Heir Of Azathoth : EXtra's Limitess EvOlution-Chapter 36: Nirvasthla

The shadow slammed down somewhere unseen.

My feet struck first, then my torso, then my head snapped into place a breath too late.

The impact drove the air from my lungs as the tendrils tore free and sank back into the darkness, retreating as though nothing had happened at all.

I lay there gasping, chest heaving, vision swimming for a moment, while Nagra remained utterly indifferent.

I suspected this wasn’t unfamiliar to him, that whatever this method was, he had endured it countless times before, enough to develop a natural resistance to the disorientation it caused.

"Huff... huff... what the hell was that?" I asked, forcing the words out as my gaze met his. "Your technique, perhaps?"

He nodded once, which could have been out of dismissal or acknowledgment too.

Though the urge to interrogate him further, about its functioning, its limits, its costs, rose sharply within me, I pushed it aside for now.

The environment around me was far more compelling, far more unsettling, than any answer he might have given.

The sky was wrong.

Yet... familiar.

A single, gargantuan eye was embedded within its depths, vast enough to eclipse the heavens themselves.

It did not blink, and yet it watched.

The pupil was not human.

It felt layered, distorted, as though several gazes were stacked atop one another. The longer I stared, the harder it became to remember why looking away felt necessary in the first place.

I forced my eyes shut.

"...Human, or whatever your name is," Nagra said as he drifted ahead, "I advise you not to stare at that thing for too long. It’s a bad omen."

He glanced back at me then, his regenerated cords already coiling into place, his voice carrying the faintest trace of something unfamiliar, regret, perhaps... or awe.

"I wonder who summoned that thing," I muttered, half to myself, half to him. "Can’t be humans, right?"

The land stretched endlessly in every direction, ruptured by colossal craters that overlapped like scars carved into a beaten hope.

Nagra did not seem interested in the question.

He released a quiet sigh instead, one heavy with reminiscence.

Humans had struck this place before, and they had not done so gently, nor only once.

The plants that grew here were lifeless things. Blackened, rigid forms clawing out of stone, stripped of any hint of vitality. They did not sway, even when faint currents stirred the air.

They simply existed, like they had forgotten how to die.

The ground beneath me was no exception. Pale and ashen, closer to stone than soil, it crumbled faintly beneath each step, yet felt impossibly old, like the exposed bones of a world long past decay.

Violet flames burned everywhere, scattered without fuel or reason, casting restless shadows that twisted and stretched in ways that made my skin crawl.

For a moment, I felt as though the shadows were watching too.

"How long has it been...?"

I asked quietly, drawing in a lungful of air that tasted of smoke and rust, as though a war had ended here only moments ago... or had never truly ended at all.

"How long do you think iron takes to decay?"

The voice resonated through my head, heavy and deliberate.

I didn’t know the answer.

But looking around, I could vaguely infer it.

Weapons were embedded throughout the land, broken rotted swords, decayed katanas, fragments of armor half swallowed by pale stone, as though the ground itself had grown around them.

In the distance, ruined structures sprawled outward, once towering monoliths, their scale hinting at something vast and terrible. Whatever purpose they had once served, however, was long gone.

"This was the land that remained under the effect of war for many years," Nagra spoke, his vision sinking far beyond the horizon, "enduring destructive and corrosive attacks, everything harmful. And it has persisted like this even now. The area miles ahead is significantly better, kek, so don’t waste time and pick up the pace."

His sudden initiative surprised me, if only for a brief second.

It felt as though he was trying to tell me something without saying it outright, conveying that they were not desperate, that this devastation was not meant to solicit pity.

The signs were clear enough. I should refrain from showing any hints of empathy here.

’Much better, huh...’

I repeated his words silently, letting them settle before responding, choosing each word with care.

"I know that," I said at last, thoughtfully.

"Even though I haven’t seen this place before, I know, somehow, that it was once far more thriving than this."

The thought lingered longer than it should have.

It wasn’t my own persona slipping in this time.

It was Rael’s.

No reply was entertained.

The horizon only stretched further, unfolding itself with cruel patience, revealing shapes wandering among the ruins, tall, distant, their silhouettes faint but unmistakably deliberate.

I narrowed my eyes, trying to force clarity out of distance, and then i saw them, both Lethyraes and humans.

Humans... actually many of them.

Instinct took over before thought could catch up, and I performed the familiar action, the mental trigger I had already etched into myself.

My technique responded immediately.

Hit and hurt boxes bloomed into existence once more, outlining me, outlining Nagra, outlining the distant silhouettes ahead, layers of blue and red stacking over living forms like truths peeled bare.

My gaze drifted upward without meaning to, drawn again to that omnipresent eye embedded in the sky.

I scanned it reflexively, but there was no outlines surrounding it.

’So it’s just a hallucination’, I thought, though the conclusion brought no comfort.

I forced my eyes away before the vertigo could fully take hold, before that wrong sense of being watched burrowed any deeper.

The moment my focus returned to the land ahead, the pressure eased, only slightly.

I studied the figures again, this time with intent, letting the sizes and shape of their hit and hurt boxes guide my judgment.

Estimating how many lives were actually standing there, and how many were Lethyraes, and how many were humans.

Halfway through the count, however, something strange crept into my perception, quietly enough that I almost dismissed it as an error on my end.

Almost. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

It was as if a new hit hurt box pair had spawned out of nowhere behind the others, not walking into range, not emerging from the ruins, but simply... appearing.

There was no body to match it.

No silhouette, no outline in the distance, nothing my eyes could latch onto to justify its presence, and yet the boxes were undeniably there, hovering in space as if reality itself had acknowledged something my senses refused to.

That alone was unsettling, but what truly made my focus sharpen was the detail I had not expected to encounter again so early.

There was a gap.

A clear, unmistakable distance between the edge of the hit box and the hurt box.

Empty space, suspended between the two, where there should have been none.

I froze mid thought, my earlier observations replaying themselves with uncomfortable clarity.

I had assessed my skill thoroughly by now, tested it enough times to be certain of at least one immutable rule. Right after piercing the hit box came the hurt box.

Always.

That was where damage was registered, where interaction turned into consequence.

And yet this thing violated that rule outright.

My mind stalled, then began circling the implication with growing unease.

Could it be that...