Ethereal, eerie laughter drifted endlessly from the mist, as if a flippant woman were mocking the travelers floundering blindly within. The phantasm that Gwayne had cleaved in two did indeed dissolve into nothing, but in the very next instant, it reformed elsewhere in the fog.
This Wraith Mist... was sentient!
The moment Hestia realized this, fine beads of cold sweat appeared on her forehead.
The mist had first put on the pretense of being mindless, lulling them into thinking the situation wasn't critical and that they could search for an escape route. But during that process, every passing second would sap their strength. By the time Gwayne's group actually attempted a breakout, everyone would already be weakened to varying degrees, and that was when the wraiths in the mist would strike. The consequences would be unthinkable.
But perhaps due to the inherent cognitive deficiencies of undead creatures, the laughter leaking from the mist had betrayed its (or their) own trap.
Even so, the situation remained dire.
Ordinary soldiers were nearly useless against such an uncanny enemy. All they could do was rely on the iron will forged through daily training to resist the malice and fear seeping from the fog. Betty, with zero combat ability, was immediately shielded at the very center of the formation. Ser Byron's steel broadsword radiated searing heat as he used it to ceaselessly drive back the omnipresent cold and sever the countless phantom arms reaching out from the mist. Under his protection, Hestia and Rebecca had a relatively stable environment to cast their spells.
Hestia chanted incantations, cycling through a variety of low-tier support spells to weaken the surrounding mist. Rebecca's attacks, however, were far more straightforward, she swung her staff, and the magic she unleashed from start to finish was one and only one thing.
Fireball.
Fireballs large and small flew from Rebecca's staff into the fog, triggering a chain of explosions. But the results were decidedly unimpressive. Fire did have a certain suppressive effect on undead creatures, but Wraith Mist was something special, diffuse and expansive, with no solid body to absorb explosive damage. When a fireball detonated in the fog, more than half its destructive force simply dissipated.
"Stop using Fireball!" Gwayne noticed Rebecca's combat approach and shouted a warning. "Use wide-area spells, they don't need to be powerful, but the coverage has to be large! Otherwise the mist will scatter every attack!"
Rebecca shouted back.
"But Fireball is the only spell I know!"
Gwayne was stunned.
"What?!"
"Rebecca only knows Fireball!" Hestia's voice was nearly frantic. "Five years of study, and that's the only spell she learned!"
Rebecca's face turned scarlet, furious at her own magical ineptitude. She gathered her considerable magical power, straining with every ounce of effort to constrain it into a spell model. Then she swung her staff, and a fireball the size of a washbasin flew toward the thickest concentration of mist.
A last-second epiphany, a desperate breakthrough, a miraculous reversal, none of that happened.
The oversized Fireball produced an oversized explosion, even thinning the mist directly ahead for a moment. But almost instantly, the gap in the fog was filled back in. And worse still, Gwayne suddenly heard a howl full of terror and rage from behind him.
One of the family soldiers' eyes had gone blood-red. The negative energy transmitted by the Wraith Mist had finally shattered this soldier's soul completely, and the psychic damage immediately manifested physically. his skin dried and paled like old parchment, and the man went berserk mid-scream. He raised his longsword high and began slashing wildly in every direction, as though surrounded on all sides by mortal enemies.
The other two soldiers nearby reacted instantly. After dodging his frenzied, directionless strikes, they rushed forward and pinned the maddened wretch to the ground.
The restrained soldier thrashed violently, his flesh writhing and contorting as though trying to tear free from his body. His eyes bulging, he finally managed a ragged scream. "Kill me! Kill me!"
But in the other two soldiers' eyes, a red haze was also gathering like storm clouds. They showed no reaction to their comrade's plea.
They too were about to lose their minds.
Seeing this, Gwayne immediately drove the Pioneer's Sword into the earth and, following the methods recorded in his inherited memories, called upon the body's original power.
"Psychic Intimidation!"
This was one of the few knight abilities that affected the mind. A powerful wave of willpower swept across the battlefield, crushing the psyche of all hostile targets while powerfully bolstering allies.
Under Mental Intimidation's influence, the two soldiers quickly shook off their fear. But the poor soul pinned beneath them had already had his spirit completely destroyed by the Wraith Mist. After a few final twitches, he went still.
Gwayne's eyes swept rapidly across the battlefield. The surrounding mist showed no sign of weakening, if anything, it had grown denser under Hestia and Rebecca's attacks. And where the three soldiers had been standing, Betty had vanished without a trace.
"Where's Betty?!" Gwayne's heart clenched. He shouted, "Betty!"
Amber leapt out from a nearby shadow. "I just saw that girl run into the fog, looked like she was sleepwalking!"
"This is bad... she's lost her mind," Gwayne said, alarmed. "Why is this Wraith Mist behaving so strangely?!"
Amber's face was pure horror. "I don't know what's strange about it, but the situation is absolutely terrible!"
"The Wraith Mist isn't showing the slightest sign of dissipating. After being attacked this long, even the strongest mist should have weakened somewhat," Gwayne said rapidly, voicing the conclusions he'd drawn from the knowledge in his head. Though those memories weren't his, he found that as long as he actively reached for them, they were as reliable as his own knowledge and experience. "And we assessed earlier that the mana focus here shouldn't be strong. How could such an ordinary mana focus give birth to Wraith Mist that's even developed sentience?"
Amber was sharp, she caught on immediately. "You're saying this mist isn't natural? There's some kind of artificial energy source or something sustaining it?"
"Not necessarily artificial, but something is definitely sustaining it, " Gwayne stared into the fog with furrowed brows, as if trying to see through it to its true nature. "And whatever's sustaining it should be somewhere nearby. We just can't see it because our perception has been blinded!"
"But Hestia already used Detect Distortion..." Amber said, puzzled. Then her eyes flew wide open. "...Unless it isn't on this layer?!"
Before her words had even finished, Gwayne watched the half-elf hop one step backward and vanish into thin air.
No, she hadn't vanished.
Gwayne noticed unnatural shadows drifting across the nearby ground. It was a blurry, human-shaped silhouette, vaguely recognizable as Amber's outline. This shadow without a body leapt and transferred between various surfaces nearby like a teleporter, appearing on the ground one moment, on a tree trunk the next, before truly disappearing after a few jumps.
That wasn't a real shadow. It was the "reflection" Amber projected into the Prime Material Plane while walking its edge in her shadow state.
Such a simple, brutal, yet powerful Shadow Walk was an eye-opener for Gwayne.
What exactly was this half-elf thief's background?
Before Gwayne could form more questions, Amber's figure suddenly reappeared in the air. She rushed toward him, and before Gwayne could even ask what was happening, she grabbed his arm and yanked him hard.
Gwayne stumbled, then felt himself pass through a cold, illusory barrier. When his vision refocused, the world around him had changed.
All color had drained from everything. Only black and white remained, as though the entire world had been reduced to two tones. A thin layer of fog blanketed this place, cool, but lacking the life-draining power of the Wraith Mist.
Gwayne looked around. The dense forest had vanished, but the ground was studded with withered tree stumps, their positions perfectly matching where the trees had stood in the forest.
And everyone, Hestia included, stood not far from him, but they were frozen in place like statues under a petrification spell, utterly motionless.
Rebecca was closest. She was locked in a pose of gripping her staff tightly, face taut with tension, yet her eyes held no spark of life. Turned into an ashen-gray "statue," she stared blankly ahead, her skin bearing the texture of rough ceramic.
Wisps of black fog were rising from the ground nearby, drilling into their bodies, creating fine cracks across their ceramic-like forms.
The eerie, horrifying sight made Gwayne instinctively check his own hands. Only after confirming they were still human flesh did he relax slightly. He gripped the Pioneer's Sword and strode quickly toward Rebecca, ready to cut away those clearly harmful tendrils of black fog.
But he'd barely taken half a step when Amber suddenly appeared at his side, gripping his arm tightly. "Don't get close. External force can't help them, if you're not careful, you'll make things worse."
Gwayne stared at Amber in astonishment, she looked completely different in this black-and-white world.
Her hair had grown longer and floated behind her as if weightless. Her light-brown eyes were now suffused with a faint golden glow, and a flame-like mass of black smoke gathered at her feet, endlessly cycling through coalescing and dissipating.
Nothing in Gwayne Seawright's memories could explain what he was seeing.
"Don't ask me too many things. If you ask and I don't answer, it'll be awkward, especially since I just robbed your grave. It would make me feel guilty," Amber said rapidly. "We're on a time limit. This is the first time even I've gone this 'deep,' and bringing you along on top of that, who knows how long I can maintain this."
"Where are we?" Gwayne asked the question that concerned him most.
"The Shadow Realm," Amber said flatly, then jerked her chin toward where Hestia and the others stood. "Look."
That was where Betty and the soldiers had originally been. But one soldier had already collapsed on the ground, shattered into countless pale fragments, truly like a broken piece of pottery. The others remained as they were, frozen in the same poses and expressions from when the Wraith Mist had first engulfed them.
Except that at little Betty's feet, a trail of faintly glowing small footprints extended forward into the distance...