A veil of darkness surrounded the world. The moonlight tried to scatter away the darkness and partially succeeded. The light blue-colored moon in the night sky looked just a little away from reaching its complete form. The area was strangely quiet.
It had been days since the Demons started moving at night, and many Beasts had seen them. Everyone was scared of facing them. The Lizardman tribes had it worse. Many villages were wiped out, leaving no one behind. It was like an ancient curse was released, targeting the humanoid reptilians.
The situation is tense. It started to become a rule not to move around at night. Some beasts that prefer to hunt at night have started hunting during the day. No one dared to anger the spirits that roamed around at night. Rumors spread that shadows talk at night; many thought it was just a rumor until they saw shadows crawling through.
A boy slowly walked toward a place fenced by wooden planks. A strange banner of the Lizard Skull was hung. The Lizardman hidden in the village felt like the night had become darker. They could feel that the temperature around them had strangely cooled down.
The rest of the things worked normally, but they could feel chill gusts moving around. The area around them also became silent, as if every creature and bug around them were fast asleep. Unknown to them, strange shadows descended on their village. Their fate had been decided.
There was no priest leading them. It was hard to find them in small villages. It was then that they smelled the scent of blood in the air. They looked around and found multiple of their tribe members lying on the floor. Their eyes fell on the creatures that came out of their shadows, and they jumped at them.
'Swish'
Something passed by the lizardman warriors; the next moment, a smooth cut appeared on their necks, and they fell. Their shadows shook, and soon two similar shadow creatures appeared. One after another, every Lizardman had fallen, becoming a corpse.
The boy moved his hand. Multiple strange mosquito-like creatures appeared out of the air and started sucking the blood from the corpses. The shadow creatures moved around and collected the reptilian eyeballs. The boy kept moving, leaving the village behind.
"It had been five days since I started hunting Lizardman tribes; I have destroyed 12 villages and created more than four thousand Shadow Creatures from them. Adding to the other creatures, I have a total of five thousand Shadow Soldiers."
"My killing Intent has moved to the next stage due to killing so many opponents of higher level. Killing humanoids increases it way more than killing normal beasts. It's as if their fear, hate, and anger—all these things increase it. I can now use the final ability of Killing Intent, 'Suppression.' " He said as his feet kicked the ground and pushed his body into the air.
He appeared on the back of a shadow wyvern, which flapped its wings and started moving. "Killing intent gave me three abilities. The first ability was exudation. With its help, I can instill fear and paralyze my opponents' minds. After training it, the user can make the opponent hallucinate about their own death and break their will."
"I am just a step away from mastering it; after doing it, I would be able to kill opponents with low will by making them believe the hallucinations are real and they have died. I can still do it now, but the opponent should be weaker than me.
"The second ability of killing intent is 'Killer's Perception.' It allows me to detect the killing intent directed by me, making it very hard for anyone to ambush me as I could sense their killing intent from far away. Its absolute mastery allows the user to use abilities similar to 'Combat Perception' and predict their moment by reading their killing intent. It would take me some time to master it."
"The last ability is called 'Suppression.' It allows him to control and hide his killing intent from others. This increases the concealment to the next level and helps the user bypass the 'Danger Instrincts' and 'Sixth Sense' of the opponent. This makes the defense mechanism of most of the opponents useless; it means death, in other words."
The complete mastery of 'Suppression,' which also means absolute mastery of all three abilities as they are interconnected, gives the user the ability to enter an 'Apathetic State.' In this state, the user would not feel any emotions; his body and heartbeat would remain calm no matter what he was experiencing. It makes the user immune to all emotion-based powers and greatly resistant to mind-control powers.
He had also heard that, after complete mastery of 'Killing Intent, one may be able to erase emotions from other people to a certain degree.
"It does sound cool, and the killing intent may appear very strong, but the reality is very different." He sighed. "It was tough to specifically awaken Killing Intent, as there was no sure way. To master it was simple; you have to kill other creatures, but this also became its biggest setback."
No matter how much society had degenerated, no one liked someone who used this type of method. As the killing intent became stronger, it started to affect the person's mind, making him a monster that only knew how to kill. Many users who awakened killing Intent and went out of control killed many innocents and were consumed by that guilt.
Only someone with no guilt, a strong mind, or like killing could pass through this stage. The next hurdle was the way the Intent was to be trained, while at an earlier level, it was easy to make it stronger. At later stages, the requirement was increased to a very high degree, and only high-level creatures helped to progress further.
The next hurdle was that the speed was very slow while training by killing beasts. At last, the user had to look for humanoid beasts, which were not easy to find. They were also tougher to kill, especially in high numbers, so it again led them to kill humans to grow stronger. It was no coincidence that people called it 'The Devil's Trap.'
So for most Killing Intent users who have still not given up or ended up criminally losing control or getting overpowered by it, the main point was not the thorny path. People were ready to go to any limit to become powerful, but the power that the killing intent gave was nothing compared to other intents like sword intent, spell intent, etc.
Only after mastering Killing Intent can one use it to a full degree, but it looked useless to most of the Awakeners. It was still overlooked because it had no requirements to awaken like other intents, which made it relatively common. As a Killing Intent user, the most depressing thing was that your mastery of it should be higher than the opponent's mental toughness, and your will or strength would decrease.
"Despite having so many limitations and problems, I believe killing Intent is the best Intent to master first if you want to learn different intents. It can be learned quickly with suitable conditions, connections, and resources. Most people compare it to other intents and think it is weak as it can't win most one-versus-one."
"pathetic! This Intent is made to be used as a support intent. You need to master it faster and then learn other Intent to increase your strength. Once you have done that, you can become a nightmare that can't be stopped by even an army of low-level opponents. It also has great synergy with assasins; they are the ones that mostly succeed in mastering it to a higher level."
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