He desperately tried to beg for mercy, to cry out for his mother, to offer anything for his life. But his throat shut completely.

​The muscles in his neck spasmed so violently that they locked into place, rigid as steel cables, preventing even a single molecule of air from entering or escaping his lungs. He was drowning in the open air, paralyzed by a fear so profound it had overridden his brain’s basic survival protocols.

​The elegant young man, the transcendent embodiment of death walking the earth, slowly bent down. He moved with the fluid, impossible grace of a ballet dancer, descending until his flawlessly pale, pristine face perfectly aligned with the trembling, filthy, tear-streaked face of the hunter.

​The scent emanating from the young man was a jarring paradox. Amidst the overwhelming stench of sulfur, spilled bowels, and rotting troll flesh, the young man smelled of cold night flowers. It was a pure, numbing, and intoxicating fragrance—a scent that offered a deeply false sense of serenity and peace right before the moment of absolute annihilation.

​The young man did not raise a single finger to touch the boy.

He did not draw a hidden blade from beneath his luxurious coat.

He did not unleash a torrent of destructive red or black Eitra to vaporize him.

​He simply... opened his black eyes fully, removing the invisible veil that separated the physical world from the abyss, and looked directly into the crying hunter’s widened, panicked eyes.

​"Look at me, little one," the young man whispered. His voice was a lethal, silken caress—a sound so soft, so musically perfect, that it instantly melted the boy’s remaining willpower, bypassing his eardrums and whispering directly into the core of his soul.

​The hunter could not close his eyes. Even if he wanted to tear his eyelids off, his body refused to obey.

​He was forced, bound by an irresistible, crushing cosmic force, to look.

​The meeting of their eyes was all it took. It was the catalyst for the end.

​The very moment the young hunter looked into that absolute blackness... he realized, with mind-shattering clarity, that he was not looking at eyes.

​His fragile human mind violently pierced the barriers of the physical dimension. The three-dimensional world around him—the mud, the dead bodies, the sky—evaporated.

​He saw the unadulterated hell that lay behind those bottomless voids.

He saw an endless, spiraling abyss of madness. He saw a torn, bleeding red sky suspended over a landscape of jagged obsidian, filled with millions upon millions of human souls. He watched them being crushed under invisible weights, skinned alive by shadow-demons, and tortured endlessly in an infinite, inescapable cycle of pure, unfiltered agony.

He saw the absolute nothingness waiting for him at the end of his timeline.

He saw the cold, mathematically cruel truth of the universe—that human beings were not special, they were not chosen by any divine light, but were nothing more than insignificant livestock, raised and fattened in the pen of reality solely to be slaughtered by higher beings.

​The effect was not merely psychological. It was not a hallucination induced by fear or toxic gas. It was total biological destruction. It was the catastrophic failure of the physical brain caused by forcing a limited, fragile human mind to process and comprehend the concept of transcendent darkness, infinity, and concepts it simply did not have the physical capacity to contain.

​"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH"