With Fenris stopping it, the Titan Encyclopedia gradually settled down, and the flow of time around him seemed to freeze in that very instant.
A rare sense of ease and calm welled up in his heart. Other than that, there was no discomfort at all.
It felt as though he were lying atop a clear river. Fenris let his consciousness drift quietly downstream with the current, surrendering himself to the stillness of the moment.
He had no idea how much time had passed. Then, as the sound of rushing water gradually grew louder, Fenris's eyes snapped open.
Splash!
His powerful body burst up from the water. Straightening from a river that reached his waist, Fenris swept his gaze across his surroundings, and a world filled with emptiness and void slowly entered his sight.
Brilliant starlight poured down from above, illuminating the barren land in stark clarity.
The winding river came from some faraway horizon and flowed onward into the unreachable distance, stretching endlessly beyond sight.
Not far from Fenris, a low hill cast a deep shadow beneath the stars.
"Where is this?"
"How did I end up here?"
Fenris wandered aimlessly, looking around. On the silent earth, there was not the slightest trace of life.
Forget humans. It was as if even plants had gone extinct here.
"I'd almost rather be seeing Stryker..."
"Beating that old bastard up one more time would still be better than wandering around this place with no clue where I'm going."
After searching for a while and finding nothing, Fenris let out a sigh.
"Human, you did not come from Wakanda?"
"And who is this Stryker?"
A majestic female voice rang out through the space without warning, echoing over and over in Fenris's ears.
At that moment, Fenris had just sent his consciousness deep into his mind, preparing to use the Titan Encyclopedia's power to leave this place. The instant the voice reached him, his whole body jolted, and he instinctively dropped into a defensive stance.
Boom!
When Fenris failed to respond, the hill in the distance suddenly moved with a thunderous crash.
In the night, its true form gradually revealed itself before his eyes.
Two bright eyes opened, dazzlingly beautiful beneath the dim starlight.
Gracefully stretching out her long limbs, an enormous black panther the size of a hill began walking toward Fenris with elegant poise.
"You are different from the others who consumed the Heart-Shaped Herb..."
The black panther stopped close enough that her shadow completely swallowed Fenris's figure. She studied him with an unreadable look. "You are stronger than they were."
"The Panther Goddess... Bast?"
Fenris was startled. At last, he recognized the black panther before him.
Bast was the panther spirit worshiped by Wakanda for generations, the one said to bestow the Black Panther with all manner of miraculous power.
He had never expected that while everyone else who consumed the Heart-Shaped Herb saw their family, lovers, or friends, he would instead meet this powerful goddess directly.
"Answer my question."
An endless pressure of divinity radiated from Bast as she lowered her head and looked down at Fenris from above.
"I did not come from Wakanda. As for Stryker, he's just an old friend of mine."
"We know each other very, very well."
With Bast blocking out the stars, darkness fell over him. Fenris tilted his head up and met her probing gaze without the slightest fear.
"A mortal dares look directly upon a god?"
"You disrespect the divine. You must be punished."
The moment Fenris finished speaking, a wave of piercing cold surged in from all directions. Perhaps it was because she had not seen the reverence in his eyes that the Black Panthers of the past had shown, or perhaps because he was not Wakandan.
Bast gave a heavy snort. Her sleek, powerful forepaw lifted and slammed down without warning.
Oddly enough, there was very little killing intent in her eyes. Instead, they gleamed with curiosity, as if she were actually looking forward to Fenris striking back.
Bang!
A tremendous impact rang out.
Bast's forepaw had only just come down when it felt as though it had smashed into steel. A powerful resistance surged up, completely nullifying the force of her strike.
The instant her paw made contact, she felt an intense, scorching heat, like plunging it into molten lava, and instinctively jerked it back.
Roooar!
In the next moment, an earth-shaking roar exploded through the air. A violent wave of sound rolled outward with sky-piercing fury, and in an instant, the entire space trembled beneath that wrath. The roar lingered for a long, long time.
"What?"
This human from outside Wakanda was completely different from every Black Panther before him.
Bast had only sensed the power inside him and, on a whim, decided to toy with him a little and test him out. She never would have imagined that such a casual probe would trigger such a terrifying counterattack.
Under her disbelieving gaze, Fenris's body, which had looked so tiny to her just moments ago, began swelling at an astonishing speed.
A darkness so dense it was almost tangible blocked out the starlight above and completely enveloped her. Against Fenris's looming form, her hill-sized body suddenly looked shockingly small.
In the blink of an eye, Fenris's form surged upward, and a colossal creature nearly a thousand meters tall crashed into existence.
His massive body was like an insurmountable mountain. His rough hide glimmered with a dreadful purple-black sheen, and a dead, oppressive aura steamed from it and spread through the air.
Sharp spines ran all the way down his thick, elongated tail. The brilliant blue light that once shone across them had now dimmed, replaced by flickering radiation and an interwoven glow of blue and black.
What had seemed like a boundless world now felt cramped and narrow beneath the presence of the beast. Under the brilliant stars, it was as though heaven and earth contained nothing except him.
And only moments after the giant beast appeared, the deathly, despairing aura emanating from his body had already filled every corner of the space.
In an instant, even the river of stars above seemed to be veiled by a layer of ash, fading into dullness.
"This kind of power..."
Fenris had never imagined that, with the help of the Titan Encyclopedia, he could unleash such terrifying strength in this strange realm.
Endless energy surged toward him from every part of the space, and Fenris devoured those heaven-sent gifts with ravenous hunger.
That thousand-meter-tall body granted him a horrifying power he had never experienced before. Even the slightest movement of his feet made the entire land quake violently, letting out groans as if it were buckling under the strain.
With a shrill scream through the air, his monstrous tail only needed to flick once to split the earth open with terrifying cracks.
"It's incredible..."
"This is what real power feels like!"
Feeling the cataclysmic might hidden in every movement, and sensing the eerie aura of corrosion and devouring spread around him like a tide, Fenris instinctively clenched his claws. Beneath the stars, the sharp talons flashed with a chilling gleam.
"No..."
"My power!"
"What are you?"
Under that silent, insidious influence, Bast could feel her body being corroded, assimilated, and erased bit by bit. The strength that had endured through countless ages without ever fading was now beginning to decay.
As she felt her body shrinking little by little, Bast finally panicked.
She leaped high into the air and slashed viciously at Fenris without holding back in the slightest.
"Give me back my power!"
(End of Chapter)
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