8. Curse Plague (12)
8. Curse Plague (12)
Any traveler arriving in Dvalchev today might have wondered if it was Christmas.
Hymns echoed through every street, and not a single house lacked a red lantern hanging by its door.
The line of villagers queued in front of the cathedral even called to mind the sight of people waiting their turn for Christmas Day alms at church.
Of course, it wasn't actually Christmas.
Nor were the townspeople using Kirkeus's Day to stage a fake holiday.
It was late July — neither December nor April first, but the height of the farming season when the countryside was busiest.
For the people of Dvalchev, though, this day held more joy than Christmas itself.
The songs they now sang at the top of their lungs were hymns of praise to the Lord. Thanks to the Saint and Saintess He had sent them, they had been delivered from the grip of the disease.
The mood was such that if next year they declared today Saint Wonderstein's Day or renamed the village Valentinov in her honor, no one would be the least bit surprised.
People fetched lanterns meant to stay tucked in the corners of their storerooms until December and lit them. Red lotuses glowed across the dark streets.
Neighbors treated each other to liquor and food as though competing to see who could fling their larder doors open widest. The boars and hens that had long reigned over their livestock were hastily slaughtered, and even the jars of spirits buried for daughters' weddings were dug up.
A girl who had turned nine this year watched her father enthusiastically shovel the earth and grumbled.
Her father was unearthing the liquor he'd interred on the day she was born. Something about how anything buried in cursed ground had to be drunk up quickly to dispose of it?
If it's buried in cursed ground, then don't drink it. Throw it away.
She knew her father was making excuses.
From her earliest memories, not a day had passed without him smacking his lips and musing aloud about how delicious that buried liquor must have grown. Curse Plague or not, sooner or later he would have found a pretext — celebrating a bumper harvest, warding off a disastrous one — and dug it up regardless.
"Hehehe, I can smell the fragrance already, right out of the jar."
When her father lifted the tightly sealed jar and broke into a broad, silly grin, the girl couldn't stay angry; a snort of laughter slipped out.
"Tch. Is it really that good?"
"What do you mean, is it good? How delicious the liquor... ah, no, that's not what I... I mean it's good that we've escaped the dangerous disease. Absolutely. Who on earth would enjoy cursed liquor!"
At her father's clowning, the girl burst into giggles.
"Fine. But if you drink it now, what'll we do when I get married?"
"Ahem. For that, I'll gather even better ingredients and brew a fresh batch."
"Really?"
"Of course. I'll taste this one today and use what I learn to make an even finer brew."
"Hmph. The ingredients had better be at least twice as expensive, got it?"
She chose to believe her father.
When it came to liquor, the man had no equal in the village.
As he was carefully lifting the jar from the earth, the kitchen door opened and a young woman stepped out. Her turn for treatment had not yet come, so a grotesque wad of bulging flesh still clung to her back and waist.
Hideous as the sight was, the girl faced her with a sunny smile.
The woman was her mother.
In one hand she clutched a fistful of meat. She had gone next door after hearing they were roasting a pig and was supposed to bring back a share.
There was nothing strange about carrying meat.
But the fact that fresh crimson blood was dripping from it... how to put it.
"Mu... must eat..."
Her mother didn't seem right.
She stared vacantly at her husband's back, as though her soul had slipped somewhere far away. She didn't even spare a glance for her beloved daughter.
"Mom?"
The moment the girl called out to her, a scream rang from next door.
"Aaaah! Stop!"
It was the voice of the older girl next door, her frequent playmate.
Her father's head snapped up, startled — and her mother lunged.
The woman's mouth gaped wide.
Inside, blade-like teeth that no longer seemed human flashed.
Her jaw kept stretching as though made of rubber.
Lower and lower it stretched, until the tip of her chin touched her chest.
As the girl stood frozen, mouth slack with shock at the surreal spectacle, the woman threw herself at her husband like lightning.
That enormous mouth tore into his neck and shoulder.
Crunch.
"Aaaaaagh!"
Blood geysered up.
The face that just moments ago had been beaming happily over the liquor jar twisted with shock — not only from physical agony, but also from the sheer impossibility of what was unfolding before his eyes.
His own wife was attacking him!
What came next was even more horrifying.
With a grinding, crunching chomp, she chewed and swallowed the bone and flesh she had bitten from her husband.
"Mu... must eat... eat and then..."
The woman's eyes rolled frantically as she repeated the same phrase.
The Devolut reshaped their hosts' bodies to suit their purpose.
To better chew through biological matter, they hardened and sharpened the host's teeth. To swallow larger quantities at once, they multiplied the elasticity of the jaw joint. And to commandeer the body toward their ends, they tore through the brain cells and seized control.
This adaptive modification ability — labeled the "Evolution Laboratory" inside Wonderstein's Status Window — was a power embedded in the very instincts of the Devolut.
The purpose of the Devolut born from Wonderstein's blood was to consume biological matter and multiply themselves.
Yet they were not mere beasts that repeated only attack and predation.
When they encountered a human already bearing deformed body parts, they made contact and transmitted a "command" to the Devolut within that human's body.
'Eat.'
The command was akin to a shepherd guiding a flock.
Devolut that had been rampaging aimlessly, once given the order to 'eat,' began to move with direction and purpose on their own.
The girl stood rooted to the spot, trembling uncontrollably.
Mom attacked Dad.
That's not Mom.
Monster. Ghost. Demon.
Dad is bleeding.
Is Dad dying?
And Mom?
What finally hauled her consciousness back above water was her father's voice. He was barely managing to hold back his wife as she tried to gnaw on him again, and he screamed at his daughter.
"R-run! Run away!"
"B-but..."
She couldn't just leave her injured father behind.
Almost without thinking, she took a step toward him. Her father glared at her and roared.
"I said run!"
The girl didn't spin around and bolt out of the house because she was cold-hearted or decisive.
In the grip of extreme confusion, her body simply reacted on its own to her father's desperate cry.
She burst into the yard and glanced back.
Her father had summoned his last reserves of strength, seized the axe beside the woodpile, and buried it in her mother's leg. Her mother, in turn, had chewed away half her father's skull with those razor teeth.
The girl roughly shoved down the thing that threatened to surge up from inside her.
"Ahp, uh, p, p, pa, ap..."
Her eyes went unfocused like a madwoman's; tears, snot, and saliva spilled freely from her eyes, nose, and mouth.
The hymns that had filled the streets just minutes before no longer reached her ears.
Screams and shouts echoed from the next house, the house across the way, the street opposite.
Shadows that looked decidedly inhuman scurried through every alley.
A nauseating stench of blood and entrails ruled the streets.
None of it felt real.
She felt like she was walking through a nightmare.
"Mu... must eat... my... daughter..."
A voice she knew well — and now wished more than anything never to hear again — called out. Mid-stride, the girl looked back.
Her mother, the axe still buried in one leg, was crawling after her on both arms. Human arms make poor tools for walking, so the Devolut had twisted several joints and reconfigured them to work more like a four-legged beast's.
"Daugh... keeheheheek!"
Blood and scraps of meat drooled from her mouth, her tongue lolled out, and she pulled herself forward with both arms — the woman was no longer anything human.
The girl ran in blind panic.
Her head could not form a single coherent thought.
Only that she had to run.
"Damned monsters!"
"How the hell did it come to this?"
"It's a curse. A real curse!"
"Any survivors, this way!"
As she dashed ahead, an armored soldier came into view, surrounded by civilians who had grabbed farm tools and formed a defensive line. Around them lay the spear-gored, scythe-slashed, and plow-battered corpses of monsters.
The group flinched for an instant at the sight of the girl charging toward them in a daze, but recognizing her as nothing more than a terrified child, they quickly pulled her inside their ranks.
"What's this? You're the kid from the street over, aren't you. Are you alone?"
"Where are your parents?"
"Ov... over there..."
Where she pointed, her mother came crawling on both arms, and in the same direction, more infected swarmed toward them.
"Kihihit... mu... must eat!"
"Eat..."
"Krweggakh!"
The soldier assessed their numbers, clenched his teeth, and shouted, gripping his spear tight.
"Handle them the same as before! Do not break formation! These things can't muster more than ordinary human strength at bes—"
He never finished the sentence.
Thwack.
Something shot out from the arm of the infected woman at the very front, flew several meters in an instant, plowed through his forehead, and burst out the back of his skull.
Fragments of his brain sprayed behind his crushed cranium as viscous fluid leaked out.
"Wh-what...?"
Thud.
His body collapsed.
"What the hell?!"
"M-monster! It's a different kind of monster!"
"Run!"
Terrified, the crowd instantly lost its will to fight and fled.
The adaptive evolution of the Devolut was shockingly swift.
Seeing the infected cut down from a distance by people wielding weapons, they had instantly devised a countermeasure.
What had shot from the man's arm was something like a whip crudely braided from muscle fibers. Attached to its tip was a blade fashioned from bone — a simplified imitation of the "Mantula's Blade," one of Wonderstein's signature techniques.
The infected's goal was harvesting biological matter.
They didn't bother overexerting themselves to chase people down; instead, each grabbed a single living human and focused on feeding.
Watching their neighbors devoured, the survivors fled with everything they had.
The woman crawling on both arms, however, had eyes for only one person amid the scattering, falling bodies: her daughter.
"Dau... daugh... must... eat..."
In a cruelly ironic twist, the desperate resistance still being waged inside the woman's brain — the part of it that still recognized her daughter as someone precious — had only made the girl more endangered.
The woman pursued her daughter on both arms. However much slower crawling was compared to running, her prey was a nine-year-old child.
Step by step, the distance shrank. Soon she was right on the girl's heels. They rounded a corner and—
Whisk.
A dead end.
A solid stone wall blocked the way ahead.
The woman rolled her eyeballs wildly and shook her head. Strange. The quarry had definitely fled this way.
At that moment, a shadow sprang from behind a building on the far side and darted like a flash down the opposite street. The silhouette was unmistakably her daughter's.
"Kweeeeaaak!"
Mouth agape, the woman let out an eerie shriek and scrambled after it. She had to eat. Her daughter.
Not long after the woman had vanished, the stone wall that had barred the way shimmered and melted away.
Behind it, a young girl sat on the ground, trembling in a pool of her own urine, while Maya stood, coolly watching the direction the monster had gone.