Kraft realized he'd made the "don't think about pink elephants" mistake.
Sure enough, as soon as he warned them, a monk who felt something strange beneath his feet reflexively looked down, trying to make sense of the change in the ground.
A liquid surface that barely reflected light rippled beneath them, making it seem as if the group were suspended over an abyss.
The liquid looked and felt so strange, like viscous shadows that light couldn't dispel, or a curtain hiding something. It exerted an irresistible pull, making it hard to resist the urge to reach out and touch it.
He bent over slightly, stretching his fingertips toward the dark, hallucinatory surface. The voices around him grew distant and indistinct, and he felt the quiet of falling alone just before waking from a dream.
A nearby explosion of sound shattered the silence.
"Stop!"
Kraft knocked away two reaching hands with his scabbard and grabbed another person by the shoulder, jolting them out of their initial confusion. Then he strode toward the rear of the group. The monk at the very back had already shut out the sounds around him and turned around; he was taking his first step toward the Shield Wall.
The Chaos Entity was still moving. Amorphous tissue writhed and stretched through the gaps, but its speed was visibly slowing.
It seemed the large quantity of Black Fluid was suppressing it. Like cooling lava, it had begun to solidify, losing the fluid freedom of movement it once possessed.
A sharp, reddish-brown object rich in iron oxide thrust forward, its barbed crosspiece trying to hook its target.
It was a halberd, rarely seen outside a proper battlefield. Its wooden shaft had been infiltrated and hardened by a substance that seemed to be Calcium, giving it a callus-like texture.
Kraft