Author: 年终 / Nian Zhong
Translator: Kinky || https://kinkytranslations.com/
Chapter 23: The Predator
When she saw the unconscious Huey, Hailey neither cried nor made a fuss.
She simply walked quickly over and sat down beside him. Instinctively she tilted her body and leaned lightly against her family, like a bird returning to its nest.
The monster scrabbled restlessly along the outer wall, the rustling friction echoing inside the church.
Myss rubbed his empty stomach, his gaze tracking the source of the sound. That fragrance still clung to the tip of his nose and teased his appetite.
Just as the priest had said, the thing could only move outside the church. It was as if there were an invisible door at the entrance that kept it firmly out.
A perfect stronghold, very suitable for a brief rest. That priest did pick the place well… Myss couldn’t help wondering how long it would hold.
On the other side, Salaar studied the summoning array for a while, then looked up at the priest.
The priest wasn’t wearing the bird-beak demon outfit. Perhaps because his face was so friendly, he still looked tall, yet the sense of pressure he gave off had dropped by a large margin.
“We know who you are, so let us skip the pleasantries,” Salaar said. “This is already the fourth time we have met, ‘Mr. Demon’.”
“Thank you for saving me.”
The priest brushed the dust from his black clothes and offered a proper bow. “I’m sorry. Earlier I mistook you for the ones spreading the sickness and caused you trouble.”
“Yeah, you are a huge pain.” Myss turned his head. “Openly running around scaring people, secretly trying to prevent and treat the plague all by yourself. One moment the city lord’s soldiers are chasing you, the next you’re being informants to them… It makes no sense at all.”
Salaar: “…”
Salaar rubbed his temples. “Although this guy is very rude, I was going to ask you much the same thing. Father, why did you not cooperate with the people of Rosha?”
The priest let out a long sigh, as if he had been waiting for this question.
“Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Kalen, a priest of the Order of Shadows.”
His voice was clear and paired with that gentle face he seemed like a harmless herbivore.
He took off his blood-stained black gloves, revealing two healthy-looking hands. On the middle finger of each hand, he wore a bone ring.
“The situation is urgent, so I’ll not hide it from you. This pair of rings is a holy relic of the Order of Shadows. The ‘left hand’ foresees ill omens, the ‘right hand’ slips into shadow.”
“When I first arrived in Rosha, I considered requesting an audience with the city lord. But my ‘left hand’ sounded the alarm like mad that doing so would cost me my life,” Kalen continued with complete candor. “As you have seen, that city lord isn’t exactly wise.”
So it was a prophecy ability. Salaar focused on the rings.
No wonder the bird-beak demon could appear at the right time every time. Apparently, this man was using the foreboding as a compass.
However you looked at it, the proper way to use the thing should be to stay as far from misfortune as possible. Kalen insisted on squeezing his way toward danger. One had to wonder what the God of Shadows thought of that.
By the same logic, the reason he could escape right under the noses of Myss and Salaar must have been the rings’ power to hide.
…“Divine power”?
If “divine power” was this special, were Myss and Salaar summoned into the human world by the will of some “god” as well?
“Since you can only foresee ill omens, how did you know there was a problem with the food and water?”
With an enemy outside, Salaar quickly reined in his thoughts.
“Ah, only the food and water?”
Kalen was genuinely taken aback. He scratched the back of his head. “I dealt with the common routes of infection, the food, the drinking water, and the patients themselves. The crows were in charge of handling the food and water. I was responsible for scaring away the people around the sick.”
“But sporadic cases kept appearing, so I thought I must have missed something.”
“Oh, that was Mina deliberately infecting people. You cut off transmission among ordinary folk. Otherwise Rosha would have been finished already,” Myss put in matter-of-factly.
He had thought Kalen could see the pale red magic too. It turned out it was a false alarm.
“That’s very good to hear. Thank you for telling me,” Father Kalen said to Myss with heartfelt sincerity.
“I’m only telling the truth.”
Kalen looked even more embarrassed. “Haha, honesty is a fine virtue, and yet I reported you to the authorities—”
No wonder the bird-beak demon never spoke. This man’s voice was too soft, and his plain, earnest manner was almost irritating. It didn’t match that grim image at all.
Seeing the conversation threaten to drag on, Myss turned away in annoyance and hid behind Salaar. He shoved at Salaar’s back, signaling the big hero to deal with this nuisance.
Salaar cleared his throat at the right time. “Father Kalen, so two months ago you foresaw misfortune coming to Rosha and came specifically to solve it? …Two full months of persistence. Your character is admirable.”
Kalen gave a shy smile. “You’re exaggerating. I have my own motives too.”
As he spoke, something seemed to occur to him, and his expression turned serious. “Now that the misunderstanding is resolved, we need to deal with that thing outside at once.”
As if to answer him, the church trembled again. A trickle of grit fell from the dome. The pale red threads on the floor slowly writhed and slid past their feet.
That aroma grew stronger, and Myss could not help licking his lips. He had no objections at all. Who could refuse a fragrant midnight snack?
Salaar didn’t reply at once.
He walked to the unconscious Huey. “Myss, check on Huey first.”
“Almost dead.”
Myss only glanced once and rendered a verdict on the spot—Huey’s Magibase was a fairly large, red-bellied tit. At the moment it was wrapped tightly in the red threads, with only the tip of its beak showing.
In fact, the real miracle was that Huey was still alive at all.
At the word “dead”, the emotionless Hailey lowered her head and slowly cradled the unconscious Huey. Her face was still expressionless, and a faint, almost indiscernible confusion flickered in her eyes.
Huey’s chest heaved violently twice, and he forced his eyes open with difficulty. “Hailey…?”
“I’m here, Uncle Huey,” Hailey said.
Huey trembled, setting the pale red threads all over the floor quivering. His lips parted, and he managed to squeeze out a muffled “sorry.”
“No, it’s all my fault.”
Hailey answered at once. Her tone was very calm, so calm it hurt to hear. “If I had not recommended you to Father Kalen, you wouldn’t have been trapped here.”
“If I hadn’t barged into Scintilla’s room, I wouldn’t be here either.”
Huey straightened his back weakly, clearly sensing that something was off about Hailey. He didn’t press the point, only lowered his eyes.
“Helping others isn’t wrong…” He spoke with all his strength, enunciating each word. “I also… chose to walk into Scintilla’s room of my own accord…”
“If you are still bothered… about her…”
“I have already grown up,” Hailey interrupted in a soft voice, as if reciting words from a diary. “Back then I didn’t know any better. I stopped minding long ago.”
“I have always been very grateful to you, Uncle.”
Huey’s lips curled. He let out a long breath, and his shoulders drooped a little.
In the bright candlelight of the church, he gazed at Hailey’s face with reluctance to part, and his eyelids sank bit by bit.
Just as those eyes were about to close, a hand pressed down on the crown of his head.
“It seems your reason is still intact, so I’ll be brief.”
Salaar spoke clearly. “Do you want to die now as a normal man, or gamble on a chance to live, even if failure would turn you into a monster without blood or tears?”
Huey’s lips moved, as if he were about to call for his mother, then he forced it back. His gaze swept over Hailey again. This time, it was as if he were searching for someone’s shadow on her face.
“How can I die, Sister?” he murmured dreamily. “The Summoning Ritual is about to begin… Hailey likes to watch…”
“I’ll take that as permission.”
Salaar’s left hand moved lightly atop Huey’s head, then withdrew quickly.
Huey fell asleep at once, and all the pale red threads around him wilted. In Myss’s sight, the threads slowly slid away and released the battered Magibase.
Kalen raised his eyebrows in mild surprise, but he kept silent, neither asking questions nor urging them along.
“Thank you.” Hailey bowed her head to Salaar.
“Don’t thank me too soon,” Salaar said. “I was already finding it strange. You two have been paying too much attention to Scintilla. How much do you actually know about her?”
Hailey lowered her head and took a moment to organize her words.
“My mother died in childbirth when I was born. At the time Uncle Huey was only sixteen. Madam Philomina taught him many things and helped him take care of me for a while.”
How to wrap a diaper, what temperature goat’s milk should be, how to handle a crying infant. Knowledge like that wouldn’t just spring up from a sixteen-year-old boy’s head.
After that came the story they all knew.
Philomina died before the Summoning Ritual. Scintilla summoned a caterpillar at the ritual. From then on, the Scintilla household went from bustling with visitors to nearly deserted.
Seeing Scintilla’s situation grow worse and worse, Huey asked young Hailey a question.
“Shall we bring Scintilla to live with us?” Huey asked. “Just think of it as gaining an older sister.”
Hailey burst into tears on the spot and refused, nearly rolling on the floor. Scintilla had lived ten thousand times better than they did before and had barely had anything to do with them. Why should she come take her uncle now that she had fallen on hard times?
Seeing little Hailey making such a fuss, Huey didn’t bring it up again. He only went to look in on Scintilla from time to time and brought the child food and drink. Every time Hailey found out, she would sulk for a while. She always felt like someone had stolen a small piece of her uncle.
“…Uncle Huey did nothing wrong. I was too willful back then,” Hailey said indifferently. “If not for Madam Philomina, I might not have survived in the first place.”
“After Scintilla started appearing less often, my uncle would occasionally write to her, but she never replied. He would visit in person, but she wouldn’t open the door, yet she still accepted the food.”
“Every so often I would go and check on her situation. We only met eyes a few times through the window, and I couldn’t understand what she was thinking at all.”
“Hey, why are you getting hung up on this?”
Myss had been about to charge outside in one go, but all these family matters tripped him up. He grabbed Salaar’s collar in annoyance and tugged him toward the doors.
“Every spell has a solution, and every monster has a weak point,” Salaar whispered. “That monster is clearly connected to Scintilla. Understanding Scintilla’s experiences will help us grasp the situation.”
Wait, was this kid’s occupational illness acting up? Was he going to stay here for hundreds of years to research this monster?
Seeing Salaar wholly focused on analyzing the monster, Myss felt unaccountably peeved and yanked the collar harder. “You studied me for so long and still learned nothing. Listen, what we need right now is action.”
As for weak points, hit something head to toe and you’ll find them. He needed to divert Salaar’s attention fast.
Myss closed his eyes, held his breath, and immersed himself in the slow flow of magic around them.
The monster’s sweetness, Salaar’s fresh scent, and beneath it all a summoning circle for Magibases that hadn’t yet been activated…
This time he couldn’t stop at a sniff. He had to think it through. Every spell has a solution…
…Got it!
He caught onto something. The hazy scent became much clearer.
“That summoning array.” Myss’s mind was spinning, but he finally managed to grasp the magic’s essence. “There’s a leak here.”
Salaar and Kalen: “…?”
Myss forced himself to be patient and gestured. “The entire ritual site is like a door into the human world.”
“Right now it’s only open a crack, so it can still keep the monster outside. Once it starts running for real, that monster will charge into reality at once.”
Salaar started, hesitated for less than half a second, then said, “I understand. We must handle it before the summoning begins. Otherwise, it will crash straight down on everyone present.”
He turned to Kalen at once. “We have a little under twenty-four hours left. Tell me everything you can do. We need to work together.”
Kalen showed the rings on his hands. “I can hide myself at any time. But foreseeing ill omens requires preparation and cannot be used for immediate combat.”
“My regeneration is strong. As long as the wound isn’t instantly fatal, I can recover. Incidentally, I can communicate emotionally with animals, although there don’t seem to be any living creatures nearby.”
Salaar: “Your specialty in magic?”
“I don’t know any magic,” Kalen said frankly.
Salaar and Myss: “……”
To Lord Karns in hell, there are actually two people with this outrageous handicap.
“In other words, you are a pure hand-to-hand fighter.” Salaar pressed a hand hard to his temples. “A hand-to-hand… priest.”
“Exactly. Feel free to let me lead the charge,” Kalen said with a broad grin.
Boom!
The church trembled again and swayed dangerously. At the doors, a patchwork hand scratched back and forth. Not long ago, Myss had sliced it clean off. Now it had fully restored itself.
Salaar tightened his grip on his dagger. “It seems our lady monster can’t wait to be born. Hailey, take care of your uncle.”
“Yes, sir.”
……
The three of them climbed over the protruding reliefs, leapt through the skylight, and returned to the church spire.
Outside was still pitch dark, and the hot, humid air pressed down at once. Myss looked down at the monster jammed at the doorway—its magical fluctuations were growing more intense, and its movements were highly frantic.
“When that thing’s stuffing shows, pull out as much as you can. I’ll burn it,” Salaar said to Kalen. “In short, limit its ability to move first.”
Kalen hesitated. “What about Miss Scintilla?”
“She’s already dead. She’s either inside the monster, or she is the monster. Both are possible.”
Salaar’s expression hardly changed. “But we can’t afford to hold back. Rosha’s safety matters more.”
Kalen’s brow twitched. He changed the question. “How do we make the monster’s stuffing come out—”
Halfway through, he abruptly closed his mouth.
Myss was cavorting all over the monster’s surface.
He was brandishing a deformed silver dinner fork, the tines leaving black trails as they swept. Large swaths of patches on the monster were pried up, and the brown-yellow “hair clumps” stuffed inside bulged out in heaving waves.
Pale red threads and memory fragments flew together. The split gaps healed rapidly but Myss didn’t care. Relying on his terrifying speed, he bounded all over the monster, scratching open one fresh wound after another.
Kalen pushed off hard from the ground. With the crack of breaking tiles, he shot out like a cannonball.
Mid-flight his figure melted into the dark, and one nearby wound was abruptly yanked wide, spilling out a mass of hair clumps that left the monster’s body visibly deflated.
Salaar stood on the highest point of the spire, raised the ritual dagger like a wand, and aimed at the single eye on the monster—
The next instant, countless bullet-like lances of fire poured onto those hair clumps. Dazzling gold flames turned them to drifting ash in a heartbeat, and the monster let out a scream fierce enough to rupture eardrums.
Perfect teamwork. He felt pretty good. Myss drew back his gaze and stretched in midair.
He looked down at the brightly lit church and thought of his petal-scattering practice—countless black fragments rode the wind, blossoming into numerous holes across the monster’s body in an instant.
The Minas emerged from the holes, faces twisted as they reached toward him. Countless pale red threads shot for Myss. Before they could reach his toes, they slammed into Salaar’s protective magic.
Salaar’s golden magic bloomed around him from time to time. The lights were sometimes flames, sometimes shields, sometimes little platforms of light for him to step on.
They always appeared at the perfect spot beside him, as if they were Salaar’s own line of sight.
The attacks kept coming. The monster’s body gradually shriveled, and its movements slowed further and further. Looks like we don’t need to worry about finding a weak point, Myss thought. They were about to win… huh?
The monster’s “head”—the infant—suddenly stirred.
In an instant the sound of flesh squeezing rose on all sides, and memory fragments surged in from every direction of the city. They frantically covered the monster’s damaged parts, and its insides swelled fast, a full size larger than before.
It lunged toward Myss, and the wet umbilical cords curled for him. Myss sprang back with the motion. The tip of his foot habitually tapped the air, reaching for one of Salaar’s light platforms.
He stepped into nothing.
In that weightless moment, Myss’s heart skipped along with it, and a storm of unruly thoughts exploded in his head.
…No, had he gone mad, believing Salaar like that?
…Had that guy connected the clues on his own and already discovered the truth of the body-swapping ritual?
…Were those perfect assists only to make him drop his guard, so he could be eliminated by the monster?
His thoughts were cut short by the excruciating pain.
The deadly cords pressed in from all sides, and a searing heat ran through Myss’s limbs. The mucus on the cords melted his skin. His flesh felt as if it had been splashed with strong acid. Pain pierced him from every direction.
It hurt. This human body seeped cold sweat and tears at the same time.
The human body was too fragile and too sensitive. Myss had never felt such pain. The survival instinct, coupled with fury, swept through his mind in a flash and tore at his nerves along with the agony.
He would eat it.
Myss almost lost consciousness. Only this thought echoed in his mind. In the corner of his eye something he saw bursts of golden light, but none of that mattered.
He would eat it. He would eat it.
Myss heard a hair-raising shriek, and then realized the cry came from his own throat. His vocal cords were vibrating, his skull was trembling, and all things in the world reeked of blood.
He would eat it, he would eat it, he would eat it.
Myss’s pupils were no longer the perfect circles of a human. They eroded outward into his irises, turning into an irregular, terrifying black mist. Myss sniffed madly at the monster before him, tracking those hazy, tangled traces of magic.
Right. He had just practiced this… all to shove that damned Salaar out the door. Every spell has a solution…
The instant he fully grasped that, his instincts almost immediately understood what to do.
Every spell has a solution.
Like a carnivore tasting hot, fresh blood after giving up milk for the first time. Like a cub popping out its claws and discovering how easily they slice through flesh.
All things in the world come to an end.
Soft flesh burst beside him in blooming fireworks. The scattered, complex magic before his eyes kept simplifying. The dizzying magical circuits collapsed into a single point. The monster’s flavor turned clean and sharp. Right there… Right there.
…The end was right there.
Yes, this was His power, His instinct. He could destroy everything and plunder everything to His heart’s content. Why had He only noticed now?
He seemed to be laughing, yet He wasn’t quite sure. He couldn’t remember where His mouth was, or even whether He had something like a “mouth” at all.
He only knew that He would be able to eat it very soon.
Not far away, on the church spire.
Moments earlier, the tip of the tower had been assaulted by a swarm of Minas, and Salaar’s vision was briefly blocked. He couldn’t assist Myss in time.
For some reason, Myss’s reactions were clearly half a beat slower. The monster grabbed him in a sudden embrace, and his body vanished into the wet umbilical cord.
—Damn it!
Salaar tried to snipe with flame, but his magic didn’t leave a single mark on the umbilical cord.
In his urgency he shouted for Kalen and prepared to rush in himself. Then he saw it… that foreign thing, that being more like a monster than the monster itself.
“Forgive me, may I ask a question?” Kalen hopped back onto the spire and wiped the black blood from his eyes.
“What exactly is your ‘companion’?”
“I would like to know as well, Father,”
Salaar stared intently at “that thing”, unwilling to look away for even a second, though black blood was seeping from his seven orifices and a keen, freezing ache gripped his brain.
“…I would like to know as well,” the hero muttered.
The author has something to say:
The Demon Lord is slowly developing his own instincts.
Happy researcher Mr. Salaar:
Very soon it will be your turn for a little exposure, Mr. Salaar.
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