(Written while listening to: "The Great Wonder" by HDsounDI on YouTube)
<<<>>>
Laito focused his sight on the passed out Damian.
—
—
'Meh' Laito decided to put the decision making for later.
'I'll just look around a bit… wait, until he wakes up. Maybe he will have some ideas too, cause I have none…'
Laito skedaddled fast, phasing randomly into different fleshy walls figuring out the placement of different organs of the gargantuan creature.
But the truth was…
He wanted to run away for a moment.
From the very first moment when he was thrown into the Nightmare Realm his emotional state was in complete disarray.
He suspected that it was his original Flaw acting up.
Unfortunately its description was vague enough, to the point now when he had no idea anymore what it actually did.
When Laito was back in the Meta-World he didn't feel particularly different… At some moments he suspected his Flaw slightly influenced his thought process - but nothing serious happened.
But here? In the Nightmare Realm?
Absolute chaos.
He could contain his disgust towards everything with sheer willpower…
But the longer he looked at Damian…
Laito started to feel…
Weird.
Very weird…
For some reason Laito when he looked at the poor madman he was slowly starting to see himself in him.
Like almost literally.
Within Laito's vision, when he looked at poor, unconscious sod, something almost like a mirage started to overlap Damian's image with Laito's own from his past.
It was nonsense.
It felt forced. Unnatural.
Laito wasn't even human anymore… not really.
Then again maybe he wanted to see himself as one…
Thinking of this was annoying and complicated.
But he already decided that he will not leave Damian.
Going against one's Flaw is supposed to be impossible… but one trait common amongst all that walked the path of Ascension was that they struggled, and rebelled.
Whether against Nightmare Creatures, Nightmare Spell, their own Fate, against each other and maybe even World itself.
It didn't matter.
Laito could himself try and go against his Flaw.
Even if he supposedly can only love himself, it would hurt nothing to try and help another human being.
After all, the backlash from a Flaw couldn't be THAT bad, right?
Well… it could, a mishandled Flaw could easily end his life, or worse – but nothing truly alarming happened yet, so he decided to proceed.
—
Regarding solving the current situation…
Now the question wasn't "if", but "how?".
Yes…
'How the heck I am getting him out of here?.' Laito considered next steps while looking closely at the inner workings of the monster's liver.
At least Laito thought that was liver.
Big liver.
He moved past another fleshy membrane and found some.
The rumored gastric parasites that were actually separate Nightmare Creatures from their host.
Thin oddly smooth thread-like worms, each one at least 5ft long, that wriggled and wiggled…
'Huh… though they do look disgusting I don't see how they would be…'
'Oh'
Laito wondered for a second on how these could be dangerous – as all Nightmare Creatures are… but the answer appeared quickly on its own.
They sort off… drilled. Into flesh.
And because there were a lot of them – often entangling in whole groups to the point when they made something resembling yarn balls…
Wiggly yarn balls.
'I hate it.' Laito resolutely decided.
Without skipping a bit he chanted his current favourite Spell:
[Radiant Smite].
–
'That was embarrassing. And completely not worth it.' Laito felt an influx of familiar headaches(even though he had no head) – ones that appeared every time whenever he overextended himself with magic.
That experiment proved a huge problem:
Nightmare Realm resisted Laito's magic even more than Meta-world.
'Disappointing, although not entirely unexpected. Damn. I can't believe there could ever be a reason I would miss my First Nightmare…' He reminded himself of how he could perform many feats back then.
Conjuring powerful paralyzing lightning strikes, becoming temporarily immortal, summoning his own troops…
Spells that were now far beyond his reach – and Laito knew very well the main difference between then and now:
Mana.
During his First Nightmare, Laito had absorbed a huge, concentrated amount of it.
It offered him almost unlimited power for a short duration.
Now, after suffering the frustration at meager effects of his magic, Laito wanted to go back to that feeling.
For that, he needed more Mana.
A resource, unprecedented within the worlds of both My Hero Academia and Shadow Slave.
But Laito was an owner of Tomes of Magic.
And each of them contained a chapter on finding and harvesting Mana… but of course there would be a massive problem with that.
Harvesting raw Mana was an industrial scale endeavour.
A normal way to extract Mana was to locate mature Mana nodes, usually found at the ends of their respective ley lines… the Tomes stated that most Realms with life on them had those deep underground - undetectable to those who don't know the trick to find them.
Once found, it needed to be mined, refined, purified and lastly cut and polished.
It was a very lengthy and dangerous process that required a large amount of skilled people to work on it simultaneously.
Not even speaking about specialized tools and infrastructure to work around Mana nodes which on their own was also risky.
'I'm gonna need to do that.' Laito decided for the future.
This time, thanks to having a fully researched Tome, he knew how to use Mana without poisoning himself. It promised nothing but boons.
'Not being able to use my magic leaves me in a very bad spot… my only way to properly interact with the material is a pigeon – and he doesn't even have a combat ability.' Laito realized that he is lacking in options on how to do things.
His current immaterial form made harming him insanely difficult, but without his magic, there wasn't much he could do to anyone.
As long as his goal was only to find a gateway and escape Nightmare Realm it was quite acceptable. Convenient even.
But now - if he wanted to help Damian it was not enough.
—
Little did Laito knew – that in the end it would be Damian that would be helping him instead…
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[16 months left until MHA plot beginning]
[Chapter End] The story is not over yet
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