Chapter 401: Descent Into Chaos : Trapped!
Loki closed his eyes as all his memories with Laura flashed past his eyes.
'She did get angry with me for a few seconds once I told her that I knew a way to get her husband back…'
'Is she really not acting?'
'Has she truly lost her mind!?'
Loki didn't know what to do, and that was when one of his first memories with Laura flashed in his focus.
It was the time Laura had assigned Loki the mission to find her husband.
And Loki remembered just how calm she had been during the entire time she told him about it.
'Is she just acting?'
'...'
'Do I do it then?' Loki wondered as he looked at the Ring of Harvest since it contained the ultimate weapon he had prepared for Voldemort.
If he made a mistake in his judgement and used it prematurely as long as Laura wasn't sane enough to capitalize on it, it wouldn't just affect Laura, it would also affect him since Voldemort would probably stop at nothing to get rid of him with no one present there to save him.
Loki took a deep breath in and calmed himself.
'It isn't like me to get all worked up about something so silly.'
Loki looked at the situation with a calm gaze as he analyzed everything about what was happening in front of him.
His eyes then gleamed as if he had thought up the perfect plan for the situation.
'This isn't as complicated as I'm making it out to be.'
'...yes, it is very simple.'
Voldemort extended his hand towards Laura once again as she neared him all weak and tired, fighting tooth and nail to get to the spot and stand in front of him, but completely out of energy to do anything to harm him.
Laura swung her ice sword with fervour even though her face became covered in sweat that was slowly mixing with the blood on her face, creating streaks that gave her a brutal look as if she were wearing the mask of a demon.
Her shoulders heaved up and down in noticeable sweeps as she tried fighting the last swords Voldemort sent her way, trying to stand in front of Voldemort while he stared down at her eerily with his hand extended fully.
And very soon, Voldemort's reason for extending his hand became apparent.
Because Laura had grown so tired of fighting abyssal swords, her grip over the walls confining Voldemort's abilities slipped.
It wasn't even a moment after that the worst happened.
Almost instantly, Voldemort regained his ability to breathe, to see, to hear along with all the other Beyonder abilities that had been sealed away.
Voldemort looked directly into Laura's eyes as he spoke in a whisper that one would use before falling asleep.
"Explode!"
Voldemort overpowered the Seed Of Defilement he had buried into Laura's Body of Heart and Mind.
Except before anything could happen, Loki got to work, executing the perfect plan he had thought up, to counter the move he had already expected, Voldemort exploding the defiling seed.
After all, in such a tense fight where either side making a single wrong move would cause them to pay the heavy price of death, what better way to make your opponent strike their own feet than simply manipulating your opponent's emotions to distract their thoughts and muddle them?
Forcing them to make irrational judgements and leaving them exposed to anything you wanted to do to them?
Just as the seed that Voldemort had planted into Laura's mind to increase fear exploded, multiplying it by severalfold to the point that it would've left her creaking and trembling, crawling on the floor to pull her own skin out, Loki performed a theft.
Loki stole Laura's ability to feel emotions!
Laura who was fighting against the several Abyssal flaming swords almost immediately noticed the foreign interference and was about to retaliate, it wasn't out of thought that Laura had prepared for this exact scenario!
Laura had come prepared to fight the defiling seed on her own!
But when she felt her mind becoming clearer and coldly calculative she was left surprised.
A confused frown formed on her face but she didn't waste the opportunity to surprise Voldemort since he was still looking at her like she were vermin.
She dodged and cleaved through the flaming swords like it was a practised dance, her clear mind showing her exactly what to do and how to react!
And with a frightening smile dove right through the horde of swords, speeding through all of them towards Voldemort.
Voldemort frowned.
His eyes bounced around from the various Death Eaters who were all running away with the help of apparitions to Bellatrix and Harry who had both revealed their incomplete mythical creature forms and then finally to Loki, who was looking right at him and smiling.
'He did something?'
'Again?'
'Just who is this kid?'
'Is he really Herpo's Horcrux?'
The slight shock and delay in reasoning allowed Laura to come close enough to Voldemort that her frozen Abyssal sword had begun 'burning' his fresh new skin since Laura had made it by flipping the rules of the sword, making the once corrupted sword a holy item.
'Tsk.'
But Voldemort was never a one-trick pony.
Taking a single step forward Voldemort unleashed a new ability that neither Loki nor Laura recognised in the heat of the fight.
Their ability to think suddenly became drastically slower.
At first, the silence of their minds only made them think that their focus had heightened.
It was a reasonable development since one often loses track of the mind while maintaining a single-pointed focus on a particular task.
With Laura's mental bridge of logic and experience degrading because of the constantly pulsing defiling seed in her mind, she never realised what was happening.
But Loki was different.
He had been using spirit vision from nearly the start of his fight against Voldemort.
Loki was constantly trying to study Voldemort's surface thoughts to always see if his thoughts were ever trying to cook up something to be aware of Voldemort doing something to trick him.
And when Loki saw Voldemort's thoughts speed up, something set off alarm bells ringing in his mind as he saw Voldemort thinking about Victory in such a precarious situation.
His chest tightened.
'Victory?'
'How…will…he…win…this!?'
'Something…unexpected…?'
Loki's gaze almost immediately shifted around as he looked at the arena in front of him, the arena in which Laura and Voldemort were fighting.
Loki scoured through, trying to analyze what was going on as he tried calculating what advantage Voldemort could've gained, but he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his head due to the overload of information that his senses passed to his brain to analyze.
'My…brain…can't…handle…it?'
'Stress?'
'No! My…thoughts…are…slow!'
With the crux of the matter revealed Loki stopped trying to think fast and did his best to control his emotions by replacing them with illusory ones so that Voldemort would never notice that he had caught onto Voldemort's trick.
It wouldn't have worked for long against a master of legilimency like Voldemort, but Loki didn't need to have to do it for that long.
Only a short time was enough for Loki to try and think of what he would do next.
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