Chapter 329: The Weakness Of Mind’s Eye [Bonus - ]
Every single falling drop of freezing rain, every shifting pebble, and the terrifying dense mana signatures of the women surrounding him were all flooding his mind with infinite data points.
"Ugh... We need to win..."
If he maintained the Mind’s Eye for even three more minutes, his brain would literally hemorrhage so he had to end this instantly.
Twenty yards away, Tasmin pushed herself up from the mud.
The Shadow Commander wiped a thick streak of blood from her dark lips.
Her crimson eyes locked entirely onto Hiro’s serene, blindfolded face.
She had just watched him effortlessly swat away Brida’s multi-ton axe and perfectly parry her own strike.
He was untouchable in a clean straightforward exchange butTasmin was a Huntress and she didn’t fight clean.
"Let’s see just how perfectly you can process things, blind man," Tasmin hissed.
Tasmin didn’t use a Phantom Leap as she stayed on the ground, engaging her raw physical speed once more.
SWISH!
She shot forward, picking up two jagged chunks of shattered bedrock from the mud as she ran.
Instead of swinging her shortswords, Tasmin violently hurled the massive stones directly toward Hiro’s chest.
At the exact same second, she whipped her dark Eclipse-Thread chains outward.
She explicitly layered her attacks, channeling a massive burst of blinding chaotic crimson flames through the metal links.
The attack was a mess... It was completely uncoordinated, lacking any pure martial form.
It was just a massive, overlapping wave of rocks, screaming chains, and explosive fire.
Hiro didn’t flinch.
He raised his right hand with his mind desperately tracking the incoming sensory data.
’Spatial Deflection.’
CRACK! BOOM!
The invisible spatial pressure effortlessly deflected the two heavy stones, sending them crashing into the distance.
The exact same wave parted the crimson flames flawlessly down the middle, perfectly protecting his unarmored body but Tasmin didn’t care about the deflection at all.
Her sharp crimson eyes were locked on his right hand.
She watched his fingers so she watched the microscopic twitch of his muscles.
...And then Tasmin saw it.
The deflection was perfect, but his response lagged... barely a heartbeat, but enough.
When forced to process the mass of the rocks alongside the chaotic unstable crimson flames, his brain had physically stalled.
The number of spells and physical variables was too complex to process instantly.
Tasmin’s dark lips curled into a sharp lethal smirk.
She immediately aborted her charge, using a rapid back-step to slide fifteen yards away, completely retreating from his immediate effective range.
"I see," Tasmin whispered quietly to herself.
As Tasmin backed off, the rest of the Vanguard finally arrived at the edge of the crater.
KRA-THOOOOOM.
The massive Primordial Crimson Dragon landed heavily on the upper lip of the destroyed bedrock.
Talira’s weight shook the entire ground, her massive golden eyes glaring down at the blind man.
With a brilliant flash of light, she transformed smoothly back into her humanoid form, her crimson tail swishing aggressively as she drew a deep breath of fire.
VWOOOOOOM!
Aeliana slowly floated down from the dark purple clouds.
The Astrea Archon of the Stars hovered exactly twenty feet above the crater floor.
Her luminous cosmic green eyes tracked the blue lines of the domain with Starlight mana actively sparked and hissed around her delicate fingers.
Footsteps echoed from the northern side.
Rowenna, the Grand Runemaster, walked casually to the edge of the crater.
She elegantly adjusted the sleeves of her pristine white robes, her deep blue eyes entirely unbothered by the domain.
Finally, Brida marched heavily forward to stand exactly beside Tasmin.
The Titan Bastion reached down, pulling her massive Void Cleaver entirely out of the mud, cracking her thick neck with a loud pop.
Hiro was now completely surrounded by five S-Rank walking calamities in a way.
"Tasmin," Rowenna called out softly, her voice carrying clearly across the crater. "His domain is highly suppressive... He is utilizing forced spatial awareness to redirect force. Have you mapped a viable counter-strategy?"
Tasmin didn’t look away from Hiro. Her eyes glowed with certainty.
"I have," Tasmin declared loudly, ensuring Hiro heard every single word.
Tasmin raised one of her dark shortswords, pointing the sharp mythril tip directly at Hiro’s chest.
"He is relying on his spatial awareness to read our spells," Tasmin explained. "If you throw a single sword swing, a single arrow, or a single massive boulder at him, his mind perfectly processes the exact requirement to effortlessly deflect it. He can redirect raw force flawlessly."
Tasmin smiled dangerously.
"But he is still just a human," Tasmin continued confidently. "His brain has a hard processing limit. He is relying on an external mana source to sustain this domain, which means his own mind is the physical bottleneck."
Tasmin tightened her grip on her twin blades.
"When I threw chaotic unstable crimson flames at him alongside physical debris, his deflection lagged a bit," Tasmin revealed clearly. "He struggled to process the number of things going on simultaneously so we can guess his brain physically stalled from sensory overload."
In the center of the crater, Hiro’s serene stoic expression completely cracked.
His jaw tightened visibly. The glowing blue light leaking from his empty sockets flickered violently for a fraction of a second.
Tasmin had perfectly deduced his weakness in a single, probing exchange.
"So," Tasmin concluded, raising her voice to address the entire Vanguard. "The strategy is incredibly simple. We do not engage him in a clean duel. We do not throw single, isolated attacks..."
Tasmin’s S-Rank shadow mana violently erupted around her boots in a massive, swirling vortex.
"We throw too many spells for his brain to handle!" Tasmin commanded! "We overload his senses!"
Instantly, the entire Vanguard synchronized with terrifying precision.
"Understood!" Rowenna declared cleanly.
The Grand Runemaster slammed the heavy mythril butt of her Sapphire-Core World Weaver into the dirt.
’Omni-Elemental Runic Array!’
Four massive, multi-colored, incredibly intricate magic circles materialized instantly in the air around Rowenna and she didn’t summon a single spell... she summoned a chaotic overlapping mixture of deep purple gravity wells, volatile crimson fire, and jagged sub-zero ice, perfectly designed to scramble Hiro’s control.
"I will incinerate his perception!" Talira roared.
The primordial dragon-girl opened her mouth wide as white-hot, volcanic fire violently condensed in her throat, mixing completely erratically with razor-sharp emerald-green wind blades.
It created an unstable swirling tornado of chaos.
Up in the air, Aeliana elegantly raised both of her slender hands toward the purple sky.
’Starfall Barrage!’
Hundreds of volatile glowing orbs of celestial starlight mana materialized entirely in the air above the crater.
The power of the cosmic magic completely distorted the spatial coordinates of the entire quadrant!
Hiro stood entirely still in the center of the crater, completely surrounded by a literal apocalypse of conflicting data.
His mind was screaming in white-hot agony.
The blue lines of his Mind’s Eye domain began to violently glitch and shatter around the edges of the crater...
He couldn’t process the exact trajectories of the hundreds of starlight orbs while simultaneously tracking the expansion of Talira’s fire and the gravitational pull of Rowenna’s magic circles.
The sensory input was simply too immense as his mind was violently overloading.
Brida stepped heavily forward to the front of the line.
She rested the massive flat of the Astral-Forged Void Cleaver casually against her thick, armored shoulder.
She looked at the terrified overwhelmed blind man standing in the center of the crumbling domain as a brutal grin stretched entirely across her scarred face.
"Well then, girls," Brida quipped loudly.
Her booming voice completely shattered the last remnants of Hiro’s serene silence.
"Why don’t we test out this little theory of yours... and see if we can kill him in one go?"
...
The shattered ruined expanse of the Umbral Basin blurred violently past Silas and Evelyn as they sprinted at maximum velocity through the suffocating, dark purple light of the forced perception domain.
Silas easily kept pace with the exhausted, unarmored girl running beside him.
His frame allowed him to cross the violently crushed bedrock effortlessly with his boots barely making a sound despite the heavy cratered terrain.
His glowing golden-ringed eyes were locked entirely onto the colossal, towering silhouette of The Unmovable Wall looming ominously on the eastern ridge of the battlefield.
It was certainly not Silas’s first time stepping inside an enemy’s command structure.
’Well it’s mostly me entering caves of monsters and I’ve been here several times.’
But he could never grow old of this one.
The Unmovable Wall wasn’t a standard static castle built of stone and mortar.
It was a terrifying massive mobile fortress that actively defied the natural laws of the Sovereign Realm.
As they closed the distance, the sheer scale of the engineering marvel became terrifyingly apparent.
Evelyn didn’t even hesitate as they reached the massive lowered steel boarding ramp at the base of the fortress.
She rushed straight into the dark, metallic underbelly of her own territory with her oversized gray hoodie flapping wildly behind her.
Silas rushed in directly after her, the heavy echoing thud of his combat boots entirely out of place in the high-tech dwarven-engineered corridors of a rival Lord.
"I have to admit, Evelyn, your engineering and architectural team is top-tier," Silas noted calmly.
He effortlessly kept up as she frantically scrambled down a narrow, spiraling metal staircase that led deep into the bowels of the fortress.
"The structural integrity required to move a mass this large without fracturing the internal support beams is staggering," Silas continued, casually observing the thick glowing mana-conduits running along the iron ceiling. "But I still have a dozen questions about your operation. How exactly do you handle the precise voice modulation during a live stream? The deep pitch of the male Sky was flawless. Are you using an artifact hidden in the helmet, or is the audio hardwired and filtered directly through your broadcast drones?"
Silas was just trying to make small talk which would lead to identities being discussed.
Evelyn shot him a completely incredulous wild-eyed glare over her shoulder as she took the metal stairs two at a time.
"Are you seriously asking me about my streaming setup and audio filters right now?!" Evelyn snapped.
Her breathing was incredibly ragged with her lungs burning as she threw her entire physical weight against a heavy rotating iron bulkhead door to push it open.
"My blind vanguard is actively frying his own brain out there on the dirt, and my oldest friend is literally burning her soul to ashes in a tank to power him!" Evelyn yelled, her voice echoing frantically through the dark corridor. "Can we please hold off the casual podcast interview until later?!"
Silas offered a small smirk, seamlessly slipping through the heavy bulkhead door right behind her before it could swing shut.
"Just gathering essential intelligence on a friend," Silas replied smoothly, his golden eyes scanning the dim flickering emergency lights of the subterranean level. "Lead the way, Evelyn."
They descended deeper and deeper into the heavily fortified foundations of the mobile fortress.
The air down here grew incredibly dense, it was filled with the sharp sterile tang of distilled mana-salts and other kinds of things that Silas could not even come close to naming at all.
As they rounded the final sharp corner into the deepest, most secure medical sector of the territory, the ambient temperature in the corridor suddenly and violently spiked to an absolutely unbearable degree.
"Brenna!" Evelyn shouted, her voice echoing off the metal walls.
Standing frantically in front of a massive reinforced iron blast door was Thora’s sister, Brenna.
The stout dwarf was aggressively slamming her heavy mythril-forged wrench against the digital access panel, her face completely slick with panicked terrified sweat.
"My Lord!" Brenna cried out, completely dropping her wrench as she stepped back from the door, ignoring Silas’s sudden presence out of desperation.
"The manual override is jammed!" Brenna reported frantically, pointing a thick trembling finger at the glowing metal. "The ambient mana pressure building up inside the medical chamber is actively warping the internal locking mechanisms! The run-off is fusing the door shut from the inside! I can’t get it open and Elm is in there!"