Avery stiffened up as he felt a pulse of unfathomable power pass through him.

It was almost maddening to the point that he wanted to curl up into a ball and wait for his existence to come to an end so that he could be freed of the fear gripping him.

When the monstrosity was sealed away, its power was already bad, but now it was on another level entirely.

The entity that had been long sealed away in this system was a being that's very existence destroyed the minds and wills of everything else.

'Damn it! I won't let this overwhelm me!' Avery thought, pushing back against the psychic energy that had been worming its way inside of his head.

It took an immense amount of strength for him to fight back against the true presence of the world ending creature that had just been released.

Without even needing to make a conscious effort, it could overpower the will of most lifeforms. Leaving them in paralyzed states as an unfathomable dread warped their minds.

When Avery managed to recover from the sudden shock, he found his three lovers had fallen out of their chairs and were huddled up on the floor with looks of horror on their faces.

No amount of grit would allow a person to withstand the powers of the being that had once brought ruin to many systems.

Even the toughest and most grizzled mercenaries could not resist the power of a monstrosity far beyond them. Leaving Avery and only two other people in the entire fleet able to act in any capacity.

"This is Zefield, reaching out to anyone. Respond if you can!"

Avery's eye widened in surprise when he heard Zefield's voice over comms.

He had honestly figured that he would be the only one able to resist the entity's powers.

However, what served as an even greater shock was that someone else responded before him.

"This is Nali. You got any idea what's going on here Zefield. The people that were fixing my ship look like they all suddenly started having the absolute worst panic attacks."

From what Avery knew, Nali was currently on the Intrepid getting her vessel repaired after sustaining some damage during the lure operation. That meant that she was probably the only one on the entire carrier ship that was still able to move.

"So, we're the only two that are left. This is troubling." Zefield responded a couple moments later.

Before the two of them could start a long conversation though, Avery spoke up.

"Sorry, I was just a bit stunned that anyone else was able to keep their wits about them. I'm still here as well. And I might be able to get a few more people up as well."

Avery focused on spreading his energy out like he had before to encompass Kasandra, Jasmine, and Liesel.

Truthfully it was far more difficult for him to do so this time than the last. Just covering the entire cockpit of the Dauntless with his energy was straining him.

Nevertheless, his efforts paid off, and he was able to offer some protection to his three partners. Allowing them to shake their stupor off and recover their minds.

"Avery, what's going on? I feel so cold." Kasandra said the moment she regained a semblance of lucidity.

Even with him giving his protection to them, the lingering malicious energy was still having an effect.

Jasmine and Liesel came back to being fully conscious a few seconds later and had similar complaints.

While they had not been able to fully comprehend what was going on, the terror that had incapacitated them was still fresh in their minds.

It was not something so easy to get over, and Avery had the three of them gather around him so he could strengthen his own powers and comfort them a bit with his presence.

"Whoa, what's happening here?! There's suddenly a lot more voices!" Nali shouted as she heard Kasandra, Jasmine, and Liesel talking through the Dauntless' communications.

Except, while she was taken aback, Zefield quickly understood what was going on. He had been carefully listening to what Avery had said and was keeping his calm the best that he could.

"Do you have some power to cure people of what's happening, Avery?"

Zefield was naturally curious about the developments going on onboard the Dauntless.

Even his own crew members had succumbed to the terror of the psychic attack permeating the system.

"No, it's nothing so grand. I can just protect people within a few meters of me. That's the best I can do right now. What about you? I didn't think that you had any psionic abilities at all. How are you and Nali okay right now when everyone else had been paralyzed?" Avery asked.

As it turned out, both of them had spent outrageous sums of money for bionic implants in their brains that gave them resistance to outside psychic forces.

"Around thirty years ago, I was on a kind of shady protection job when some brats with strange abilities attacked. One of them knocked me out just by looking at me. When I woke up, I found out it was from some sort of telepathic attack directly on my mind, so I made sure to be ready in case something like that ever happened again. Whatever's going on right now is still making me feel like sh*t though even with the damn thing in my head."

Hearing about what had happened to Nali, a certain image flashed through Avery's head.

The time she was talking about would have been when his mother and the other kids like her had rebelled against the people that had experimented on them.

From what he remembered when his mother divulged her past to him, the ability Nali had been hit with sounded like the power one of his mother's comrades possessed.

Zefield on the other hand, had done so because there were certain space monsters that could muddle people's thoughts with psychic abilities.

Typically, specialized equipment installed on his ship could block these out, but he wanted to be especially prepared just in case.

It seemed that his caution had been prudent. Otherwise, he would have been incapacitated as well.