Chapter 120: Everyone’s shock
He turned slowly.
The woman standing before him was beautiful in the way a predator is beautiful. Her dark hair cascaded past her shoulders like liquid shadow. Her eyes held depths that should not exist in anything mortal. And her smile, that gentle curve of her lips, promised things that Alex’s instincts scread at him to avoid.
Sofia tilted her head, studying him like a child examining a particularly interesting insect. "You have grown stronger since we last t. I can taste it."
"Taste it?" Alex kept his voice level, though every nerve in his body had gone taut. "That’s an interesting choice of words."
"Isn’t it just?" Sofia took a single step forward. The grass beneath her feet withered. Not dramatically, not with flas or decay, but quietly, as if the life simply chose to abandon it. "Words matter, Alex. Intentions matter. Souls matter most of all."
Behind him, Alex heard his thirteen companions shifting uneasily. They felt it too, that primal wrongness emanating from Sofia. Even Ares, born of a primordial race, had gone pale.
Mira had already backed away several steps. Her earlier confidence had evaporated entirely. "Alex," she whispered. "Her shadow. Look at her shadow."
Alex looked.
Sofia’s shadow stretched across the ground, but it did not match her form. It was too large, too dark, and it moved independently of her body. Within its depths, Alex could see shapes writhing. Faces pressing against so invisible barrier. Hands reaching upward as if begging for release.
"How many?" Alex asked quietly.
Sofia’s smile widened. "You noticed. Good. Most people never look down." She raised one hand lazily. "I stopped counting after the first thousand. Souls are like collectibles, you see. The more you have, the more you want. And yours, dear Alex..." Her tongue traced across her lower lip, red and glistening. "Yours would be the crown jewel of my collection."
Boom.
The world changed.
Sofia released her domain, and reality itself seed to shudder. Darkness exploded outward from her body, swallowing the clearing, swallowing the forest, swallowing everything. The sun vanished. The sky ceased to exist. Alex and his companions stood in an endless void where the only light ca from the faint glow of trapped souls.
And then the ground began to churn.
Shapes rose from the darkness. Humanoid figures, monstrous beasts, creatures that defied classification. They erged from Sofia’s shadow like drowning victims breaking the surface of a black ocean. Hundreds. Thousands. Each one radiated a distinct aura, a signature of power that marked them as forr candidates, forr warriors, forr beings of considerable strength.
Now they were nothing but puppets.
"Magnificent, isn’t it?" Sofia’s voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. "Each soul I snatch becos mine. Not just their power, but their mories, their techniques, their very essence. I am not strong because of so talent I was born with, Alex. I am strong because I take strength from others and make it my own."
Alex watched the army assemble before him. Ten thousand souls at minimum. Each one had been a prodigy in their own right, selected for this trial by sages and transcended beings. Each one had fallen to Sofia.
"Damn," Alex muttered under his breath. "She’s like a female version of Jin Woo."
"What?" Mira asked from sowhere behind him.
"Nothing. Old reference."
Then he smiled a little too.
"Guess what bitch, I take powers from others as well.
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