FREE USE in Primitive World - Chapter 271: Shocked Crowd!

Chapter 271: Chapter 271: Shocked Crowd!

His footsteps were light, completely unbothered by the pressure field he was generating, but in the silent, suffocating square, each soft step of his leather boots echoed like a death knell.

He stopped right in front of the kneeling, trembling Elder and looked down at him.

For a fraction of a second, the towering, terrifying phantom silhouette of a Lord Dreadwing flickered into existence behind Sol’s back. The massive, iridescent sapphire Dreadwing glared down at the tribe with its thirty thousand multifaceted eyes, radiating an aura of ancient, unyielding, hyper-lethal malice, before seamlessly fading back.

Sol leaned down slightly, his silver-crimson eyes glowing ominously in the shadow of his brow, radiating the cold apathy of a god looking down at a mortal.

“Now,” Sol whispered, his voice carrying clearly through the absolute, paralyzed silence of the tribe, dripping with dark, mocking amusement. “What were you saying about throwing me out of the gates, ’Elder’ Thorne?”

Thorne’s mouth opened, a line of drool spilling over his lips, but he couldn’t say a single word. The pressure on his vocal cords was too immense.He could only stare up at Sol with wide, bloodshot eyes filled with a potent mixture of excruciating physical pain and dawning, absolute terror.

Satisfied, Sol mentally pulled back.

He didn’t show it outwardly… his face remained a mask of cold, untouchable supremacy… but internally, he was completely exhausted. Forcing the aura of Lord Dreadwing as an unranked was draining his Golden Liquid and Silver liquid at a terrifying, suicidal rate.

His core ached, his head throbbed with a phantom migraine, and his lungs burned, as if he had inhaled liquid fire. If he held it for another ten seconds, he would likely cough up blood and ruin the entire display of dominance.

But he knew that he had to do it, because no matter what, he was an outsider. And in this volatile war situation, if he wanted to remain safe, he had to prove his worth. He had to show them he wasn’t just useful, he was indispensable.

And honestly, to project the essence, Sol had executed a miraculous, highly dangerous internal synergy. He had used his tyrannical Silver Liquid… the Domination power… as a metaphysical floodgate, violently forcing the heavy, Layer 3 Essence of the Lord Blood Dreadwing outward, while burning his Golden Liquid at a terrifying, unsustainable rate to heal the micro-tears in his flesh as the power surged through him.

Slowly, carefully, Sol’s silver liquid and golden essence emptied out of his immediate pathways, retreating back into the dense core of his solar plexus.

The oppressive pressure vanished like a blown-out candle. The terrifying, leaden pressure disappeared entirely. He acted exactly as if he had casually, effortlessly removed the pressure himself out of sheer boredom.

Finally, the crowd could breathe normally again.

A massive, collective gasp of air ripped through the courtyard as hundreds of people violently inhaled, clutching their chests and coughing.

But once again, there was silence, but it was a different kind of silence. It wasn’t the silence of disbelief, it was the silence of absolute, reverent awe.

The common people, those without the blessing of the spirits, had certainly felt the pressing, terrifying aura that had driven them to their knees, but they didn’t possess the spiritual senses to truly understand what it meant. They only knew it was a power unlike anything they had ever felt.

Someone near the middle of the crowd, a young gatherer, nervously nudged a pale, sweating warrior next to them.

“What… what was that?” the commoner asked, gulping hard, her eyes wide with fear, even though the terrified reactions of the warriors and the Warchief seemed to already spell out the impossible truth.

The warrior slowly turned his head, his eyes still wide and dilated,his hands shaking as he wiped a thick streak of sweat from his brow.”It… it indeed seemed to be Layer 3. The weight… my spirit felt like it was going to shatter just being near him. My spirit beast wouldn’t even answer my call.”

Even though the warrior had said it quietly to himself, in the absolute, pin-drop silence of the recovering crowd, his words rang out like thunder. The realization spread outward like a ripple in a pond for a single, suspended moment.

And then, the manic uproar began.

It wasn’t a roar of skepticism this time; it was a volcanic explosion of hysterical, frenzied excitement and sheer, unadulterated terror. The crowd erupted. Men yelled to the skies, women wept, and warriors slammed their spears against their shields.

The Veynar tribe had a Lord Blood phantom! An outsider, a man who had arrived at their gates with nothing but a strange manner of speaking, now held the power of a walking calamity.

Elder Thorne, his pride entirely broken and his mind fracturing under the weight of his humiliation, hurriedly scrambled up from the dirt, stumbling over his own boots.

“Impossible!” Thorne screamed, his voice cracking, spittle flying from his lips. He wildly gestured at Sol, refusing to accept the reality that had just literally crushed him. “It’s not possible! Even our greatest ancestors took a long time and an army of hundreds to even find one! Lord Blood beasts have human-like intelligence, they rule entire sectors of the jungle! It must be a lie! A trick of the light! An illusion artifact! A trick of his strange magics!”

“Shut up, Thorne,” Warchief Veylara commanded, her voice finally returning, cracking like thunder across the square.

But Thorne seemed to have gone completely crazy. His entire political survival, his legacy, and his authority depended entirely on Sol being a fraud, and his mind twisted the facts into deranged conspiracies to protect his fragile ego.

“No! He must be a spy!” Thorne rambled frantically, pointing a trembling finger at Sol,looking wildly at the crowd for support. “He is a spy from another tribe, or the deep-rot cults! They must have given this spirit to him to infiltrate us! Yes, yes, that’s it! No unranked human could kill a layer 3 Lord blood!”

Thorne let out a manic, desperate laugh, looking around at his lackeys as if he had just solved a major, world-saving puzzle,his eyes wide with madness. “We must apprehend him! We must kill him before he—”

BOOM!

Warchief Veylara didn’t say another word. She unleashed her own beast.

A massive, spectral shadow of a Storm-Tiger erupted from her back, its body crackling with blue lightning. Its deafening roar drowned out Thorne’s hysterical rambling entirely. Because she was far more experienced in aura manipulation than Sol, she didn’t hit the crowd with an area-of-effect blast. All the crushing, Layer 2 pressure was focused entirely and exclusively on Thorne like a laser beam.

The Elder was pressed again crashing hard into the dirt, coughing up a mouthful of blood.

“I said, shut up,” Veylara said coldly, her Storm-Tiger phantom growling menacingly over the fallen Elder, daring any of his lackeys to intervene. None did. They all stepped back, lowering their eyes in submission.

Veylara turned her back on Thorne, dismissing him entirely. She looked at Sol, her chest heaving slightly. She was absolutely shocked by the sheer magnitude of the aura she had just felt.

But what truly terrified her, what sent a cold shiver down her spine as a seasoned veteran of the Great Orrath, was the brief, flickering silhouette she had seen behind his back right at the end.

She stepped closer to Sol, ignoring the manic cheering and hysterical uproar of the crowd around them. She stopped just a foot away and lowered her voice so only he and Zephyra could hear the tremor in her words.

“That silhouette…” Veylara said, her voice trembling slightly, betraying her stoic exterior. “That wasn’t just any beast. That was a Dreadwing. A walking calamity of the skies.”

Sol didn’t confirm or deny it, merely maintaining his calm, detached smirk, though he was privately focusing entirely on keeping his breathing steady.

Veylara looked at his torn clothes, the dried, highly toxic acid burns on the leather, and the absolute lack of any fatal physical damage to his actual body. She realized the impossibility of the situation. She instead asked the only question that mattered, the question that defied all logic, history, and reason of their primitive world.

“Sol,” Veylara breathed, her golden eyes searching his for any hint of a lie. “How… how did an unranked human possibly manage to kill and anchor a creature like that?”