Northern's mouth slowly dropped, his eyes widening for a second then creasing into a deep, frightened grimace.
'What in the world...'
The air around the open space crackled with pale blue lightning that flowed through each other in slow motion. It was like severed threads of lightning were falling in an extremely decelerated time flow.
The soft glow shimmering from each lightning bolt as they crackled and, even though slowly, passed through each other was what illuminated the wide area of the dungeon.
Compared to the pitch-black tunnels, this place radiated with a soft blue hue. And even though Northern did not need it, seeing was made easy nonetheless.
The digits of Northern's hand slowly curled around the grip of the hammer, clenching tightly as he braced himself internally.
At first, he could not make out what it was, but for everything his mundane eyes did not understand, Chaos Eyes already had answers for.
All he just had to do was release the polycoria Eyes that made him look like a primordial existence of mayhem in human form.
He looked up and slowly turned his neck as he observed all the crackling threads of lightning. 'Time is frozen up there...'
Chaos Eyes allowed him to see the truth of reality, the truest form of soul essence that no one could ever behold. These are what the ligatures are, essential makeup of everything's soul.
Everything had a Soul. From the wind, to the earth, to the trees, to the oceans. Everything had a soul. The only difference that Northern had noticed was, theirs usually is not always as tangible as that of humans'.
Because of its intangibility, manipulating them with Chaos Eyes was possible. Because of the human soul's tangibility, however, manipulating their ligatures was impossible.
This was why the most he could do was subtly control their emotions, heighten the feeling of anger, or reduce it; of course, his eyes had to be fixed on the person for it to work.
He could also place an illusion on someone with the eyes.
'Now that I think about it, I rarely use Chaos Eyes except to look into the essence of things.'
The four Azure Eyes with blackish lines running the depth of their pupils like net cracks, enlarged a little bit.
The upper air of the cave was in a paused time, the flow of ligatures there was frozen to Northern's view, literally.
The lightning, however, was not a cause of this; they were only a result of the true incidence.
Northern's eyes narrowed to a slit.
'Don't tell me those are because of the rifts.'
Forcibly tearing rifts from the essence of a Dimension, after all, had to have consequences.
If the consequence was a slowed world, Northern did not know and could not even imagine what they could be signing for.
His focus suddenly swept westward as his senses picked up something.
In the depths of one of the maws stretching deep into the dungeon, several crimson lights flickered, blinking in eerie succession.
A chorus of low, guttural growls rumbled from the darkness, each note reverberating through the cavern and trembling the ground.
Northern, with squinted Chaos Eyes, carefully measured and gauged what kind of vicious monsters they were and what rank and danger level they belonged to.
True Name: [Tides of the Crimson Flood]
Danger Level: [Calamity]
Attributes: [Blood Hunter]
Abilities: [Crimson Tide], [Primal Formation]
Every single one of them had the same information from the panel that appeared before Northern's eyes.
He continued to read a couple of things from the panel:
Blood Hunter: [Bone Jaws are a rapacious kind of beast that can smell any crimson blood in a being's body from ten kilometers away. They are almost immune to any attack, except decapitation or breaking their bone jaws]
Northern glanced at the sledgehammer resting on his shoulders, a grin spreading across his face.
With deliberate intent, he brought it down, slamming the hammerhead into the ground with a resounding crash. The impact unleashed shockwaves of dust, rippling outward in a perfect
"How so convenient..."
He gripped the hammer with both hands, hurling it backward as he stepped forward. His form blurred, then vanished in a flicker of motion, like a glitch tearing through reality, as he swung the hammer behind him.
In an instant, he reappeared amidst a pack of four-legged monsters. Their crimson skin stretched tightly over grotesquely thick muscles, making them look like animals that had pushed the boundaries of bodybuilding to an extreme.
Their eyes burned with a sinister red glow, and their maws snapped wildly the moment Northern materialized in their midst.
The nearest ones lunged without hesitation, a reckless leap of faith to sink their jagged, metallic teeth into his face.
But they didn't get the chance. The sledgehammer tore viciously through the wind, propelled by Northern's ferocious strength.
The hammer's head collided with devastating force, shattering their lower bone jaws into splinters. With a single, fluid semi-circular swing, it smashed their heads aside, leaving nothing but broken remains in its wake.
Northern immediately redirected the hammer, hurling it upward with precise force before slamming it down onto the Bone Jaws that lunged at him from below. The impact obliterated their heads and cracked the ground beneath them in a thunderous explosion.
A sudden chain of lightning erupted from the sledgehammer, crackling with raw energy as it surged through their bodies.
The electrified force threw the creatures violently away, their mangled forms convulsing as they crashed to the ground with a shuddering finality.
Northern looked around with a slightly shocked expression.
All it took was two attacks to render a number of ten Bone Jaws dead.
The lightning discharge from the sledgehammer did most of the work, not stopping until
each one of them was in its grasp. But still, this was an amazing result.
Not to say that the weapon was very easy to wield also. It adjusted perfectly to the ratio of strength he used to swing the hammer.
A small smile of satisfaction briefly tugged at his lips, but it vanished just as quickly.
His expression hardened, replaced by a stern and cold glare that climbed across his face like a
He turned towards the entrance of the tunnel, walking back to the wide area.