The mercenary trio was standing in the clearing, watching the strange man enter the cave they couldn’t even approach, without showing any signs of strain. Even Neivor stopped praying as he glanced at the weird man, somehow still keeping his serenity.

  “The day I see him showing an emotion, hell will freeze over,” Ellie said absentmindedly as she turned her gaze back on the merchant. The guy just stepped inside the cave. Was he waving? She could swear she had seen something like that.

  “The world became so bizarre; my skill was screaming at me not to attack that guy,” Erne said as he turned his back on the cave, starting to walk back to the forest. “I find it pointless to stay here.” He said, and Ellie could see the man was annoyed.

  “What? You are gonne leave and miss the show?” she said in a cheerful voice. Her mana was not essential to her beyond making her mind work, so she was the most comfortable person of their group.

  “The show, as you call it, might result in our miserable deaths,” Erne said, sounding like a dad lecturing his child.

  “Don’t be so grim, what is the worst-“ Ellie stopped. Or rather, her words stopped as the world was stripped of all concepts for a moment. She stared around hectically, trying to see, but what was seeing in a world without the concept of colors?

  The world flowed back in, and she felt bile come up as she fell on the ground, throwing up her last meal on the ground.

  When she could finally, look up, she was faced with her friends’ faces covered by a simple emotion. It was pure unadulterated fear. So much for not seeing Neivor showing an emotion... She tried to get up.

  After a few tries, she managed to get up as she looked back at the cave. Everything seemed as it was before, showing no difference.

  “We should go,” Neivor said, speaking for the first time since they entered the mana-draining zone. His voice was faint, and he still had fear in his eyes as his eyes darted around frantically as if he could see something they couldn’t see.

  Ellie stumbled toward the others, and they started walking toward the forest in silence. What they’d seen was not expressible by words; they had only a simple thought, and that was escape.

  About a minute after the strange phenomenon, Ellie could feel something in her back as they walked. For a second, she was turning back, but something she saw, or rather couldn’t see, in the periphery of her vision made her stop.

  They were standing on the edge as the world simply stopped existing behind them. Ellie, for all her courage, couldn’t make her body turn back. The thing behind, the nonexistence of all was too terrifying, too alien.

  When she looked at her friends, she saw that their faces were covered with a sheen of sweat as their eyes were locked in the distance, not daring to look back. I am no different, aren’t I? She wanted to look with all of her being, but she couldn’t. Her existence refused what was behind her.

  This time, the phenomenon lasted more, and they kept walking, as if nothing happened behind. The merchant was forgotten, they all took it for granted that he was dead.

  Ellie, with all of her mind, tried to look back. She refused to be scared of something she didn’t dare to look at. At least, she would see. Slowly, her concentration made her eyeball turn towards the zone of emptiness around the cave. She felt his mind disassemble in real time, as what she was seeing was way beyond its ability to process.

  In an emptiness, void of the concept of distance, color or shape, her mind tried to understand what she was seeing. There were two figures at the heart of it all as their shapes trembled as her mind tried to see what remained real in the unreal space.

  She felt something break as her vision cleared for a mere moment. Deep down, she would never forget what she had seen then. In the void, a scale stood. Ellie could instinctively feel that this was just an interpretation of her mind of a scene completely otherworldly.

  On one side, the scale weighed something she couldn’t understand. It was an amalgamation of everything she knew and much more. It was the mountain, the creatures, the planet. It contained all, yet it still felt beyond them.

  She felt like she was looking at the night sky after listening to her grandmother’s stories about the endless universe. Yet this feeling was much stronger, this thing was larger. For it, a universe was a moment, and people nonexistent. She felt her sense of self slip and with a miraculous show of will, she managed to turn her eyes to the other side of the scale.

  On the other side, the scale weighed a figure with no stable form. For a moment, she could see a figure of a man; in the next, she could see a fish; another moment, and it turned into a bird. It was everchanging, yet it stayed the same. The figure continued to change, but as she watched, it stabilized. It was now a puppy?

  And suddenly, she was looking at the cave. It was as normal as before, as if nothing worth mentioning had happened.

  “Ellie?” Neivor asked, his voice coming as if he was expecting her not to answer.

  “Huh? What?” She asked in bewilderment. She could swear that she had just now seen something incredible when she looked at the emptiness behind. For some reason, she felt very weak as she tried to remember the scene she saw. She was startled by a system notification coming out of nowhere.

  Title Acquired.

  “Witness”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Witness: You have seen.

  She felt a sudden chill after reading the notification. Why did this notification gave her such an eerie feeling? She felt like she was missing something important, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

  All she could summon was an image of a scale. The scale was white, red , yellow and black. Its size was immense as it towered above her. It was so beautiful, so unapproachable, so worthy of ultimate dev-

  “Ellie!” Erne’s voice made her wake up from her thoughts. She looked around dazedly, trying to breathe, before shaking her head like someone waking up from a particularly deep sleep.

  “Sorry, have you guys felt that too?” she replied, meaning the eerie feeling they got before she managed to look behind.

  She didn’t know what this trait meant, but even she could understand that she saw something abnormal.

  “I felt that certain death awaited if I turned back to take a look,” Erne said, somehow sounding even more solemn than he usually was.

  “We, shouldn’t waste time.” Neivor urged them to move. The man still seemed very scared for some other reason apart from what they felt. He still looked around like something was going to jump from the forest.

  They ran as Neivor lead them. She and Erne didn’t comment as they followed the man without any opposition. They were not used to seeing this much emotion from the man.

  A couple of minutes later, they learned why Neivor was afraid. Things happened so suddenly that Ellie couldn’t realize what was happening for a moment. One second, they were still walking as Neivor directed them; in the next second, they were flying north with breakneck speed, pushed by an immense wave of mana coming from the direction of the cave.

  The last thing Ellie saw before they were struck was the terrified glance Neivor threw towards the south. Immediately after, she was flying with a speed she never reached before.

  She watched as a multicolored wave of light passed through them, being faster than their flying speed by a large margin. It took her a moment to realize that this was the culprit of their displacement.

  She watched as the wave passed through the trees, creating a confusing world in it’s wake. Some trees turned into crystals, some turned into metal. She even saw one turning into sand before collapsing in a pile.

  She could see that she was flying directly towards the crystal tree. That looks hard, she thought, and it didn’t take too long for her to find out that she was right. There was a loud crack as she impacted the crystal tree, and she knew no more.

  Maxwell looked at the puppy as it played with a branch he threw toward the little forest inside the cave. He was not sure if it was right to treat the little guy the same as an ordinary puppy after all that happened, but it felt right.

  He checked the space more clearly now that he didn’t have a godlike dog beside him. He found that Mana density was ridiculously high in the small space. Probably, even a normal person without any mana sense would be able to sense that something was wrong with the cave.

  With this immense density, though, came a problem. What was holding the mana inside the cave? He really, really didn’t want to find out what couldn’t hold the mana when he was here, so he hoped whatever it was, it lasted a bit more.

  He sent the puppy a simple message, trying to tell it to follow him. The good thing about soul’s voice was that it was above any language at its core. It used the base intention of a message to communicate despite also being able to transmit voice if needed.

  The puppy seemed not really surprised receiving the telepathic message as it quickly let the stick hit was playing with go before slowly walking towards Maxwell.

  Maybe it’s used to it because of its mother? Maxwell barely could stand this creature’s mother's way of communication. If The Traveler as it called itself, used even a smidgen of what it was using to communicate on the puppy, it would explain its ease of understanding it.

  They could only walk a couple of meters before the puppy’s limited attention span made it go after some sort of moving plant. Maxwell sighed before grabbing the puppy from the back of the neck. He lifted it towards his face, and couldn't help but chuckle at its guilty expression.

  Bluberry, meanwhile was back on her rightful place, and she was not ammused by this ridiculous creature. She threw it a look of superiority before going back to trimming her hair.

  Maxwell was speechless, due to exchange, but the feeling of unease he felt about this cave was steadily increasing. The mana felt a bit more agitated, somehow. It had places to be it seemed.

  He placed the puppy on his shoulder, trying to send it the idea to stay there for now, but the attempt was met with failure. A level 3 puppy had no dexterity to speak of to do such a thing. In the end, with the increasing unease he was feeling, Maxwell started running towards the entrance while hugging the puppy with his arms.

  When he could see the end of the cave, he could also feel the mana approaching an invisible boiling point. The Traveller’s command was probably similar to Maxwell’s, but it was weakening at a visible rate after the demise of the creature.

  After a period of a few seconds, Maxwell reached his fastest speed in this world, and they were outside the cave. Maxwell looked around briefly to see if the trio were still around, but only thing he could see was a faint trace of mana towards the forest.

  Maybe they felt the system’s punishment? He couldn’t come up with a different reason for the group to leave. He doubted that they could feel the mana inside.

  After a brief moment of thoughtfulness, Maxwell returned to the fastest speed he could muster as he dashed towards the forest.

  Instictively, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to run away from the inevitable expansion of the incredible amount of mana. The least he could do was try to cover some distance, though.

  He quickly covered the clearing, and soon he was manuevering between trees in the forest. Everything happened quickly, afterwards.

  One moment, Maxwell could feel something from the direction of the cave. It felt like someone unclogged the world itself. It was rejoicing, and Maxwell’s soul could feel it clearly.

  In the next moment, Maxwell completely focused his mind on the present. He would need it all to survive this. He formed a simple plan with what he had.

  First, he formed a simple construct of mana before him, not too different from a shield. It had two sides connected at the corner, perpendicular to each other. He quickly connected to the mana, and he visuzalized this construct not letting any mana pass, he visualized the wave of mana splitting by the edge of the construct, and continue on its way leaving Maxwell unharmed.

  Maxwell knew this would not be enough, though. He quickly divided his mind to three, and repeated the same process over and over again, stacking the shields on top of each other.

  He could feel his mana dwindling as he formed the shields. Luckily the upkeep of the shields was not very high, due to the nature of his mana manipulation. After he was satisfied, he pulled some metal mana, and quickly visualized it making his skin more resistant to change.

  He could hear some notifications in the background, but he ignored them for now. As a last touch, he focused on the compendium, using the skill more broadly, which would be quite inefficient in a normal situation.

  He told the skill to absorb everything coming near him. He hoped this would decrease any mana managing to pass the shields he created.

  This was the last thing he has done before finally giving himself a moment to look up. In the distance, he could see a wave of iridescent mana approaching him. In any other situation, Maxwell would be absorbed by the sight.

  The wave of mana was so dense that Maxwell could see it achieve something similar to infusion by its sheer power. Things changed as mana wave passed through them, creating a field of different colored trees and rocks.

  Maxwell couldn’t enjoy the sight for long, and soon, the wave of mana reached him.