Chapter 26: A Heavy Burden
The so-called Nightmare Plunge, the description in the forum guide was: Pull the player into the most unbearable memory of their life, causing their emotions to fluctuate violently and their spirituality to be damaged.
Although it was written in a mysterious way, the game pod naturally couldn’t really read the player’s memory, so for players, it was just a simple willpower check. If they failed the check, they would only get a “Shaken Spirituality” debuff.
However, at this moment, Asker felt that something deep in his memory was being violently torn out by the other party’s ability.
In the blink of an eye, he was standing at the door of the bathroom in his old home. His small body was probably only six or seven years old. His dead father was slumped on the floor of the bathroom, the wounds on his wrists from the suicide attempt still oozing blood.
His mother was kneeling on the tiled floor, her clothes soaked in blood. Her body was trembling slightly, making incomprehensible sobs, which gradually turned into desperate wails.
That unbearable childhood memory, along with the feeling that the whole world was collapsing in front of him, resurfaced from the depths of his memory.
What did he do at that time? It seemed like he hugged his mother and cried together?
Thinking about it now, it was really not worth it.
His small hand clenched tightly in the air, as if pulling something out, and slashed forcefully at the scene in front of him.
He really drew his sword!
Then the entire memory world was cleanly cut in half.
Blue blood splattered, and what came into view was the Nightmare’s incredulous expression.
It didn’t understand why this human in front of it, whose consciousness had been pulled into the nightmare it had woven and couldn’t extricate himself, could still draw his sword and deliver this decisive blow that broke the dream.
Then it realized that it had made a huge mistake.
Eleanor was still fighting the illusion of her father, when the tall illusion suddenly trembled, and its shield-raising movement froze. Her gaze turned to the distance in confusion, to the place where Asker and the Nightmare were fighting, and her attention was immediately attracted.
What a violent and fierce swordsmanship it was. The sword light connected up and down, left and right, almost impossible to see how many swords he had drawn per second. Only the blue blood that was slashed out splashed continuously to the upper left, upper right, lower left, and lower right, like a huge cosmos flower blooming in the air.
The Nightmare, with its back to everyone, was shaking like a sieve under the sword light. First its right arm was cut off, then its left arm, and finally its head and waist. Its broken limbs were thrown out in a flurry.
Asker let out a low shout and swung the last horizontal slash, splitting the empty air in front of him. The Teutonic Knights’ “Storm Cross Swordsmanship” (Sturm Kreuz) was actually not about brute force, but about controlling every movement and force in the midst of a violent attack.
And the reason why he slashed at the air after killing the boss was simply to vent.
His mentality had become unbalanced.
His professional psychological quality allowed him to quickly adjust and calm himself down. Turning around, he saw that the tall illusion in the distance had also disappeared with the wind. As a puppet created by the boss’s dream ability, it was only natural that it could not maintain its existence after the boss died.
Eleanor stood up shakily, leaning on her spear, took off her armor with difficulty, and began to receive Nuo’s healing.
“Heh.” Medea, whose injuries had stabilized, walked over, looked at the Nightmare’s severed limbs on the ground, and sneered, “I thought the Nightmare was so powerful, but it was killed by us so easily…”
Her words came to an abrupt end, because Medea saw Asker’s face clearly: a gloomy expression, like a volcano about to erupt.
“What’s… that expression on your face?” Medea’s voice trembled a little. Through her ability’s vision, she saw that Asker’s mental body was also bright red, obviously his heart was filled with extreme rage and killing desire, making her have the urge to run away desperately on the spot.
“What’s wrong with me?” Asker said slowly, forcing a smile on his face.
“Your smile is uglier than crying.” Medea secretly breathed a sigh of relief. It was close, it seemed that this guy hadn’t lost his mind yet.
“Forget it.” Asker waved his hand, turned around and sat down on the stone steps of the altar, silent, not knowing what he was thinking.
The others also came over after a short rest. The most seriously injured was naturally Eleanor, who had fought fiercely with the illusion, while Peggy had fallen into a coma and fallen to the ground at the beginning. Although she was covered in dirt, she was not injured. Under Nuo’s healing, both of them had recovered their combat effectiveness.
“What’s that expression on your face?” Nuo said, biting her lip. Looking at Asker’s gloomy expression, she felt inexplicably afraid.
“What’s wrong with my expression?” Asker asked.
“It’s as if you made a stupid mistake in the arena and were beaten up by the other party.” Peggy said.
Eleanor burst out laughing. She had been sparring with Asker in the training ground for several days at first, so she knew what Peggy meant.
In every fight at that time, Asker would beat up the mercenary on the other side like this, and then mercilessly criticize them until they were worthless. If this great master was really beaten up… that scene was simply unimaginable, it would probably be this gloomy expression now.
“Oh.” Asker said with a straight face.
“What is the spiritual material on this Nightmare?” Seeing that he was really in a bad mood, Peggy didn’t tease him anymore.
“Hair.” Asker said.
So Peggy went to collect the hair on the Nightmare’s head, cutting the nerve bundles with her short sword while secretly looking up to observe Asker’s expression.
“Don’t look.” Medea’s voice sounded in her mind. “He’s in a bad mood right now.”
“What’s with his expression?” Peggy asked puzzled. She had been hypnotized from the moment she approached the Nightmare, and had been in a coma ever since, so she had no idea what had happened. “I feel like there’s a bit of hatred in it.”
“It’s not necessarily hatred.” Medea said, “Anyway, it’s a feeling of carrying some heavy burden.”
She sighed in the mental communication, looking at Asker’s gloomy face, she inexplicably thought of her father when she was young.
It was when Medea was six years old, her father Suleiman had not yet become the emperor of the Seljuk Empire, and was serving as the governor of the Damascus region as a prince. At that time, her grandfather, Sultan Selim, favored another son, her uncle Alauddin, and seemed to intend to pass the throne to him.
Alauddin, because he had been leading troops for many years and had once killed two of his brothers, the princes, for his grandfather, became increasingly arrogant and domineering. He once met his grandmother Hafsa outside the palace and whipped her severely with a horsewhip in front of the eunuchs, on the grounds that the Sultan’s women should not show their faces outside the palace.
Her grandmother fell seriously ill after returning to the palace and later wrote to her father in Damascus. Her father, Suleiman, took the letter and sat alone in the governor’s mansion, neither summoning his confidants to discuss nor eating or sleeping, but just sat silently in his room all night.
That night, she had gone to her father to act coquettishly and asked him to read her the bedtime story “One Thousand and One Nights.” However, her father just stared at her with a gloomy face and a cruel expression, which frightened her and made her run away in the end.
From that moment on, the elegant father in her memory, who was always full of energy and had a scholarly air, disappeared, as if he had completely turned into a cold-blooded devil.
After she grew up, she probably guessed what was written in that letter, nothing more than that her grandfather Selim had decided to implement the “Fratricide Law.”
The law, promulgated by Mehmed II “the Conqueror,” stipulated that any prince who became or was about to become Sultan had the right to kill all his brothers who threatened his throne.
If her grandfather Selim had made up his mind to pass the throne to his son Alauddin, then Suleiman, who was also his son, as well as his mother Hafsa, his wife Roxelana, and all his children, would all be executed by her grandfather Selim – or by her uncle Alauddin, who would become Sultan.
But at that time, she was only six years old and didn’t understand the hidden swords and shadows in the court. A year later, in the midst of his sons’ open and secret struggles, her grandfather Selim finally decided that her father Suleiman was the most qualified prince to inherit his throne, so he took action to massacre all the other princes and their immediate family members.
Another year later, her grandfather Selim died in the court. Her father Suleiman returned to the capital to inherit the throne, and sneered as he rode into the city: “A carpet is enough for two Sufi believers to live on, but the world is too small for two kings.”
The sneer her father showed at that time had gradually faded in her memory. However, what she could never forget was the expression on her father’s face when he was meditating in the dark room of the mansion that night: it was a feeling of carrying a huge burden, both extremely painful and extremely cruel, both cold and rational, and full of madness.
Very similar to Asker’s expression at this moment.
“What heavy burden?” Peggy asked in confusion. It was hard for her to understand what else could be heavier than hatred.
“Ah, it’s that feeling of being cornered.” Medea said casually, “Men, sometimes they just turn into beasts, carrying all kinds of heavy reasons, and then go to fight and confront the whole world.”
“But, it’s quite charming.” She chuckled softly.
Asker sat on the stone steps, his hands clasped under his chin, not knowing what he was thinking. Eleanor beside him looked at him cautiously and asked tentatively:
“No more review?”
“You fought well, this should be your first boss. To be able to fight like this in the first attempt, it’s already quite good for newbies.” Asker was silent for a long time before replying, “Now we are already in the depths of the island. If we go further in, we will reach the foot of the mountain. We will encounter the second boss when we head to the top of the mountain. Keep up the good work.”
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