Chapter 451 - 451: The subtle mass of Jolthar - 1

The moment they crossed the Veil, the assault on their senses began.

The air itself felt wrong, thick and oily, carrying a taste like rotting meat mixed with chemicals that had no business existing in nature. Each breath required conscious effort, as if the atmosphere was actively resisting being drawn into healthy lungs. The temperature fluctuated wildly, patches of freezing cold giving way to oppressive heat within the span of a few steps.

And then the creatures came, and it was like they came out of nowhere and everywhere.

They emerged from the twisted landscape like manifestations of nightmares—pale, ashen things with bodies that defied proper description. Some had too many limbs arranged in configurations that shouldn't support movement but somehow did. Others had faces that were almost human but distorted in ways that made them more disturbing than if they'd been completely alien. Their skin—if it could be called skin—had the texture of old parchment stretched too thin over shapes that writhed and shifted beneath the surface.

They swarmed forward with jerky, unnatural movements, dozens of them appearing from behind corrupted trees and rising from the diseased ground itself. The sounds they made were worse than their appearance—clicking, gurgling, almost-words that might have been attempts at speech or might have been involuntary noises from throats that had forgotten how to be silent.

Haryntha's hand went to begin her attack, divine energy beginning to gather around her as she prepared to create a protective barrier.

But before she could complete the technique, Jolthar moved.

His aura exploded outward—not the green of Beast King power, not the void silver of his erasure abilities, but the roiling purple and darkness of pure chaos energy.

The Chaos Aura manifested as a visible sphere around them both, approximately twenty feet in radius, creating a zone where the fundamental rules of reality became uncertain and malleable.

The effect on the creatures was immediate and dramatic.

Those who had been rushing forward suddenly stopped as if they'd hit an invisible wall. Their pale forms recoiled, actually retreating several steps, and Jolthar could see what might have been fear in their malformed features—or at least the corrupted equivalent of fear, the recognition that the energy radiating from him was more dangerous than even their twisted nature could comfortably approach.

The creatures circled the sphere but refused to enter it, making their disturbing sounds but keeping their distance, as if instinct or survival drive warned them that crossing into that zone of chaos would mean dissolution or worse.

Haryntha, who had been gathering her own defensive power, let it dissipate as she realized it wasn't needed. She stared at Jolthar with undisguised surprise, her divine senses analyzing his actions and finding them both impressive and concerning.

"You're manifesting a chaos domain," she said, having to raise her voice slightly over the sounds of the circling creatures.

"That's... that shouldn't be possible for someone at Tier 9. Domain manifestation is a Tier 10 ability, and even then, most warriors can't sustain it for more than brief moments."

"I contain multitudes," Jolthar replied with a slight smile, though his attention remained focused on their surroundings.

"And apparently, chaos energy really doesn't like corrupted creatures. Good to know."

He was, in fact, completely unfazed by the oppressive atmosphere and the horrific entities surrounding them.

Not because he felt no effect; the wrongness of this place definitely registered on his senses, but because he had faced enough genuinely terrifying situations that nightmare creatures and corrupted landscapes didn't overwhelm his ability to function.

Fear was just another sensation to process and work through, not something that paralyzed or controlled him.

"We should move," Jolthar said, maintaining the chaos sphere as they began walking forward. "Standing still just lets more of them gather."

Indeed, more creatures were emerging from the twisted landscape—scores of them now, perhaps hundreds, creating a writhing mass of pale, malformed bodies that blocked the pathway ahead.

They didn't attack the chaos sphere directly, but they were definitely preventing forward progress through sheer numbers and the physical barrier their bodies created.

Jolthar assessed the situation like someone who had fought through impossible odds before. They needed the path cleared, needed to establish dominance immediately, needed to send a message to whatever intelligence or instinct governed these creatures that the humans who had just entered the Depths were not prey but predators.

He stretched his hand, and the strodem ring pulsed with response to his will, and from its dimensional space emerged his sword.

Vorthak.

He chose this sword because he could tell that creatures were more afraid of it and previously, when he fought such similar creatures, he had used the void blade and it was also effective, but right now, he felt the chaos blade would do justice, and the void blade Knashii would be another card to play; after all, he would be staying here for some time anyway. He will get the opportunity to use the Knashii, too.

Vorthak appeared in his hand, the long purple-hazed blade made from chaos.

The chaos-blessed blade materialized in his hand, and the moment it did, everything changed.

The sword seemed to drink in the ambient wrongness of the Depths, drawing corruption toward it like a lodestone attracting iron filings, then transforming that malevolence into something else—into raw, destructive power that fed back into Jolthar's already substantial aura.

His Chaos Aura, which had been impressive before, suddenly intensified to a degree that made Haryntha actually take a step back.

The purple and blue colored energies blazed brighter, expanding the sphere to nearly forty feet in radius and creating visible distortions in the air where reality itself struggled to maintain coherence against the onslaught of entropic force.

The creatures surrounding them shrieked—high-pitched sounds of what could only be terror—and tried to retreat further, but there were too many of them, packed too densely, blocking each other's escape routes.

They were too repulsed by the chaos, and the more chaosaura Jolthar released, the more agitated they were.

"Move aside," Jolthar said to Haryntha, his voice calm but carrying an undercurrent of gathered power that suggested something significant was about to happen.

Haryntha didn't question or hesitate. She could already feel the immense change in his aura and the radiating energy pouring out of him. It was hard to tell if he was really a tier 9 swordsman.

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