Chapter 234: Fear

Whisper’s screamed in pure agony.

For the first time since he consumed The Substance, the blessed numbness had shattered. Pain ripped through his nervous system.

He stumbled backward blindly, his boots tangled in his own bloodied mantle, and he collapsed onto the floor. Whimpering, he scrambled back on his heels, dragging himself toward Silas like a maimed insect.

Silas stood frozen.

In the center, Eren was no longer bleeding out.

A suffocating, predatory miasma of deep purple mana was boiling off his battered frame, wrapping around his limbs in thick, crackling ribbons that warped the very air. The severed arm in his left hand suddenly burned with a burst of flame. In less than two seconds, the flesh, muscle, and bone disintegrated into ash.

Slowly, Eren rose to his feet.

His blue eyes were cold, locking onto the two syndicate lords. And the ring on his left-hand finger started glowing a faint red.

Silas’s breath hitched.

He felt a terrifying, primal aura of pure dread that Silas, in all his decades commanding the underworld as the Lord of Contracts, had never once felt.

"What... what is this?" Silas muttered as he raised his blade. "What is happening to him?!"

Whisper hauled himself upright behind Silas, panting through clenched teeth. His arm had stopped bleeding and sealed, yet the regeneration of his hand was too slow.

"It’s... Burst," Whisper gasped out.

Silas’s monocle caught the violent violet haze.

A mythical state achievable only by people born with catastrophic, bottomless mana reserves. A synaptic overdrive where the nervous system floods every muscle fiber with raw mana, accelerating cognitive processing, physical speed, and output tenfold.

"Burst is unsustainable!" Silas barked, trying desperately to steady his racing pulse as he shifted into a high fencing guard. "It eats the host’s mana! It won’t last more than thirty seconds! We only need to hold—"

Eren vanished.

Silas’s instincts screamed.

Without thinking, Silas spun with blinding, desperate speed, channeling his aura into a sweeping, lethal slash.

The rapier stopped dead in mid-air.

Eren was standing right there. He hadn’t dodged. He hadn’t parried with an axe. He had simply caught the blade between his bare thumb and forefinger, halting a blow as though plucking a feather from the breeze.

"Seems amateur," Eren whispered, his voice hollow, chilling.

Before Silas’s brain could register the impossibility of the grip, Eren punched him.

The lord’s ribs and his breastbone caved inward in a single, sickening burst of snapping bone. The shockwave blasted Silas clean across the warehouse, slamming brutally into the reinforced stone foundation wall.

Eren then turned to Whisper.

He raised his right arm.

"Barrier! Iron Aegis!" Whisper shrieked in panic, his remaining hand desperately tracing an arcane glyph in the air.

A dense, translucent dome of interlocking hexagonal barriers formed between them, capable of withstanding siege catapults.

Eren took one casual step forward and shot his fist.

The defensive ward shattered like cheap, fragile glass and the punch didn’t lose an ounce of momentum, striking Whisper dead-center in his face.

Whisper’s body skidded across the floor like a thrown pebble, blood trailing. Before the broken body could slam into the far wall, Silas materialized through a blur, hooking his arm beneath Whisper’s collar to arrest the skid.

Silas choked on blood, his chest knitting back. His greatcoat was in tatters, but his calculating eyes darted to the dark corner where Baron Kiliyan lay snoring in oblivious bliss.

"Get up," Silas hissed through crimson-stained teeth, shoving the one-armed assassin toward the corner. "Take the Baron and extract. Now."

"Lord Silas—no!" Whisper wheezed, his shattered jaw clicking unnaturally as corrupted black veins struggled to knit his facial bones. "He’s in Burst! He will tear you to pieces before—"

"That is my order!" Silas barked, his voice cracking with authority. "Rujgard cannot lose another lord! Secure Kiliyan, report the anomaly’s capabilities to the central pipeline, and leave!"

Whisper’s eyes flickered with reluctance, but the conditioning won. He lunged toward Kiliyan, his remaining hand clamping onto the nobleman’s collar, and with shadow mana, both of them vanished.

Silas slowly turned back, leaning his weight against his slender rapier like an ornate walking cane.

Across the chamber, Eren hadn’t pursued. He stood still.

Silas forced a trembling smirk, trying to reclaim the veneer that had just been pulverized into the masonry.

"Three hundred armed men from the municipal vanguard are converging on this block," Silas said, his voice flat, projecting clinical coldness over the frantic drumming of his pulse. "They will breach that archway in exactly five minutes. Your Burst state is an incandescent candle, boy. You are burning your own marrow to fuel this mirage. So tell me... will you die in those five minutes as your organs liquefy, or will you surrender and let us harvest your mind before you turn to ash?"

Eren didn’t speak.

He didn’t offer a witty retort. He didn’t mock Silas’s condition.

Flicker.

Silas’s pupils contracted into microscopic dots. He didn’t even see the boy cross the threshold.

CRUNCH.

Before the sound of displaced air could reach Silas’s ears, a bare, blood-slicked hand clamped onto his jaw with the crushing pressure of a hydraulic press. Eren had closed thirty feet in zero seconds, his face inches from Silas’s frozen expression.

"Let’s check your balance sheet," Eren whispered.

Eren took two effortless strides forward and drove Silas’s skull backward into the solid stone wall.

SLAM!

The wall was pulverized into powder. Silas’s ears rang with deafening white noise, blood spurting from his nose as his vision strobed violently.

"Frail," Eren said softly, quoting the bureaucrat with cold, mechanical detachment.

He pulled Silas forward by the jaw and slammed him back into the same crater.

SLAM!

"Messy."

SLAM!

"Reckless."

With every sickening concussion, Silas’s limbs twitched uselessly, his rapier slipping from numb fingers and clattering to the floor. The exact rhythm, the exact words Silas had used to torture him moments ago, were being returned tenfold.

Eren released his grip on Silas’s face.

The Lord of Contracts slid down the blood-smeared wall like a deflated sack of silk, collapsing onto his knees in the dust. Silas coughed, a thick clot of lung blood spattering over his silver embroidery, his hands trembling violently on the flagstones as he tried, pathetically, to crawl backward.

He looked up, gasping for air, his haughty composure stripped away to reveal a weeping, terrified dog.

Eren stood over him, casually rolling his shoulders, holding the notched hatchet that Silas had driven into Eren’s thigh earlier.

He flipped the weapon casually and thrust the notched iron edge downward with casual precision.

The steel bit deep into Silas’s right kneecap, shattering the joint to splinters.

"AAAAAAAGH!" Silas shrieked, the facade disintegrating into an unhinged, throat-tearing wail.

Eren knelt in front of him, heedless of the agonizing scream. Reaching out with his left hand, Eren pinched the remaining glass shard of Silas’s silver monocle, slowly peeling the bloody metal frame off the man’s swollen cheekbone.

Eren twirled the monocle between his bloody fingers, tilting his head with chilling curiosity.