Chương 122: Teetering

The silence of June's thoughts drove him insane. Live, Die, Survive, Relief, Ending, Prolonging. How could thoughts that screamed in his mind be so quiet? How could they so thoroughly violate his presence? Give up? Keep fighting? His mind and body were tethered together by a double-ended noose, and both sides fought for opposite reliefs.

His mind understood that death meant relief; his fight was not action, but merely reaction; it was a downward battle that would simply extend his dread and pain until his ending provided relief. His body didn't care; it felt that to live meant relief; it was deadset on braving another of the thousands of storms it had already survived; its movements were not purposed to minimize injury; pain was an afterthought; agony was a means, and simultaneously the red carpet to relief.

Silence and Pandemonium Two opposites, two ideals, two perspectives. Both had the same end goal. Relief But both ends of the noose tugged relentlessly at one another, hoping to silence the other. What kind of pain was it? Was it pulsing? Was it throbbing? Was it aching? It was everything and nothing, an unnatural conflict. It was a dull sensation. Desensitization Did it burn? Did it split the fibers of his being? Did it….

June tore his fingers from the trenches they carved on his face; they twitched, they contorted, his face bled, then sizzled, then fixed itself. He looked up at the sky and extended his arms, allowing the rain to freely fall and mix into his tears and blood alike. He inhaled air and water with indifference and felt both flow into his nostrils and mouth; mucus and congealed blood seeped into his mouth, threatening to choke him, but he accepted it nonetheless as he continued to fill his woven lungs.

AND HE SCREAMED But no noise came from his chest apart from air unsteadily exiting his body. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. A moment went by, then another, and the next passed, then suddenly his boneless arms filled to immediately snap and contort as they uncannily dug into his chest; every individual appendage found its way into his flesh and skin. His arms pressed against his body into a cruel self-embrace as his throat down to his chest distended and quickly re-hardened.

June tore his fingers from his chest without grace and contorted them, regardless of whether a bone would snap; his palms rose and his arms spread to embrace the dark sky. He inhaled once again without care or discomfort about what entered his body. AND HE SCREAMED ONCE MORE. The sky rumbled, the ground shook once more; he did not scream like a man or a child. His scream didn't resemble man or beast, but a deafening guttural war horn.

The monstrous samurai looked upon the roaring Dreamer with a wary interest. Surviving a single beat of his taiko drums was an uncanny feat; it was a blast of pure aura with the purpose to ruin. A single strike would affect everything in a radius with such violence that living matter would split into cancerous cells and simply collapse into mush in a near instant, which wasn't even the tip of the iceberg of mal-effects.

Even being a far distance away wouldn't save you, since simply hearing it from a distance would cause irreparable damage. June, on the other hand, survived several strikes with little to no physical aberrations. Even the immortal Wendigo struggled to hold shape after a single strike; the only thing that the taiko seemed to affect was his mind. The thunderous resonance of the taiko drums forced-fed the Nightmare's Will of death; the physical effects would only occur if an opponent submitted to it.

A battle of minds, ideologies, and most importantly, Will assumed; in fact, anyone with the ability of Will could kill another with a stare. All they had to do was channel their Will with the purpose to kill their opponent or stop a crucial organ; it would be a convenient power if not for it being an impossible taboo. A dreamer with exceptional control over Will could attempt to stop a mundane's organ, but even then, a mundane person without control over Will could still resist instinctively.

Will was a fickle power after all. Having visible Will, on the other hand, would be like dropping an ocean into a cup; Will could only become visible in very few cases, and even then, having excess Will had its drawbacks; Will was relegated to an auxiliary ability due to its fickleness, a set power that was difficult to increase and control.

The reason in the end for June's survival being an uncanny fear was simply due to one reason: he was an anomaly, and the taiko drums may have flooded his mind with horrid emotions and malignant Will, but even then he still stood on his two feet; he was still capable of moving his limbs, and most importantly, he somehow managed to make the Nightmare bleed. The third carved eye ceased its shifting, and after a moment the wooden eye split and a dark crimson began to run out the crack.

Oni rubbed his brow with his fingers and looked at his fresh blood for the first time in years. The samurai's weapon emitted a dissonant resonant hum, something only the wielder could derive meaning from.

'Brother, I don't like it' The small human who stood below, even half Oni's stature, had somehow made him bleed with a single scream.

'Its wail was similar to your drums' Oni's amorphous weapon writhed as it changed back into a long odachi. Gears may have turned within the Noble's mind: fear? Excitement potentially? Something else? Nonetheless, the mask betrayed emotion except for a stream of crimson crawling down from its split eye. It was impossible to tell if it was paralyzed or dead as it stood and watched the Flesh-Shaping anomaly, unmoving like a suit of living armor.

The only thing anyone was sure of was that these were the final moments of the preliminaries.