Chapter 34
“Aaaagh!”
“Help me!”
“Stop! Stop iiiit!”
“Kyaaah!”
I clapped my hands over my ears in the depths of that unfathomable darkness.
The pain and screams that never let up kept gnawing at me, one after another.
I could barely breathe under the weight of emotions tangled together out of hatred and grief.
Click.
The sound of a cell door opening.
“Get in!”
“Aagh!”
There was another person in the cage now.
I had no idea how much time had passed since they locked me in here.
I had only caught fragments before they threw me into this cold cage, things like first experiment and successful specimen.
After the agony of having my whole body torn apart, people were brought into this place, then made to disappear when the time came.
When I thought I would be next, terror shook me so hard I curled in on myself and trembled.
I don’t want to hurt anymore. Please, save me. Mom. Dad.
I was thirty years old and desperately calling for my parents.
I wasn’t ashamed at all. I wanted to see them that badly.
“Hey, are you all right?”
“Eep?!”
Someone. Someone came over and touched me.
The thin, delicate voice that escaped my throat sounded so unlike my own that I screamed in shock.
“Ah, sorry. Did I scare you?”
“W-who are you?”
“Yuria. I’m Yuria. And you?”
“...”
Name? Cynthia.
No. No, that wasn’t my name.
What was it? My name. I couldn’t remember my real name. I didn’t know.
“Hey, are you okay?”
I wasn’t okay. How could I be okay?
“I wanted to ask you for a few days now, but why are you shaking so badly?”
“I-it’s the screams.”
“Screams? I don’t hear anything.”
You don’t hear them? No way.
The awful sounds are still ringing in my ears right now.
You can’t hear this? Don’t tell me I’m hallucinating? No, impossible. Sounds this real can’t be hallucinations.
“Anyway, you’re the only one my age here. Want to talk to me? The others are way too quiet. I’m bored.”
“Y-you’re not scared?”
“Nope. I was terrified before I got kidnapped, but once I blacked out and woke up, I felt totally clear-headed. For some reason my body feels lighter too. Don’t you?”
I didn’t know.
I kept losing consciousness and waking up because my head hurt like it was about to split open.
All there was now was pain. It hurt so much.
“Looks like you’ve had it rough.”
“It hurts. It hurts so much.”
As I crouched there, curled into myself, a thick human scent suddenly drifted close with a trace of warmth.
“I’ll hold you tight. Then it won’t hurt as much. That’s what my mom used to do.”
“...”
For the first time since I’d lost the ability to see, unfamiliar kindness washed over me, and my tears burst out all at once.
Without even realizing it, I leaned into that warmth. I clung to it.
Don’t leave me.
I don’t want to lose this.
But my wish came to a hollow end.
“Specimen 81. Come out.”
After several days, Yuria, whom I had finally grown close to, was dragged away.
I threw myself at her desperately, trying to keep her from going, but a brutal kick sent me sprawling across the floor.
“No. No. No. Don’t go. Yuria, don’t go.”
I crawled along the floor, chasing after that human scent. I grabbed the iron bars blocking the way and pleaded through tears.
“It’s okay. I’ll be back soon.”
The brave voice growing farther away trembled faintly.
Fear and dread spilled from it so thickly that my heart dropped.
A moment later.
―――!!!
A familiar voice was stained by a horrifying scream.
It tore at my ears as she shouted that it hurt, that it should stop.
Then, just as suddenly, I couldn’t hear anything at all.
“Ah. Aaah.”
I collapsed face-first, clutching the iron bars.
A terrible cold swept through me, and I shuddered like a leaf in winter.
“Specimen 11. Come out.”
I had no idea how long I stayed like that.
I had been dazed like an idiot, and before I knew it, I was laid out on a cold floor.
“This specimen has great promise.”
“It has adapted to the body that borders on the immortality of a true vampire.”
“It’ll make a good test bed for all the data we’ve gathered so far.”
The people around me were noisy.
It felt like thunder crashing in from every direction, and I flinched again and again.
“We’ll start with that one first.”
“With what?”
“Transplant the ‘king’s mind’ that specimen 81 adapted.”
“If you put two in one body, they’ll reject each other.”
“Only if you transplant both from the beginning. What if we bring in a body that has already adapted?”
“I see. The odds are much higher.”
“Start with the head.”
Noisy. Noisy. Noisy.
I feel like I’m going insane. Please, stop.
Is this a nightmare? Yes, it must be a dream.
There’s no way something this sick could be real.
“Huh?”
At that moment, a familiar human scent drifted closer.
Yuria. It was definitely Yuria’s scent.
Ah. Right. It was a dream after all.
When I woke up, I’d be in her arms as always—
Thud.
-Thirty years adrift in another world. Inside the cage where warmth once existed. Dreaming of forgotten despair-
Domain Liberation.
Bloodline Frontier Extreme Blood Sea Record.
Gurgling, the spilled blood surged outward through the windows and the front door.
The cloud of blood insects staining the clear sky red spread across the city from this house and began searching for a single human.
=I’m running a little late. Keep a close eye on Seo-ah.=
I had just sent a message through the device I bought for my familiar when Kim Su-hyun called.
“What?”
/Kim Su-hyun/ - That’s what I’d like to ask you. What on earth is going on this early in the morning?
“My daughter’s friend disappeared. I’m only looking for her, so mind your own business.”
Since we were at least acquainted, I figured that was enough to tell him.
I ignored Kim Su-hyun’s urgent reply and ended the call at once.
I tossed the device into my inventory and tipped my head back.
The cold corpse at my feet was Shin So-ra.
We had only spoken yesterday, but even so, I had thought she was not the worst kind of person.
It felt foul to see the woman who always addressed me so respectfully as Seo-ah’s mother lying dead like this.
The smell of blood in the house all came from this corpse.
Were Ma Yu-ri and her siblings who had disappeared still alive?
At the very least, Ma Yu-ri had to be safe. She belonged to Lee Seo-ah.
She would be terribly sad if she died. I didn’t want to see that expression on her face again.
“Found it. The afterimage.”
I stood still for a while, focusing on Jusu, then lifted my head.
I remembered Ma Yu-ri’s scent.
I thought I’d find her quickly since her appearance was so distinctive, but it took a little time.
The reason was that Ma Yu-ri wasn’t in the city.
The faint trail of scent led outside the Wall.
The blood insects spread beyond the city and followed that scent.
“What the hell. It cut off?”
The lingering trace I’d been tracking vanished all at once at one point.
Clap.
I clapped my hands and swapped places with the blood insects at that spot.
The scene of death hanging in the house warped, and my view flipped in an instant.
A barren wasteland greeted me with dry wind.
“You’ve come a long way.”
When I glanced back, the towering Wall of Daejeon City stood in the distance.
I spun around and surveyed my surroundings.
I naturally unfolded my mana field.
There was no sign of life. No monsters either. Not in the sky, not under the ground. Just an empty plain.
But I had found it.
The faint distortion of mana.
“So they used warp magic.”
They had tried to erase it, but traces always remained.
Warp, the twelfth-circle spatial spell that could move across multiple coordinates at once.
I didn’t know whether it had been a high-ranking mage or a magic scroll, but I had dealt with this kind of mana residue more than once before.
Back in the middle and late stages of the war, it had been a favorite trick of those elven women who ran guerrilla raids to protect the World Tree.
Thanks to that, I was used to reading coordinates and tracing them backward.
Even if I couldn’t get the exact location, I could still move to somewhere nearby.
The problem was that unlike back then, I didn’t have Lime here to do the magic for me.
“Let’s pay to win.”
I opened the shop and bought several spatial-movement magic scrolls.
The Karma Points I’d let sit idle from neglecting my hunting had gone down.
It stung, but money was meant to be spent.
I wrote down the coordinates I’d figured out, then tore the scroll with a rip.
Immediately afterward, a powerful flow of mana surged, and my vision shifted once more.
“Ah?”
I went down with a ridiculous splat.
My body had been split in two. Blinking with the one eye I had left, I spent a split second wondering what the hell had happened.
I restored my body at once and stood up to look around, and that was when I saw the half of me stuck in the wall.
Right. The coordinates were fucked.
Come to think of it, Lime had looked like this too whenever she used magic.
Generally speaking, spatial movement with unstable coordinates was suicide.
Of course, that didn’t apply to me or Lime, so I’d completely forgotten about it.
So where the hell is this?
It was dark all around. Was I underground?
The air nearby sat thick and sticky.
Hm?
I tried to unfold my mana field, but there was a problem.
I raised a hand and tried to move my mana.
It’s frozen.
The mana wouldn’t move.
Just like the special force in the room where Kim Su-hyun had once stayed, something with unusual properties was freezing my mana in place.
I clicked my tongue lightly and looked around, opening my senses wide.
Rat. Insect. Filth and the stench of nauseating stagnant water. Monsters and beasts. Rotten blood and meat.
And human voices.
Front. Back. Left. Right. Up. Down. Artificial presences were felt from every direction.
Fortunately, it looked like I hadn’t come to the wrong place.
“Then first of all,”
I might as well kill exactly half of them.
Gurgle-gurgle.
An enormous amount of blood burst from my whole body and took shape as though it had a will of its own.
Through the gaps in the broken walls. Through drainpipe holes. Through anything that connected to the outside, it squeezed and crawled its way in.
It seemed they had frozen the mana in the surrounding area as some kind of security measure, but that meant nothing to me.
For me, mana was no more than one sense among many. My real weapon had always been Jusu.
I made reality out of imagination drawn in blood. I didn’t need mana for that.
Soon, all manner of screams began to ring out.
Those fighting back. Those fleeing. Those hiding themselves away.
There were quite a lot of humans here. Naturally, their reactions came in all kinds of forms.
I widened the area by killing them one by one.
Then, at some point, I paused.
“Ma Yu-ri?”
I found Ma Yu-ri’s scent again after it had been cut off.
After clapping and moving to the place, all sorts of chaotic signals slammed into my brain.
Frowning, I looked around.
Countless lights and equipment that looked like operating tables were scattered all over the place, and on them lay grotesque things, dead as doornails.
Stepping over the remains of humans who had burst apart after touching the blood, I approached a nearby operating table and examined it.
Then I frowned slightly.
“These bastards. They were at it again.”
Overall, they had human shapes, but the bodies making them up were not human.
Their skin had discolored too, and one arm was bizarrely huge while both legs resembled those of birds.
They had taken the bodies of monsters and beasts and grafted them together.
“They’re making chimeras?”
The unnatural life form in front of me was a chimera.
Ah, shit. That gives me PTSD.
I’d been stitched together with all sorts of things once myself, so I knew exactly how fucked up this was.
I remembered the disgusting experiment record that said chimera conversion had been scrapped not long after because of the severe rejection reaction and the body’s tendency to recover too quickly.
I’d begged my master to let me see it, and I’d been furious with myself afterward for ever learning about it at all.
“Wait. Don’t tell me?”
A bad thought flashed through my mind, and I spun around in a hurry.
Instead of killing the remaining humans, I focused every bit of my attention on the source of that scent.
Thanks to that, I found it before long.
Right. I found it, but...
“Ha, fuck.”
Cages of iron bars holding beasts were lined up endlessly on both sides of a path.
Standing at one of them, I looked down into the cage.
“Ma Yu-ri.”
I found Ma Yu-ri at last.
I supposed I should be glad she was still alive, but... this?
“...Ah... ma...?”
Her speech was badly slurred. Her unfocused eyes, stripped of all light, recognized me, but not clearly enough to tell who I was.
On her head, two horns like a dragon’s jutted from a place no human should have them, and at the joints blood bubbled violently as yellow pus oozed out.
Both of her arms were inhuman, blue scales growing over them from the shoulders down like a lizard’s.
Near the spot where she sat, a thick reptilian tail hung limply, and her left leg had been torn off and crudely stitched back on.
“This is insane.”
It had only been one day. No, half a day at most.
It was absurd that the girl who had been laughing so brightly just yesterday had ended up like this.
I tore open the iron bars and pulled Ma Yu-ri out from inside.
Still dazed, she leaned against my chest.
Blood gushed from her nonhuman limbs and soaked the floor.
Her body, with not a single thread of clothing on it, trembled all over.
Even so, she didn’t seem to feel any pain, staring only at my face the whole time.
Had they numbed her pain so she wouldn’t go into shock during the experiment?
And seeing her left here in this state, it looked like she hadn’t reached whatever standard they wanted.
In other words, a failed specimen.
The same fate as the people who had died beside me long ago.
“Huh?”
There was something else inside the cage.
I had been so focused on Ma Yu-ri that I noticed it only belatedly.
So I pulled it out first.
“...”
It was a dead crow-like beast with a human head.
That head looked familiar.
“Wa... aaah...?”
When I pulled out the body of the crow-human chimera, Ma Yu-ri reacted weakly.
Even after becoming this wreck, did she still recognize her little brother?
She didn’t seem like it, but she had a very strong will.
But if I left her like this, Ma Yu-ri would be dead soon enough.
It looked like they’d transplanted a lizard man into her, and the rejection was severe.
Her horns and arms were bad enough, and the tail was leaking rotten blood too.
Tch. No helping it.
I had no knowledge of alchemy or bioengineering.
So I’d have to patch this together the same dirty way I’d made Lime in the past.
Gurgle.
I sprayed out my blood and wrapped Ma Yu-ri in it.
Then I forced it into her body and used Jusu to bind and hold together the points of rejection.
Good. That should at least be enough for emergency treatment.
Swish.
“Hm?”
As I checked her condition from one angle to another, two scaled hands suddenly looped around my throat.
“Ma Yu-ri?”
Had the suppressed rejection just returned a fragment of her lost will for a moment?
As I looked into Ma Yu-ri’s eyes and examined her for a brief moment,
“Heh. Got you.”
my vision went black.
Thump.
Ma Yu-ri fell to the floor like a doll with its strings cut.
Without so much as glancing her way, Cynthia turned around.
Slowly lifting the head she had bowed, she broke into a wildly twisted smile and began laughing loudly.
“Kahahaha!”
She laughed for a long while, clutching her stomach as if she was dying of amusement, and Beta—no, Cynthia—shook her shoulders while bursting with delight.
“Ahhh. So level 700 isn’t anything special after all. Huh? You all made such a fuss over something this easy? Heh heh, idiots.”
Beta remembered the Union’s advice to keep quiet for a while and crooked one corner of Cynthia’s mouth into a sly grin.
Truthfully, when Cynthia had reached this place, her heart had been pounding.
She hadn’t left any clues behind, and yet somehow she’d still been tracked down. Watching her come closer while turning every human in sight, researchers and all, into bloody chunks had been pure horror movie material.
But then an opening had come.
Wasn’t there a saying that if you walked into a tiger’s den, you could still survive as long as you kept your head?
She never would have expected him to come looking after a subject affected by Possession.
“Thanks to that, it was unbelievably easy.”
Beta possessed two traits: Hypnosis and Possession.
Possession required brief eye contact with a sentient being, but once that condition was met, she could steal anyone’s body.
On top of that, while in that state she could also use Hypnosis, which made changing bodies a breeze.
Even after changing bodies, if a body she had once Possessed remained within a certain radius of her true self, she could steal that body again.
Beta had used the synergy between those two traits to kidnap countless humans over the years.
The test subject Cynthia had intended to take back was one of them.
While the husband, who had accidentally awakened mana, was out beyond the Wall for a long period pretending to be a hunter, Beta had approached the wife and placed her under Hypnosis.
She had been working like that in many households for a long time.
She had been told to keep herself in check while left alone in the city, but Beta was never going to sit still.
Anyway, catching him had been close to impossible.
The combination of Hypnosis and Possession made it possible.
Of course, she had almost blown it by getting arrogant, but look at this now!
She had stolen the body of someone in the level-700 range. She had won.
“I really am amazing!”
Beta spread her arms wide in Cynthia’s body and basked in the joy of the moment before starting to walk.
She was already trembling in anticipation at the thought of telling everyone about this incredible achievement as soon as possible.
Plop.
“Huh?”
Beta tilted her head.
No, it wasn’t her head that tilted, but her whole body leaning to the side.
Staring down blankly, she soon widened her eyes and screamed.
“Aaaagh?!”
Her left leg had crumpled like rotten meat and lost all shape.
“W-what is this! Aagh! It hurts!!”
From there, the cooked body of Cynthia began to collapse.
Her limbs were crushed, melting into blood and boiling up.
I, I have to go back!
Sensing that something had gone very wrong, Beta tried to release Possession, but Cynthia’s body collapsed before she could.
Half of the face left behind melted into the floor, and the Beta inside it let out a soundless scream.
And a moment later.
Gurgle-gurgle-
Beta’s consciousness fell into a deep darkness.
---