The stalemate continued for a few more moments.
Oliver's team was waiting for Eren or Ivor to attack them. It looked like they wanted to be attacked by the duo so they could retaliate right after.
Ivor and Eren both guessed that Oliver's team had adopted an attack response battle formation. Something that would allow them to use their opponents' strengths against them.
The more Ivor and Eren waited, the more precise the battle formation would be. Thus, Ivor spoke in a grim voice.
'We can't just wait here, Eren. That old man or Oliver will figure out what is going on sooner or later with Layla's array. This hound must be eager to see his master so that he could tell him I was here.
Your identity has also been revealed. I fear Oliver will engage in a friendly fire to escape the prism barrier just so he can contact Arthur.
You don't want us to wait until that happens, right?'
Ivor had the brains to analyze the situation rationally. Eren agreed with his prediction right away before commenting.
'You are right. We can't wait for long. But let's not attack carelessly either.
Oliver's revelation has rattled these rankers a lot, preventing them from feeling anger and other dominant emotions. I need to break their formation a bit.'
Eren scratched his chin as he looked at the two rakers who were injured by his wrath creatures. Their transformation was delayed because they had stopped feeling anger towards him or anyone.
Eren needed these two rankers to break Oliver's formation from within. He looked at Ivor and smiled wickedly before concluding.
'You wanted to see my Ability, right? I'll provoke them. Let's see what happens afterward.'
Under his wrath domain, Eren commented on the rankers' changed psyches. He narrowed his eyes and pondered a bit before coming clean to his audience.
"Ivor is right, you know. He is not what you think he is. Poor guy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Eren summoned Rigor Mortis and Anduril in his right and left hand respectively before finishing what he had to say.
"I am the Osan Woods' Butcher. Arthur and all his minions are just too stupid to see the truth. Imagine all the grown-up rankers getting duped by a then-nobody teen like me.
Hahaha. It's like a kid swindling a bunch of grown-ups with his shoddy lies.
Don't believe me, right? Let me prove it to you."
Eren spread his soul sense as he spoke. After that, a bone-chilling bloodlust swept over everyone's minds.
All of Oliver's soldiers felt as if they had been summoned to a different reality. A different world. This world had blood-red skies and blood-red soil. The barren expanse of land with heaps of bones littered on the ground.
The white and yellow carcasses of monsters and humans. The skulls of various beings and beasts. A red moon suddenly appeared in the sky before red lightning cackled through red clouds.
Except for Biru, all the rankers including Oliver fell prey to this psychedelic-like phenomenon. They heard Eren's words while finding themselves inside the illusion. As a result, they heard his voice like some kind of prophecy revealed to them by the world itself.
Eren had found another way of using his soul sense. He could overwhelm the slumbering souls of his opponents by sending them bits and pieces of his memories through his soul sense. Those memories would be interpreted in different ways by all the rankers depending upon their souls and their abilities to keep tabs on what was going on for real.
Biru was a Master ranker. His soul was strong enough to resist the effects of being exposed to Eren's soul sense. His sense of being was also too strong to get stuck in a soul-sense-induced illusion.
Others were not so lucky.
All of the rankers were then summoned to a peculiar place inside that world. They were summoned to a forest that looked like regions found in the Lionheart Duchy.
The sky and the soil were still as blood-red as ever. That was because they were part of the illusion. But the other renditions of the illusion felt real to these rankers. They felt like they were reliving a real memory from a third person's perspective.
A memory from Eren's past when he was still living in Osan.
The rankers saw how Eren had gotten in touch with Dom Walker. How he had used him to tame a strange demon beast. Then saw him killing Isaac's party using that strange form, grotesquely.
Various macabre scenes unfolded before the rankers' eyes. They soon found out that they couldn't even close their eyes as they had no bodies in the illusion. They could also not run away or willfully take their consciousness out of the illusion. They couldn't look away from what the butcher was showing them.
They lived through various of Eren's memories like these in fast forward. They felt as if they were present in the vicinity of Eren's audience when he did what he did best– killing and more killing.
Eren's eyes turned white as he activated Sedating Gazes to change the perception of time for rankers who were trapped inside the illusion. Now every second in real time would feel like a week or two for them.
After experiencing an extreme form of violence in such a way that altered their perception of time, they felt shattered. Their slumbering souls were affected by Eren's soul sense so much that they started having soul-related injuries.
Eren too felt a heavy burden on his soul after using his soul sense like that.
'Stop the madness this instant, Eren. Your soul is not strong enough to influence so many rankers like this.'
Alephee's intervention finally made Eren stop what he was doing. He felt a huge headache and soul-related fatigue. But when he looked at his audience, they seemed to be in much more trouble than him.
"Aaaaaaaa!"
"The butcher…. He is the butcher…"
"Demon…."
"Abomination…"
"Why… Why did we accept this mission? Our captain didn't even know who we were chasing."
"How can Captain Oliver be so careless…"
"It's all my fault. I… I shouldn't be here. I… I hate myself for being here."
The feeling of fear opened the gates for a lot of other emotions the rankers were preventing themselves from feeling. The butcher then just needed to crank up the feelings of anger and wrath inside these rankers.
And crank he did.
