Chemical Weapons (1)

4.444.404.

A few days after banning the troll who had forcibly infiltrated the gallery, Erzsebet finally caught a lead on that elusive IP address.

"So you've arrived."

A bizarre, deeply unsettling presence radiating from the Kellierton territory prickled against her senses. Without hesitation, Erzsebet departed her castle and surged toward the focal point of that unnatural signature. Before long, she discovered an anomalous rift.

Wuuuung.

"Something about this is wrong."

It was starkly different from ordinary fissures. Under normal circumstances, rifts functioned strictly as one-way passages. One could cross from this side to the Outside, but entities from the Outside could not simply wander into this realm. Typically, only a handful of lesser beasts managed to squeeze through after lying in wait for an opportune moment. Yet this particular rift pulsed rhythmically like a living heart, exuding a foul, suffocating miasma.

"Someone tore ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠this open by sheer force."

Even for Erzsebet, ripping a rift open through raw magical power was a monumental feat—one that would have left her ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠bone-weary with exhaustion. Whoever had crossed was no ordinary demonic beast. She immediately attempted to track the residual mana trail, but the intruder had already vanished without leaving behind so much as a stray whisper.

A few days later, however, Erzsebet managed to pinpoint 4.444.404's physical appearance.

With the launch of the official Myeolgal Wiki competition, gallery users had begun actively compiling and cross-referencing field data. As a direct consequence, snapshots of the very rift she had investigated were now circulating freely on the board.

"Found you."

Inspecting the edges of the high-resolution image with supernatural precision, Erzsebet discerned a distant silhouette fleeing across the far reaches of the barren plain. To human eyes, the speck would have been utterly imperceptible, but resolving such minute detail was effortless for a true progenitor.

Long silver-white hair, crimson irises, and the youthful visage of a frail girl. An unnatural perfection clung to her features—an eerie beauty reminiscent of the ancient demons recorded in forgotten lore.

4.444.404. It was unmistakably that unregistered lurker.

My Assistant Moderator was openly lobbying for cold-blooded murder. Her rationale was straightforward: the little stray girl I had rescued from the outskirts might very well be an apex beast originating from the Outside. I had wondered why she had been unusually quiet over the past several days, and it turned out she had been conducting a full-blown espionage investigation.

"Hmm."

I glanced over my shoulder at Penny. Tucked snugly beneath a plush fleece blanket, she was entirely absorbed in an illustrated fairy tale. Her eyes sparkled with childlike fascination, completely captivated by the whimsical narrative. The stack of storybooks she had devoured since moving in was already teetering near the ceiling.

You're telling me that cute little couch potato is an ancient demon?

Faced with my sub-mod's unyielding suspicion, my own confidence began to waver. Truth be told, there were a handful of glaring anomalies that I hadn't been able to rationalize away. For starters, Penny had grown—visibly. She had shot up by at least twenty centimeters in a matter of weeks. When I first carried her into the shelter, she looked no older than an elementary school kid. Now, she resembled a middle school adolescent. Fast growth spurts were one thing, but completely warping human biological limits in a few weeks was another.

Then again, the Holy Sword didn't react to her in the slightest when she was near it.

When questions piled up, the quickest path to clarity was confronting the subject head-on. I crossed the room and stood beside the bed where Penny lay buried in colored pages.

"Penny."

"Yeah? What is it?"

The moment her name was called, she set the book down and locked her wide, curious gaze onto me. Living in the bunker had stripped away nearly all of her initial wariness; she looked at me with unreserved trust. After a brief pause, I decided to test the waters.

"Would you mind logging into the gallery for a second?"

"...Huh?"

"Our Assistant Moderator claims she knows you. She just messaged me insisting you might actually be a monster from beyond the void."

I laid it out plain and simple. Even as the words left my lips, the premise sounded absurd. A demonic horror who could converse fluently, complain of illness, cry genuine tears, and laugh over silly stories? It defied common sense.

Rattle, rattle.

"Penny?"

Before I could even finish my sentence, Penny began to quiver violently. Her small hands clamped around the wooden drawer beside the bed, rattling the frame as though she were an electronic appliance switched to maximum vibration. She blinked rapidly in sheer terror before squeaking out a faint, hesitant inquiry.

"B-By sub-mod... you don't happen to mean...?"

"Vampire Till I Die."

"Eeeeeek!"

Her conscience clearly wasn't clean. Every drop of color drained from her face, leaving her chalky white.

"Malphite! H-How do you even know that terrifying monster?!"

"Ah, well, about that..."

I briefly considered keeping my identity under wraps, but that ship had already sailed. The bunker was crammed wall-to-wall with modern stainless steel refrigerators, designer plush carpets, and imported luxury goods that had never once appeared on the marketplace. Denying it was pointless.

"I'm the Head Moderator."

The casual revelation hit Penny like a physical blow. Her shivering ceased instantly, her jaw slacking as if temporal flow itself had frozen around her petite frame.

"I-I'm so sorry... I swear I didn't mean to deceive you!"

In the end, Erzsebet had been dead right. The lazy vampire who spent her days guzzling soda and tomato juice had pinned the culprit with terrifying accuracy.

Come to think of it, she did drop hints back then.

When I first asked for her identity, she had stubbornly insisted that her true name was 'Lust.' At the time, I brushed it off as some bizarre, edgy chuunibyou persona, but the pieces finally clicked together. She was an embodied cardinal sin—the Sin of Lust from the legendary Seven Deadly Sins.

Seeing me frozen in disbelief at the revelation that she was an ancient cosmic fiend, Penny dropped her head, curling into a ball of sheer misery. In her bid to escape the Outside, she had exerted every shred of her authority to tear a dimensional breach open with her bare hands. The disastrous consequence was that the forced dimensional transition had stripped away virtually all her primordial power. Worse still, the rupture left behind was now radiating a catastrophic volume of concentrated chaos.

The rift Penny had ruptured was expanding in real time. According to Erzsebet, the impending monster wave would dwarf anything the continent had ever endured. Deciding that getting answers took priority over punishment, I lifted Penny's ban temporarily and dragged her into the administrator chatroom.

That was the central mystery. Why sacrifice virtually all her divine demonic might just to breach this realm? The fact that she crossed alone proved she wasn't leading an invasion force like standard beasts. Her subsequent explanation, however, left me utterly speechless.

I snapped my head toward the bed. Only Penny's reddened eyes peeked out over the rim of the quilt, her face flushed crimson from acute embarrassment. Humiliated down to her soul, she shoved her face back into the pillow before typing frantically on her terminal.

"Wait, you ran into Frederick?"

"Yes," she mumbled from beneath the sheet. "He was the first human being I had ever seen, and I was so ecstatic... I just wanted to play around with him for a bit, but he dropped dead all on his own!"

I had heard the tyrannical prince had been sentenced to exile beyond the rift, but it seemed he hadn't survived very long out there. Normally, isn't it an unwritten rule of fantasy tropes that exiled villains survive against the odds and return as vengeful final bosses? Guess real life isn't so generous.

In any case, meeting a human for the first time must have shattered her monotonous existence. Penny had spent an eternity stranded in the barren, empty void of the Outside. When she caught wind of civilization through his memories, her curiosity and boredom overtook her survival instincts, compelling her to breach reality even at the cost of her ancient strength.

Naturally, Erzsebet wasn't buying a single syllable. The notion that an ancient demon lord embodying Lust had willingly sacrificed her overwhelming omnipotence simply because she was bored and horny was preposterous. Erzsebet demanded to know what kind of idiotic calamity would do something so brainless, leaving Penny with no defense whatsoever. All she could do was tuck herself into an impenetrable chrysalis of blankets, sniffling mournfully.

"I thought... I really thought it would be nothing but fun and games here..."

Yet the realm she crashed into was a scarred, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Starvation, raging epidemics, brutal warfare, and senseless murder—the colorful paradise she had imagined was nowhere to be found.

I could vouch for her on that front. The timeline proved that the plague had already been festering across the territory long before Penny slipped through the veil. Ultimately, she was exonerated under the pitiful conclusion that she was an ancient Sin of Lust who had crossed dimensions without ever experiencing a single romantic indulgence, only to contract the plague and nearly perish like an ordinary mortal.

Penny had successfully cleared her name of hostile intent, but the harsh reality remained unchanged: her forced entry had destabilized the fabric of space, detonating a catastrophic rift. Worse still, the beasts preparing to emerge from that gaping wound would be unlike anything seen before.

Thoroughly dejected, Penny began spilling every scrap of tactical reconnaissance she possessed regarding the other side.

I had been contemplating the exact same approach. Surely a generous barrage of High-Explosive Grenades would blast them into red mist just like the others, wouldn't it? Penny, however, promptly crushed that optimistic assumption.

Standard High-Explosive Grenades couldn't crack them? If their entire bodies were solid steel, fragmentation grenades would be equally useless—shrapnel would just bounce off like pebbles. We were facing a localized swarm of heavily armored monsters impervious to my current ballistic stockpile.

"Kellierton is in serious jeopardy, then."

If modern small arms failed to pierce their armor, the city's newly established defenses would be steamrolled within hours. Just as tension peaked, Erzsebet chimed in decisively.

Her direct intervention would cleanly annihilate the problem, no question. But in doing so, the immense expenditure of true progenitor mana would strip away her casual netizen demeanor, forcing her back into that stiff, haughty, machine-translated archaic prose she used when we first met. I squeezed my eyes shut as phantom memories of her painfully cringeworthy speech echoed in my head.

"Yeah, no, that's way too much to handle."

If kinetic shockwaves and concussive blasts couldn't breach their steel shells, I simply had to bypass their armor entirely. I opened the system shop for the first time in a while, navigating straight toward a restricted tab I had kept bookmarked in the back of my mind.

"If the rift is strictly a one-way entrance, can't we just exterminate the entire horde before they even set foot on our side?"

I had previously introduced Fritz Haber's nitrogen synthesis to rescue this fantasy continent from widespread famine. Now, it was time to deploy the dark side of that legacy—unleashing devastating weapons of mass destruction directly into the gaping maw of the rift.