Chapter 895: Erasing Memories |
Nick had done the same thing as Julian.
He had been working under Julian for decades, and he had seen this ability many times.
Julian just talked to somebody and mentioned specific things.
This triggered memories of these events, and Julian used his ability.
Julian would talk about his identity, and if the person already knew about it, their memories concerning his true identity would appear.
Metaphorically, it was like the person walked down a bridge towards a file with the memories, grabbed the file, and returned with it.
What Nick was doing was to let the person grab the file.
When they were walking back over the bridge, he was deleting the bridge behind them.
Lastly, he deleted the file in their hand.
They knew that they had just grabbed a file, but there was no file.
This would make them search for the bridge again, but the bridge was gone.
Then, the second part of the ability would trigger.
The ability would create a new bridge at the same place, and the person would walk down that bridge.
They would find a file.
But when they opened it, it would be empty.
This wasn't supposed to be empty.
At that point, Nick just jostled their memory again.
The person would think that what Nick said was in the file, but instead of reading the file, they would just write down Nick's words.
After that, the person would create new memories to make the file make sense.
Bryan Summer? The file said that he met this guy before.
Where was that?
The most frequent files would be gathered.
They went to bars a lot.
They probably talked to him in a bar.
Yeah, right! Now, they remembered!
There was this guy with that name in the bar.
Yeah, he remembered meeting Bryan Summer clearly.
This was how it worked metaphorically.
More concretely, Nick just dealt with the neurons connected to his identity and planted a select few neurons.
The brain would do its thing and try to make sense of these neurons, creating new memories in the process.
In order to use that ability, Julian needed to talk to the person.
However, Julian had been a Fanatic.
Nick was an Adversary.
And the quality of his ability was also at the level of an Adversary.
The next moment, Nick looked at the center of the city.
The Governor and another Hero were currently there.
Both of them knew about him.
An instant later, Nick's Zephyx gathered and covered the building.
Almost immediately, an alarm went off.
Technology had advanced a lot, and there were Zephyx sensors everywhere now.
The Zephyx sensors noticed that a lot of Specter Zephyx was spreading throughout the building, and it alarmed everyone.
Everyone went into combat mode.
But that didn't matter.
The job was already done.
The two beams leading to the two Heroes had completely vanished.
Everyone was searching for the cause of the alarm.
That was when Nick used his ability again.
Suddenly, people started talking about stupid technology and how it always gave false alarms.
The engineers went to the sensors with annoyance and rebooted them.
After being rebooted, the sensors no longer gave off an alarm.
That was because there was no more Zephyx anywhere in the building.
People chalked it up to faulty technology and just forgot about the incident.
Finally, Nick focused on all the other beams in the city.
Moments later, they all vanished.
A couple of alarms went off, but they were all attributed to a glitch in the system.
Nick had done it.
He had deleted his identity from the entire city, and he hadn't needed to kill even a single human.
Compared to Julian, Nick could also delete memories without interacting with anyone.
However, this ability had its limits.
This worked for Fallen, Protectors, and weaker, but if he wanted to delete the memories of a Shield or Adversary, he would need to interact with them.
Additionally, there was a chance that he would be uncovered if the target was stronger than Nick.
Nick calmly left the city.
'Works just as expected,' he thought. 'This ability makes sense to the aliens as well, considering my job. I can delete knowledge of technology, and it makes it easier for me to infiltrate Aegis.'
'It also works with my primary ability.'
'Lastly, I don't know how to find out how the aliens work without killing one of them, but with this ability, I can experiment on them. As long as they have memories, the ability should still work.'
'I can just grab a random engineer working on one of the Prephyx generators, experiment on them for a while, make them believe that they just had to repair something, and let them go again.'
Nick dug deep into the ground and looked at his primary ability.
'This will also help my primary ability a lot.'
Naturally, whenever Nick advanced, his other abilities also improved.
'I thought this would happen when I become an Eternal, but apparently, it is already a thing when I am just an Adversary,' he thought.
Nick still remembered the old Champion's fears and the Technician's suspicions.
The more Nick's ability advanced, the more important it was to stay as unknown as possible.
He had the power of the Null, and since Nick had just copied its ability with his Zephyx Synchronizer back then, it essentially also just copied part of the Null's ability.
As the ability improved, it would become more and more similar to the Null's ability.
'Power dependent on knowledge,' Nick thought.
As a Specter, Nick had intrinsic knowledge of his new abilities.
'The being who knows the most about me determines the power of my primary ability.'
'This is different from the Champion's ability. For him, quantity is important. For me, only the weakest link is important.'
'If one person knows everything about me, my primary ability will remain at a fivefold increase in power.'
'If two people know everything about me, the same thing happens.'
'If one person knows everything about me, and there are millions of people who know almost everything about me, the same thing happens.'
'If there is no person who knows everything about me but millions of people who know almost everything, my power will increase.'
'It all depends on the weakest link.'
'At this moment, there is not a single black beam.'
'This means my primary ability is already stronger than before.'
The author's patreon. If he gets more than 1000€ per month, he will increase the number of words in the chapter.
https://patreon.com/user?u=27791050
Comments 9