Chapter 27
“Epsilon. Don’t use the Demon King’s grace so carelessly.”
“Eeeeh~ what’s the big deal? As long as you offer a sacrifice at the altar, He’ll give it to you anytime, won’t He? We’ve piled up way too much over the past few years, toooo. This is exactly when we should use it, right?”
As the two clowns, Zeta and Epsilon, talked, three puppets fell onto the wasteland where they stood.
“Myu. You’re here.”
“Nyu. We’re here.”
“...Ow.”
Three villains in black raincoat-like cloaks.
Like the two clowns, they wore masks with different expressions.
“My, my. Phi, are you hurt?”
“I’m missing an arm. It hurts.”
At Epsilon’s startled question, Phi waved his right arm up and down, the limb gone below the elbow.
“Did Shin Hyun-ah do that?”
“Unlike Kim Su-hyun, it looks like she can actually grow.”
“Myu dodged it well. Phi is stupid.”
“Nyu didn’t get hit either. Phi’s an idiot.”
The twin villains laughed as they hopped in circles around Phi, teasing him mercilessly.
Phi’s shoulders slumped, and Epsilon stepped closer to comfort him.
“It’s okay, it’s okay. When we get back, let’s have Alpha fix it.”
“...Okay.”
Zeta watched his companions for a moment, then turned his head.
Far off in the distance, the city they had left behind was shining brighter than usual.
“So Delta really is dead.”
Delta’s mission had been to bring back a girl while they stirred up chaos in the city.
He had judged there would be no direct fight, so he had thought it was a relatively easy assignment.
He had never imagined they would come back without him...
“Red Riding Hood must have set up some kind of trap.”
“It’s a result we should have expected. That’s why we sent Delta.”
He was only a 10th-circle mage, but his trait made him formidable.
Once someone fell into Delta’s Shadow, escape was nearly impossible no matter what method they used.
To beat him, you had to understand his trait in advance and avoid being bound by the Shadow from the start.
And yet Delta had died.
Not even at the hands of Red Riding Hood herself, the target they were trying to recruit, but because of one safeguard she had put in place.
“We underestimated her, that’s all.”
“Agreed. We completely misjudged the level of power a returnee in the seven-hundreds could wield.”
“I feel bad for Delta.”
“His death gave us a clearer measure of Red Riding Hood’s strength. It was not a wasted sacrifice.”
“Yes. It was not a wasted sacrifice.”
The two clowns who had been talking turned their heads at the same time.
A masked man in a red tailcoat and top hat emerged from the deep darkness.
“Gamma. You’re here.”
“Gamma. You’re here.”
“...Ow.”
When the three villains in raincoats greeted him, Gamma gave them a light wave and faced the two clowns.
“Welcome, Gamma. You’re alone?”
“So recruitment failed, then.”
“Yes. She was killed right after mentioning the matter of the Door. We only lost a valuable host.”
“And the part about control?”
“Of course we brought it up. Even so, she killed him.”
“Hmm. Was the approach wrong? Through the Eraser’s eyes, she definitely looked like she knew about the Door and regretted something.”
At Zeta’s muttered words, Gamma shrugged.
“Who knows? We possessed the Eraser for too short a time. We didn’t see the whole process, so there’s a high chance we misread things. Even earlier, when she killed my host, she looked at him as if he were utterly beneath her.”
“...Then at the very least, she knows more about the Door than we do.”
“Were we too hasty?”
When Epsilon cut in, Gamma shook his head.
“No. Right now is actually a good time to approach her, since Red Riding Hood has taken up residence in Daejeon City, which is relatively weakly defended compared to Seoul.”
“Shin Hyun-ah might deploy more puppets because of this.”
“Or maybe she’ll move in person?”
Gamma denied the two clowns’ guesses.
“Shin Hyun-ah won’t have that kind of bandwidth. She’s still focused on developing North Korea after losing the territory below.”
North Korea had already been ruined long ago when monsters began appearing on Earth.
At present, a few high-priority figures, including Shin Hyun-ah, were all focused on developing that territory.
“For now, let’s just watch how things play out. Hold off on touching Red Riding Hood and her child for the time being.”
“Persuasion. Threats. Both failed, so all that’s left is negotiation?”
“Maybe we should just show off our Demon King’s greatness? We could bring her to the altar, couldn’t we?”
“Maybe.”
Gamma held his tongue.
It had been a meeting through a host, but when he faced Red Riding Hood, what he felt was... honestly closer to awe.
He didn’t know why. A feeling with no reason whispered for him to bow his head.
If the one standing there had been her true self instead of a host, he might even have knelt and sworn to serve her.
Yes, it was almost like...
...the way I felt when I once beheld that person’s countenance.
The blue, four-pupiled eyes behind the mask trembled softly.
A strange emotion he couldn’t name, neither joy nor fear, brushed past him.
Then Gamma closed his eyes and opened them again before turning away.
“Let’s go back. Our work starts now.”
“What about Red Riding Hood?”
“Beta is still in the city, so it’s fine.”
“Hmm. I don’t trust Beta. That guy causes trouble all the time.”
“Since his own life is on the line, he won’t make a reckless move and get caught.”
One by one, the villains vanished into the darkness.
“Is that so? Doesn’t seem like it to me.”
With Epsilon the last to go, tilting his head and staring back toward the city with a question mark above him, all the villains disappeared without a trace.
By the time I got back late after checking a few things, the city was a mess.
And my newly bought house was even more of a mess.
“Hey, Bro.”
“Goreuk. The master, I see.”
My familiar lowered his greatsword while his expensive equipment remained deployed.
What the hell was this idiot saying like it was perfectly normal?
“Cut the crap, you bastard. Why is this place in this condition?”
The house had been smashed to pieces in a very thorough way.
There was no ceiling, no walls, and the garden and yard had both been overturned.
The only thing that was still more or less intact was the living room, where my familiar stood.
“Huh? Did you use a scroll?”
I frowned at the unpleasant smell of grass seeping into my nose, and my familiar answered as if confirming it.
“I did.”
Then he stepped aside.
“Seo-ah!?”
I saw Lee Seo-ah lying unconscious on the sofa behind him.
I rushed over in one stride, tearing through the leaves fluttering around like flies, and pulled Lee Seo-ah into my arms to check her over.
Fortunately, she didn’t seem to be badly hurt. She had only fainted for a moment.
“There was an unidentified enemy attack.”
“What the hell? Fuck. Which bastard was it?”
When I growled low, my familiar pointed to a corner of the living room.
Sure enough, there was a corpse left with only the upper half of its body remaining.
“It’s already dead.”
“Damn it. At least control your force properly.”
“Goreuk. Of course I controlled my force. It wasn’t like I was trying to kill the master, and with Lee Seo-ah here, there was no way I’d go all out like last time.”
“Then why did it die?”
“It was weaker than expected. And the rule is that enemies don’t get to live.”
“Man, you inflexible bastard.”
I looked at him with annoyance, but he wasn’t wrong.
With no guarantee that the attackers were only this one, killing him whenever we could was the right call.
That was how we’d always done it in war.
“But why are you so late, master?”
“Some crazy bastard came by and caused a scene.”
“What kind of scene?”
“He said he could control the Door and told me to join some alliance or whatever.”
“Goreuk. Nonsense.”
You couldn’t call it “control” just because you opened and closed the Door by summoning it from the abyss.
From the beginning, it was not something that could be controlled.
Really, I had even asked, just in case, what lay beyond the Door, and would you look at that.
He really was one of those clueless bastards.
So I just killed him, but then another problem surfaced.
When the body swallowed by blood changed and I spat it back out, its appearance had altered.
While I was clicking my tongue at how everybody and their mother was using clones these days, something familiar struck me, so I split its head open.
“Bro. What does this look like to you?”
When I showed him what I’d taken from inside the head, my familiar, who had been removing his gear, widened his yellow eyes.
“Master. Where did you get this?”
“It popped out after I killed the bastard I mentioned earlier.”
A thumb-sized dark violet larva, dead on my palm.
My familiar poked at it a few times, then adopted a grave expression.
“Goreuk. That’s definite. It’s the Gu Poison Insect of the 7th Legion Commander.”
“Right? Considering the guy I killed also changed shape, it looked like a host to me.”
“Why would this be on Earth? Didn’t the 7th Legion Commander die in the war?”
“Don’t ask me, asshole. I don’t know either.”
The 7th Legion Commander of the Demon King’s Army. That insect-loving bastard had long ago fallen into a trap like I once did and been beaten to death by a mob.
What was it, four saints plus the Hero’s party? Something like that.
I’d gone down because I was stupid, sure, but that bastard had been a sly one who schemed from the shadows.
He’d stuck his head out for no reason, crawled outside the Demon King’s Army’s camp, and been cut down in his prime.
As always, the bastards who think they’re brilliant die young.
The problem, in any case, was why a parasitic insect that the already-dead 7th Legion Commander liked to use was showing up on Earth.
There was one more thing bothering me.
“Hey. There are monsters outside. What are those?”
“Gobra doesn’t know. Gobra stood guard here.”
The quiet city night was burning loudly now, screaming.
Human shrieks. Monsters’ roars. Deafening explosions.
The whole mess of noises ringing in my sensitive ears made me frown.
I didn’t fully understand what was going on, but I might as well deal with the annoying part first.
“Domain Release.”
— Bloodline Frontier Extreme Branch Blood Sea Chronicle.
Rumbling—
Fwoooosh!!
A torrent of blood, blasted out from my back, shot into the sky and spread across the entire city.
As long as I killed the rampaging monsters, the humans would handle the rest. Then things would quiet down.
“Master. Are you still saying that embarrassingly cheesy line?”
“Shut up. Do you think it’s easy to make the same image every single time? You need a startup phrase, you bastard.”
“The eccentric True Ancestor doesn’t do that, does he?”
“That’s because Master is perfect. I’m stupid, so this is the best I can do when I use Jusu.”
“Goreuk. Why not study a little, like your master said?”
“If studying could fix this brain, I’d have done it ages ago, you idiot. Quit picking fights and grab the corpse in the corner and follow me.”
My familiar slung the upper-half-only corpse he had killed over his shoulder.
“Goreuk. Where are we going?”
“To the sucker I know. We can’t just keep staying here with the house in this condition.”
There was no way I could send Lee Seo-ah back to the orphanage either.
For now, I planned to keep her by my side until I judged the situation safe, so I needed somewhere to stay for the time being.
It was just as we were leaving the wrecked house behind that...
“Huh?”
“What is it?”
As I carried Lee Seo-ah and moved forward, I suddenly sensed something strange in the Jusu I had unleashed.
I was sweeping away the monsters rampaging inside the city.
“Why the hell aren’t these bastards dropping Mana Cores?”
Even after I killed the monsters, no Mana Cores came out. Naturally, no Mana Stones either.
Just... black ash, disappearing into nothing?
“Uh, fuck?”
Something was wrong.