Chapter 24

Chapter 24 : What Counts as a Normal Route? (4)

Once I entered the fog, the red lines grew even clearer, tangling across my vision like a spiderweb and making it impossible to move carelessly.

Those faintly glowing lines carved out only a narrow space, barely enough for a single person to stand in.

The hand holding the dagger was taut with tension.

I rolled my eyes around and first checked where the ostrich-giraffe thing that had leapt in earlier had gone.

Its blade-like wings had sunk wholesale into the tree trunk and rocks, and it was flailing helplessly. That thing was not going to last long.

‘There was one more.’

The moment I pressed my back to the tree and exhaled, a huge mouth lunged at me.

Instinctively, I slashed with the dagger.

KRRRK—!

Sparks flew from the dagger, half caught between those long fangs.

At the force of it, strong enough to numb my wrist, I nearly lost my grip, but I clenched the dagger harder and found myself staring straight into the face of the rabbit monster pressing in right before my eyes.

Its reddened, bloodshot eyes were positively brimming with affection as it tried to devour me.

As though chewing on the blade were not enough, the sharp claws of its raised forepaw tore into my forearm and sank in.

“Agh!”

The burning pain snapped my mind awake.

Kkyung—!

I grabbed the long rabbit ears, tore it off me by force, and slammed it to the ground. Then I planted a foot on its jaw, forced it open, and drove the dagger deeper inside.

Its forepaws jerked a few more times and added a few more scratches to me, but its movements quickly stopped.

“Huff, huff.”

When I pulled the dagger back out of the tender flesh, thick purple blood spilled across the ground.

That grotesque color made the moment Woldeer died flash across my mind.

Fuck.

When I lifted my head, I saw the ostrich-giraffe thing still half embedded and flailing.

I shifted the dagger to my other hand and walked over to the trapped creature, then finished it off.

I could not bear to watch the blue blood pouring out the same way, so I looked instead at my forearm, which had been burning since before.

A long slash had opened the flesh below my elbow.

“Ha, ha…… this is insane.”

My right arm would not put any strength into itself at all, so I clicked my tongue, stripped off part of my clothing, and wrapped it around the wound to stanch the bleeding.

When I got back, I was going to wring medicine out of Pan.

Along with a complaint that I had nearly died because the affection was excessive.

After checking the remaining time at the top of my vision, I immediately started forward along the red lines.

Finding the source of the fog was mostly guesswork.

The red lines looked as though they spread out without pattern, but in one particular direction, more of them were woven together in darker, denser strands.

I had confirmed that the black fog drove the Phantasmal Species mad, so now it was time to determine who had left what at the source of the black fog.

“Can’t things like this just sort themselves out on their own?”

Instead of making me do all this work about thinning the number of Phantasmal Species and so on.

The black fog, faintly threaded with red light, looked exactly like the entrance to hell.

And in reality, it probably was.

The deeper I went, the more of those deranged Phantasmal Species would come bursting out.

---

It was worse than I had expected.

The red path seemed to be coated in some sort of pheromone that Phantasmal Species loved.

After encountering one chimera-like Phantasmal Species after another, my own appearance was no longer intact either.

And yet I could not stop, because if I was going to be attacked whether I stayed in place or moved, then the choice was obvious.

If possible, it had to be somewhere Pan was likely to find me, and somewhere I could also figure out the source and cause of the fog all at once.

A place exactly like this.

The moment I found an object that looked utterly out of place, I almost wondered whether I had stumbled into the wrong genre entirely.

The sphere, roughly two meters in diameter, was a peculiar structure made of metal.

Light leaked through its split seams, and the way it moved subtly, opening and then fitting back together again, made it look almost like a spherical cube.

“This is science fiction.”

It looked like a component from some alien movie, and the precision of it felt so alien that it clashed even with the fantasy of a world that was supposed to run on magic.

On top of that, to my eyes, with all those red lines dangling from it, it looked almost like an anemone or a jellyfish.

Clank.

The sphere adjusted its position once again, and thick black fog poured out.

Naturally, the fog dispersed quickly while avoiding the red lines, so the area immediately around the sphere itself remained clear.

“Do I just break it?”

I looked down at the dagger in my hand, then back at the sphere, and frowned.

Would this thing even break?

But the hesitation didn’t last long.

[▶Temporary duration ― 00h : 11m : 53s]

The pressure of the skill’s remaining time, flashing red at the top of my vision and dropping second by second, was crushing.

I gripped the dagger in reverse and drove it into one of the seams.

Clang—!

Clang—!

Krrrk—!

Only on the third try did I manage to wedge the dagger into the seam, and the force pushing back from inside startled me enough that I let go.

The sphere rotated once with a hard metallic click, and the dagger I had finally managed to stab in couldn’t withstand the force and was flung back out.

I blinked at the dagger as it grazed my cheek and disappeared somewhere behind me, and then a hollow laugh escaped me first.

“Ha, ha. I fought my way here through six Phantasmal Species…….”

And now I was nearly going to die to a machine.

Still, a dagger was my only weapon, so I turned to retrieve it—and with a rustling sound, an unfamiliar figure emerged from the edge of the fog.

“Hmm?”

The moment his eyes met mine, he faltered and pulled back farther, and seeing the fear in his unsteady gaze, I could only tilt my head.

He was not someone I had seen during the preparation stage earlier.

“Underfolk?”

The question that fell from his mouth was rather awkward.

I had thought that after all my fixer work, the way people looked at Underfolk had softened quite a lot, but he looked down at the dagger lying near his feet and retreated even farther.

“It seems you don’t know me, but I—”

“—So you’re the culprit!”

“What?”

His transformation came quickly the moment he unlocked his Frame.

Thorny vines stretched out from behind his ears and wrapped once around his head, forming a crown of thorns.

Whoosh—WHACK!

Before I could even be startled, the thorn-vines that appeared in his hand lashed down at me.

My only weapon was lying far away, and I had no way to catch something like that barehanded—

After already going nearly to the point of bleeding out from dealing with the Phantasmal Species, all I could do was dodge.

The one fortunate thing was that, unlike Pan, or Ochel, or Pering, or Hwipone, this man moved slowly.

The angle of his arms, the direction of his gaze, all of it telegraphed itself so clearly that I was able to circle the sphere, dodge the whip, and recover my dagger.

Of course, I paid for the dagger with my forearm.

It was obvious that I was the one losing if I dragged things out. He, unlike me, seemed to have been moving around inside the fog just fine— And that was when something suddenly struck me as wrong.

I more or less abandoned my forearm to the thorns, let them wind around it tighter, and yanked hard.

His widened eyes were close.

Without waiting, I lunged at him first and thought,

‘Even Pan was in pain from the fog. So why is he completely fine?’

Using the arm that had gone numb as bait, I pinned down the whip and drove the dagger into his wide-open shoulder.

It grazed him, but it hit.

Watching his face twist in pain, I slashed again at once.

I dodged the fist that flew at me and, in place of my arm that was as good as lost, bared my teeth and bit into the back of his neck.

“Gah!”

More of the thorns erupting from his body stabbed into me than into him, but I did not care.

“You’re weaker than I expected.”

Weaker than someone ordinary like me, even.

The red lines swayed wildly, as though drawing out the route of the next attack. I followed them and swung the dagger, and hot blood soaked my whole body.

I did not want to know whose blood it was.

Ding!

[!WARNING!]

[An abn〓■rmal rou▶e has been dete☆√ted]

[!ERROR!]

[……Processing……]

[!ERROR!]

[!WARNING!]

[!WΔRNIN♥!]

[An abn〓■rmal ♨▶e has been dete☆ed∑]

[∴ccess the n▼rmal route○]

[!ⓌAR※ING!]

[!W↝R▼IN■!]

[BEEEEEEP――――――!]

Surrendering my reason to the sensation of adrenaline flooding my body, I raised the dagger high to cut off his final, screaming breath.

“Iwon—”

At the low voice of someone gripping my arm, I rolled my eyes in that direction.

It was Pan.

[▶Temporary duration ― 00h : 00m : 00s]

[〈Skill—Phantasm Domain Deployment〉 has ended.]

The red lines filling my entire vision vanished all at once. Only then did my wavering sight finally return to normal.

The metallic smell stabbing at the tip of my nose turned my stomach in an instant.

Ding!

[The Original Work has been greatly affected, and a branching point has been created.]

[Beware the backlash of the penalty.]

Dizziness flooded my vision white, and blood surged up from inside me in a hot rush.

Why did the last face I had to see have to be Pan’s?

This is how dangerous severe blood loss can be.

---

Pan rubbed at his throbbing temple as he looked down at the man teetering on the edge of death.

The ordinary brown hair was soaked in blood, making it look even more miserable.

The shredded flesh at the nape of the neck, the small puncture wounds all over, the deep stab wound in the abdomen, and even the ruthless precision that had severed the nerves at each major joint.

“If I don’t make medicine for him, even if he lives, he’ll be bedridden, won’t he?”

Pering, who had come to fetch Pan while also delivering accumulated work reports, nearly jumped.

“What do you mean, won’t he? You’re not planning to leave him untreated, are you?”

“I am. He’s a member of the forest, after all.”

Timol, a member of the forest and directly under the ruler’s command, had gone off to inspect an area he had not even been ordered to inspect and had then been saved from the brink of death by that “Iwon.”

Pan kept silent about the sphere.

Not only was its condition deeply troubling, but everything that reacted to Iwon had begun to behave in a distinctly unsettling way.

Because of that, Pan had not wanted Timol to live.

He could already predict the kinds of things that would come out of Timol’s mouth if he survived.

“The meeting?”

“They’re all already there waiting.”

“Then the meeting must be urgent, so this one…… we’ll save him later.”

“What?”

Pering tilted his head, but Pan ignored him.

The meeting itself was nothing remarkable.

It concerned the follow-up measures for the incident in which an Underfolk attacked a member of the forest inside the forest’s own domain.

Pan could practically already hear the elders, whipped into a fury, shouting reckless things.

The true source of his headache lay there.

“Who exactly thinks they can do what to whom…….”

While Pering fidgeted beside him at the sight of Pan’s vicious expression all the way to the meeting hall—

the moment Pan flung open the great doors and strode inside, shouting broke out from within.

“—We should never have accepted the Underfolk in the first place!”

The meeting hall was the broad round-table chamber at the center of the ruler’s castle, and most of those gathered there were once again passionately arguing over whether that Underfolk should be killed or not.

“There were casualties. This is a serious matter.”

“Perhaps the ruler’s decision was too lax……”

“It was because you wagered lives on another one of your amusements!”

“That’s going too far. No matter what, why would our ruler deliberately endanger a member of the forest…….”

It was Pering who put a stop to the shouting of those who had not even noticed Pan enter.

“My lord has arrived. Of course, if you’d all prefer to go somewhere nice and quiet for ‘rest and recuperation,’ you are most welcome.”

The moment Pering’s cold voice fell, the meeting hall went silent as a grave.

Pan shrugged, patted Pering on the shoulder, then pulled out whatever chair he pleased and sat with one leg crossed over the other.

“I suppose this is mostly my fault, then.”

“N-no, of course not. It’s all because of that Underfolk—”

“—You’re all missing the point of this incident. Have you forgotten that something even more serious than the Underfolk is at issue here?”

Pan’s gaze swept across the hall.

Compared to the way they had all been spitting fury just moments before, the sudden meekness in the room was not to his liking at all.

“Someone left a gift squarely in the middle of the forest’s domain, and none of you knew.”

“And what was done with that gift?”

One of the participants from this operation, seated farther away, raised a hand and spoke. If Pan remembered correctly, he was one of Timol’s rather close friends.

“It’s under investigation.”

“And what about that Underfolk? He’s the one who tried to kill Timol. Leaving such a dangerous element in the forest’s domain any longer is—”

“—A decision made by the rulers of all five domains. There is no decision above that.”

Pan watched the speaker seethe in resentment, then flicked a hand and shattered the meeting’s momentum.

“Shouldn’t we be focusing first on the ominous movement of the new lord’s faction, rather than on punishing that Underfolk?”

Pan dragged a hand down his face and sighed.

That was because Iwon, too, had been hovering at death’s edge in exactly the same way.

The very first thought Pan had when the abnormality broke out in the forest had been of the safety of the Iwon he himself had thrown out there as bait.

No matter how he thought about it, this time the target had not been the forest.

It had been Iwon.

And when he found Iwon at last, the man was scattering red light from his eyes and recovering something of his former self.

Revealing in full the aspect of the Underworld Lord who stood above all things.

Enough to send a chill down even Pan’s own spine.

That red earring swaying at his ear, that peculiar crimson power flickering around him, that brutal gaze that seemed to shake one’s insides—

all of it belonged to Sek.

“Now even I can’t tell anymore.”

Are you Sek, or aren’t you?