Chapter 480 - The New Halon

Chapter 480: 480 - The New Halon

The shape that rose in the center of the office was, at first glance, almost identical to the one from before.

It was a sphere of gelatin, the size of a large ball, with two small, round white eyes floating on its surface, and a small smiling mouth that slowly opened, like someone trying on a new piece of clothing for the first time.

But the color had changed, or rather, deepened. The crystalline blue from before now had the depth of a dark sapphire, with obsidian reflections moving beneath the surface, and the gold and white particles, which once resembled a starry sky, now formed constellations so sharp they looked like small galaxies slowly spinning inside him.

That was all. No new wings appeared, no horn formed on his forehead, no spikes showed up on his body. He was still just a sphere of dark gelatin, the same one Lisa had known for months.

But she felt her entire body freeze.

Lohan, for his part, had gone completely still, and for a few seconds, neither of them said a word.

What he felt was hard to explain.

It was as if, suddenly, someone had removed an entire layer of noise from his existence, and the world was sharper, slower and closer than ever.

He heard the creak of the tree’s wood, the distant murmur of sap rising through the trunk, the rhythm of Lisa’s breathing and of her heartbeat, and he felt every molecule of his own body responding to his will with an almost immediate obedience.

He tested a tentacle.

Before, to move one of them, he had to think about the movement. Now, wanting it was enough, and the tentacle was already in place, at such a speed that the air cracked in a small shockwave, knocking down a feather that was floating in a corner of the room.

He extended a second hand, and the feather stopped before touching the floor, gently resting on the tip of a transparent finger, without the gelatin even crushing it.

’This is...’ he murmured, more to himself than to her.

A familiar, almost forgotten sensation surfaced in the back of his mind, and it took Lohan a moment to recognize what it was.

Over the last nine level ups, he had gotten used to small gains, of just a few percentage points, the kind of improvement that only showed up when he stopped to compare.

He had forgotten, over those days, what it was like to go through a real evolution. He had forgotten how much it changed everything.

And now it was back, stronger than last time.

He tested the resistance. With Abyssal Clarity, he could feel each layer of the new membrane, and compared them with the old one effortlessly.

Back at Level 11, a well placed sword blow would have scratched the surface. Now, he felt the layers fitting into one another, absorbing, distributing and dissipating the force before it got anywhere near the core, as if his gelatin had learned to throw the impact away from itself.

’I think I need a real test,’ he thought, and turned his little white eyes toward Lisa.

"Lisa."

"Hm?" she replied, still frozen where she stood.

"Can you attack me?"

She blinked twice, and then frowned, with the expression of someone who had heard wrong.

"What?"

"Attack me. It can be a real strike, with everything you’ve got. I just want to know how much I can take."

"Halon, you just went through an evolution..."

"And I’m great. Go."

She hesitated for another moment, but curiosity, and maybe a little stubbornness, ended up winning.

Taking a deep breath, she stepped back a few paces, and her claws lit up with white spirit fire, more intense than Lohan remembered, a blazing blade that cut through the air in a perfect curve toward the center of his body.

The strike hit the membrane with a dry crack.

And nothing happened.

There was no cut, no crack, not even a mark of heat.

The dark gelatin merely deformed under her claw, in a small dent that lasted half a second, and returned to its original shape with an almost insulting smoothness.

Lisa stood with her paw extended, looking at the spot where she had struck, and Lohan saw her golden pupil contract.

"I used seventy percent," she said, in a thin voice. "Seventy percent of my strength, Halon."

"I felt a tickle," he replied, and his voice, no matter how hard he tried to sound playful, came out more thoughtful than he intended. "A tickle, really, but in exchange a part of my biomass was spent to resist and recover from that..."

’This is madness,’ he thought. ’This is completely insane.’

He repeated the test with agility. He asked Lisa to throw a fireball toward him, and the ball crossed the room and passed within a finger’s width, because he had already moved before she finished releasing it, almost as if he had read the trajectory at the exact moment she decided to shoot.

Then, he asked her to move as fast as she could, and followed each of her steps with his eyes, without any difficulty, as if watching a slow motion movie.

His mind was the hardest change to describe.

It was already sharp, with Abyssal Clarity and the parallel layers, but now each of those layers operated at one hundred percent capacity, without dividing anything, and he felt his thoughts organizing and resolving themselves, before he even finished formulating them.

He read all of Dylan’s reports stored in the Astral Chest in a matter of seconds, solved a calculation that would once have taken minutes in his head, and still had room left over to hear Lisa breathe.

’I need to calm down,’ he thought, trying to hold back the excitement, which rose through his body like a wave. ’I need to calm down, or I’m going to start laughing and I won’t stop.’

But he couldn’t hold it in.

A mental laugh, joyful, almost childlike, escaped him, and it was in that instant that he noticed Lisa had backed away, without realizing it, two more steps.

Her ears were pressed flat against her head, her two tails low and tightly tucked between her hind legs, and her whole body was tense as if she were ready to run. Her golden eyes, wide, were fixed on him with an expression Lohan had never seen, and which made him stop laughing immediately.

It was fear.

He activated Mental Perception without thinking, and felt her light, which was normally golden, warm and steady, tremble in a wavering glow, like a candle exposed to the wind.

There was no hostility in her, only a pure and ancient instinct, the instinct of a smaller creature before a predator she couldn’t even gauge.

"Lisa?" he called, softly, and immediately pulled back everything he could of his own presence.

It was only then that he realized what he was doing without meaning to.

The air around him was heavy, dense, charged with a pressure that had never existed before, something between Killing Intent and Mental Pressure, only on a much larger scale, like the weight of an invisible mountain resting on everything nearby.

He wasn’t even using any skill, it was just his existence.

’Sorry,’ he said, hurriedly, softening his aura as much as he could, and felt the air gradually return to normal. ’Sorry, Lisa, I didn’t realize.’

"It’s fine," she replied, and her voice came out hoarse, as if she had swallowed sand. She took two deep breaths, straightened her posture, and forced her tails to rise again, with an effort he could feel. "It’s not your fault. I just... I’ve never felt this before."

"What?"

She stayed silent for a moment, searching for the right words.

"When we fought the dungeon boss, I was scared, but it was a fear I could face, you know? It was the kind of fear that said ’I can win if I’m smart.’" She looked at him, still a little pale under her white fur. "Now, looking at you, I feel the opposite. I feel that if you decided to, it wouldn’t matter how smart I was."

Lohan didn’t answer right away.

"It’s like standing in front of the final boss of a dungeon that’s still far above me," she added, and a nervous laugh escaped her, short and broken. "Except the boss is you, and you’re sitting on a cushion I stacked."

"I’m not sitting on a cushion," he protested, but her laugh had already broken the mood, and he couldn’t help laughing too.

The two of them stayed there, laughing, a slightly desperate, slightly relieved laughter, until Lisa approached him carefully, slowly, like someone approaching an animal that had changed size overnight, and pressed her forehead against the dark surface of his gelatin.

It was warm, firm and alive. And beneath the surface, despite everything, it was still Halon.

"You’re still the same," she murmured, more to herself than to him. "Just... bigger."

’Just a little,’ he agreed, and felt her affection cross the barrier between their two bodies.

She stayed there for another moment, and then pulled away, with a small smile and a glance that drifted, almost involuntarily, to the leather pouch hanging around her own neck.

"Halon," she said, slowly.

"I know," he replied, and this time there was an enormous calm in his voice. "Now is the time."