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Chapter 331

Of course, I hadn't told the headmaster anything about the cultists or the extradimensional stuff.

Those cultists aren't the type to move around because they want a social gathering.

They only happened to be nearby — they weren't scheming about the exchange meeting.

They seemed to have their own plan.

This time it just so happened that I was the one who struck them, so there was no worry about the exchange meeting.

When everyone was asleep, I lobbed a tactical smack at Melissa — who had come back late — and sent her off to the dormitory.

Then I layered dozens of protective spells over the room and readied Sur, the brave little spirit of heat.

Beep!

Sur folded his wings into a salute; I ruffled his head and cracked a small smile.

“Can you keep watch? And don’t go burning random people, okay?”

—Beep!

Trusting the short reply, I cast invisibility on Luna and myself.

We passed by the Valtosma knights and their soldiers who were on guard.

“Yaaawn… I’m sleepy.”

“Keep your post straight. If something happens and we get blamed, our pay will be docked.”

“Man… why are we babysitting other countries’ kids?”

“Tough luck, complain to the royal upper echelon. Our job is to do it right and hope for a bonus.”

“By the way, sir, did you hear? They say someone’s seen a ghost in the western woods recently…”

“Hey, I’m scared of ghosts. Quit with the nonsense and do your duty.”

“Eeeh… you’re such a scaredy-cat.”

The drudgery of salaried work shows up everywhere…

Luna and I watched them quietly as we passed, then headed for the ruins the Watchers had pointed out — the place where Nyala was presumed to be hiding.

After he’d bashed Cthugha’s skull in and killed him, Nyala had fled somewhere.

Apparently he’d been hiding out and scheming during that time.

The Moon Watchers had located him later, but they hadn’t been able to enter because of a strange curtain that surrounded the place.

But… the barrier spread over the ruins was far weaker than I’d expected.

I’d considered many ways to break something they’d said couldn’t be broken, but if it was this fragile…

“This… I can break this, right?”

Had they claimed we couldn’t pierce it with just this much?

I tapped the weirdly colored veil around the ruins.

Then I clenched my fist and struck.

[Fist — Strength]

[Disharmonic Yin-Yang — Collapse]

A massive reactive force interfered with the air; the barrier and the surrounding space shattered in cascading fashion like glass cracking.

Within one or two seconds the curtain was utterly destroyed as if the collapse had spread contagiously.

It showed no sign of recovering.

“Is it okay to break it like this? What if someone’s inside?”

“What do you mean? Even if someone’s in there now, we’ll kill them if needed.”

What a needless question.

The interior was filled with grotesque masses of flesh.

Like the inside of a living thing, pulsing and covering walls, ceiling, and floor — so nauseating it made the skin crawl.

Most bizarre of all were the countless eyes and toothed mouths embedded in the walls.

They weren’t overtly threatening, but their arrangement was so chaotic you couldn’t help wondering what kind of creature those fragments belonged to.

“Are those eyes watching us?”

“…No. They’re just attached. They don’t seem to be emitting any particular signal.”

That made it even stranger.

If they did nothing, why were they there?

The grotesqueness deepened the farther inside we went.

Slimy, reddish, waving arms hung from the walls as if begging for mercy; a massive maw exhaled a constant, nauseating red mist.

Then, when we reached the heart of it, we opened our eyes wide and took in the scene before us.

The underground ruins opened into an enormous cavern — as if the space had been forcibly expanded.

Like somewhere Nyala had once remodeled.

Tens of meters high, a huge egg so transparent its interior could be seen stood there.

“What on earth is that creature?”

I’d never seen such an amorphous lifeform in my life.

My head grumbled a little from instinct, but thankfully nothing broke.

“Leon — you okay?”

“My head hurts a little.”

“It’s from extraneous-dimensional information. Ordinary people would go insane just from seeing this, so be careful.”

She skimmed her gaze around the egg and smiled coldly.

“Leon, can you see that?”

Nearby lay fragments of a gigantic octopus turned into chunks of meat.

“That’s… a kraken?”

“It looks like they captured a kraken offspring and used it here.”

If so, then that egg is…

[Warning. Significant concentration of Red Moon energy detected. Must be destroyed.]

‘What happens if we leave it alone?’

[It is expected that the Red Moon phenomenon will occur at a scale and frequency incomparable to before.]

It is the Red Moon god’s body.

They planned to leave something like that here?

Why?

[Based on current inference…]

“Tell me.”

[It is judged that the Red Moon collected a kraken offspring to build its body.]

But one of those materials — a baby hydra — had been taken by my hand and died.

Meaning a crucial ingredient was gone.

Nyala had no choice but to unseal and seek other materials.

They are not omnipotent.

That means there is always a gap.

And now I’d taken advantage of that gap.

In other words…

We were in the perfect position to loot an empty house.

“Can we smash that?”

At my words, Luna summoned a one-handed battle-hammer and cast it at the egg.

CRACK!!!

Although solid, fragments of the egg shattered where Luna struck.

As soon as she swung, I drew my sword and Luna fitted Hand of Fury on her bare hand.

“Empty-house looting, huh?”

A grim smile spread across both our faces.

* * *

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Pitch-black suit.

A black top hat.

Where skin should have been on hands, face, and neck there seemed only a veil of dark mist.

Nyala entered the ruin slowly.

He held a chunk of meat covered in blood in his hand.

“……”

White motes of light around his face twisted oddly.

Step… step…

Nyala stepped in slowly; the way the light around his face curved made it look like a grin.

“What… how did this happen?”

Thud.

The bloody piece of meat in Nyala’s hand fell to the floor and vanished — gone in an instant. How could such a thing have occurred in that short gap?

“Huh… hahaha… hahahahaha!!!”

Nyala’s white, light-made mouth split into a mad grin as he laughed wildly.

KUUUUNG!!!!

But his laughter didn’t last.

The surrounding air compressed and detonated in a massive explosion.

Because of that blast, the bloody meat he had carried also burst, leaving no trace.

“I acknowledge it. You called them cultists? You’re stickier than I thought.”

His white round eyes glittered chillingly.

“I will have to clean you all up then.”

Without meaning to, Nyala’s arrow turned toward the cultists.

Ting...

At that moment, something snapped and a tremendous amount of high-voltage electricity shot out, striking his entire body.

“You filthy bastard!!!”

A voice of fury finally tore from his mouth.

* * *

We’d been having a blast smashing the egg and destroying the pulsing meat inside it.

Honestly, it was satisfying.

The idea that that arrogant monster’s expression might have crumpled made me feel like a weight had been lifted.

“Damn… this lousy thing…”

Luna and I wondered where that damn creature had gone, but the answer wasn’t far off.

“They’re all dead.”

Where the cultists had been gathering were now littered with corpses and the stench of blood.

It was clear the cultists had been storing something here.

But, as luck would have it, those cultists had been ambushed and slaughtered while they were preparing some plan with whatever they’d hidden here.

I’d intended to kill them anyway, but someone else beat us to it — not exactly welcome news.

The perpetrator was obvious.

“It looks like Nyala was headed here.”

Can this be called a missed crossing?

It felt ambiguous, but in the end Nyala had ended up getting blood on his hands because of me.

The problem would be if, when the one who profited returned and saw the shattered egg…

That’d make things very interesting.

One odd thing was that the cultist gathering had been earlier than expected.

The Watchers’ info said the cultists had a few days’ delay before assembling here, but they’d moved far sooner and were killed by Nyala.

Looks like prophecy didn’t amount to much.

“Leon. Here.”

Luna brought over a blood-stained bundle of papers she’d found as she scanned the area.

“It looks like some information the cultists stored here.”

Although smeared with blood, the contents were still legible.

“Seems like this is why they moved so quickly.”

Originally the cultists weren’t here — instead, they’d stored something they’d been sealing.

-Observations of aberrant behavior from a certain organism. Therefore, meeting held earlier than planned to devise countermeasures. Determined to re-subdue and control the entity.

“Is this a butterfly effect?”

This was caused by me stopping Nyala’s action earlier.

The world’s a strange place.

I flipped the pages.

There was information on the being they had kept here.

-Name: Immortal Serpent.

-Found in the western continent’s jungle. Enormous titan boa-like body. No venom but absurd regenerative ability. The current order judges that it is impossible to kill.

They planned to isolate it and extract its cells to push its regenerative ability to the extreme.

They would use specially created toxins and lower temperature to drastically reduce its activity…

The rest of the document was unreadable, but it was clear that Nyala had coveted the Immortal Serpent.

At that moment the threads of stored mana tightened and triggered a chain reaction.

“Oh. The trap magic set in the ruins all went off?”

One by one the traps detonated with enormous explosive power and waves of high-voltage current.

On a ruin of this scale, it would have pulverized everything into dust.

Since the cultists planning the ambush had been wiped out, there was nothing more for me to do here.

Most of the remaining materials were destroyed too.

Might as well salvage whatever I could.

So Luna and I left the cultist lair and went to the place where Nyala had been making the egg.

Although the underground ruins were completely destroyed and collapsed, there were no traces of Nyala.

“He’s probably not dead…”

“Whatever happened, we sure showed him.”

[Signs of spatial distortion detected. It appears the creature took substantial damage. Based on current situation it looks like two years’ worth of plans were ruined.]

After nearly two years of hiding, Nyala’s plans were foiled — I couldn’t be happier about that.

I gave up tracking him without regret.

Now I could focus on the exchange meeting with a light heart.

What I didn’t know then was that Nyala, thinking the cultists were the ones who’d done it, had gone berserk and started ripping the cultists apart.

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