The Walker Of Voids

As everyone began to leave the tent, Lloyd felt a tug on his shoulder that caused him to look back.

"Roderick? What's wrong?" Lloyd asked.

"Me and Hime need to speak to you." He whispered before pulling Lloyd back into the tent and waiting for everyone else to leave.

After a while, Roderick and Hime couldn't sense anyone around the tent, yet knowing Veronica, they looked at Lloyd in order to confirm if anyone was listening in or not.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" Lloyd asked while pressing his temples.

[4-Dimensional Thought] had just ended, so when they pulled him back in, Lloyd could not help but grunt as the need for sleep tried to overwhelm his sense of thought.

"Is Veronica listening in?" Roderick couldn't believe he was asking the question since it was pretty obvious what they were thinking about. From what they had seen, Lloyd was the only one capable of sensing Veronica.

"How am I supposed to know?" Lloyd asked, his headache getting worse and worse by the minute.

"You sensed her before..." Roderick replied with a deadpan expression.

"No, I didn't. I just assumed that she was listening in. She seemed quite snoopy." Lloyd shrugged.

"She doesn't seem to be around, but it doesn't really matter if she hears us or not." Hime shrugged.

"Alright, we are just going to start then. We only have one question so it won't take much of your time."

"Get to the point then." Lloyd sneered.

"Why did you do that?" This time, it was Hime talking instead of Roderick; however, while it seemed like an interrogation from Lloyd's point of view, Lloyd also recognized that he should be careful since his brain wasn't working the way it should.

"I assume you're asking why I lead a revolution against your old leader, and the answer is simple.

I want to survive. I want to get out of here alive rather than being spilled out with the rest of the dungeon. That guy had no idea what he was doing and would have most likely led us to our deaths, so I chose to impeach him. Are you done now? I really need to sleep."

"Didn't you just wake up?" Roderick asked, yet Hime was more focused on what Lloyd was saying, yet when she saw Lloyd getting up, she quickly spouted out what was on her mind.

"Can we trust you?" She asked, her eyes analyzing every fiber of Lloyd's being despite her inability to see through his skin and see him for who he truly was.

"What a stupid question." Lloyd sneered while rubbing his temples to soften the horrible headache that was beginning to reach unbearable levels.

It had never been like this before, and Lloyd had no idea how he should combat it.

Pain killers? Normal ones wouldn't work. Maybe mana potions would work, yet even then, Lloyd knew so little about his own anatomy that he had no idea what would work on him and what wouldn't.

'I guess there is a first time for everything.' Lloyd sighed before continuing from what he had last said.

"I can just lie, and you would have no idea. Even if you can't trust me, give me one reason why I would hurt your group, and then if you find one, give me a scenario where I, a half-step first commandment, can hurt a group of second commandments without instantly dying a horrible death." Lloyd snarled before walking out of his tent.

Hime and Roderick looked at each other for a moment, yet before they could begin conversing, Lloyd entered the tent again and interrupted-

"Y'all have mana potions for headaches?" Lloyd asked.

"Yeah, we have pain killers over there if you want the-" Hime couldn't even finish her sentence, and Lloyd immediately ran over to the box she was pointing at, rummaged through it, and picked up a bottle with a red liquid in it with the label [Pain Killers].

Without even thanking them, Lloyd left again, this time for good, and went straight to his tent to drink the glass bottle and immediately go to sleep.

***

Hours had passed, and by the time Lloyd had awakened from his sleep, the sun was beaming through the gaps in his curtain and into his eyes, not that it he felt anything from it. It didn't even wake him up, and the only thing that made him squint was the fact that he still had human instincts he could not get rid of.

As Lloyd got out of bed, he quickly looked at himself in the mirror before pausing to admire his body for a moment, the same way bodybuilders would flex in the gym.

He was wearing nothing but underwear, which only added to his muscular definition.

While Lloyd didn't look anything close to a bodybuilder, his body was defined enough to make most people's jaws drop while also being inauspicious to the point where it didn't show through clothing that didn't cling to his very skin.

"My muscle definition has definitely grown, but my height remains the same... And my weight... My weight?" Lloyd muttered to himself while jumping a few times, yet despite doing so, he felt as light as a feather.

On the other hand, he could probably try to calculate how much he weighs from the sound of his jumps if he activated [4-Dimensional Thought], but after the headache, he got the last time he used it, he chose that it was probably for the best if he didn't use it for such trivial tasks.

'Thinking back, I have been using it for pretty stupid things...' Lloyd thought as the image of him sitting in front of a tv and answering, "Who wants to be a trillionaire?" questions before the presenter could even say them.

Of course, he would love to go on the show, but they actively stop anyone with a mind-amplifying ability from joining. The other reason was simply that Lloyd didn't want to put himself in the public eye even more than he already did.

It was it enough of a pain in the ass for him to go out as a masked adventurer named Null but to use his real identity to catch attention? That would be too much.

Walking past the mirror, Lloyd picked up his pants from the floor and quickly wore them before walking up to the dining table and taking his shirt and jacket off one of the chairs.

After wearing his black shirt, as well as his black and purple jacket, he walked out of his tent with his hands inside his pants pockets.

"I swear to god, sometimes I feel like its about to snow, then I look up and realize that the clouds are fake." A semi-masculine voice complained, making Lloyd look towards it before looking away just as fast.

"Stop looking up like that, Felix. Knowing you, you'll probably snap your neck trying to look that far up." Veronica sneered.

"Shut up, b*tch! Just because you are the hottest one in this group doesn't give you the right to insult us, you hear me?!" Felix shouted.

"Us? What are you talking about? I was insulting you." She grinned, yet before they could continue their bickering, Roderick walked in between them before reaching Hime, standing on a rock to get the higher ground.

Lloyd was certain that there was no need for the rock since her stature alone allowed her to look over most people in the group, yet he wasn't one to complain about things that didn't matter... Or at least he didn't do it openly.

"We'll be leaving in 15 minutes. Make sure that you all have everything with you, including your tents." She glanced at Lloyd, who immediately took the hint and deactivated his tent, turning it into a small marble that slowly floated towards his hand before being stored within his dimensional storage.

Hime continued to speak about a few more things, like the importance of hydration during the trip and how everyone should stay on alert at all times, even if the sun is out.

She said a few more things, but Lloyd wasn't really listening anymore since he was more intrigued by something else.

'The first element out here is pretty weak.' Lloyd thought to himself as he concentrated on absorbing some of the fire element into his elemental rune.

'And it won't rain any time soon either, so there are barely any lightning particles, even less than the fire elemental particles. And to add insult to injury,

I feel weaker than I did at night because of my shadow sustenance passive ability, and now that it's the day, I can't even spend any of my time cultivating my shadow element, since I can cultivate it 10 times faster at night.' Lloyd sighed.

15 minutes seemed to have passed in the blink of an eye, yet Lloyd did not bother speaking to anyone and instead simply watched from the sideline while trying to figure out how to use the void element to cultivate.

'Maybe if I was next to a spacial tear, it would be a lot easier to cultivate it or at least understand it, yet since we are so far away, I don't really see a point in catching everyone's attention by asking such a weird favor.'

"Alright. Veronica, time to take off the shield. Make sure to keep it with you at all times, okay?" Hime commanded Veronica the same way a mother would command her child. It was a comedic sight, but everyone moved on from it as the group entered the forest.

Everyone followed Hime and Roderick for half an hour, yet after realizing that the most likely outcome of this day would be complete silence, Lloyd finally spoke up.

"How do we know that we are going in the correct direction? Its not the dungeon carved arrowed into the ground to point us in the right direction." Lloyd asked.

"Well, the closer we get, the more monsters we will meet. While the main reason we aren't moving at night is due to the fact that it can get quite dangerous, it also becomes a little hard to distinguish whether or not we encountered more or less monsters. In the day however, the monsters are so little that the smallest increase is noticable." Rex, to everyone's surprise, explained before Roderick could.

"Well, what would you classify as an increase, because the other day I got attacked by a colony of rabbits." Lloyd asked.

"We haven't seen rabbits yet, have we?" Lachlan, despite losing a lot of his courage and pride over the last day or so, asked, yet while doing so, he made sure to keep his head down and not make eye contact with anyone, as if he was too ashamed to even look anyone in the eye.

"I-I d-don't think s-so," Tina replied, making everyone raise a brow again at the fact that Tina even tried speaking.

"Colony? How many are we speaking? 5 to 10? Maybe even 20?"

"Hundreds..." Lloyd grimaced.

"Hundreds?" Veronica asked while her brows knitted in suspicion.

"Well, the explains the state we found you in." Roderick chuckled while Hime smiled.

"Ugh. Anyway, since the sun is coming from here... Then it must have been..." Lloyd paused for a moment.

"That way." Hime pointed before Lloyd could, yet it didn't bother him much anyway, mainly because it was Hime and no one else.

Being the first beastkin Lloyd had ever met, he felt closer to her than anyone else in the group, which was one of the reasons why he was happy when Hime was chosen instead of Roderick.

As the group walked, the atmosphere reached new heights. They were at peace despite being in the middle of a most likely blood-drenched forest. It was a contrast that would have made most artists drool. Beauty in the belly of the beast.

Yet, there was one known fact that every living creature in the universe knew.

Beauty is never permanent

And the beast has yet to awaken...

***

"My liege... The humans and the Void Walker are on the move again. Would you like us to intercept them?" A pale man with black circles around his sunken eyes asked while looking up, his deep red eyes shining like a pair of tiny stars within the darkness of the palace.

"No... Where is the fun in that? Let them come to me. Let them see a ray of hope, so when they come to face me, I can watch that slither of hope turn to dust before their very eyes." A cruel and wicked grin stretched across the creature's face... A smile so sinister that it made the servant shiver to its very soul.

[King of the Eternal Autumn]

[Ahimoth - The Conquerer of World]