Chapter 38
Terminally Ill, but It's Okay — Episode 38
I'd broken one of its wings, but that didn't mean it was over.
Now it was just beginning.
Even drugged and reeling from the Blood Cloud Incense, Demonkin were still Demonkin.
The moment they began pouring out Demonic Energy in earnest, people shot up from their seats and screamed.
Except there was nowhere to run.
The other side wasn't stupid either, so of course they had sealed off the entrance first.
When Helmut, the Demonkin emcee, pulled out a strange remote and operated it, a heavy iron door engraved with a defensive magic circle dropped amid a crackle of sparks.
"What the hell? Somebody lowered the security door. Contact the control room, now!"
"T-Team Leader. I think something's gone wrong over there too. They're not answering the radio."
"What?"
Fear and confusion swallowed the hall.
"Request backup first, and hold those things back, now!"
ROAR—!
The Demonkin, charging in a frenzy, collided with the guards.
At that moment, I was standing alone, face-to-face with Helmut, who had thrown off his emcee's mask.
"Someone betrayed us. The plan...... I see. Then that confirms it."
He muttered to himself as if he were communicating with the Sain Sword retrieval team, then glared at me.
"Was that smoke your doing too?"
"Smoke?"
I played dumb, but there was no way it would work.
"I have a lot of answers to get out of you, so I'll make sure you can still open your mouth."
"Go ahead and try, if you can. But you'd better hurry. The longer this drags on, the worse it gets for you people."
I wasn't just saying that.
The chaos would settle soon, and a small isolated operation that had failed to take hostages was bound to collapse on itself.
"We'll see who's really at a disadvantage."
He ripped off his suit jacket.
He unfastened his cuffs almost violently as he drew up his Demonic Energy, and an unpleasant clamminess rose around me as though the rainy season had arrived.
I quickly widened the distance and activated Manifestation, engraving a sorcery formula.
A 32-stroke, 1-star Fire-Style Sorcery, Flame Bullet.
[Manifestation Completion: 86%]
SHRRRK—
The strange tentacle shot from his palm at almost the exact moment the Flame Bullet fired.
"With that pathetic little......."
He roared and swung his hand wide.
The surging tentacle punched through the Flame Bullet and rushed at me.
As expected.......
The Flame Bullet had a high formula completion rate and, in magical terms, destructive power on par with at least a 2nd-circle spell, but it was nowhere near enough against a Blue Grade Demonkin.
A 32-stroke, 1-star Wind-Style Sorcery, Bull Gale.
[Manifestation Completion: 85%]
I used my enhanced physical strength and threw myself into a roll.
The instant I leaped off the platform, the floor where I had been standing was crushed like tofu, missing me by a hair.
I let out a quiet breath and moved quickly to dodge the tentacles lashing at me one after another.
As expected.
Fighting with sorcery alone, without manifesting an Armament, was not easy.
The only thing that could directly damage him was Attribute Combination Art, but I couldn't see an opening to engrave that either.
This was the weakness of sorcery.
A single real battle drove it home far harder than hearing about it a hundred times.
[Trait, Adversary of Demons, activates.]
But my family's true strength wasn't limited to sorcery alone.
A sudden surge of indignation coursed through my body, filling every limb with energy.
[All stats increase by 5%.]
[Trait nullification partially activates.]
[The tentacles' speed and accuracy decrease.]
Right after the game-changing messages appeared, his tentacles began to dull, as if they had been plunged underwater.
"Wh-What is this......."
He would have felt the change more clearly than anyone, since his Trait let him extend his nerves like tentacles and wield them as weapons.
I could have engraved Attribute Combination Art then, but just as I sensed the presence I had been expecting, I relaxed and lowered both hands.
That was the moment another figure intervened.
SLASH—
First, a single line flashed like lightning and severed his tentacle, and then someone landed in front of me, shielding me.
The sight of that familiar back felt unusually reassuring, probably because it had not been long since we fought back-to-back.
"Park Ha-yul, are you okay? What the hell is going on all of a sudden?"
It was Baek Sa-young.
An opening the Demonkin had failed to notice.
The group, having sensed the ominous situation, had joined the fight in earnest.
"How am I supposed to know that?"
"Fair enough. But did you know? That necklace you won, Cheon Seo-yoon also......."
"Would you focus?"
I cut Baek Sa-young off with a warning.
"Be careful. The opponent is a Demonkin."
"Ah, right."
Baek Sa-young scratched the back of his head awkwardly, then gave me a faint smile.
"Don't worry. This isn't my first time fighting a Demonkin."
He looked so composed that I let out a dry laugh without meaning to.
So he's grown, has he?
Still, his skill was trustworthy, so I nodded and stepped back.
Baek Sa-young raised his sword smoothly, then shot forward like a thunderbolt.
I'd wondered where he'd gotten the sword, but the display cases throughout the auction hall were shattered.
Given the situation, he must have grabbed whatever he could get his hands on.
I breathed a little easier and sent So Yi-hyeon a text.
Since she would already have been briefed about the terrorist attack, I only asked her to keep a close watch on the Sain Sword.
If things went according to the original, there wouldn't be any problems, but there was no harm in being careful.
I turned my gaze back to the auction hall.
Thanks to the Blood Cloud Incense and the protagonists' efforts, the situation was rapidly stabilizing.
Joo A-rin was protecting civilians with her summoned Divine Beast, while Lee Dae-ho, the security personnel, and some of the other Awakeners at the auction were subduing the Demonkin.
And Cheon Seo-yoon was.......
Swinging her sword more ferociously than ever.
Even so, she kept glancing over her shoulder to check the platform.......
"Hey, you......."
"......."
Then, when our eyes briefly met, she turned her head away as if she hadn't seen me.
This wasn't the time to dwell on it.
Anyway, at this rate, they were overwhelming the enemy to the point that no backup was needed.
"But was it really this easy?"
It was in that instant that I felt something was off.
Even with the Bloodcloud Incense helping, this was still an incident with close to a dozen deaths.......
......Wait.
The moment my thoughts reached that point, something came to mind, and I swept my gaze across the hall once more.
Then I was certain.
"......She's not here."
The Bomb Demonkin.......
In the original, besides planting the bomb on the necklace, hadn't she also joined the battle and provided fire support?
It was no exaggeration to say that most of the casualties had come from her hands.
But now she was nowhere to be seen.
"......Why?"
A chill ran down my spine. Just as I was retracing what I had missed, the words he had muttered in passing suddenly surfaced.
"Heh heh, we'll see who it's really worse for."
Was there really something more?
I was about to head over there to get a clearer picture of the situation.
"It would've been better if the bomb planted in the necklace had gone off."
"What?"
I heard Helmut's voice from his fight with Baek Sa-young.
I sharpened my hearing and listened to his words.
"Ahh, you don't know? Then just die. No—let's all die together."
"No, right now......."
"Don't be too shocked by the hell that's about to unfold."
Baek Sa-young dismissed his words as mere provocation and swung his sword without a flicker of hesitation.
But after suspecting something all along, I couldn't dismiss them so easily.
The Bomb Demonkin, who wasn't here, and hell.......
All die together?
Once I strung together only the key words, the conclusion was simple and clear.
"......There might be another plan."
A Plan B prepared in case the original plan failed.......
But why hadn't it been used in the original?
Hadn't the original failed too?
The thought kept spiraling. And before long, I was able to arrive at an answer.
"Because the process was different."
If the failure flag had been raised too quickly, and they had switched to Plan B from the very start.......
If so, stopping the explosion and setting up the Blood Cloud Incense had actually backfired.
.......
If this was true, then real hell might be about to unfold.
He was the type to do what he said he would, and his trait was specialized for exactly this kind of thing.
He might try to bring down the entire building.
"X—."
The necklace didn't matter anymore.
I had to find the Bomb Demonkin before something happened.
But how?
All I knew was that the Bomb Demonkin was scheming something.
That was when it happened.
['Greed' asks if you want to find the Demonkin.]
The creature, which had been quiet for a while, spoke up, and I shot back a question like a man who had just found a lifeline.
"Can you do it?"
['Greed' boasts that it is sensitive to Demonic Energy.]
[It says it wants to smell the Demonic Energy embedded in the necklace one more time.]
Wait a second.
I quickly climbed onto the platform and reached for the necklace.
['Greed' memorizes the burning scent mixed with the Demonic Energy.]
[It beckons you to follow its lead.]
A ray of hope appeared through the uncertainty. I grabbed the box and followed its lead.
Going around behind the platform, I saw a staff entrance.
It was just an ordinary iron door, not a security door, so I summoned a dagger and struck it hard.
Clank—
I grabbed the broken handle and yanked it roughly.
['Greed' points to the end of the hallway.]
"Hold on."
I left a short message for So Yi-hyeon, then began sprinting at full speed.
* * *
Not all of them, but most Demonkin were mentally unstable.
The condition was caused by Demonic Energy affecting the brain, and usually became pronounced after childhood, once they began handling Demonic Energy in earnest.
But the Bomb Demonkin was an exception.
Her name was Kali, wasn't it?
She had been born with antisocial personality disorder.
She showed almost no emotion and was obsessed only with the rapture and ecstasy that explosions gave her.
Therefore, if what she was trying to carry out was a large-scale terrorist attack.......
Even if it was an act so inhumane that it would produce hundreds of casualties, she would carry it out without hesitation.
Because she was a madwoman who had never once felt anything like guilt.
['Greed' says you're almost there.]
With Greed's help, I had made it down to the second basement level.
I sprinted down the long hallway, and soon found the place where she was likely to be.
"Facility Control Room."
The lock was already broken, and thick Demonic Energy was seeping through the gap in the door.
I didn't bother deliberating and charged straight in.
['Greed' shouts for you to stop.]
But before I had taken more than a few steps, I stopped, just as it said.
"What in the world......."
I stared blankly at the bizarre, horrifying sight.
A low-ceilinged, dim underground space.
Long, unidentifiable cylindrical pipes twisted together into a maze, while red energy seeped through the space like crimson raindrops.
And at the center of it all, she was there.
With her hands pressed to the floor, her eyes closed as if savoring something, and the corners of her mouth twisted to the limit.......
[Activating trait, Manifestation.]
I gritted my teeth and manifested the First Sword.
Restriction Rate: 40%. Manifestation time: just five seconds.
Borrowing the effect of Absolute Accuracy, I hurled it at her.
The target was the source of the Demonic Energy—her heart.
WHOOOSH—
It was a strike aimed at the gap in her guard, so I never once thought it would fail.
RUMBLE—!
That was the moment the anomaly occurred.