A Rest for the Cat (3)
No sooner had I drawn my spear than the woman before me slowly smoothed her twisted expression back into place and let out an utterly absurd, hollow laugh.
"Blood magic? Don't tell me you're a vampire?"
That smile was nothing short of open contempt for me.
As if she knew everything there was to know about vampires, she kept chuckling to herself, then slowly swept her hair back with a look of easy confidence.
"So that's why your skin was so oddly pale. I thought you'd gone extinct, but there are still a few of you crawling around, huh?"
The words that finally spilled from her lips carried not just dismissiveness, but open scorn and humiliation.
Ordinarily, the moment I'd drawn my spear, an indiscriminate assault on this woman should have already begun.
Instead, her strangely intriguing words, deliberately calculated to pique my curiosity, had unexpectedly brought my movements to a halt.
"I didn't know your kind could use magic like that. It's been so long since I've seen a vampire that I can hardly remember."
"You seem to know quite a lot about vampires."
"I haven't lived a short life, you know. I've fought my share of them."
"Hmm, is that so."
"What, that's all you've got to ask? I'd have thought you'd have plenty more questions."
The moment she saw how lukewarm my attitude was, a flicker of genuine bewilderment crossed the woman's face.
She had a point. If I were a real vampire born in this world, I would surely have asked several more questions beyond the ones I'd just posed.
But I wasn't a native of this world to begin with, and the vampiric race had merely become entangled with my body by pure accident.
"I'm not particularly interested. Besides, I'm not sure what that has to do with me."
"...You're serious?"
"Of course. The past is the past, and the present is the present."
"Ha. Pathetic to the very core, just as befits an inferior race..."
Before she could even finish her sentence, I raised the tip of my spear without hesitation and moved.
Caught off guard by my sudden motion, the woman's face froze for an instant.
It seemed she'd been trying to rattle me by dredging up talk of vampires' past.
But to someone like me, who had no connection whatsoever to them, such talk was nothing but a waste of breath.
Shwiiik—!!
The instant she entered my range, I swung my spear in a wide, horizontal arc at her throat without a moment's hesitation.
Despite the ambush that wasn't really an ambush, the woman evaded the strike by a hair's breadth and immediately put a considerable distance between us.
"You insane...!"
Shwiiik—!!!
My next attack came straight at her, before she'd even had a chance to grasp the situation.
Every time I closed the gap, she only retreated further, but even so, I never let my guard slip, keeping a careful watch on her every move.
"Wait, you... Do you really think such a brainless attack is going to work?"
"Yes."
Despite the mockery laced through her every word, I paid it no mind and kept swinging my spear.
I did have the skill Transfusion at my disposal now, but I didn't believe such a basic ranged skill would work on a demonkin—not a mere monster, but a true demonkin.
And so I had no choice but to throw myself into the fight, trusting nothing but my own level and stats.
"A vampire, of all things—!!"
Evidently fed up with the unshakable calm I maintained throughout, the woman finally began attacking with the tentacles sprouting from her back.
They shot toward me at considerable speed, and I twisted my body reflexively to dodge—
but the tentacles, as if they had predicted my movements, followed me precisely to where I was going and pressed the attack without missing a beat.
"You do use some unusual techniques, but a vampire is still a vampire. There's a reason they were driven to the brink of extinction."
"Your tongue has been awfully slippery for a while now. You must be feeling pretty relaxed."
"Did you expect me to panic at the sight of an inferior vampire?"
"Who knows."
"Well, at least thanks to you, I now know vampires are still alive. So it wasn't a complete waste of time after all."
Even in the middle of our increasingly fierce exchange, the woman kept her mouth running like it had a motor attached, and I was starting to grow tired of it.
I'd been deliberately walking the tightrope, barely dodging her strikes, on the off chance I might glean some useful information about the demonkin—
but it seemed I'd been mistaken.
"Once I've killed you, the rest of you vampires hiding in your holes, I'll—"
"You really do talk too damn much."
"...What?"
Around me, severed chunks of tentacle lay strewn grotesquely across the ground before I'd even noticed.
They'd been weighty, fast attacks that screamed demonkin, but it seemed the gap in our levels was not something to be ignored.
"It's about time I went back to make the children dinner, so—"
"Wh-what...? My tentacles... why are they..."
"I'm afraid I can't entertain you any longer than this."
With those final words, I calmly leveled my spear and drove its tip, without hesitation, into the throat of the woman who still stood there in a daze.
Her neck pierced as easily as a block of tofu, not a single drop of blood spilled out. Instead, it was absorbed straight into the spear and flowed directly into me.
"If you'd known more, you might have lived a little longer."
"Wh-why... why... me, a demonkin... beaten by a mere vampire..."
Despite the flurry of attacks that had rained down on me during those few short minutes, my body didn't bear a single scratch.
The woman only realized this too late, and even as her blood was drained away, she ground her teeth in fury.
Before long, she began to wretchedly deny the reality that she had been so helplessly crushed by the very vampire she'd held in such contempt.
"You... what are you... what in the world are you...?"
On the verge of her final breath, she rasped out her last question with labored, ragged gasps.
To her, I offered a faint smile and answered quietly.
"I'm a nun."
The moment she heard my flat reply, she let out a feeble, hollow laugh and slowly went limp.
She called herself a demonkin, so I'd expected her to be quite the handful, but in practice she turned out to be surprisingly unremarkable.
The tentacles had been the part of her I was most wary of, but whether due to some unfavorable affinity, their regeneration was slower than I'd anticipated—beyond flailing them around, there was nothing particularly special about her.
"Amen."
By then, the woman's body had withered into a twisted scrap of dried husk, utterly devoid of life.
The moment I wrenched the spear from her throat, her body scattered into the air like ash, as though it had only been waiting for that.
It was a moment that truly deserved the name of a demonkin's end.
And so, having neatly finished the job, just as I was about to head back to the church—
Once again, a translucent window had popped up out of nowhere, without any warning whatsoever.
Wondering what change had come over me this time, I examined the information written inside it carefully. And there it was—the field that had previously simply read Skills when I last checked was now divided into Active and Passive.
"...Rapid Regeneration?"
Not only that—a passive skill called Rapid Regeneration had appeared, completely unbidden, without my even realizing it.
I didn't need to read any description to understand what it did from the name alone, but I couldn't fathom why this skill had suddenly been added to my abilities.
"Could I have... absorbed her ability?"
Judging by the situation alone, the most plausible explanation was that I had absorbed my opponent's power.
But because it was so utterly at odds with how I'd gained Transfusion, the answer didn't come to me easily.
After all, Transfusion had materialized spontaneously, back before I'd even begun hunting monsters in earnest.
"......"
These questions briefly threw my mind into disarray, but a wave of sudden exhaustion made my thoughts go hazy, and I found myself naturally emptying my head.
Either way, gaining a new skill was a good thing.
Especially one that was a passive directly tied to survival—
Thud, thud.
And so, with no room to think about the consequences, I dragged my weary body back toward the church.
It was an outcome that left an unpleasant taste in my mouth in more ways than one, but what made me sigh the hardest was something else entirely.
Namely, the fact that I'd have to start preparing dinner the moment I got back to the church.
No matter how big the crisis, I couldn't very well let the children go hungry.
"If I'd known this would happen, I would've wrapped things up fast and headed back..."
Of all the demonkin I could have crossed paths with, it had to be a low-ranking grunt who barely knew anything.
The regret came flooding in, late as always.
.
.
.
"—!!"
"—!"
The moment I returned to the church, the children's urgent voices came ringing out from inside, loud enough to cause a real commotion.
Eisen's voice was the loudest of them all, which meant they were probably discussing some plan to come rescue me.
"Th-the nearest village is all the way over there, you know..."
"No... that's way too far no matter how you look at it... even if we somehow found someone to bring back, by then..."
"I'm sorry... it's all my fault..."
Clunk.
The door swung slowly open on rusty hinges.
As if responding to the sound, I stepped calmly inside the church, and the first thing to catch my eye was three children huddled close together on a long wooden bench, deep in what they clearly took to be a very serious discussion.
"I'm home."
"...?"
I murmured the words quietly, wearing a bright, peaceful smile.
The children all flinched at once and began scrambling frantically toward Eisen as their center.
"Le-Levi...?"
The first to spot me was, of course, Eisen.
Even though I was standing right in front of him in perfect health, he kept rubbing his eyes as if he simply couldn't believe it—a sight that left quite the impression.
"Sister...?"
"S-Sister... it's really her...?"
At Eisen's dazed murmur, Ellie and Iris flinched once more and cautiously lifted their heads.
For the briefest moment, a strange, awkward stillness hung between me and the children.
But the instant they belatedly grasped the situation and came running, shouting my name, an inexplicable wave of relief washed over me.
"Sister...!! It's really you, right...?!"
"Eeek... thank goodness... you're safe and sound..."
The mood had unexpectedly turned heavy.
Nothing had actually happened to me, so I tried to lighten the atmosphere with cheerful behavior and gloss over the whole affair, but it wasn't as easy as I'd hoped.
"I told you it would be fine. With Lady Paelia by your side, no demonkin is anything to fear."
"B-but... still..."
"*Sob*..."
As I soothed Ellie and Iris, who had burrowed straight into my arms, my eyes suddenly fell on Eisen, standing a short distance away with a troubled look on his face.
"Eisen?"
Far from responding to my call, Eisen only slowly began to furrow his brow.
Soon he was even backing away, for reasons I couldn't fathom, his head sinking lower and lower.
"What's wrong, Eisen?"
"N-nothing... nothing's wrong..."
My head tilted sideways of its own accord at Eisen's deeply suspicious behavior.
Until just moments ago he'd been chatting with the others like always, but the second he laid eyes on me walking into the church, his conduct had turned distinctly unnatural.
"Are you perhaps... suspicious of me?"