Catch Me If You Can
Leon left Aria and the rescued children behind and bolted out.
With a bundle slung over one shoulder, he swiftly cleared the waiting room.
The instant he stepped into the corridor—
—CRACK!
A man split clean in half with a wet, sickening tear of flesh.
Sizzle…
The magic field of the tool he'd been activating guttered out, its light dying in empty air.
"…"
The corridor was painted thick with blood. Mutilated corpses lay strewn in every direction—a true mountain of the dead, a sea of gore.
Wooooong—
Every lamp had gone dark. In that pitch-black stretch, a single sword alone still shone, wreathed in crimson aura. The woman gripping that Sword Gang was drenched head to toe in blood.
She stood with her back to Leon. When she turned her head, a chilling smile cut across her face.
"Little brother!"
"Big sister."
The sight of Hera dragged a sigh straight out of Leon.
"What are you doing following me here?"
"Hmm. I came to help my little brother, of course?"
"…Well. You definitely were a help."
"Right?"
Leon admitted it without a fight.
Just the Full Moon forces Hera had stopped in this hallway numbered in the dozens—and every last one of them had been skilled. Without her, the whole operation would have gotten considerably messier.
Hera fired off questions in a rapid stream.
"So what now? What's that cool bird? And what's the bundle for?"
"…"
"Looks fun. Let me in on it too."
Leon considered for a beat.
Does it even matter at this point?
They'd come this far. Hiding things now was just ridiculous. They were already in the same boat.
Besides, a few more small secrets with Hera wouldn't change anything. She already held his most fatal weakness—that he was on friendly terms with Bergopf.
And she wasn't the sort of woman who would politely turn around just because he told her it was fine and to go home. Tell her to get lost and she'd keep following anyway.
Might actually be better.
Adding a Master-level martial artist to the roster wasn't a bad trade at all. The raw combat boost was solid. Aria and he would suffer a little less for it.
Decision made, Leon opened his mouth.
"We'll talk on the way out."
"Okay."
Leon set a brisk pace and launched into a rapid-fire explanation.
"Honestly, it's nothing special. No grand plan or anything."
"Start explaining."
"That thing that just woke from a long sleep is ridiculously hungry. Think of it like a bear that just crawled out of hibernation. Normally it would have piled a mountain of food in its nest before nodding off, but…"
"It got dragged here and lost everything. That's why it's so furious."
"Exactly. And the food it stockpiled was sitting in Full Moon's warehouse down below. Right now it's all in this bundle."
The Hwasinjo's food was, of course, fire energy.
Inside its dwelling had been heaps of elixirs dense with concentrated fire energy, and the merchants had swept those up too—selling them as a package deal along with the beast itself.
Hera spoke as if something had just clicked.
"So that red fruit from earlier—you bought it, little brother?"
Correct.
Among those fire-energy elixirs, only the single highest-quality fruit had gone up for auction. The rest hadn't been auction-grade and had simply been warehoused.
Which meant Leon currently held the entire food cache the Hwasinjo had carefully, thriftily collected.
"Got it. So what are you going to do with it?"
"Obviously… use it as bait."
Leon's face twisted into something thoroughly wicked.
Truthfully, even Billy from the original work hadn't hunted the Hwasinjo alone.
He'd pinned it down with a single sword, then joined forces with the capital's powerhouses who arrived afterward to land the finishing blow.
…Though he basically did most of it by himself.
Either way, the fact that Billy—Expert Upper-rank at the time—couldn't take it solo meant the same held for Leon.
So Leon hadn't even begun to entertain the idea of catching the awakened Hwasinjo alone. There was no reason, no benefit, and he didn't have the ability anyway.
Of course, he would catch it. In the original, Billy had gained a special power after cutting the Hwasinjo's fire core.
In short: a fortuitous encounter. He was far too greedy to hand that off to someone else.
The process of catching it would be the same, too. He'd help out just enough, then snatch the finishing blow off something others had already seasoned for him.
Support would arrive within ten minutes regardless. This was the capital—crawling with humanity's powerhouses. Experts capable of thrashing a thrice-evolved Hwasinjo existed nearby.
Therefore, Leon's goals were three.
First: use the Hwasinjo's rampage to plunder Full Moon's enormous wealth.
Aria was handling that cleanly.
Second: land the finishing blow on the Hwasinjo and acquire a new power.
Third: prevent the catastrophe from the original, where Raigis's Holy Fire got eaten by the Hwasinjo…
…as a secondary achievement.
While I'm at it, I should snip a few buds I don't like.
A giant flying fireball.
If this thing tore around the capital as it pleased, wouldn't it be entirely possible for it to drop into some family's estate and burn the whole house to cinders?
Sure. Perfectly possible.
A thoroughly plausible "unfortunate" accident.
WHOOOOOOSH—!
From its widely spread wings poured an enormous shockwave. The entire area filled dense with crimson light.
The Hwasinjo burst from the underground cavern of the Full Moon Auction, punched through the ground, and erupted into the Plaza of Abundance in the 4th District.
It was furiously enraged that the place it had woken was not its cozy nest.
Outside, some alien world stretched before it. Realizing this wasn't even the continent it originally inhabited only stoked its fury higher.
Extreme hunger layered onto the rage. The food it had diligently stockpiled was nowhere to be found.
Absorbing the ambient energy was meaningless, too. Compared to its original habitat—where fire energy saturated heaven and earth—the fire energy circulating here was less than the dirt under its claws.
Then the Hwasinjo's senses snagged on a very appetizing fire energy.
A pure white flame it had never seen or heard of in its entire life. The gently swaying fire was beautiful and delectable—as if it were deliberately seducing it.
And that color. What of it? Pure white without a single speck of impurity. It delivered a tremendous shock to a creature that had only ever known fire to be red.
Along with its beauty, the energy contained within was supreme. The power of a high-ranking being from a higher dimension had melted into the fire energy itself.
Raigis's Holy Fire was, to the Hwasinjo, an unparalleled delicacy.
— …
Thump!
The Hwasinjo's fire core pulsed.
It could see small animals scurrying away, carrying that white flame.
It couldn't endure it. Where do you think you're running? Come back. Sate my hunger. Become my strength.
As its full-body feathers brightened and the Hwasinjo was about to begin beating its wings—
In a plaza filled with screams, shouts, and raw shock, amid crowds scattering in every direction with faces pale as death—
"Hup."
From the hole the Hwasinjo had punched through the ground, a masked ruffian—Leon—leapt out.
Emerging into the open, he pulled out a wooden box and cracked the lid. The dense fire energy the box had been concealing flooded free, and a red fruit flaunted its presence.
— …?!
The Hwasinjo froze.
A familiar energy. How could it not know a fruit it had personally harvested and carefully saved? The memory of delighting at the thought of eating it later was still vivid.
In other words… that was the single most delicious item among the countless foods it had stored.
Leon held that fruit and shook it teasingly. The Hwasinjo's gaze tracked his hand as it swayed left and right.
"Hey. See this? Want to eat it? Too bad."
Leon grabbed an elixir at random from the bundle on his back and flung it.
Whoosh!
A spirit stone imbued with fire energy spun through the air toward the Hwasinjo's head. Caught off guard, the beast opened its beak and swallowed it whole.
Abundant fire energy spread, caressing its fire core.
Like a breadcrumb dropped into a stomach that had starved for months. Its insides tingled. Its appetite went mad. The hunger only grew worse.
Not stopping there, Leon opened the mouth of the bundle and showed the inside to the Hwasinjo.
"I've got all your stuff."
— …!!!
The pure fire energy wafting from the bundle. Those were clearly the foods the Hwasinjo had painstakingly collected, one by one.
So that damn bastard was the one who took all my food!
Rage surged through the Hwasinjo's mind—intense enough to instantly erase its greed for the white flame.
The provocation was sufficient. It shot its body forward to turn that insolent little animal into a handful of ash and reclaim its food.
FWOOOOSH!
Fierce flames surged as its wings beat. The fire writhed as if alive, swirling around its body.
The Hwasinjo descended on Leon with terrifying force.
BOOOOOOM!!!
A massive explosion. A giant crater of fire opened where Leon had been standing.
However—
"Think that'll do it?"
Leon was already far away, sneering.
"If you want to eat it, try catching me."
— …!
The Hwasinjo's eyes rolled back.
FWOOOOOM—!
Flames exploded. Its form cut across the sky.
Leon laughed long and loud as he stepped into the Heavenly Escape Steps.
A hungry, enraged divine beast—and a madman.
The chase began.