“Judith, it’s me! Snap out of it!” Grace shouted. Every instinct told her to shove away the figure she saw as her sworn enemy, but she forced herself to stay put and gripped Judith’s wrist tighter.
With her advanced cultivation and iron-willed focus, she managed to hold on to a sliver of clarity. Even so, she still reeled from the visions clawing at her mind.
Dustin watched the group descend into chaos and frowned. Mirage’s illusions were more insidious than he’d imagined.
Besides creating large-scale environmental illusions, she also targeted every person’s mind and conjured visions born from their own fears and desires.
There was no defending against an enemy that attacked from within. If this continued, they would kill each other without their enemy lifting a finger.
He unleashed another wave of divine sense, but it was far less effective this time.
Her illusions had corrupted their minds, and a raw blast of his power wasn’t enough to purge them.
“Close your eyes. Cover your ears. Hold your focus and trust your comrades.”
Dustin’s sharp, authoritative voice pierced the illusion clouding their thoughts.
The guards, driven to a frenzy by the illusion, followed his command, as if it were their lifeline. They forcibly suppressed the fear and bloodlust, sheathed their weapons, and fell back toward the center.
Moving on memory and instinct alone, they formed a defensive circle back-to-back. They stopped looking at or listening to those terrifying illusions. But Mirage clearly had no intention of letting them off that easily.
“You think closing your eyes and ears can help you escape from your inner desires and fears?”
Her voice echoed in their minds, dark and hypnotic.
“Look. Your worst nightmares have come for you.”
As soon as the words fell, terrifying visions involuntarily surfaced in everyone’s minds, even with their eyes closed.
The earth split open, and countless hideous ghostly hands reached out to claw at their ankles. The sky turned blood-red and began to weep a corrosive, bloody downpour. Countless shadowy figures with blurred faces surged in from every direction, radiating pure malice.
Mirage’s attack directly targeted their minds and was far more dangerous than any mere visual or auditory illusion.
One of the guards screamed miserably as his mind snapped. Blood trickled from his orifices, and his mental defenses collapsed under the assault.
Grace grunted, and her slender frame trembled slightly. Visions of her father dying from illness and the kingdom crumbling into chaos flashed before her eyes. The torrent of despair threatened to crush her will.
Dustin knew he could no longer remain on the defensive. He had to find Mirage’s actual form, or strike at the heart of the illusion itself.
Ignoring the endless waves of phantom attacks, he closed his eyes. He drew all his divine sense inward, focusing entirely on his own awareness.
The screams of his companions, the terror of the illusions, and even Mirage’s taunting seemed to drift far away from him.
His mind, now a calm and silent void, began to perceive what his eyes could not.
In that stillness, he stopped seeing the illusions. Instead, he saw the raw currents of energy flowing through the valley.
Dustin saw multicolored strands of mesmerizing energy twisting and flowing from every direction. They all converged on a single point at what seemed to be a natural spring, serving as the anchor of the entire illusion.
At its center pulsed a shifting, rainbow-like core of condensed spiritual power, beating like a living heart. It was Mirage’s actual form, the Mirage Orb. While she didn’t have physical form, her essence was hidden within the most real and illusory node of this illusion
“Found you,” Dustin muttered.
After standing motionless for so long, his eyes suddenly snapped open. They held no trace of confusion, only the piercing clarity of one who has seen the truth, and a cold, lethal intent.
He ignored the horrors clawing at his mind and the piercing ghostly wails echoing in his ears. His body became a blur of motion, a streak of azure light that seemed to tear through the very fabric of space.
Man and sword merged into one and darted toward that spring at a speed faster than the eye could follow. He had concentrated every ounce of his life essence and mental energy into the strike. The sword tip’s target wasn’t the water’s surface, but the pulsating rainbow core hidden beneath.
Before the sword aura even arrived, the sheer force of his intent had already locked onto the target. It was as if space itself would be pierced by that strike.
Mirage, who had remained composed until now, finally screamed in terror.
“How did you find it? No…”
She unleashed all her illusory power to block the strike. Impenetrable walls appeared, whirlpools swallowed everything in their path, and the figures whom Dustin held dearest in his heart stood before his sword. But before his ” Soul Sword”, all of it shattered at a mere touch.
With a soft pop, like a bubble bursting, his figure and the sword light plunged into the spring.
Time seemed to pause for a heartbeat. The next instant, the entire Vale of the Mirror of Illusions shook violently.
The exquisite pavilions, towers, and exotic flowers and plants shattered inch by inch like broken glazed glass. They dissolved into countless multicolored light particles that danced through the air before winking out.
The hideous, ghostly hands, blood rain, and dark shadows dispersed like smoke scattered by the wind, vanishing without a trace. The valley soon returned to its original desolate silence.
The spring had stopped flowing. Its surface dried instantly, revealing the bottom. At the base of the spring lay an orb roughly the size of a fist. It was perfectly round and glowing with a soft, multicolored light. But a clear crack ran across its surface, and its radiance had dimmed noticeably.
Dustin stood at the edge of the dried-up spring, his longsword already sheathed.
His face was slightly pale. The mental exertion required for that single, perfect strike-the one that abandoned all his senses to strike at the truth of things-had taken its toll.
Mirage’s form began to coalesce in the distance, but she had become extremely translucent. It was as though she might disappear at any moment. Her eyes, filled with venom and a stunned refusal to accept her defeat, were locked on him.
“Impressive! To think your Soul Sword could damage my core…” Her voice was a broken, grating rasp, and stripped of its former ethereal allure.
Dustin met her gaze evenly and said nothing. Mirage knew it was over. With her core damaged, she could no longer maintain the grand illusion. She cast one last, lingering look at Dustin, as if to etch the man who had broken her illusion into memory.
Her insubstantial form suddenly exploded, transforming into a stream of rainbow light. It swept up the cracked Mirage Orb from the spring’s base. Like a startled bird, she instantly flew into the depths of the valley’s rocky walls, disappearing from sight.
