Facing his aggrieved creditor's demand for repayment, Charlie Credos showed no sign of panic. Instead, he looked at the old gentleman before him with utter surprise.
"Sir, please don't use words like 'cheat'!
That will give people the wrong impression of my integrity as a 'Medium'!
We merely made a wager.
You just happened to lose."
Old Charlie stressed the point.
"Ha! Lose?
Faced with sophistry like 'You will die a moment before I do,' I hardly think I lost!"
The old gentleman tightened his grip on his cane until veins rose on the back of his hand.
Anger filled his heart.
At once, the power of death, which withered all things, began to fluctuate.
Vast swaths of shadows began to die.
They appeared without awareness and died without awareness.
In what seemed like a single cycle, a vast swath was cleared away.
Yet no light appeared. There were only more shadows, surging like a tide, bearing a void that eroded power and hatred that corroded the mind, like a natural disaster.
This only further enraged the already angry old gentleman.
"Begone!
Go back where you belong!"
With a low roar, an illusory skull appeared within the old gentleman's well-groomed face.
It was not the skull of a dead person.
Rather, it represented the power of death.
Or rather...
It represented the God of Death.
The shadows surging toward them like a tide suffered an unprecedented fright. They shrank back even faster, retreating from the area and returning to where they belonged.
Only deathly silence remained here.
Pure white deathly silence.
Surveying the deathly silence around him, Old Charlie wore an expression of admiration and flattery.
"Your might truly inspires awe. Even insensible 'shadows' fear you."
Yet the sight only made the old gentleman angrier. Despite being death incarnate, he