Episode 84
Translator: RaidenTL
Episode 84
SYSTEM: The ‘Faint’ status has been lifted.
Continuous damage has been applied for 2 hours.
HP -2,400 (1,400 / 4,800)
“Cough! Ugh, hhh…!”
She coughed, her eyes fluttering open. Her body shivered uncontrollably in the cold, a temperature unbelievable for summer. She glanced around but could see nothing. It was only then that she realized a black cloth had been thrown over her head.
“You son of a… bitch…! Cough, get this… thing off me, now! Cough!!!”
As Elysia screamed and tried to flail her limbs, she was surprised to find they weren't tied.
Just as she fumbled to push herself up from the ground, a foot kicked her in the back. The moment she bit her lip to scream, the cloth on her head was whipped off. She was sprawled carelessly on the cold stone floor, wearing nothing but her slip.
When she looked up, she saw Alma lying on a luxurious bed with a cigarette in her mouth, her expression blank. Before Elysia could say anything, Alma exhaled a long stream of smoke and spoke first.
“You know, I kept trying to remember where I’d seen you before.”
“…”
“And I just remembered. You’re that young master from back then.”
Elysia clutched her dizzy head and pushed herself up. Her staggering body nearly collapsed. As she reached for a table to steady herself, her hand missed, knocking a water bottle off the edge. It shattered on the floor.
At the crashing sound, Alma simply raised an eyebrow in annoyance but didn't bother to get up from the bed. Instead, she just chuckled and asked.
“You’re supposed to answer yes or no, you know? Hmm?”
“Fuck off, you… crazy… What kind of bullshit are you spouting…”
She struggled to regain her balance, her center of gravity constantly shifting. Just as she braced herself against the wall and looked around for an exit, Elysia saw Alma finally rising from the bed and clenched her fists in alarm.
Alma glanced mockingly at Elysia's arm, which was shaking weakly from her disorientation. Elysia growled at her.
“I beat up anyone, man or woman, but there’s nothing on you worth hitting. Get lost.”
“Is that so?”
The woman's lips twitched in amusement. She grabbed Elysia's wrist with a firm grip and pulled her toward the bed. It wasn't even that strong a pull, but in her weakened state, Elysia fell helplessly onto the bed.
In an instant, Alma was on top of her, straddling her stomach. She smiled playfully as her hair cascaded over Elysia's face. Elysia spat—ptui—and a merciless slap landed across her cheek.
SYSTEM: HP -400 (1,000 / 4,800)
Clutching her bright red, swelling cheek, Elysia glared up at the woman on top of her with murder in her eyes. In stark contrast to Elysia's expression, Alma smiled brightly. She gently patted the struggling Elysia's head and whispered.
“What a coincidence. I hit both men and women, too.”
Alma admired Elysia's face, contorted in pain, as she groped her chest. Then she muttered a curse in annoyance and complained.
“Hah… So you really are a woman? How disappointing.”
“Get your… hands off. I'll kill… you, I swear…”
Elysia grabbed Alma's collar with one hand, threw her to the other side of the bed, and started coughing. She immediately opened her Inventory, about to pull out the first weapon she could grab, but hesitated and froze.
If I pull out a gun in this state, can I keep it from being taken? My HP is barely 1,000, and my head isn't working right. If a portable and even more lethal weapon from <Panic in the City> falls into this woman's hands, it'll be uncontrollable.
Having made her decision, Elysia gritted her teeth and pulled her hand back from the Inventory. A sudden chill made her turn around.
Alma was slowly rising from the bed, staring at her with an eerie gaze.
“This is so annoying.”
“Let go of me, now—”
“A face like that, and you’re a woman? What a damn waste.”
Furious at the perverted remark, Elysia tried to get up, but froze in shock as her body moved sluggishly, as if it were seizing up.
Her fingers, gripping the bedsheets, multiplied from five to ten, then fifteen. As Elysia panicked at her splitting vision, Alma gently wrapped an arm around her shoulders and whispered in a seductive voice.
“Did you really think I'd leave myself alone with you without taking any precautions?”
SYSTEM: ‘Injection of Unknown Drug’ has occurred.
Judgment Ability 20% Reduction Debuff has occurred.
Movement Speed 35% Reduction Debuff has occurred.
‘Vision Splitting’ is now at 80% progression.
“You… bitch… What the hell… gasp… did you…”
“How is it? It's a new drug Caden helped me create. You're practically the first one to take it.”
“Hah, you fucking psycho…”
The woman leaned in close, as if to kiss her, and a strong perfume scent wafted from her. Elysia gritted her teeth and glared at her. Her red-painted lips slowly parted as she whispered sweetly.
“I'll give you one chance to ask me a question.”
Alma lowered her gaze, staring intently at the blood trickling down Elysia's cheek. She smiled seductively and joked.
“Well, if you give me a kiss, I might add another one to the count.”
“Crazy… you’re completely insane…”
Horrified, Elysia turned her head away, her movements sluggish. A fever was rising, and her thoughts kept scattering.
She drugged me. A new drug that even I don't recognize… What are its effects? The side effects? Could I die? No, that's not what's important.
Something else is more important. Caden Hertz, who was he again? Ah, Blair's cousin. The victim whose death was disguised as a suicide but was actually a murder. This woman brought up his name first… Why?
Her eyes, clouded with confusion, blinked slowly. Elysia gasped for breath and asked.
“Hertz… You were the one who killed him… weren't you? Why. Why…”
Seeing Elysia, dazed and succumbing to the drug, still trying to dig for the truth, Alma laughed in disbelief. She remembered what that man had said with a meaningful smile. He'd told her, ‘She'll probably ask a lot of questions when she wakes up, so answer them as you see fit.’
His attitude, as if he were dropping off his pet cat for her to play with for a while, had been absurd. But now she thought she understood why that monstrous man had taken an interest. This woman wasn't sane either.
A wide grin spread across her face. She toyed with a lock of Elysia's hair and answered.
“Oh? You’re right, but also wrong. It was more of a joint project.”
Being the nasty person she was, she had no intention of answering all the woman's questions. She wanted to see a look of anxiety, so she'd decided not to answer even if Elysia had asked about the drug.
Alma's expression turned cold as she looked down at the woman desperately clinging to her fading consciousness.
“Then, why, how…”
This was the woman who'd fled last time, dripping blood from a gunshot wound. She'd already had one brush with death. And yet she'd come here on her own two feet, and all alone at that.
Alma couldn't understand why she was so persistent about the death of some worthless human.
But since she had his permission, there was no reason not to talk. Alma spoke the truth in a cheerful voice.
“Why did I kill him? Because he was no longer needed.”
“You had a… contract… Hertz was handling distribution… Wasn't he… your business partner…”
“Puhaha! Ahahaha! How could a loser like him be any help to my business?”
Alma burst out laughing as if she'd just heard the funniest story ever, wiping tears from her eyes. Elysia frowned, looking surprised.
“Hertz is… a noble… He connected you and Minerva, brought in more… cough!… clients…”
“Yes, under normal circumstances, he would have been a valuable connection.”
Alma paused, her expression souring with displeasure. It was a natural reaction, brought on by the memory of the madman who had brought this woman here.
“But I have a partner who's far more than that man could ever be.”
“More than that…?”
“His life was over the moment you exposed the fact that he was skimming off the top. And right around then, my partner developed an even more addictive drug. We bought some people on the cheap and had them try it, and they all went insane right after taking it.”
She sighed deeply, tapping her head as she continued.
“They all started spouting nonsense about seeing strange things and the 'truth of the world,' then bashed their heads against a wall and died. It was so inconvenient. I'd thrown the bodies in the basement and was wondering what to do with them when Hertz ended up in my debt.”
The basement. Elysia, desperately clinging to her reason as her eyes tried to close, remembered the smell of blood from her first visit to Alma's base. The smell of blood by the stairs… then that means…
Unable to complete the thought, she squeezed her eyes shut. She felt like she was going to vomit.
Disgust filled Elysia's eyes as she looked at Alma, who spoke of killing people so casually. She gritted her teeth and muttered.
“You make me sick, you piece of trash…”
“It seemed like the problem was a lack of tolerance, so I decided to use that guy, who's tried every drug under the sun, as a test subject. He was old but naive, so when I tempted him with a business partnership, he fell for it right away. He coughed up blood a few times, but… it all worked out in the end. That's how that drug ended up in your body, isn't it?”
Alma pouted like a child and muttered to herself.
“But I still don't get what my partner was thinking. The name of the drug… why did he call it that?”
She had asked Cain, who was staring down at the finished drug with a blank face, what he would name the new product. Contrary to her expectation that he would think about it, the man had simply raised one corner of his mouth and answered.
“‘Let's call it Verum.’”
“‘What does that mean?’”
His smile vanished in an instant, as if it had never been there, and the man replied. Alma, pondering that answer, muttered.
“‘Truth’ in the ancient tongue, or something…?”
Truth? Elysia's eyes narrowed. Alma sighed deeply and continued.
“Doesn't he sound crazy? Ah, I really don't know why he'd give a drug a name like that.”
Elysia searched through her hazy mind. Come to think of it, Hertz was said to have constantly muttered the word ‘truth’ before he disappeared. He'd also boasted that a product ‘on another level’ would soon appear. Truth, verity, on another level…
Elysia flinched and wrapped her arms around herself. The chill she'd been feeling for a while now began to intensify, a biting cold that felt like she was slowly freezing.
Something like a fractal flickered before her eyes. Her vision went dark and then bright again, over and over, like someone was flicking a light switch relentlessly. And every time her vision cleared, two status windows appeared.
[Logging out.]
♥ Player, you're logging out! ㅠ0ㅠ! Please come back and see us again! >-< ♥
[error;logout failed]
♥ error;logout failed ♥
Is this my hallucination, or is it real? Elysia stared ahead, her face a mask of confusion. It was the first time the status windows for <Panic in the City> and <You'll Fall in Love> had said the same thing at the same time.
The status windows seemed to be screaming, repeatedly showing the logout screen before fading away on their own. Something injected into her body was relentlessly trying to push her back to reality.
Something hot rose up her throat. She spat it out, and dark red blood dripped down from her chin. Beyond the status windows that filled her vision, she could see the woman smiling brightly.
“Ah, you really are most handsome when you're scowling.”
Unable to even groan, Elysia hunched over and closed her eyes, trying to escape the status windows that kept attempting to log her out. And she caught her breath.
One second, two, three… As she slowly counted the time, her mind began to return. Her head ached as if her brain were melting into a sticky mess, and she couldn't think straight, but she was somehow holding onto her sanity.
Alma looked down at Elysia, who was trembling with clenched fists, and her expression soon turned bored.
“Let me make an excuse. I didn't actually intend to kill him. He'd built up quite a tolerance, so I thought I could use him in the next experiment…”
Her voice trailing off, Alma drifted into a memory.
Two hours before Hertz's death, she had been recording the results of her experiments.
Hertz, scorned by his family, seemed to secretly long for a fresh start. He expected this ‘business’ to truly be the second act of his life, but to Alma, it was nothing more than the delusion of a sheltered flower who couldn't face reality.
Use him as a business partner? What could she possibly trust about that idiot? But she hadn't planned on killing him. He still had his uses… Just as she was making those calculations, that man appeared.
“The moon is beautiful, isn't it?”
“Are you drunk or something?”
Cain, who had visited her out of the blue, seemed quite excited. Perhaps because he was standing on the balcony in the faint moonlight, his pale face seemed to have a rosy flush. Alma looked him over with a displeased gaze and closed her notebook.
She had lived a life crawling at the bottom. Back when she was grinding her teeth, willing to do anything just to sleep in a soft bed and trample on others as she pleased, this man had approached her.
She had manufactured and sold the drugs he taught her about without hesitation, and the man never asked for anything in return.
Even when she first realized the drugs she made brought not only pleasure but also addiction and was greatly flustered, even when a man who'd lost all his money for drugs went mad and came at her with a knife, the man had only smiled gently.
Gradually, Alma came to realize he was no ordinary madman.
And of all the things she had seen over the years, the smile he wore on his face that day was the most chilling of all. The man clenched his fists, as if unable to hide his excitement, and said.
“I need you to kill Caden Hertz.”
She had no right to refuse. The man was the son of a Duke, one of the highest-ranking nobles in Alea. He was the man who had given her everything she now enjoyed, and who could also take it all away. Barely controlling her trembling jaw, she asked.
“Why? I was going to run other experiments on him.”
“We've figured out the lethal dose of Verum. Is there any more use for him?”
The man closed his eyes for a moment as if rewinding a memory, then opened them. His red eyes gleamed as he answered in a languid voice.
“And… she said that nothing would be over until a body turned up.”
Alma returned to the present, looking down at the face of the woman who was blinking weakly. She hadn't understood what it meant back then, but it was probably something this woman had said. If so, then this was probably,
“‘Since she needs it, I felt like giving it to her as a gift.’”
the conclusion that man had arbitrarily reached. Alma thought the woman flailing in the drug's haze was pitiful.