Chapter 81: Eyes of Nightmare
Translator: Atlas Studios Editor: Atlas Studios
Actually, the name of the eye technique was not important. It was all about the definitions for Roy in any case.
If there was a need, Roy could even shoot out kinesis light waves with the Sharingan…
If he wanted to see through illusions and not be affected by them, he needed to have the ability to perceive and distinguish reality from illusion. Roy drew his demon eyes on the system’s design panel.
Then he drew a blood-red pentagram in his pupils to distinguish between using eye technique and not using it.
Demons, of course, used pentagrams for show…
Roy named his eye technique ‘Eyes of Nightmare’!
Eyes of Nightmare
Definition 1: Insight. Can see through and break illusions, distinguis.h.i.+ng between reality and illusion.
Definition 2: Fear. Enemies looking directly at these eyes will have inexplicable fear arise from the bottom of their hearts.
Worried that there were not enough souls, Roy only made two definitions for the Eyes of Nightmare for the time being. Definition 1 was naturally designed to deal with the illusion demon, but definition 2 was inspiration from nightmare demons.
During his time in the middle Abyss, Roy had come into contact with several nightmare demons. These demons with a demon horn on their heads and burning with flames were middle-rank demons resembling horses. Although high-rank demons frequently used them as mounts, it was wrong to underestimate them because these nightmare demons were among the stronger middle-rank demons in the middle Abyss.
Through observation, Roy found that the magic power growth rate of these nightmare demons was generally relatively fast. This was because these demons had the nightmare bloodline. Their magic power circuits would form a special magic power that caused others to feel fear. When they killed their enemies with this magic power, the souls they obtained would be larger than normal!
Roy had seen the nightmare demons hunting and compared the souls they harvested to his. If it were just one or two souls, then it could be described as coincidence. But after many comparisons, Roy realized that the souls they obtained were indeed bigger when hunting the same monsters.
At that time, in order to verify his guess, Roy had specially found a nightmare demon to fight against, but Roy had not won. He found that the longer he fought with the nightmare demon, the more disheartened he would feel, feeling that the nightmare demon in front of him was very powerful and dreadful!
After that, Roy came back to his senses. This fear effect with an intense suggestion effect might be something worthy of reference. This fear effect could allow him to obtain souls with more negative emotions in his future hunts!
This thought made Roy understand why Spider Queen Araniya had been chattering and threatening him non-stop. It seemed like Araniya wanted to get a better, more fearful soul from him.
In fact, these kinds of threats were not only used by Araniya. Many demons liked to roar loudly at their opponents and reveal their sharp fangs and claws when fighting, which were in themselves acts of threats.
The effect of simply using language to scare enemies was not very good because it required incessantly repeating threats to induce fear in them. But many villains had died because of talking too much! The nightmare demons’ fear effect was much better, as it silently affected the opponents during combat.
Therefore, when Roy thought about using the ability of these nightmare demons for reference, his first thought was to obtain a force field of fear, also commonly known as a halo of fear. This way, as long as he stood there, he could affect his opponents without saying anything and also use it on many other targets at the same time!
However, it was still those words. There might not be enough souls currently. The effect of such a halo of fear had to be set to emit all the time. And he would have to stand in a crowd to make others feel the effect of the fear and terror. Moreover, the radiation range was tiny. Furthermore, Roy still needed to deal with the illusion demon. So, in the end, he could only give up on this idea temporarily and change the ranged halo effect to a one-to-one eye technique to use first.
When he had enough souls in the future, it would not be too late to modify.
Of course, fear often came with the imagination of others running wild. In a sense, this was a kind of illusion. However, he could not create and guide the opponents to imagine horrific scenes, and he could only let the opponent’s imagination run wild to produce psychological fear themselves.
Roy temporarily defined his Eyes of Nightmare with these two attributes. When he had enough souls in the future, he would continue adding stronger abilities.
For example, he would be able to see the ability of the opponent’s magic power circuit or directly see the opponent’s weaknesses. Or even like the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception and seeing the opponent’s lines of death and then cutting the lines of death to kill the opponent directly. Of course, Roy was salivating over these abilities, but at the same time, the more powerful an ability, the more souls it would consume. So he could only treat them as goals to strive toward for the time being.
After finis.h.i.+ng his settings, Roy gave it some thought and added special light and shadow effects to the Eyes of Nightmare. This way, when Roy used the eye technique, his eyes would s.h.i.+ne with blood-red light, making him look more terrifying and exacerbating the fear of his opponents.
When Roy chose to save and materialize, he found that the number of souls he currently possessed was not enough, and he could only complete 75%. Left with no choice, he could only bring Fat Tiger to the living area of the fire salamanders to hunt. After killing two hundred of them, the Eyes of Nightmare finally materialized.
The souls of more than a thousand fire salamanders was equivalent to three hundred normal low-quality souls. Unexpectedly, this eye technique was rather expensive…
He naturally had to test out this newly-acquired toy. When Roy input magic power into his eyes, a bright pentagram appeared in the depths of his pupils. At the same time, Roy’s demon eyes glowed with terrifying blood-red light!
Fat Tiger looked up. He was originally watching his master, but he was frightened by Roy’s sudden change and whimpered!
Roy lowered his head and stared intently at Fat Tiger. Fat Tiger’s three heads looked into Roy’s eyes as well. After a while, Fat Tiger’s tail stopped wagging and subconsciously clamped between his hind legs.
Not only that, but there were different scenes appearing in all three of Fat Tiger’s heads.
All these scenes had a common theme—hunger and cold!
In these delusions generated by fear, Fat Tiger’s ‘dream’ brought him to a world of snow and ice, and his master was missing. A sense of inexplicable fear invaded Fat Tiger, so he ran, wanting to find traces of his master, feeling that he could only relieve his uneasiness by being by his master’s side… However, he obtained nothing. He did not encounter any living creature nor even any plants. There was only a vast expanse of white snow all around!
As the days pa.s.sed, the surrounding scenery did not change at all. Fat Tiger gradually could not run anymore, and his stomach had long sunk in, becoming as thin as a stick, because he had not eaten anything for a week, and his master was still missing.
As he thought about it, Fat Tiger suddenly felt so wronged. He looked up at the sky and howled loudly!
“Aw!” (Master!!!)
“Woo!” (No want!)
“Woof?” (Fat Tiger?)
Roy did not know what the scenes appeared in Fat Tiger’s mind. He merely stared at Fat Tiger for a while before Fat Tiger was first uneasy and then terrified. Fat Tiger suddenly lifted his three heads and wailed with tears in his eyes.
“F*ck! What did this kid see?” Roy was shocked. He hurriedly withdrew his magic power and woke Fat Tiger up.
Fat Tiger regained his senses and found that the ice and snow environment around him had disappeared, and his master appeared in front of him again, so he whimpered, pounced on Roy, and licked Roy with his three tongues vigorously.
“Hey, what are you doing?!” Roy quickly pushed him away, only to find Fat Tiger becoming exceptionally clingy!
Roy did not know what Fat Tiger saw just now and why he became like this…
Roy really regretted testing it out on Fat Tiger…
Over the next few days, Roy changed his experimental subjects, using the fire salamanders and some middle-rank demons he encountered to test his Eyes of Nightmare.
He realized that the lower a creature’s intelligence, the worse the fear effect of the Eyes of Nightmare. This was because muddle-headed creatures had simpler imaginations of what fear was. Fire salamanders were like this. Roy did not even need to use his Eyes of Nightmare to exert fear on them. They would escape when they faced a powerful enemy and felt the threat of death.
For creatures with high intelligence, the fear effect of the Eyes of Nightmare had room to play its role.
When using the eye technique, Roy’s eyes would flash with a b.l.o.o.d.y light. Especially when his head moved back and forth, faint traces of light would be left in the air, making his opponent unconsciously look into his eyes and become affected by the fear effect.
They would pa.s.sively have things flash in their minds that were difficult for them to accept and felt terrifying. And to demons, the most terrifying thing was encountering stronger opponents, so they would think that Roy looked terrifying and very powerful. It was inevitable that they would become constrained when fighting, causing them to be unable to display their usual strength and allowing Roy to fight more comfortably.
Of course, there were demons with higher willpower that were very difficult to affect with this fear effect…
Overall, Roy was quite satisfied with the fear effect because he had already confirmed that the souls he obtained after killing those affected by fear had indeed increased in volume and soul power!
This meant that Roy would receive this fear bonus when hunting souls in the future, turning the original soul power of 1 to 1.1 or even 1.2! This way, he would slowly gather tiny amounts to obtain a huge quant.i.ty. When he had enough souls, he could change this fear effect into a halo radiating around him and even further strengthen this fear effect.
With this thought, Roy could not help but think of a question. Will I become a dreadlord in the future?
Hmm, no. It’s hard to say what a dreadlord is currently. Now, I’m probably more like a Protoss like Zeratul…