Chapter 168: Rain Shower 3
Chapter 168: Rain Shower 3
Was there ever a phrase more perfect than "hoist by his own petard"?
"Aagh, stop—stop it!"
A wretched sight, writhing and grinding his face into the floorboards. No blood sprayed—this was a mana-forged Clone. I'd been half-worried the guy would bust a nut watching all the theatrics, but he held it together. Not that there was any reason to build piss, shit, or blood into a sex Clone in the first place.
And it was precisely that convenient omission that let the pain of a knife stab feel so bracingly fresh.
'Peel back a layer and it just gets stupider. Like an onion made of fuckups.'
When I first learned to make Clones with mana, I built in a basic failsafe. Enough shock, and the Clone would break. Part of it was my own clumsy mana control, sure, but there was also the unease of being a man stranded alone in a world of psychic powers and magic. How could you not install a safety cut-off when you had no clue what was coming? Hell, even my old underground hideout had a rat-hole disguised as a ventilation duct.
But the Heart of the Exiled Serpent, who'd been gallivanting around in a Clone without a care, got pinned like a bug by a single dagger—a little collaboration between a black mage and a shaman—unable to sever the sensory link back to her borrowed body.
"Hmm, so what to do? Any preferences?"
Vwomm-
A pocket of sickly blue split open with an uncanny hum. Tools clattered out, reeking of ill intent at a glance—no doubt bought off the mages who supplied the dagger. A wickedly curved awl. A saw blade with crooked, jutting teeth. A mallet as lumpy-faced as a cutlet hammer.
'These are the tools mages sell?'
Forget the Constellation of Clubs and Entertainment. This collection made you wonder if there wasn't a Constellation of Torture and Slaughter rattling around somewhere too. Maybe it was just the fact that they were autopsy tools used by mages, but the things stank of iron and blood by look alone. The Heart of the Exiled Serpent saw them clattering to the floor beside her face and bucked wildly—only to slump back into a cringe, the blade in her back slicing deeper from the movement.
"Haah. Moving on your own really does make this easier. So. How should we proceed?"
Her sheer absurdity pulled a dry, disbelieving laugh from the blond man. How could it not? His only family had died at the hands of this moron. I imagined him chasing her through the slums, steeling himself for a final showdown at her Origin, not so different from the way I'd once strategized my fights. A revenge play plotted by a mere Incarnation, bent on killing a real Constellation. And it all ended here: a pretty-boy honey trap and a knife in a love hotel sex room. Like chugging syrup-thick soda and realizing you won't be able to brush your teeth.
"You need to keep the mana absorption rate steady. Do what you want, but keep the Clone intact."
"Meaning what, exactly?"
"Flay the skin. Pare the guts. I don't care. Just don't cut off the Clone's limbs or tear its head out."
"Ah. Understood."
When the blond man beamed sunnily and produced a straight razor from inside his clothes, I tuned out the visuals and focused on siphoning mana. The situation had twisted a little, but absorbing the mana was the entire original plan. Channeling harm through an Incarnation or Clone to strike the main body was a trick only a Dream Demon could pull off. Wasn't that exactly the knowledge The Incinerating Tyrant had passed along to me? I lacked the skill to use an Incarnation as a conduit, but with a Clone forcibly anchored by a shamanic dagger like this, I could drain the mana of the real body lying in her Sanctum like a corpse.
Draining mana by proxy was unfamiliar. The yield was small, the pull agonizingly slow—
"Laugh, you bitch. It's a long night."
"——! ———!!"
—but time was the one thing we had in abundance, thanks to her scrubbing the unmanned hotel booking.
Did that count as hoist by her own petard, too?
I'd never tortured anyone before. Most people haven't, sure, but my world was a nuclear apocalypse where food and water had run dry. Torture itself had become a luxury. We had no resources to do it properly—tearing a body to ribbons right before the kill, tossing a still-living man to the mutants, those were simply efficient survival moves, not interrogation. Flay the skin, pull the teeth, slice the limbs? What medicine did we have to staunch the bleeding and keep a person alive? I spent my days chewing cave moss because water didn't exist. The worst we could manage was a web of shallow cuts to expose raw flesh, then grinding contaminated stone shards into the wound. We didn't even have salt or chili powder to rub in.
"Ah, it's a bit tricky without visible muscles."
"Hhh—h-haah—hhh—"
Not quite a scream. More a broken, guttering wheeze.
The blond man clicked his tongue at the sagging figure. Using the dagger handle buried in her back as a handhold, he'd been diligently sectioning her backboard like a slab of pork. No skin to flay, no muscle to part—all he could do, whether he sliced shallow or stabbed deep, was keep carving through her torso.
Seeing that, the instinctual dread I hadn't even acknowledged finally eased. Her mind had gone hazy from sustained agony, barely ten percent of her mana left. For a human, she'd be in circulatory shock by now, bleeding out. Was there a better moment to breach an Origin than this?
"Time to finish this. Just keep it steady. Don't overdo it."
"Will do. Less to work with than I thought."
Crazy bastard. Who talks like that after hammering nails into a person's back? Watching him crush flesh with a mallet and drive in fire-heated spikes, I swore silently: once this was over, I'd have nothing more to do with this man. I pushed mana into motion even as I thought it, staring into eyes gone glazed and vacant, holding what might have been resentment.
The world spun.
An excellent sign.
When I had breached Ellis's Origin, hadn't it felt like cramming myself into a rubber tube cinched so tight it might burst?
"Well, this is a shitshow."
Had the pain done it, or the mana extraction? A study once decorated in antique style was now an obliterated wreck. I saw the desk first, split clean in two. As if someone had demonstrated a breaking technique, the bisected desk lay half-buried under a collapsed bookcase tipped against it. At least seventy percent of the carpet had been torn away above a gouged-out floor. Toppled bookcase, shattered desk beneath it. Broken lights, cracked ceiling, windows simply gone. Ink, fountain pens, scattered books littering the floor like trash. The scene looked like it had taken a direct shell, or survived a focused earthquake.
And there, curled up on that filthy, ruined floor, lay a woman.
The Heart of the Exiled Serpent. Naturally.
"Y-you—y-youu—"
She clutched herself with both arms, shivering like someone freezing. Sprawled miserably across the debris, the sight was wretched enough to tug pity from a stranger. A stranger.
"The fuck are you glaring at, you shitstain bitch."
Better that she couldn't fight back.
I snapped my leg straight out and buried a soccer kick into her jaw. Who gave her permission to roll her eyes at me like that when she couldn't even twitch? Her body went limp, consciousness flickering out. I dropped down onto her without ceremony—a lanky frame, sure, but still the full weight of a tall, grown man. A choked hack wheezed up from beneath me as the careless impact crushed the air out of her, but she didn't resurface. I laid a hand atop her skull and set my mana in motion.
An Origin struggle is a peculiar art, unique to the Dream Demon race. She was still glaring with simmering hatred, so chances were her Origin remained intact. Before I barged in blind, I needed information. To break her thoroughly—Origin, soul, every last shred.
※
A dim, cavernous factory. Gearwheels taller than a man rotating in steady loops. Machinery hissing and clanking without pause. And there, standing eerily upright on the conveyor belts, were humanoid androids.
"Your fears are really something else, aren't they?"
"I-it—ma-made—"
This was what terrified the Heart of the Exiled Serpent. Drain a Constellation—a Dream Demon—of her mana and psyche, and her naked fears spill out just like anyone else's. She clutched her head and curled inward in her own subconscious. Sheeeek. Sheeeek. The rhythmic venting of steam. Every lurch of the conveyor belt added flesh to human-shaped skeletons. Engines slotted in. Artificial organs. Camera-lens eyes. Synthetic skin. A factory grinding briskly away, churning out dozens, hundreds of androids. Identical to her.
"You grew up soft, didn't you. The fear engraved on the deepest part of your soul is this cliché?"
"Get them away!"
"It's a little different from automatonophobia... Were you scared of being replaced?"
That assembly line was her terror. A cheap horror yarn that existed in every world. Indistinguishable robots appearing, certain people being "disposed of" by the government, identical replacements slipping in where they once stood. An SF spin on the old doppelgänger legend, more or less. Seeing hundreds of robots wearing her face, she broke apart in violent denial. Tearing at her hair, screaming, and finally burying her head against the floor like a tortoise.
Even after becoming a Dream Demon, she was slave to her own fear. A fish too lashed by the current to swim, drowning. A bird too battered by the wind to fly, falling. That was exactly what happened when you thought being a Dream Demon made you nothing but a sex-queen hypnosis master.
She carried a huge ego relative to her actual ability, and deep down, she knew just how meaningless she really was. The powers of Constellation and Dream Demon were how she kept that knowledge at bay. She'd used both just to keep repeating to herself: I. Am. Special. What if she lacked special abilities and ended up replaced by a robot like everyone else? That was her delusion. Which was also why she'd never grown her powers, never learned to truly command mana.
I'm a Dream Demon and a Constellation, so I'm special. So people obey when I give orders. So I will never be replaced by a robot!
Something like that, probably.
Still, at least it showed me how to end this. Lucky for me.