Eldritch Horror Theatre

It was getting a little too loud.

Watching the significantly darkened ground melt into a waterbed in the blink of an eye, Fu Qian frowned.

The human faces blanketing the landscape now converged into wildly exaggerated ravings. Even worse, as the visages drifted and interlinked into bizarre textures, a single glance was enough to breed chaos in the mind.

A Tier 1 was truly hard to kill.

Fortunately, the Red Moon still shone brightly in the sky, now looking almost as large as the Blue Star once had.

”I apologize for underestimating you earlier.”

In this ghostly domain, however, Yasui Tokiyuki looked entirely in his element, completely at ease.

”From now on, I will treat you as a genuine threat and grant you my utmost attention.”

”And when your will finally dissipates, I will turn you into a legend as well. That will be my final show of respect.”

”I’m flattered.”In the face of Yasui Tokiyuki’s profound favor, Fu Qian offered a casual reply while lightly taking a step back.

A split second later, a rift nearly a meter wide sheared through the exact spot where he had just stood, plunging deep into the earth.

It was as if an invisible Greatsword had silently cleaved the ground.

Fu Qian peered into the chasm and discovered that even beneath the surface, the earth was made of countless faces pressed tightly together.

He hadn’t actually seen an incoming Greatsword. He had retreated only because he sensed a peculiar rhythm converging on him.

Indeed, no matter how grating the sound, he hadn’t ignored a single echo of the surrounding ravings.

That previous attack had been born from the overlapping cadence of those ravings, rising like a sonic wave to form an invisible, lethal strike.

Although he was newly promoted to Tier 1, the man’s mastery over his power was extraordinarily refined.

Even as he marveled at the thought, Fu Qian’s figure blurred into another evasive maneuver.

The spot where he just stood was instantly riddled with dense holes, as though bombarded by a torrential shower of arrows.

There was every reason to believe Yasui Tokiyuki had converged an immense amount of cognitive force upon this domain. Rather than manifesting specific monsters, he was riding the ebbs and flows of the domain’s power, materializing those ripples into lethal strikes.

These ripples were fleeting, rendering them silent and formless, but that hardly meant they lacked power.

The barrage of attacks just now had contained at least Demigod Realm power.

The most troublesome part was that he could only predict the incoming strikes by listening to the ravings.

But while these overlapping whispers weren’t draining his SAN Value, they were rapidly accelerating that peculiar evolution where form is emptiness.

The situation was nothing short of precarious.

Looking up, countless lethal strikes seemed to be brewing in the gloom. The ravings grew unstoppably louder by the second, churning the invisible waves into a violent storm.

Compared to Fu Qian’s growing discomfort, Yasui Tokiyuki’s condition amid those waves seemed to have actually improved.

Which meant that for every second they dragged this out, his chances of victory slipped further away.

A moment later, Fu Qian flexed his arm, and his figure vanished from where he stood.

...

Yasui Tokiyuki had undoubtedly been monitoring Fu Qian’s movements the entire time, and he reacted instantly.

However, his reaction wasn’t to reposition and retreat, nor was it to manifest more shields. Instead, his Crimson Robe suddenly billowed outward.

Almost simultaneously, a burst of bloody light exploded from his body once more.

Even as Yasui Tokiyuki suffered a strike that pierced straight through him, the Crimson Robe snapped tight around Fu Qian, who had just materialized out of thin air.

Several weapons radiating an aura of Death immediately slashed inward to butcher him.

”I said I would grant you my utmost respect. A fair exchange of injuries, for instance.”

Despite the heavy blow, Yasui Tokiyuki’s voice didn’t waver in the slightest as he looked down at another chunk of flesh that had been gouged out of him.

This was because the Inky Weapons had also finally struck Fu Qian’s body.

The power of Death they contained was so potent that the very instant Fu Qian’s flesh was severed, it disintegrated into ash.

”And it seems you won’t live long enough for your Pope to intervene.”

”Says who?”

Faced with a pure contest of Health Bars, Fu Qian used the same hand that had just carved out the Deity’s kidney to pull off his mask once more.

...

Cough! Cough!

Upon returning to the Warehouse, Fu Qian was undoubtedly in an even worse state than before.

His condition was so dire that he had pulled off his mask before the duration of his Pseudo-God Incarnation had even neared its end.

Aside from his severed arm, the most grievous wounds on his body were undeniably the fresh gashes left by those slashes.

The flesh around every wound was turning a pale, withered gray. One particular strike had cleaved straight through his chest, leaving behind a gaping hole that refused to heal.

This was the power of Death—a force that even Yasui Tokiyuki was reluctant to touch.

Although his Rank had been forcibly elevated, his physical body remained firmly locked at the Demigod Realm.

Yasui Tokiyuki’s strategy was now glaringly obvious: he wasn’t going to run anymore. Whenever Fu Qian attacked, he would simply trade blow for blow.

But if Fu Qian didn’t attack, he would never outlast Yasui on the man’s home turf.

Even if he donned the mask and returned right now, the battle would remain caught in this brutal deadlock.

The strategy made perfect sense. In a raw war of attrition comparing Health Bars and bodily resistance, Fu Qian was undeniably much more fragile.

No matter how he looked at it, he would collapse long before he could help the Red Moon fully infect Yasui.

But that was only how things appeared.

The true length of a Health Bar was total vitality plus recovery speed. While the gap in the former might be massive, Fu Qian’s recovery speed was in an entirely different dimension.

...

Tossing the mask aside, Fu Qian’s body was instantly swallowed by boiling darkness.

A moment later, motes of starlight flickered to life within that near-tangible darkness, weaving together into lines.

The complete Mythical Form.

Based on the few times he had used it before, Fu Qian understood this state as an absolute liberation from all restraints.

It was undeniably perfectly suited for a situation that demanded he go all out.

This was especially true since he could maintain his Deity status the entire time, meaning he didn’t need to worry about the automatic drain on his SAN Value.

In fact, Fu Qian could already feel that in this state, his previously clouded will was rapidly growing bold and unbridled.

The only problem was whether he would be able to revert back to normal once everything ended, after having fully unleashed this unfettered power.

...

A short while later, sensing that his Pseudo-God Incarnation was ready to be used once more, Fu Qian opened his eyes.

Within the Mythical Form, the boiling crucible of both spirit and flesh forcibly mended the gaping sword wounds on his body. Even his severed left arm had regrown, albeit looking much thinner than before.

Looking closely, however, the Dislocation ring patterns that symbolized the Red Moon’s power were still bleeding into the blackness.

Remaining separate from the starlight, their brilliance was impossible to conceal.

”Not bad.”

Fu Qian wasn’t surprised. He even offered a quiet word of praise to himself.

”My condition is inching ever closer to Emperor Yasui’s.”

The contest of Health Bars was merely the foundation required to keep the game going. The ultimate crux of this battle lay in whose rate of corruption was faster.

[SAN Value -10]

Carrying that sense of satisfaction, Fu Qian donned the mask once more.

...

”What exactly are you? Or have you finally gone mad?”

Yasui Tokiyuki, whose flesh had just been violently gouged out once again, spoke with a distinct trace of bewilderment.

This confusion wasn’t just due to Fu Qian’s mangled new appearance, but also because of the pistol currently pressed squarely against Yasui’s forehead.

But a split second later, he realized something.

”A special curse? You certainly do possess a multitude of tricks.”

”Unfortunately, it seems your luck is rather poor. It didn’t trigger.”

”Maybe it’s just my rotten luck.”

Fu Qian casually spat back the nonsense and activated The World for the third time.