FREE USE in Primitive World

The thunderous approach of the eighty Blood Hounds had sent a wave of icy terror through the Veynar loyalists.

The ground vibrated like a plucked string, and the air turned thick with white limestone dust and the foul, copper stench of the beasts’ dripping jaws.

The Coalition warriors, especially Zharun cheered, believing the tide had finally turned.

In the middle of his high-speed slaughter, Sol paused.

He stood amidst a freshly carved clearing, leaving behind fifteen freshly slaughtered Coalition corpses.

Zeyra’s silver-edged bone daggers hung in his reverse grip, their tips dripping thick, hot blood onto the gravel.

His neon-crimson eyes flared like twin light-clusters spinning rapidly as his heightened senses locked onto the incoming wave of six-legged monsters.

Beasts.

Sol’s lips curled into a cold, calculating sneer.

Unlike human or alien practitioners... whose complex minds, hardened wills, and stubborn, ego-driven soul structures fiercely resisted external mental interference... beasts operated on raw, primal instinct, territorial hierarchy, and basic neurological impulses.

To someone wielding his level of soul-authority and free-use mental manipulation, an animal’s psyche was not a fortified citadel; it was a wide-open door with no lock, seductively inviting him inside.

Sol raised his left hand, pointing his bare, blood-drenched palm directly at the front line of the charging cavalry.

His gaze narrowed on the massive lead mount... a gargantuan, scar-riddled Blood Hound twice the size of its packmates, ridden by the Zharun cavalry commander.

He didn’t waste his precious, carefully gathered Free Use essence. Instead, he channeled a razor-thin, highly concentrated wave of the soul-power he had harvested from the Malphas and the surrounding dead, projecting it outward in a concentrated psychic spike aimed straight into the Alpha hound’s brain.

OBEY! KILL THE RIDER!!

To the human soldiers on the field, nothing happened.

But to the massive Alpha Blood Hound leading the charge... a titan of a beast twice the size of its pack mates... it was as if the heavens had suddenly ripped open to reveal the terrifying, gaping maw of an ancient, primordial apex predator that dwarfed its very existence by a million fold.

WHIMPER!

The lead Blood Hound abruptly locked all six of its muscular legs, skidding violently across the limestone slate.

The terrifying mental shockwave slammed into its simple brain like a sledgehammer, instantly overwriting its generations of conditioned training and its recognition of its rider.

”What are you doing?! Charge, you stupid beast!” the Zharun cavalry leader screamed, his face flushing red as he hauled back with all his strength on his heavy leather reins.

The lead Hound didn’t charge forward.

It violently reared back, its glowing red eyes turning completely milky-white, overflowing with primal terror, as it let out a high-pitched, agonized whimper. Its eyes rolled back, and driven by the sudden, overwhelming command forced into its mind, it reared up its massive front torso.

It snapped its long, bone-crushing jaws shut directly around the commander’s midsection, throwing him off its back and flinging him twenty feet into the ranks of the pack.

Seeing this Sol went ahead and ordered it to command other hounds and rip the riders apart.

Sol expected the rest of the eighty Blood Hounds to follow their Alpha’s lead, expecting the pack hierarchy to instantly cascade into mutiny.

However, the twist of generations-long blood-bonding revealed its true strength.

The other seventy-nine Blood Hounds halted their charge in a chaotic, dust-plumed pileup, whimpering and snarling in confusion as they received strange commands, and threw their riders off their backs, launching the Zharun warriors flying beautifully into the white dust.

But despite throwing their riders into the gravel and snapping wildly at the air, the beasts refused to tear them apart.

”G-gram! Stop! What Happened to You” a Zharun rider cried out, scrambling backward in the dust as his six-legged mount stood over him, growling viciously with foam dripping from its jaws.

The hound snapped its jaws within inches of the rider’s face, its body trembling, but it hesitated.

The Zharun riders were not ordinary men; they had been bonded with these hounds from early childhood. They had shared meals, slept in the same blood-pits, and bled together through decades of brutal conditioning.

Their deep, soul-bound training fought furiously against the external psychic pressure Sol had placed upon the Alpha.

They stood paralyzed, confused by Alpha’s command yet stubbornly refusing to devour their bonded human partners.

They snapped their jaws at the empty air, whining pitifully as they stood over their thrown riders, trapped in a harrowing paralysis between Pack leader’s commands and lifelong loyalty with their partners.

”Curse it!” the Zharun Chief Vane screamed from the rear, seeing his elite cavalry thrown into total disarray. ”Control Them! Get back on your mounts! They must have been spooked by that demon’s aura!”

”Stand up! Grab the reins!” the Zharun cavalrymen shouted to one another, picking themselves up from the dirt and desperately reaching for their thrashing mounts.

Sol watched the scene play out with a cold, unbothered expression. A low, disappointed sigh escaped his lips,

”So a simple alpha-override isn’t enough to break a life-long bond...” Sol muttered, his raspy voice echoing faintly over the chaotic thrum of battle.

”Tch...Fools built a strong leash. I suppose I can’t be stingy with the reserves. Distracting them was cute, but I don’t have the time to play mind games with dogs.”

Sol reached deep into his chest hollow, tapping directly into the pool of gathered, free-use soul power he had been hoarding.

It was a power meant to bend reality itself to his absolute will.

He had been saving it to deal with the Layer 4 powerhouses, like earlier with Malphas, but looking at the eighty thrashing Blood Hounds, and Veynar warriors at disadvantage, he decided to use a portion of it, anyway he just gotta kill a few more enemies, and this place had anything but enemies to kill.

He didn’t send a subtle hint of fear this time. He unleashed an absolute, uncompromising mind-shattering command.

BOOM!

An invisible, suffocating pressure wave detonated from Sol’s hand. A wave of dark crimson soul-light, invisible to normal eyes, flooded across all eighty Blood Hounds in a fraction of a millisecond.

To the other warriors, it felt like nothing had happened, except the air felt a bit heavier. But to the eighty Blood Hounds, it was as if an ancient god of extinction had descended upon the world.