BXBX NOVEL Chapter 59 Eternal Autumn [1]
When did it all go so wrong?
Why?
Why did everything fall apart, just when I thought I had put everything back together?
Those were the questions that entered Lloyd\'s mind in that moment, yet he knew better than anyone else that...
That the only person who could answer that question was him.
Standing up with a pitch-black Katana in his hands, Lloyd pushed mana through the blade, causing its purple runes to shine brighter than ever before, burning the red blood that stained it.
"Remember..." Lloyd muttered to himself while taking a step forward, blood staining his face and clothes while several corpses lay around him, every single one of their eyes frozen in fear as death took them.
Of course, not all of them looked dead, but what did Lloyd know?
While some were scorched beyond recognition, others were mutilated beyond belief as claw marks tainted their bodies, showing how they were quickly ripped apart without mercy... As if a monster had finally gotten to them, seeing them more as prey than enemy warriors.
"You did this..." An emotionless voice finished Lloyd\'s sentence as a man wearing a black mask appeared in a flash of purple light a few meters behind Lloyd, making his presence known by the sheer aura he exuded, followed by the glint of violet within his eyes as he analyzed Lloyd from top to bottom...
"No..." Lloyd whispered, his teeth grinding onto one another as a vein on his forehead looked like it was about to burst.
Pointing his blade at the masked man, Lloyd parted his lips and muttered with a voice filled with pure rage-
"You did this!"
*FWOOOOOHM*
*DOOM*
***
Earlier
Opening his eyes, Lloyd could not help but drop his jaw at the Gartia-shattering beauty before him. [Meaning of the term at the end of the chap]
The entire scenery could be described in two words.
Eternal Autumn.
A range of orange leaves could be seen littering the ground for miles, causing even the mountains in the distance to reflect an orange glow that was only representative of the autumn season.
"Even the grass is orange." Lloyd couldn\'t help but mutter aloud while crouching to brush his hand upon the orangey-red grass.
Looking up, Lloyd stared at the distant sun that was beginning to disappear behind one of the mountains and estimated that it would take an hour or two for the sun to set at the speed it was going at.
*Rustle*
Without a second of thought, Lloyd\'s instincts took over, and before he knew it, a flame bullet had traveled through the skull of the creature coming out of the bush, causing its brain to melt in an instant before it fell onto the ground with brain matter dripping out of the hole in its head.
"Oh... My bad." Lloyd laughed awkwardly while scratching the back of his head, but he could not help but feel as if another problem was emerging.
"I may or may not have a little trauma left in me..." Lloyd muttered while remembering how his instincts were the first time he almost died
"Squeak."
"Hm?" Raising a brow, Lloyd quickly turned around and looked at the orange-furred bunny. Its fur had the texture of leaves, while its ears were brown and slightly spiky, camouflaging as twigs.
However, what caught Lloyd\'s attention was not that its fur was orange or its ears looked like twigs, but instead, it was that its eyes had become a deep red, unlike the eyes of the last rabbit Lloyd killed.
"Oh, hey, little rabbit." Lloyd smiled, not thinking of the rabbit as much of a threat since the last one had died in an instant, completely forgetting that he had recently upgraded his [Flame Control] ability.
"Squeak."
However, before Lloyd could get closer to the rabbit, another squeak entered his ears, and when he turned around, it was an identical rabbit, looking at him with the same red eyes.
\'What\'s that feeling?\' Lloyd asked himself while looking into the eyes of the rabbit, but after thinking about it for a moment, he shrugged it off since the feeling wasn\'t strong enough for him to analyze.
"Squeak."
And then he heard another...
"Squeak."
and another
"Squeak."
The feeling was becoming more prominent, as if every rabbit was amplifying the signature, making its transmittance more powerful by the second.
"Squeak."
"Squeak."
"Squeak."
"Squeak."
"Squeak."
"Squeak."
"Squeak."
And in less than a second, the squeaks became plenty, and the aura exploded in strength, immediately making Lloyd\'s hairs stand on their ends as a magnificent bloodlust washed over him.
"Oh, crap..." And with those words leaving his mouth, Lloyd did not wait for another second as he launched himself out of that situation, shooting at about 150 kmh.
While the rabbits didn\'t appear powerful alone, Lloyd had played enough video games to understand that a colony of rabbits with red eyes was the most dangerous thing a man could stumble upon.
Looking back, Lloyd\'s eyes widened in horror as the colony seemed to only grow larger, making it look as if hundreds of rabbits were running towards him. Their eyes shone in rage, and their aura flared in bloodlust, creating a deep red fog in the area that would make most feel as if they were suffocating.
\'Damn it, instincts! Why did you have to kill that first rabbit! He meant no harm!\' Lloyd inwardly cried while running as fast as he could while dodging both rabbits and trees that happened to be in the way.
*Creak*
"Huh?" Those were the last words that came out of Lloyd\'s mouth as a tree branch wrapped around him and picked him into the sky.
\'Don\'t tell me...\' Lloyd\'s eyes shone slightly as the tree before him gained three slits that slowly opened to show two eyes and a large mouth lined with razor-sharp teeth as if it were a shark\'s maw.
If that wasn\'t bad enough, the lines of teeth also began spinning, making the maw feel more like a blender, waiting to turn Lloyd into soup the moment he fell in.
\'A treant...\' Lloyd gritted his teeth before breathing in an out calm himself.
He remembered reading about treants in the past. According to the mythology of Elves, who relied more on religion, legends, and \'witchcraft\' than science, treants were simply trees blessed by the almighty tree, Yggdrasil, with the semblance of life by connecting it to its own will.
Treants are considered passive creatures that only fight back when someone attacks them or the forest they inhabit.
\'It must have seen the rabbit\'s aggression as a sign that I attacked the forest or its inhabitants, meaning that the rabbits were also peaceful creatures before I decided to kill one of them.\' Lloyd thought as he finally decided on what his next course of action should be.
[Flame Control]
Touching the branch that held him, Lloyd\'s eyes shone even brighter as orange and blue flames engulfed his hands as he pointed his other hand towards the maw.
"Incinerate."
*FWOOOOOHM"
In an instant, flames exploded out of Lloyd\'s hands, covering the branches around him in flames, and allowing him to escape from its iron-clad grip while turning the tree into a flaming spectacle as a ball of fire engulfed it from the inside out.
Dropping to the ground without even making a thud due to his [Soundless Steps] passive ability, Lloyd turned towards the massive colony of rabbits and had an idea.
"How about he try something?" Lloyd muttered before raising his foot off the ground and releasing the full power of his killing intent combined with [Monarch\'s Aura].
Feeling a powerful killing intent wash over them, the rabbits froze in place for a quarter of a second, yet that was all Lloyd needed to-.
[Basic Lightning Control]
Lowering his foot, he slammed it into the ground, kicking up a dust cloud a little less than a dozen meters tall.
*Crackle*
With the dust now blocking the rabbit colony\'s vision of Lloyd, they were quickly forced to use their other senses, yet when they tried that, they could only pick up the strong smell of wood burning to ashes as well as the sound of several of their kind either squeaking in terror or pain.
[Electricity Chain]
The moment Lloyd slammed his foot into the ground, he had activated [Basic Lightning Control] and coated his foot in it. The electricity quickly moved through the soil and zapped the closest bunny, yet due to the constant surge of electricity that Lloyd was outputting, the electricity became too much for one rabbit, causing the rabbit next to it to be zapped.
This quickly created a chain of rabbits turning into charcoal, but due to the fact that the ability was only the basic version of Lightning Control, he quickly found that he could only zap 10 rabbits at a time, compared to the hundreds that were just about to attack him.
Stopping the output of electricity, Lloyd quickly created 4 shadow clones of himself that left the already-settling dust cloud with hands covered in flames.
[Flame Control]
Pointing his hands toward the sky, Lloyd immediately created several dozen flame bullets before swiping his hand down and causing the bullets to float in the air in a position that would have allowed them to shower the battlefield, yet that was not all.
\'While my proficiency over my flames isn\'t high enough for me to control the bullets in more than three batches without putting a strain on my mind and mana, let alone control them individually, right now, I don\'t need it... I just need to make sure they keep their form.\'
Lloyd smiled while gritting his teeth as he used all his willpower to move the bullets in a way where they looked like they were skipping rocks rather than dozens of artillery bullets showering the sky.
Swerving the bullets, it looked like they were dozens of stars being swung behind Lloyd to build momentum, just for him to finally swing his hand towards the rabbits with everything he had.
*ZOOM*
As if time had paused, nothing moved for a moment, yet in an instant, a spectacle of orange and cyan lights entered Lloyd\'s vision as the bullets shot past him at lightning speed as Lloyd tried his best to keep the bullets from breaking.
Shooting past him, the bullets pierced through several rabbits before destabilizing enough to explode and incinerate everything within a half-meter radius.
They shot through everything from trees to even Lloyd\'s clones, and in the blink of an eye, the battle was over, with Lloyd standing victorious in a once beautiful autumn forest replaced with a hellscape of charred carcasses and burning trees.
(Author\'s Note: The word Earth-shattering had become slightly insignificant due to the increase of universal exploration.
Now that the galaxy IC 1101 (the largest galaxy in the universe) now no longer out of reach, they chose to rename it to the Gartia galaxy, which comes from the mixture of the words "Gargantuan" and the greek word "Terastia."]
[Huge thanks to NotGRE3D, TheWallOfFantasy, Clapdatbooty and Daemoncles_000 for all your gifts. It is greatly appreciated.]