I Never Said I'd Spare You
He was getting farther away.
Yujin watched Eliyah's receding back in silence.
"We've got plenty of time."
He hadn't ripped the man's head off at once. He'd given him a full hour of leeway instead.
Of course, that wasn't for Eliyah's sake.
It's for me.
That damn fucker who ate people. There was no way Yujin was going to let a bastard like that die easy, free of pain. For the sake of everyone he'd devoured, Yujin intended to kill him as cruelly, as agonizingly, as possible—until the words that left that mouth weren't a plea to be spared, but a desperate begging to be killed.
For the next hour, Yujin planned to ruin him.
Thud—.
He took a single step.
And Yujin's form moved at a speed Eliyah couldn't even begin to match.
Sshhk—!
He brushed past the figure that had already vanished into the distance. At the same time came the sound of something being severed, and blood sprayed through the air.
"Aaaargh!"
It was Eliyah's little finger.
The Heavenly Silk Thread [C] sliced through a low-level player's flesh as if it were nothing.
"You fucking bastard!"
Eliyah poured out curses. But that was all he could manage. He didn't even dare to counterattack. That single exchange had made the gulf between them brutally clear.
So he chose to run again. Clutching his bleeding hand, he bolted for his life.
"Hey, you're allowed to hit back. I said survive for an hour—I never said you couldn't try to kill me."
Of course, there'd be a price for trying.
Yujin muttered it under his breath, but Eliyah never heard. He'd already rounded the corner of a building and disappeared.
"Honestly."
Kids these days had no guts.
"If it were me, I'd have charged in trying to crack the other guy's skull no matter what."
He clicked his tongue and started walking at a leisurely pace.
"Wonder where he scurried off to."
A predator hunting its prey. Yujin pressed after Eliyah without the slightest hurry, slowly tightening the noose.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
His hand hurt. This was a serious wound—something he had never suffered once on the climb this far. His finger, severed clean off!
Even when a Wendigo had hunted him on the sixth stratum, he hadn't lost a single piece of his body. One attack from this man had cut it away.
Crazy bastard. That guy is completely insane.
Remembering the madness burning in Seong Yujin's eyes, Eliyah shuddered before he could stop himself.
Can I hold out?
An hour was long. Especially when you were the prey instead of the hunter. But he couldn't just stick his neck out and give up either.
I survive. No matter what.
Eliyah swept his surroundings, hunting for somewhere to hide. Fortunately this was a city—ruined, yes, but still full of places to slip a hunter's gaze.
There!
He cut into a particularly secluded alley.
Grrraaaagh—?
A rotting corpse was there.
A zombie?
Only then did it click. The seventh stratum's main theme was a zombie apocalypse.
Eliyah lashed out and kicked the zombie's head.
Thwack—!
Like an overripe watermelon, the skull burst apart.
No time to waste on trash like this!
Leaving the collapsing corpse behind, he pushed deeper in—and found a building that blended into the ruins almost too well. An utterly ordinary three-story wreck, so plain it was easy to overlook.
There!
Hide first, then heal. Fortunately Eliyah had a recovery skill. One of his former companions, Edgar, had known quite a few useful ones. After tearing off and eating Edgar's arm, Eliyah had taken Emergency Treatment [E] for himself. The effect wasn't dramatic, but it should be enough to handle a missing little finger.
He slipped inside quickly. Weak sunlight slanted through broken windows, catching the dust that hung in the air. The atmosphere was almost dreamlike, but he had no time for aesthetics. Finding a tucked-away room, Eliyah hid himself and triggered the skill at once.
Emergency Treatment [E]
Fwoosh—!
Pure white bandages materialized in midair and wound themselves tightly around his maimed hand.
"Urgh!"
Pain flared from the severed stump. Eliyah nearly screamed; he clamped his other hand over his mouth. He could not let that maniac know he was here.
Holding his breath, he poured mana into his ears.
Detection [E]
A skill that was his own, not one stolen from a companion. Nothing stirred nearby. Only the distant, meaningless groans of zombies drifted in from far away.
Huuu—.
He let out a silent breath of relief. For now, he seemed safe.
How much time is left?
It felt like a solid thirty minutes had passed. But that couldn't be right. Coldly, carefully, he recalculated every second since the chase began.
Damn it.
Five minutes? Maybe not even that. Barely any time at all had actually gone by.
Can I hold out?
He asked himself the same question again. Gear wasn't the problem. That lunatic genuinely meant to kill him.
He had no leisure left to savor questions like Why? Right now, survival mattered more than reasons.
Stay here as long as I can and secure an escape route.
Seong Yujin would find him eventually—that much felt certain. So he needed to know his exits in advance. Quietly he rose and edged toward the window, careful not to make a single footfall. He had taken maybe three steps when a voice dropped from above.
"A little too complacent, don't you think? Did you really believe hiding in a place like this would keep you safe?"
Overhead. As if he had been floating there the entire time, Seong Yujin looked down on him from the empty air.
"Hup!"
The instant Eliyah saw him, he wrenched mana upward.
"Shadow Blade [E]!"
The dagger girl's skill. The dagger he had scavenged from her corpse shot toward Seong Yujin on a blur of faint presence.
Shhhreeee—!
The sound of splitting air was enough to raise the hair on the back of the neck, but Yujin didn't even bother to dodge. He simply raised an open palm.
Clang—!
The strike failed to pierce even his skin.
"Monster!"
Stunned, Eliyah hurled himself out the window. But—
"Leave another finger behind."
Slick—!
Another finger was severed. This time the ring finger. Leaving a spray of blood droplets in his wake, Eliyah ran—across a city crawling with zombies.
How much time had passed?
It really felt like a full hour now.
Collapsed on the ground, Eliyah thought that while he dragged in ragged breaths.
Drip, drip, drip—.
Seven fingers. His left ear and right eye. A chunk of flesh and rib from his side. And both legs. Those were the things Eliyah had lost. The bleeding was so bad his remaining vision had begun to blur.
Shhhhk—.
Propped against the half-collapsed wall of a building, he sat there as Seong Yujin stepped into view before him.
"Still alive?"
He already knew the answer. He asked purely to mock him. Nothing else.
Eliyah lifted his head and looked up at the monster of a man.
"Damn, you've got one tough life thread. Even after being cut into pieces like that, you're still breathing?"
Yujin even clapped, wearing an expression of exaggerated admiration. Under normal circumstances Eliyah would have been furious—at being looked down on and mocked like this. But he couldn't manage fury now. As the man said, the fact that he was still alive at all was a miracle. Right now, death almost seemed preferable to any more pain.
That was what Eliyah thought.
"J-just… kill me…"
At those words, Seong Yujin smiled.
"I was hoping you'd say exactly that."
Not a plea to live—an entreaty to die. Eliyah had spoken the very thing Yujin had wanted to hear. Even though it was a humiliation, he felt something close to relief. He would be able to die without suffering any further.
Yujin crouched down until their eyes met. With only one eye left, Eliyah couldn't see properly, but he could still tell the man was enjoying himself thoroughly.
"Let's see. How much time do we have left?"
Yujin rolled his eyes upward, doing the math. Then—
"Huh? The hour's already up."
Surprise flickered across his face.
"…What?"
That hellish stretch of time was over? Truly?
"Shit, I didn't think a whole hour had gone by already. Did I get a little too into it?"
Yujin's brow furrowed. Just watching that was enough to drag a broken laugh out of Eliyah.
"Heh… heh-heh."
A rough, metallic sound scraped free as blood-soaked blond hair swayed.
"Happy about it?"
Of course he was. He had believed death was inevitable. He had even given up and begged to be killed. And now the hour was over? That meant no more of this torment.
"D-did I… win the bet, then?"
Survive for one hour. By Yujin's own terms, Eliyah was the winner.
"Yeah, you're right. It went past an hour."
He couldn't stop the laughter that kept bubbling up. If he could have, he would have surged to his feet and mocked the man right back. Unfortunately both legs were gone, so that was impossible.
But that's fine.
Eliyah refused to despair. One of the abilities he had taken from the Wendigo he had turned the tables on and eaten back on the sixth stratum was Regeneration [D]. With that, he could reverse this. It would take a while, sure, but still—
I'm alive. That's enough.
He could recover. That simple fact filled his chest like a symbol of hope.
And someday, without fail—
He would repay today's humiliation and agony. Revenge. He would tear into Seong Yujin's flesh and spit a mocking glob of saliva onto the dying man.
"Then…"
"Yeah, you won. Congrats."
Through the mouth of the teddy bear dangling from his arm, Yujin produced the stake of their bet—the Solar Blade [D].
"This is yours now. Nice, right?"
He tossed it casually down in front of the severed legs.
Eliyah bared bloodstained teeth in a grin.
"Good. The bet's over, so now it's time for me to vent."
"…What?"
Eliyah's remaining eye went wide, as if asking what the hell that was supposed to mean.
"Looks like you were under some kind of misunderstanding. The stake for the bet was this one sword."
As if it were the most obvious thing in the world, Yujin lifted his hand. Between his fingers, a thread glittered faintly in the dim sunlight.
"I never once said I was going to let you live."
"W-wait—!"
The thread unspooled and whispered past the body of the frantically shouting Eliyah.
Heavenly Myriad Slaughter [C]
True to its name, Eliyah's flesh was shredded into a thousand pieces, ten thousand pieces.
Yujin watched the result for a moment, then lightly smacked his own forehead.
"I said I'd play soccer with his head, but I completely forgot."
A man who always kept every word he uttered—yet this time, unfortunately, he hadn't managed it.
"Can't be helped."
He reeled the Heavenly Silk Thread [C] back in, scattered it into the air once more, and turned away.
"Time to go find that kid and head up already."
Leaving Eliyah's pulverized corpse behind him, he slowly walked away.
Grrraaaagh—.
Zombies moved. No reason, no thought—just wandering the ruins.
Squelch—.
One of them stepped into a pool of blood and planted its foot on a scrap of flesh.
And then…
Fwoooooosh—!
Blood and meat erupted upward, swallowing the zombie that had been standing on top of it.
Then one more. Ten. A hundred. A thousand.
More than anyone could count.
For a very long time.