Those lights melted the skin and bones of the raincoat-clad townspeople, but beneath their melting bodies, twisted souls transformed into vast shadows and pounced on the Edwards Brothers:
"Stop!"
Their intact eyes flashed, and the power of spatial fixation forcibly pinned those shadows in place. But on this island, where space was extraordinarily unstable, this talent for forcibly fixing space could only last a very short time.
The shadows quickly broke free and lunged at the brothers. The Edwards Brothers, blind in their left and right eyes, tried to continue casting, but none of their attacks proved very effective against those shadows.
In the end, before Shade even had time to intervene and save them, the two were swallowed by the shadows formed from the townspeople's souls.
In an instant, the ground seemed to tremble. Firelight flickered, and everything before them shifted with the glow of that enormous bonfire. The townspeople who had turned into shadows became living people again, standing in raincoats before the bonfire, while the brothers, who had clearly died moments ago, once again stood before it with grim expressions.
This was not time reversal. Shade had not sensed the Power of Time. Everything that had just happened was real; it was only that, after the brief battle ended, some force had saved the dying Edwards Brothers and then restored those townspeople to "normal."
Yet what concerned Shade most was not that scene of a Recurrence Cycle. He looked at the ground. The townspeople's blood, along with the blood of the Edwards Brothers, had not vanished after everyone returned to normal.
The blood seeped deeply into the earth. With Shade's extraordinary perception, he could even sense that as the blood soaked in, the island itself was changing.
There was something beneath the soil.
"She" softly reminded him,