Chapter 85: Gloom over the City gate- 2
He saw a hollow, void-like darkness, a pair of eyes that had completely dissolved into a milky, glazed film. The moment their vision connected, a sharp spike of psychic pressure slammed directly into Kenji’s temple.
"Let me control you," the voice that echoed inside Kenji’s mind was an absolute abomination. It was not spoken in the physical air. It was a greasy, slithering probe that forced its way into his auditory cortex, dripping with an hypnotic weight.
It carried a strange, heavy static that sought to immediately paralyze his nervous system, turn his thoughts to mush, and override his motor functions. It was a command meant to turn his entire consciousness into a vacant, compliant slave script.
But Kenji did not fall into the mental trap. Deep within the core of his spiritual mind, nestled right beside his soul line, a hidden variable reacted.
A tiny, ancient bone fragment, the singular, nameless relic he had managed to retrieve from the terrifying depths of the apocalypse tunnel, vibrated with a cold, absolute permanence.
It did not flash, nor did it emit any visible light that the system interface or an outside observer could track. It acted as an ultimate anchor, rendering his fundamental ego completely immune to external psychic corruption or soul-binding arts.
Yet, as the greasy probe tried to latch onto his brain stems, Kenji made a split-second tactical calculation. The bone fragment did not aggressively push the intrusive force away or destroy the connection.
Instead, its unique properties allowed Kenji to consciously simulate total compliance.
It permitted the external parasitic virus to seamlessly coat his nervous system and seize control of his muscles, while keeping his core consciousness entirely separate, clear, and perfectly capable of violently breaking free from the illusion at any split second he wished.
Kenji allowed his shoulders to go entirely slack. He let his arms hang loosely by his sides, his iron sword and light wooden shield tilting downward as his hazel eyes lost their sharp, lethal luster, mimicking the exact same hollow, glazed film that covered Amran’s pupils.
To any outside observer, the zero-soul cripple had just been effortlessly subjugated by the passing psychic wave.
Inside the absolute fortress of his own mind, however, Kenji was profoundly horrified by what his expanded perception began to uncover as he let himself be integrated into the parasite’s local network.
Because his body was now technically a node within the entity’s active hive mind, Kenji’s consciousness was suddenly granted access to the background data streams flowing through the area.
He followed the invisible, dark threads of soul power radiating outward from Amran’s position like a massive, parasitic spiderweb.
The web did not just stop at a few weak students nearby. Kenji’s mental vision tracked the lines as they stretched vertically upward, scaling the massive, hundreds-of-feet-high stone walls of the southern gatehouse.
Every single one of the elite city guards stationed along the battlements, the armored professionals who had been formally dispatched by the high administration to scout the surrounding clearings and monitor the perimeter ditches, had already been completely and utterly controlled.
From the common sentries to the heavy vanguard officers, they were all standing in a rigid, uniform line along the stone parapets. Their eyes were glazed behind their iron visors, their lungs breathing in perfect, mechanical unison.
The entire defensive line of the southern gate was not an army preparing to fight a monster. It had already been silently converted into a massive, hidden nest of sleeper agents, completely dominated by whatever terrifying anomaly was currently pulling Amran’s strings from the dark.
"The perimeter is entirely secure, Captain Cole," one of the controlled city guards suddenly spoke aloud from the top of the wall, his voice perfectly steady, projecting down to the plaza below through a mana-amplified horn.
"No anomalous movements detected within three thousand yards of the southern clearing. The forest remains entirely clear."
Down on the stone plaza, Brandon Cole let out a loud, self-satisfied chuckle, completely oblivious to the fact that the guard speaking to him was a hollowed-out husk.
He stroked the feathers of his Bronze-ranked Razor-Feathered Hawk, his chest puffing out with pride as he turned toward the administrative officers of the city guard standing near the main gate mechanisms.
"You see that?" Brandon boasted, his voice carrying his high-level soul power across the stone tiles.
"Under my strategic supervision, the southern sector is a fortress. If that forest beast is stupid enough to try and slip past the wards to repeat last night’s slaughter, my hawk will spot it from a mile away.
We will pin it against the iron gates and harvest its core before the elite teams even finish tracking its scent in the mud!"
The two thousand low-tier students surrounding Brandon cheered loudly, their previous panic completely evaporating as they listened to the confident declarations of their ranked leader.
They looked up at the heavily armored guards lining the high battlements, drawing an immense, false sense of security from the sheer presence of ten thousand abled men guarding the post.
They had absolutely no idea that they were standing in the middle of a literal slaughterhouse, entirely surrounded by weapons that were already pointed directly at their own backs.
Kenji remained perfectly still against the cold stone wall, his body swaying slightly to maintain the illusion of a mindless drone.
Through the dark data streams humming in his head, he could feel the parasitic entity inside Amran testing the connections, ensuring every single human node in the plaza was locked down and ready for the signal.
The strategy behind the city block massacre from the previous night was finally starting to make perfect sense to Kenji. The Enders or whatever faction was running this operation did not care about hiding their tracks from the public.
They had intentionally slaughtered those baseline citizens inside the walls to generate a massive panic, successfully forcing the academy to deploy its massive numbers of low-tier students and city guards to the peripheral gates.
They had created the perfect concentration of human livestock in an open, isolated terrain, completely cut off from the protection of the inner academy powerhouses who were forced to stay behind and guard the main infrastructure.
Kenji secretly calculated his options, his thumb lightly brushing against the hidden bone fragment in his spiritual space.
He could break free from the psychic control within a fraction of a millisecond, but doing so right now would instantly alert the entity inside Amran.
He needed to wait for the exact moment the parasite committed its forces to an open strike. Far across the courtyard, Amran’s wide, maniacal grin deepened.
The boy raised his hand, his fingers twitching in a bizarre, rhythmic pattern that perfectly mirrored the sudden, synchronized cocking of thousands of crossbows along the high stone walls above.
The cold air around the southern gatehouse grew heavy with the suffocating scent of approaching death, and Kenji silently braced his muscles, ready to shatter his chains the very moment the trap snapped shut.
While the real culprit of the city massacre now held the entire city in its palm, on a faraway tree outside the city, a black cat with thick fur yawned lazily.
Beneath it, the dead bodies of more than a hundred beast masters and their pets lay scattered around.
Ayla’s golden gaze pierced into the distance and locked onto the walls of the academy where she knew Kenji was.
