Chapter 518
Chapter 518
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Translator: Ebonarch
Chapter: 518
Chapter Title: Disappearance (5)
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Exactly one day after Si-woo vanished, Amelia concluded that this incident was far graver than she'd imagined.
No one else but Shin Si-woo.
There was no way he'd leave behind just a single note and wander outside the entire day.
She'd asked Sophia to deploy crows across every corner of Gehenna and had personally sought out his acquaintances one by one, inquiring about his whereabouts.
Sharon, Takasho, Cybele Periwinkle, Yesod Count—she'd even visited the Jemernai estate twice.
Yet not a single person had seen Si-woo.
As the next day dawned with no leads whatsoever, a crumbling terror began to grip Amelia.
She was certain now: something had happened to him.
Otherwise, how could he possibly vanish without a word?
Amelia didn't collapse right then and there.
This was Si-woo, after all—no one else.
She resolved to try everything she possibly could.
"Please help."
She sought aid from his acquaintances and scoured Gehenna high and low.
Sharon, considering the chance he'd impulsively gone to meet Tiphereth Duke, headed off to see Sua Branch Chief in the present world.
But even after two days turned to three, there was still no sign of Si-woo.
While wandering aimlessly in search of him, word arrived from Sophia: a suspicious figure had been spotted loitering in one of Gehenna's blank zones.
Amelia raced straight to the maple forest where Sophia had detected the witch.
Exiles or public enemies sneaking into Gehenna while concealing their identities happened all the time, so it could simply be some smuggled exile.
But her instincts screamed otherwise.
A disappearance and a suspiciously timed infiltrator—there had to be a connection between the two.
Perhaps it was just her desperate hopes projecting a false pattern, but she had to meet the woman to know for sure.
The moment Amelia confronted the witch Sophia had found, she launched into battle.
The opponent was a public enemy.
A thick stench of blood wafted from her, too potent to guess how many humans she'd slain.
The fight was brief.
Amelia's particle magic was virtually impossible to counter in the first place.
Rain falling utterly without distinction resonated with her waves, blooming into seeds of particles.
The instant it struck unprotected, control of mana—the crux of any magical duel—shifted entirely to Amelia.
The key here was that this rain held no special characteristics.
Thus, unless the foe had prior knowledge or exercised unusual caution, she could dispatch them with ease.
In the end, what barely qualified as a battle concluded anticlimactically in Amelia's effortless victory.
Amelia secured the woman's custody and arrived at the Jemernai estate.
Given the gravity of the matter, even Albireo— who had been in seclusion—rushed out to greet her.
Albireo gazed at Amelia with a faintly flustered expression.
"I've captured a public enemy."
"Pardon...?"
Meanwhile, from Albireo's perspective.
Upon receiving the urgent report that Amelia had apprehended a "pureblood witch" who had infiltrated Gehenna, Albireo emerged from her sickbed of several days to receive the guest.
To be frank...
Seeing Amelia at this point was mentally uncomfortable.
Just before, when she'd visited with that grave look and said, "Si-woo seems to have gone missing," she'd had to hide her guilt and send Amelia away.
No matter how worried Amelia was about Si-woo's disappearance, how could she possibly reveal that he and Deneb had run off on a lovers' getaway?
It went beyond mere ethics or face-saving; it could gravely tarnish the count family's honor.
"You've done something remarkable."
Even if it was a largely nominal duty, the Jemernai family was still responsible for dealing with public enemies who invaded Gehenna's interior.
That was precisely why the underground prison existed.
"I want to lock her in the prison and interrogate her."
Albireo blinked again, eyeing the public enemy Amelia had dragged along like a trophy.
Amelia was unscathed, while her opponent was a utter wreck.
No visible external wounds, but her internal mana circuits were reduced to mush.
In that state, she wouldn't wield proper magic for quite some time.
A pureblood witch of the 21st hierarchy, subdued so easily...
It truly drove home that Amelia was a witch of the same rank as that formidable Tiphereth Duke.
"She seems connected to the missing Si-woo."
Setting aside her combat prowess, Albireo judged Amelia's claim as mere conjecture.
Amelia had likely torn through Gehenna in a frenzy, mistaking his absence for a disappearance.
This fool had probably snuck in without a care and gotten pummeled for it.
Of course, Albireo had no intention of voicing that.
In any case, the underground prison suppressed magic use except by Jemernai counts, so her cooperation would be needed for a proper interrogation.
"Yes, I'll open the prison for you. And I can assist with the questioning, of course."
"Thank you."
Albireo didn't offer help to just anyone, anytime.
She was fundamentally a businesswoman to her core, always weighing the benefits first.
But she harbored an unspoken debt to Amelia, so she readily promised her aid.
2.
A common trait of vampires in folklore across cultures was, inevitably, sleep.
Whether doused in holy water, staked through the heart and plunged into eternal slumber, or retreating to a gloomy coffin for a daytime nap.
The last one was practically their trademark.
Yet Clech Asmode despised sleep.
More precisely, it would be intuitive to say she loathed the nightmares that invariably followed.
Her apprentice witch days: the study room where she'd spent the most time, and her mother-cum-teacher, Erzebet Asmode, watching her.
Even the most vicious public enemies were said to cherish their apprentices like fledglings, but not every witch-apprentice bond was so heartwarming.
"Can't you get even this one thing right? You worthless bitch. How the hell did someone like you end up as my apprentice?"
Her teacher's sharply pointed finger jabbed repeatedly at her crown.
Clech's cheek, battered multiple times that morning alone, was swollen bright red, and from lips that had burst open repeatedly without time to heal flowed pus instead of blood.
"...I'm sorry, Mother."
Erzebet roughly seized Clech's cheek as she replied in a voice thick with fear.
Clech's shoulders stiffened like stone.
Erzebet smirked in satisfaction at the reflexive response born of conditioned terror, meeting her eyes squarely.
"What a joke—prophecy organ's nothing but a con artist. Maybe I should just kill you off and get a new apprentice divined. Clech, do you really think you suit the great name of Asmode? Seriously? With all your heart?"
Sharper than any blow, the words lacerated Clech.
The great Asmode.
Once great, perhaps.
The Asmode house had once boasted prestige among witches rivaled by few.
Just the continental spread of vampire legends and tales hinted at how ostentatiously the past Asmodes had strutted about.
There were even tales of them commanding nearly a thousand humans as night-kin, reveling in lavish blood banquets every night from their sinister castles.
But when Kether established the "public enemy" concept and banned reckless human experimentation, the Asmode decline began.
Asmode autonomic magic demanded vast quantities of blood.
With the old research methods—indiscriminately vampirizing war captives and commoners, then grinding them down—now impossible, it was only natural.
Thus, the Asmode bloodline, limping along like a lame dog, gradually coursed with inferiority and hysteria rather than pride.
And Clech's teacher, Erzebet, was like the impure essence squeezed from that tainted blood.
Having failed to ascend even a single hierarchy over her century-long life, she filled her ego by carving wounds into her own apprentice's body.
Not content with that, once Clech's budding breasts fully developed into adulthood, Erzebet began casting peculiar glances her way.
One day.
As usual, Erzebet lashed Clech's back with a whip, then gazed at her while panting raggedly.
It was breath reeking of utter foulness.
"Stop...! Teacher! Please don't...!"
Dragged by the hair and thrown to the floor, Clech flailed desperately to escape.
But for an apprentice witch alone, shaking off Erzebet had been impossible from the start.
"Stay still! You're my apprentice. Obey your teacher."
The silver lining—if it could be called that—was that the bruises lightened somewhat afterward.
The misfortune was that pointed tooth marks now filled the gaps in her flesh.
In truth, it was hard to discern which was the misfortune and which the mercy.
The visions continued: a bed in a pitch-black basement.
"Clech, come here. On your knees. Crawl."
Atop it lay her naked teacher.
On the shelf beside them were tools meticulously arrayed for inflicting utmost humiliation on women.
Beyond mere pervert, a extreme sadist, Erzebet toyed with her apprentice to her heart's content without the slightest hesitation.
"Don't want to?"
Clech's trembling eyes flicked over them, but refusal was impossible.
If she crawled between her teacher's legs and satisfied her, the brutal abuse would ease, if only a little.
"Filthy rag of a girl—at first you squirmed like some noble miss. But this is your true nature, isn't it? You love it too, don't you?"
Or become her plaything and let out wretched moans.
That damned teacher remained utterly selfish to the end.
After years of using Clech as an outlet for her desires, Erzebet grew bored even of that, passing on her stigma without giving her the chance to plunge a knife into her heart—and simply vanished.
Without so much as a commonplace last word.
Clech wandered.
Her teacher was gone, but Clech felt another stigma she'd left behind.
Ridiculously, left alone, she felt confusion at the void left by her cruel mentor— even longing, even love.
The only human connection Clech had ever learned amounted to total collapse of her autonomy, surrendering all choice to a domineering master.
Like a freed slave yearning to be enslaved once more.
For the first time tasting freedom, Clech felt not liberation, but terror at not knowing what to do.
"Hello? So you're my new business partner? What's your name?"
The lover who completely transformed such a Clech's life was Bianca Belliri, the Witch of Desire.