In reality, the moment Herwin Lambis invaded the target's mental world, his own body had already begun its terrifying transformation.
His face, the backs of his hands, every inch of skin exposed to the air — grey-white scales like stone pushed through from beneath, rough and hard. His clothing shredded in an instant, revealing the dragon-scales beneath.
In moments, Herwin Lambis had become something enormous and monstrous. His head alone retained its human form — everything else had transformed completely. He looked like a massive grey-white dragon that hadn't yet finished growing, a mythical creature form in its incomplete state.
This was the Spectator Pathway demigod's incomplete Mythical Creature Form.
Among all the pathways, only the Spectator Pathway could so readily deploy a full mythical creature combat form at demigod level — and it was their most common way of fighting: one fragment of their personality operates inside the mental world, dominating the enemy's consciousness, while their physical body tears through reality in dragon form. An ordinary demigod from another pathway, caught on the back foot by a Spectator demigod, could very realistically be swept away before they had a chance to respond.
One glance at the grey dragon, and Vincent felt his spirituality scream. Fear and panic crashed through him involuntarily — because that was precisely what the Mythical Creature Form did. The moment you laid eyes on it, contamination began. And as contamination accumulated, you lost control, went mad, broke apart, and died.
All Vincent could do was keep running in the Ambition state, dodging constantly. He still had one use of Mystical Re-enactment in reserve, and he needed to hold it for the right moment.
"ROAR!!!"
The dragon with a human head lunged. A soundless, soul-shaking roar rolled out — an upgrade of "Intimidation" and "Chaos," the Dragon Awe, also known as Mind Stripping. Vincent felt his brain plunge into violent panic, his body thrashing out of his own control.
The dragon closed in while he was helpless. Herwin Lambis's human mouth opened to an impossible angle, and a transparent, formless breath weapon erupted from it.
This was direct damage to the Spirit Body and the Mind Body. Vincent, already struggling to function under the Dragon Awe, felt his spirit body threatening to tear apart — searing pain radiating through him from every direction.
BOOM.
No time to recover. The dragon's third attack arrived, this one with no complexity whatsoever — it simply came down from above and drove one enormous, razor-edged claw directly at Vincent's skull.
At that moment, Bernadette's spirituality decisively seized control of the body by force. The silhouette flashed sideways, barely avoiding the killing blow — and then immediately tried to rip open the Spirit World and escape.
The dragon gave no opportunity. Another wave of Dragon Awe crashed down, throwing the spirituality that had "occupied" the body into disarray. The Spirit World rift she'd forced open collapsed and scattered.
"Distort!"
Vincent bit down hard on the tip of his tongue, using the shock of pain to create a window. He activated the Blood-Drinking Bracer's Distort ability — forcing the Dragon Awe's terror and the spirit-body damage down to manageable levels, buying himself enough clarity to reassert control.
BOOM.
The enormous claw slammed into the ground — but Vincent had already used a Shadow Jump to get out from under it. The sprint had carried him beyond the masked man's "forbidden" zone.
But of course — at exactly this moment, the masked man, who had been fleeing the Spear of Longinus all this time, finally broke free and came streaking back. The blood-red spear had ceased its pursuit. The masked man levitated on columns of air, raised one hand, and announced:
"Shadow abilities are forbidden here."
In the same motion, he twisted Vincent's consciousness and turned the Blood-Drinking Bracer's Amplify ability against him — expanding the Bracer's negative effects to full power.
The blood in Vincent's body felt as though it had been hooked up to a pump — the Bracer drank deeply and without stop. At the same time, massive gibberish roared to life in his mind.
Under normal circumstances, the Bracer's murmuring was just an irritant — a persistent noise that made both him and Bernadette uncomfortable. But right now, layered on top of the spirit-body laceration he was already enduring, it was the last straw.
The skin across Vincent's surface began to boil like liquid. Then cracks split open all over his body — skin parting in jagged lines to reveal the flesh beneath, and from each crack, blood and tissue coalesced into a distinct shape: a black-and-white eyeball, cold and expressionless.
Countless eyes. Every one of them scanning the surroundings with flat, impersonal indifference — as though they were the physical manifestation of vast and chaotic knowledge, their presence so dense that the figure bearing them began to blur and dissolve, abstracted into a writhing black mass existing in some higher dimension.
He was going to lose control.
The masked man, still some distance away, caught one look at that mass of eyes — and a wave of dizziness hit him immediately. A knowledge-storm raged through his mind, and he hung frozen in the air, skin beginning to sprout short, curling black hairs across the surface.
He snapped back to himself in an instant and reversed direction, retreating at speed.
A Spectator Pathway demigod could afford to deploy their mythical creature form because they could keep their mind intact, stay rational, not lose control. But the entity before him — Mr. A — had clearly already lost control. Getting caught in a clash between two mythical-creature-form Beyonders was not something he had any interest in doing. Better to wait this out from a safe distance.
In the midst of it, Vincent's awareness had gone to chaos. His mind held nothing but the frantic roar of madness. The vast tangle of knowledge had transformed into a razor-edged shrieking in the marrow of his skull; pure destructive desire poured through him like molten rock, burning against the last dam of his reason.
He wanted to tear everything in front of him apart — to scatter the maddening knowledge that had been forced into his soul like a plague, to let it spread.
His body twisted violently and swelled. The skin split in deeper and deeper lines, down to the bone, and from each crack a new eye wrenched itself open — black-and-white, cold, without mercy.
In a single instant he was no longer "Vincent." He had become a writhing, squirming black mass covered in uncanny eyes — abstract and terrifying.
Loss of control. One second away.
And then — at the very moment he was about to go completely under — a bone-deep coolness spread through his spirit body, and the chaos receded. His mind surfaced from the madness. At his ear, something that sounded like a quiet stream running over stones:
The resonance of flowing spirituality.
Bernadette's spirituality.
To be continued…
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