That Time an American was Reincarnated into Another World-Chapter 264: Death Shrine

Umara watched John torch the surrounding forest, steadily walking forward as the fire engulfed everything around him. The forest was trying to resist the flames, but like John’s Psyka, it too operated by the power of the mind. Whatever poisonous power it was, it was forced to meet John’s specialty head on.

But it was able to resist. The fire burned without end yet John walked through it anyway.

Umara scanned around, the platoon gathering behind her.

Feiden shouted.

“What are we doing, Umara?!”

“...Just support John! He sees an enemy we can’t! Kill anything that gets near, and burn this fucking forest down!”

Feiden nodded, he, Tana, and Shadowbane all splitting off. The others took up defensive stances as they felt creatures linger nearby, targeting them instead of the man wreathed in fire.

Umara grit her teeth and charged forward, using air and fire magic to protect her from the heat. But even though the fire remained at a distance from her, with Psyka as its catalyst, it couldn’t be controlled by her mana alone.

She felt it suppress her Aura and press down on her mind, the toxic fumes being released trying to enter her lungs and permeate her psyche. She dumped mana into her body, protecting herself with brute force, using sheer mana saturation to prevent Psyka from entering.

It worked, but the further into the fire she went, the greater the pressure there was on her body. It was a different kind of power.

And John looked like he was reveling in it.

The flames flickered with his formations and runes, esoteric powers of intelligence that hurt Umara’s eyes just to look at, let alone try to comprehend. He was surrounded by layers of those formations and scattered stars of power.

Another pale creature dove at him, what Umara assumed to be one of the Shrikes Kwon mentioned. It was a freak, an abomination of intelligent life that repulsed her just to look at. She wouldn’t be surprised if she was going to have nightmares about them later.

But she knew she could kill them, and quite easily at that. There was a reason they lurked in the darkness and tried to break someone's mind before their body. They were weak.

With John burning their nest, she knew there was no going back. They had to push this to the end, though she would’ve much preferred getting some sleep before taking on such an endeavor.

She suddenly equipped her Jetpack, pushing her thrusters to full throttle while supplementing with her air magic. She was launched into the air, rising high above the trees and hovering.

She could see the vast forest around them, spreading for miles in all directions. She could also see two towering pillars of Psyka and mental magic shooting into the sky. It stung her brain to look at, but it told her all she needed to know.

One was John’s. The other, that thing he was hunting. From her vantage point, however, she could see its true form clearly.

It was a metallic tree of darkness and dripping blood, with branches of massive thorns, upon each of which was a human body. They looked alive, their faces contorted with agonizing screams and horror. Those massive thorns impaled them through the chest or stomach, suffocating them, torturing them. There were more skeletons than otherwise, but those corpses with flesh still on them, Umara could sense faint life.

She shuddered. Even after decades, those souls were still being tortured. That pillar of poisonous energy was feeding off their pain and terror. Even if it wasn’t for sustenance, Umara could sense in those terrible powers of intelligence the malicious glee it received from consuming their cries.

It loved what it was doing. It took pleasure from torture. It was sadism made manifest, the sheer depth of its depravity causing Umara to gag as simply bearing witness to that sinful monument infused images of its horrific actions into her mind.

She moved mana to cast her spell, but was interrupted when she buckled over and vomited. She coughed, glancing down at John as the horror of what she was witnessing made her body cold.

He still advanced toward it, flamethrower in hand. Tana, Feiden, Shadowbane, and Aki defended him, cutting down all Shrikes that dove toward him. They were being forced out of hiding, that tree, that Death Shrine, commanding them to fight.

Umara quickly regained her bearings, tearing her eyes away from that thing and focusing on her spell.

Her body flashed under her armor, biological conduits of mana pumping through her flesh and preparing the spell using both her comprehension and instinct. She felt the Fire and Air mana push through her blood before being infused into the sky above her, forming vast arrays of spell formations that pulsed with power.

She didn’t want to put herself on the edge of exhaustion, but she had gotten too used to dumping all her power into singular spells. It was like her mana pool couldn’t keep up with her spell casting, despite it being so massive.

She shook her head, completing the spell after nearly 30 seconds of uninterrupted casting.

Eighteen arrays flashed around her as her Jetpack started running low on power. They angled themselves, pointing to the forest between John and the Death Shrine.

Then they fired, a channel of air being carved out of the atmosphere and compressed fire being propelled through it with such force that it created a shockwave powerful enough to uproot the trees around the impact zone.

The beams of fire swept across the ground, torching everything in their path, igniting everything nearby, killing every Shrike lurking in the area.

The spell ended with one last explosion, clearing the area just before the Shrine. She was only disappointed that there wasn’t enough mana to level it as well, though based on how it didn’t sway at all with the shockwave, she guessed even her spells wouldn’t be enough.

The Jetpack lowered her down, Jaya there with a canister in one hand and a recovery pill in another, for her.

“Good job, babe.”

“Thanks. Where’s John?”

“Marching. He isn’t responding to us.”

Umara looked up. John was walking through the new sea of fire she had created, looking around a bit more before suddenly jogging. The others kept up, and Umara quickly lost sight of them.

She took a step forward despite her body screaming at her.

“Let’s follow!”

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She and the rest of the platoon ran forward, smoke, ash, flames, and unbearable heat filling the atmosphere. Every single one of them said a silent thanks for the full environmental seal of their armor, else they would be breathing in the byproducts of the most poisonous forest fire in the world.

Even then, their armors were in overdrive trying to keep them cool. The flames, while not hot, were dampening the enchantments and preventing them from working at full capacity, the Crystals within them actively consuming their power to keep them running. If they weren’t quick, those Crystals would run dry and they’d take on the full brunt of the hell they were in.

Unable to see five feet in front of her, Umara simply charged forward through the flames, eventually reaching the clearing she had created. It was still surrounded by fire, but she could at least see the Shrine.

Everyone looked up at it. It had to be several hundred feet tall, branches extending out into the sky, on every huge thorn a corpse. Shrikes surrounded the tree, screaming at them, mixing their demonic voices with the cries of those still alive on the tree and the billowing fire around them.

If this wasn’t hell, Umara wasn’t sure what it would look like.

Yet John stood before the tree, looking up at it. She couldn’t see his face, but his Aura wasn’t holding anything back. She could sense how crazed he was, could sense the poison in his mind. That Shrine was infecting him, the darkness encroaching on his psyche and turning him mad.

But what it didn’t do was turn his allegiance. Instead, it looked like it simply broke down the barriers that John had put up, pulling forth the ugliest part of him. For now, at least, he was just as much of a nightmare as they were.

Umara watched him take out his SEER Knife with one hand, the blade no longer a crystalline blue, but a dark purple. It released a fog from the blade, that seemed to corrode the invisible ether of another dimension, diffused with Anarchy and the tricks of Unholy Light.

She heard him scream.

“Come out, you writhing parasite! So I can show you what real fear is!”

Umara saw the Shrine respond to his challenge. The base of the tree, almost as wide as the tree was tall, melted open to reveal what was inside.

Umara gagged again, feeling her stomach churn with just a glance.

It was a massive brain, a complex of pure neural tissue soaked in viscous goop that released the most putrid stench Umara had ever smelled.

She, and nearly every other person around her, fell to a knee and started vomiting or heaving. Kwon, Song, Aki, and John were the only exceptions. And Katta, who instead vomited while standing and staring.

Umara watched as the thorns on the branches started retracting, corpses and skeletons falling from the sky all around them, even hitting Ponteck and Aria. As they did so, a being started forming at the center of the brain.

Skinny like the Shrikes, wreathed in metal armor with razor spikes all over it, and an umbilical cord attached to the bottom of its spine. It stepped out, double John’s height, and smiled with an unholy visage of twisted flesh.

Umara could hear it breathe, to speak, but then John slapped the air with his hand, all the Psyka and mental formations around him smacking the entity across the head.

It staggered, John taking out another SEER Knife, this one much longer than the first. It was clearly weaponized.

Umara heard John’s voice in her mind, despite the protections she had raised.

“I’m going to reduce you to a portable shitter. If I can, I’ll try to keep your consciousness intact.”

The entity merely shrieked in response, swinging its spiked arm at John so fast that Umara could barely register the attack.

John just stood there, ripping off his helmet to reveal a wide grin and bloody eyes.

And Kwon dove in, barely managing to repel the strike with his blade. The ground cratered around his feet, the entity recoiling.

John stepped around Kwon, twirling his knives leisurely. Then, an attack came from behind the entity, Song flickering for a second with two large knives, leaving two massive lacerations in the metal shell.

Umara finally regained herself, the Shrikes all around the Shrine scattering and rushing towards them, the only enemies they could attempt to handle. There were nearly two hundred of them and yet more flooded in from the unburned forest beyond.

She raised two fingers as one lunged toward her, slicing across its body and blowing it into two with a line of compressed air.

“I think I’ve figured it out. What you would hate the most. The one thing that you can’t stand more than virtue!”

John’s words echoed through the power all around them. Umara noticed that he didn’t merely utilize the pure Psyka from his body, but also the poison around them. He breathed everything in from the atmosphere, laughing as smoke and searing air puffed from his lungs.

Like he didn’t care if he were to die.

The entity tried attacking him again, but its arm went straight through his body, his figure puffing away into fog.

He reappeared inside the Shrine, amidst that writhing lake of neural tissue. His Psykic formations clashed with it, two insane minds fighting one another as if to prove who could be more depraved than the other.

It stung Umara’s eyes to watch, so she just listened.

“Reducing you to a tool of good would be quite the treat. But of course, it wouldn’t piss you off unless you could actually experience that. And you can’t do that if I kill you.”

The entity tried to rush back into the Shrine, but Kwon and Song repelled it. Utilizing more power than they had ever used as Desert Eagles before, they kept the entity away from its own mind.

John raised his knives, now dripping with so much complexity that the air was filled with numbers and programming.

And he stabbed them into the brain.

<SCREEEEEEEEE>

The brain released so much of its agony that Umara’s mind threatened to lapse. All the Shrikes around them started twitching and thrashing with seizures, the exposed brains on their heads splitting in two.

John cackled as he dug through the brain, tearing at it with his knives. Infusing pure data and stimulation, he ran his cypher engines and overwrote the brain's own thoughts and memories localized to that area. The neurons throughout the tissue were lighting up with snapping electrochemical activity, many of them being killed.

But others in the area were put to death in order to cut off John’s attacks. The entity raged against Kwon and Song, but when Aki jumped in, it had no chance.

John simply stomped across the brain, knee deep in its neural tissue, and drew his knives across it.

He marched toward the center, all the Shrikes dying, the Shrine withering, dumping its power into the entity so it had a chance to stop him.

Kwon and Song, boasting the ability to fight toe to toe with an Authority 11, continued knocking it back with increasing difficulty.

John smiled even wider as he reached the center.

“I see you.”

His knives went down, his eyes dripping blood. He carved into the brain, the screaming growing so loud that Umara couldn’t hear her own thoughts.

Then, they suddenly cut out with a flash of light.

Umara froze, struggling to regain herself, her body responding before she could. She looked up, seeing the tree above John half dead.

Within that brain, he raised an object.

A glittering red gem, surrounded by neural tissue with thick roots attaching it to the rest of the brain. It flashed with such unfathomable complexity that illusions of its own thoughts started projecting into the atmosphere.

John clutched it, Psyka rushing into it and wiping away those illusions.

A shell of formations sprang up around the gem, darkening its glimmer, suppressing its presence. Then he cut the roots holding it to the brain before carving away some of the excess and sealing it for good.

As soon as that happened, Umara felt any lingering fear or paranoia vanish. Even the sense of danger that she thought was supposed to be normal after coming to the island completely evaporated. She felt so safe that it caused her anxiety to spike, as if it was impossible to ever truly accept such safety.

The writhing brain matter under the Shrine started withering and decaying in real time, its light going out and any Aura it had puffing into nonexistence. Everything went dark, and the fog throughout the forest started dissipating.

The fire continued to rage, having spread to the forest beyond all across the mountain, but now the poisonous energy was having a harder time resisting the Psyka-fueled fire. With no entity to empower it, it was simply a matter of time.

“John!”

Umara shouted, stumbling as she tried to run over, still disoriented by the successive mental attacks.

She saw John standing there, the neural gem still clutched in his hand.

Then he collapsed back into the brain matter, the putrid juices splashing around him as he started sinking.

Umara grit her teeth, crying out.

“The things I fucking do for this stupid man! Somebody give me a hand before I leave him to drown in brain jelly!”