Hiding Something Like That
The moment Leon's party stepped into the city.
Near Pribil.
A man in a pure white robe, crowned with a pair of rounded horns, wore a complicated expression. Belger, the demon, was turning over the report he had just received from his underlings.
The target.
The black-haired, red-eyed boy — Leon Crusif.
The boy was here. Now. Leading a force whose name was whispered with awe among humans: the Mukwol Squad.
Belger's nails scraped roughly across the armrest of his chair.
His target was right under his nose, yet he felt no joy. Only suspicion. Only wariness. The thought that Leon had seen through the plan and come hunting on his own would not leave him.
This was, after all, the individual the Great Devil Cryptos himself had ordered him to eliminate. No ordinary human.
Rain drummed against the silence, a steady, relentless fall.
Belger sat for a moment, remembering.
Roughly a month ago, he and his brothers had received a single directive. More precisely: a thought-image of a boy, and a one-line command to dispose of him.
Finding one person across the vast Empire with nothing but an appearance to go on should have been impossible. His brothers still managed it in a week. The academy uniform the boy wore had been the decisive clue.
Third son of the Crusif ducal house. Leon Crusif.
A noble of considerable rank — but that was no obstacle. Human hierarchies meant nothing to them. And orders were absolute.
Among the brothers, Belger stepped forward.
He had operated in the Empire long enough to know the truth: even for lowly humans, Elprime Academy was no soft target. His current underlings alone would never be enough. Yet to kill the boy, he would have to infiltrate the place. Leon Crusif was a student of Elprime; he spent nearly all his time within its walls.
He could have waited for an off-campus practical or the holiday break — but his forces were thin, and gathering reliable information on the academy's academic calendar had proven difficult. The underlings now known to the public as the Gonghyeol Group were poorly suited to delicate operations. Waiting for vacation would take far too long. Belger had no desire to test Cryptos's patience.
So: infiltration.
True to his demonic nature, he devised a bold solution. First he selected a city of suitable population near Elprime Academy. Then he set his underlings to work constructing a magic circle — a high-level formation Cryptos himself had taught him, capable of devouring the souls of thousands of humans in a single breath.
It would take time. But once the circle was complete, killing one human would be trivial. He could overturn the city itself, Elprime included.
Yes. If only the circle could be finished.
Belger drew a long line down his own cheek with a razor-sharp nail. Black blood welled; a sharp sting followed. The pain cleared his head.
Five sites left until completion.
Perhaps the target coming here of his own accord had even simplified things. Finish the circle, then kill him on the spot.
But attempt it unfinished?
No.
Belger shook his head. He knew how to look at a situation objectively. Caution and thoroughness were his strengths.
His current forces: a few hundred ordinary humans whose physical abilities had been slightly enhanced. And the thing he had bound in the forest. Nowhere near enough.
That one.
With the keen senses honed over years in the Demon Realm, Belger had felt it clearly — if only for an instant. A chilling killing intent and a vast power leaking all the way beyond the city walls. Among the humans accompanying the target, there was a true powerhouse.
If that one moved, his underlings would be swept away like insects. Had his own strength still been what it was in the Demon Realm, it might have been different. But long residence in the Middle Earth had drained his demonic energy; much of his power was gone. Even if he somehow won a fight, if the target simply fled, there would be nothing he could do.
So the circle had to open. He would pour everything he had into it, by any means necessary. This was also a golden chance to finish the mission in a single stroke.
Not tonight.
He needed time to prepare the thing.
Tomorrow night.
When the sun above the storm clouds had fully set, and the yin energy of the world was at its peak.
Then we strike.
Ten minutes before three in the morning.
Rain hammered down like a barrage of bullets. The knife-edged wind howled like soldiers' battle cries. Thunder rolled and cracked in the distance, sounding for all the world like artillery. It felt as though they had stepped onto a battlefield.
In that downpour, in a city of cramped houses packed so tightly they barely left room for proper alleys, Leon sat cross-legged on the balcony of a two-story house. His back was straight. A sword lay horizontally across his knees. His closed eyelids did not so much as tremble.
The balcony had no roof; rain drove in freely. Yet the black robe Leon wore was dry as if brand new. Water could not approach him. An invisible force pushed every droplet aside, turning it away.
Mana circulated through every circuit of his body. With total concentration, Leon extended his senses in all directions, reading the surrounding district as clearly as if it lay open before him. The moment anything suspicious stirred, he would be ready to move.
Three o'clock was nearly upon them — the hour when yin energy peaked. Leon sharpened his vigilance and focus still further.
Several minutes passed.
His eyes snapped open. Blood-red irises flashed. His head whipped to one side, gaze locking on a point far beyond Pribil's eastern wall.
"Aria."
"Yes."
Aria stood at his side, eyes calm and settled. Leon drew the communicator from his coat.
"—Little bro—"
"We're going."
Leon cut off Hera's voice mid-flow.
"—Hmm. Go on, then."
"—Have the enemies appeared? …Ah. I see. Fortune favor you."
"—What showed up? Which way?"
Riel and Fenril's voices followed in turn. Of the others, only Riel had sensed the presence at all.
Leon vaulted from the balcony, communicator to his lips. A brief briefing for the rest of them was the least he could do.
"Something big is coming through the eastern gate. We're going out to fight it — fill our positions yourselves."
Fighting here would reduce the city to rubble. The presence he felt was no ordinary threat. Only Leon and Aria's team were equipped to handle it. Hera could have stepped in, of course, but they were far closer.
Heavenly Spirit Steps carried Leon's form through the twisting alleys like a gale. Aria followed at nearly the same speed, blue mana coiling around her body.
As they raced toward the eastern gate, Leon spoke casually over his shoulder.
"First time fighting something like this, isn't it?"
"It is. I'm looking forward to it."
Aria's eyes sparkled. Every opponent the two of them had faced together had always been the same kind of person. Judging by the savage demonic energy rolling toward them now, this enemy would be something entirely different.
Before long they reached Pribil's low outer wall. Leon did not slow. Mana concentrated in his legs; his body launched upward. The wall was barely four meters high. He cleared it in a single bound without so much as touching the stone.
The view that opened was pure black. The sky hung under thick storm clouds dumping rain without end. Not a single thread of moonlight reached this dark, pre-dawn hour. Leon sharpened his vision with mana and swept the surroundings.
What he saw was a dense, gloomy forest — the eastern woods where an entire mercenary company had been wiped out — stretching to the horizon. Between the wall and the treeline, a short stretch of open ground filled the gap.
And onto that plain, something was stepping.
Every one of Leon's senses flared wide open of its own accord. His body had registered the threat and reacted automatically.
At the boundary where forest met open field, where the trees thinned, a smooth, jet-black pincer claw emerged. It was so massive that great trees looked like toothpicks beside it. A body just as colossal followed — long as a centipede, with legs beyond counting. Those countless legs were elongated like a spider's and flexible as an octopus's tentacles. The head was insectile: compound eyes claiming half the face, elongated horns like a stag beetle's jutting from the jaws, and where a mouth should have been, a cluster of white tentacles.
"Fucking disgusting."
"Revolting."
Leon and Aria each offered a single assessment, brows furrowed. The creature combined every physical trait humans instinctively abhorred.
"What the hell is that? Did a demonic beast like this even exist?"
"I've never seen one either…"
The demonic energy and the overall black form marked it as a demonic beast, at least. But if even Aria didn't recognize it, this was a new specimen humanity had yet to catalog.
The thing drove its nightmarish legs without pause, closing rapidly on Pribil. The sight was profoundly alien. Its bulk and length could easily coil around an entire house; its weight should have been crushing. Yet its movement was fluid as water, agile and smooth. The ground it crossed showed only lightly pressed grass — not a single scar. Even Leon's hyper-alert hearing caught no sound at all. A monster moving with the footwork of a martial artist at the peak of mastery.
The demonic energy it leaked was not the raw, violent kind common to other beasts. It felt subtle. Covert. Insidious.
"Shit. No wonder the mercenary company got wiped out — they were hiding something like that in the forest."
This was a finished hunter. A predator specialized in stealth and ambush. Leon could picture it clearly: the thing ranging through the woods, devouring humans at will.
It had already covered half the plain when a bolt of lightning slammed into the earth. For an instant the world turned pure white.
In that flash, the creature's head lifted slightly. Its compound eyes registered the two humans standing motionless atop the stone wall. The twin horns on its jaws swayed left and right — as if it were salivating. Or sneering. Delighted that its prey had come out to meet it instead of running.
"Haha."
Leon let out a hollow laugh. That insect bastard? The sheer gall of it left him speechless. Then the fury arrived — a white-hot rage that scorched his brain in a single breath.
"Hahahahaha—!"
He threw his head back and roared with laughter. Then, like a manic-depressive flipping a switch, his face went stone-hard.
Thunder crashed a beat late, shaking the heavens.
"Aria."
His voice was a low, predatory growl.
"Yes, Master."
Blue current wound around Aria's hands like living vines.
They needed no further words.
Both figures leapt from the wall, cutting through the rain-lashed dawn.