Chương 428: Chapter 429: The Nature of the Eldritch

The group of Scavengers spent several minutes outside of the dorm rooms chatting. I wasn't sure why - I had expected them to get back to raiding long-forgotten dorm rooms after a short break. However, they showed no signs of moving from the spot - instead, they kept conversing about the state of the Market. Sadly, we didn't learn anything new from their conversation - mostly, they grumbled about how many valuable objects and the quantity of Achievement the Coalition had carted away after the fall of the Market.

Based on their conversation, I started to get the feeling that the reason they weren't keen to continue their search was simple - they had found nothing of value at all in their previous dorm searches, and were tired of fruitless effort. While their conversation didn't yield any valuable information, by using my Spatial sight, I was able to constantly look around for any strange objects the scavengers were wearing.

Equally fortunate, they didn't seem to have any great method of detecting me - so I was free to take my time searching for the 'Mark' that supposedly kept them safe from the dimensional laws of the Market. While I worked, Felix also moved a bit further away, and started to fill the hallway with traps, while Sallia lent him some essence to rig up a giant round of explosives, foul-smelling gas that the scavengers might mistake for poisonous gas, and most surprising of all, a spike trap.

Anise used a few of her force spells in a rather creative way, to suppress the vibrations in the air from reaching the scavengers - basically soundproofing Felix's efforts. It looked like Anise was struggling to maintain the spell, but it worked wonders for keeping the scavengers from noticing Felix's setup. Finally, after several minutes of checking, I found the 'Mark' that kept the group safe.

There were several major sources of alteration essence on their bodies, but after careful analysis, I confirmed that one of the invaders, the strongest woman in their group, was carrying an orb in her pocket that radiated alteration essence into its surroundings. It seemed to work off of similar principles to other dimensional terraforming magic systems that I had encountered - basically, it transformed all nearby air into a sort of 'sealed bubble,' and then propagated a specific set of dimensional laws.

After Felix finished preparing his traps, the four of us glanced at each other one final time, before Felix gave me a nervous smile. <Ready? > asked Felix. <I think so, > I said. <Let's get as far away as possible. I want a big head start if we can get one. > The others nodded in agreement, so we spent several minutes travelling as far away as possible from the scavengers. Finally, when we were at a point where I could barely see them with my dimensional sight, I opened up a portal.

One end of the portal was right in front of me - and the other end of the portal was opened right inside of the strong woman's pocket. She seemed to notice what I was doing almost immediately. Her hand shot towards her pocket - but not fast enough to stop me. I grabbed the mark, pulled it through the other end of the portal, and then snapped the portal shut. Almost immediately afterwards, a scream of horror rang out in the distance, followed by several hisses of pain.

The woman I had just stolen from whirled towards us. I had no time to figure out how she identified our location before the group started charging. The four of us immediately dashed towards the ball room we had come from. A moment later, I heard a loud boom in the distance, and saw three of the souls in the distance wink out. Felix's trap had worked wonders - half of the scavengers had died in his trap without us needing to risk anything at all in a real fight.

However, while Felix's traps had taken out half of them, the other four were still dashing after us - although they were moving quite a bit slower than before. As they continued chasing after us, I also started to notice something odd. I could feel space being distorted somehow - much like when I used my own abilities to warp space and manipulate my surroundings. It wasn't just space that was changing, though - that spatial manipulation felt almost as if it were carrying along something familiar to me.

Something I valued, but couldn't quite identify. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. Instinctively, I used some of my innate eldritch-body to send some of my essence towards the little dribble of warped space sent by the scavengers. I didn't know why they were sending out waves of essence, but even if I had no idea what they were planning, that didn't change what I needed to do.

If our enemies wanted to accomplish something, stopping it was obviously the right thing to do. So I used a few bits of absorption essence to snuff out the wave of spatial essence - and in the process, destroyed the 'extra' thing attached to the wave of spatial essence. I felt a flicker of pain in my heart a moment later. It was as if I had just stabbed myself in the chest.

I gasped in pain, and I saw Sallia's eyes widen in horror before she reached to me, as if she were afraid of me toppling over - but it only took me a few seconds to stem the pain in my heart. What had just happened? Had one of the scavengers somehow attacked me while I was snuffing out their wave of spatial manipulation? I glanced at the invaders with both my spatial sight and my soul sight, but they didn't have the happy expressions I would have expected them to have after successfully counterattacking.

Instead, they looked exactly the same as before - worried, rushed, and angry. I started to play back through the incident in my mind, and after several seconds of thought, I finally realized what had happened, and what I had sensed attached to the spatial manipulation the scavengers had tried to send out. What I had reached out towards was the very concept of 'hope' attached to that wave of spatial manipulation.

The invaders had 'hoped' that they would accomplish something, and the very concept of hope had stood out to me like a candle on a dark night. Since half of my body was now an eldritch embodiment of the concept of 'hope,' I could sense the hope in my environment. Then, I had destroyed that hope with my own hands. In fact, I quickly began to suspect that I hadn't directly 'snuffed out' the spatial fluctuation at all. Instead, I had attacked the concept of hope attached to that wave of essence.

This, in turn, had outright deleted the spatial fluctuation - since that was the most literal way to remove the 'hope' of the scavengers. The wave of spatial manipulation disappearing was the symptom of my actions, but not the root cause. However, destroying 'hope' had consequences. After my ability evolution, I had chosen to undertake the identity of 'hope.' I was now the eldritch embodiment of a concept, made flesh.

As such, at least part of my body was literally hope - and removing hope from my surroundings would naturally hurt. It would be like growing a new arm, only to immediately cut it off. I had no idea what that meant in practice yet - perhaps I simply felt pain when destroying hope, or perhaps there were deeper consequences, like a temporary reduction in essence or a weakening of my soul - but regardless, destroying hope without creating more hope in exchange would hurt me.

It wouldn't kill me, but it was certainly something to avoid when possible. That wasn't the only consequence of my actions. When I checked my absorption essence pool, I realized that interfering with reality on a conceptual level was very expensive. About a quarter of my absorption essence had vanished from one conceptual attack. Interfering with reality at a conceptual level was not cheap, especially if I took actions opposed to my eldritch essence.

I suspected that if I had done something to make more hope, instead of destroy it, this might not have cost me so much essence - but even so, interfering with reality at a conceptual level was likely to be expensive no matter what I was doing. On the bright side, whatever I had done had definitely messed up the scavenger's plans. They didn't even seem to notice that the fluctuation of spatial essence had vanished into thin air.

A few moments later, our group finally reached the ball room, before we tore through the hallway and exited the universal tree branch of the school. I checked behind us as we dashed back towards the receptionist area, and felt a wave of gratification when I didn't notice the invaders follow us, even after a few minutes had passed.

The sheer quantity of exits to the ball room had clearly confused the enemy, and since they hadn't had sight of us when we entered the ball room and we'd had a multi-minute head start, we had managed to shake them off, despite our comparable speeds. Now all we had to do was wait for them to die out, and in a few hours, we could return to assess the main force of the enemy.