BCST 41

Durdin couldn’t easily understand the situation that had happened to him.

“What the hell happened?”

Wasn’t he the one who had the advantage?

At first things had been a little dangerous.

But he’d recovered thanks to his high-level countermeasures.

And he had cast aside any complacency toward that arrogant troubleshooter who had invaded his hideout.

That had surely been the troublemaker’s misfortune.

Because what he had trusted must have been his own complacency.

So he threw that complacency away and injected every drug he had into his body.

They were items provided by some mysterious corporation that had noticed and sponsored his excellence.

Their power was such that even injuries that should have sent someone to the next world could be healed—dragged back and forth and brought back.

They also had the effect of making one ridiculously strong when injuries were minor.

And he’d injected six of them.

Do you know what that meant?

That he truly had decided to take the troubleshooter down with everything he had, with no turning back.

So he pressed the attacker with the volcanic power he’d never felt before…

Then that wizard-troubleshooter suddenly cast a strange, obscure spell.

[Grasp of Pulling]

As he felt a force tearing him through the air, the situation changed.

Was it because he was slammed into the ground by that uncontrollable force?

No.

Although his bones reverberated, it was a degree his trained martial arts could handle.

So was it the terrifying scarlet magical beam the troubleshooter had shot after that?

No.

Actually, that did hurt quite a bit.

Before he’d injected the drugs it would’ve been a lethal strike in one blow.

Certainly, when those beams rained down like a torrent, the overwhelming power would normally have been unbearable.

But?

Hadn’t he injected six of those drugs?

He had used them without a second thought for side effects, so it should have made him able to withstand this.

So even being torn apart by that scarlet line of magic seemed okay.

If he could pour such enormous attacks on the troublemaker, the troubleshooter’s mana would run out quickly too.

Durdin trusted that the moment would come.

And finally the attacks ceased.

Despite the pain, Durdin grinned.

Full-body regeneration would take maybe six seconds now.

If he could just hold on that long, he could add up all the pain he’d taken and send it back to that troubleshooter.

Absolutely.

He’d make him neither dead nor alive—an utterly miserable existence.

Yes. Just like those crippled fools the underlings had kidnapped and tortured.

‘But maybe that was my mistake.’

[Low-grade Regeneration]

When another spell sprang from the troubleshooter’s hand—when Durdin thought the enemy’s mana must surely be gone—everything changed.

On the full-body injuries that had been trying to regenerate, flesh began to swell as if mushrooms had grown a thousand times faster.

In an instant, flesh overflowed past his neck and jaw; his eye sockets became buried in flesh and his vision was obscured.

The rapidly enlarging body demanded oxygen—his cramped lungs urgently demanded air.

‘But I can’t breathe…’

Because even his nostrils had been blocked by flesh; he was suffocating.

Yet, while his breath choked off, the drugs’ power that kept restoring his body prevented him from losing consciousness or dying.

He had never imagined he would be in a more miserable state than the ordinary citizens he’d considered useless.

‘Please, just kill me…’

Durdin uttered the same words he’d heard from the tortured citizens.

Only when he shared their position did he finally empathize with their words.

And whether by luck or calamity, the final moment came to Durdin, who was wracked by pain.

[Ah… ugh…]

Durdin first noticed the anomaly as an eerie sound sinking deep inside his ear, from the innermost parts.

It must have been some sound coming from outside.

But it was something outside the human audible range.

Yet when it crawled into his ear and stuck to his inner self, a tiny noise began repeating from deep within.

[Heheah… aaaa… …gi… gii… giiik… gaah… aaah… heheuh… chaa… uh, uh… heuah…]

It was the lament of some soul that had not been summoned to heaven.

The sound kept circling his cochlea in a loop.

Then, gradually, he even began to hear a nasal whispering right beside him.

A cold chill felt not on the skin but inside the organs.

At the moment he perceived that coldness,

even in total darkness he could see the bluish form of a person.

‘Who is that?’

Thick curling hair that could cover the eyes.

A man holding a long sword.

Durdin didn’t know it, but that was the spirit of Payneuf, who had died trapped in the whirlwind created by the artist behind him and whose soul had been bound.

[Mountain Fox Slash]

It was Payneuf’s greatest strike, a fourth-rank blow he’d never shown before dying.

Swoosh—!

Watching the fatal blow fly toward him, Durdin sensed his own end.

‘So this is how I die…’

Screech!

He thought maybe it wouldn’t cut through.

He’d got so fat like a pig.

But Payneuf’s strike cleanly bisected Durdin, who had swelled up like a giant balloon, into two.

To be fair, Payneuf had been a proper fourth-rank swordsman—back then even I couldn’t have guaranteed the outcome.

To think such a chunk of flesh couldn’t be cut—what an insult to him.

Pfuuaaak—!

A horrifying torrent of blood erupted like a water bomb—unbelievable for a single human body.

Watching that, I calmly activated a defensive magic.

[Shield]

Thud-thud-thud-thud…

In the blood rain,

I saw a hallucination of Payneuf’s spirit—the one who’d cut down Durdin—turn and look at me with eyes full of resentment.

So what.

As if asking what I was staring at, he bobbed and then vanished.

Tsk tsk.

That’s your fate.

You were trying to kill me anyway.

I casually shrugged off the vengeful gaze of Payneuf and checked the severed cross-section he’d made.

On the cleanly halved surface, a gruesome sight of necrosis and regeneration overlapped.

It was a body that couldn’t fully cross from death back to life.

Seeing that, I nodded.

“No problem.”

Then I inspected the artist behind me—the U.M.O. I had.

When I picked the last trait, the artist behind me had entered cooldown because of the runaway whirlwind.

So I had worried that this might be a problem when I used the Soul Roar this time.

Luckily, it seemed fine to handle only souls I had already acquired.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

When I learned Soul Roar, I hadn’t followed a normal tech tree; I’d obtained a soul-holding status through an Easter-egg-like U.M.O., skipping all stages.

In other words, I’d learned the skill in a manner lacking deep understanding of spirit magic.

I had worried whether that might cause some conflict with the artist behind me, but that concern was useless.

“Then shall we finish cleaning up?”

First, get rid of the trash left in the hideout.

And free the remaining drugs and the people being held.

…free them?

Now that I thought about it, I should also release the ordinary citizens’ souls trapped with Payneuf’s spirit in the artist behind me.

“Hmm.”

That would only be possible once my understanding of souls grew deeper—later.

While I was organizing my thoughts, I sensed via [Mana Detection] a man frantically fleeing into a corner over there.

About mid-level first-rank?

Judging by his level, this guy was probably the lieutenant boss of this Blue Plane.

Let’s capture him first.

Celebrix Pharmaceuticals Research Lab.

A man in a suit sat down.

When he entered, the other researchers left, and the chief researcher in a lab coat stood there uneasy.

The suited man didn’t look at the chief; he put a cigarette in his mouth.

Tick. Tick.

Smoking was prohibited in the lab because of flammable substances, precision equipment, and other contamination risks, but the man didn’t care.

After all, with a single gesture from him the research might have to be restarted from scratch.

When the chief, trying not to look at the lit cigarette, broke into a cold sweat, the man with the cigarette asked his first question.

“When will the Hecaton finished product be ready?”

The chief’s mouth dropped.

“It was originally scheduled for the end of this year… but now, we don’t know.”

Who would want to hear that?

As he spoke, the chief squeezed his eyes shut.

It felt like at any moment something might fly in or an order shout down.

However—

“Fuuuh…”

The man only exhaled cigarette smoke for a moment.

“…”

As an awkward silence grew and the chief began biting his nails, the suited man spoke again.

“Why?”

The chief answered in a trembling voice.

“After the lead researcher… John, left, the manufacturing process completely halted. To complete the research…”

“Hey.”

The man cut in, not hiding his irritation.

“Incompetent?”

“N-no… I’m sorry.”

“While you take that much money every month without complaint, go home and grope your wife’s ass and eat the food she sets out? Is that how you work?”

The chief lowered his head as the man’s abusive rebuke gritted his teeth.

The man took another drag and spoke again.

“So why can’t you do it?”

“…John Skoige wasn’t just a researcher—he personally designed the core structure of Project Hecaton. The manufacturing formula is recorded, but the optimized ratio and precise synthesis process were encrypted only within John’s neurons.”

The man, still not looking up and only smoking, listened.

The chief continued.

“And… John used dynamic encryption between a neurochip and his brain’s neurons. In other words, he used his own thought processes themselves as the encryption key.”

Fwoosh.

The man exhaled smoke again.

He brought the cigarette down almost to the filter, then for the first time looked at the researcher and said,

“This project, if it succeeds, could let Celebrix Pharmaceuticals expand into the 30th district. You mean to tell me it can’t be done because John’s gone? Then kidnap him and bring him back. Dynamic encryption? Just pull the brain out, isn’t that enough?”

As if struck by an idea, he continued.

“Ah, yeah. This is the perfect time to use those useless bastards who just eat up money. The Recovery Team’s got nothing to do right now.”

The Recovery Team was a corporate private enforcement unit organized solely for such tasks.

They handled corporate assets—technology, data, personnel, or evidence related to reputation—disposing of or recovering these items.

And John Skoige’s brain was, plainly, a corporate asset.

An item that properly had to be recovered.

When the man finished as if satisfied, he stood up. The chief researcher cried out in a panicked voice.

“B-but…!”

“I already authorized disposal, didn’t I? What, still difficult?”

The man’s tone grew colder.

It was a warning that unnecessary words were dangerous.

Nevertheless, the chief spoke in a trembling voice.

“Th-the current location where John Skoige is hiding is the ‘Edge Line’…!”

At that the man reacted for the first time, raising one eyebrow.

“Isn’t that where Mia Dunlby is? Do you mean to say the lead researcher would have made the decision to hide there with that information?”

The chief, seeing this as a chance to dispel the poor impression he’d made earlier, praised himself for ordering background checks on John Skoige.

“Yes, yes…! It looks like before going there he’d been in contact with the Aires Corporation, so maybe Lucas Aires tipped him off…”

The man decisively denied that.

“No. Boss Aires may be capable as an individual, but not to that degree. This is… likely a coincidence.”

Intrigued, the man had relaxed a bit, and the chief thought to stop there.

Luckily, the man’s interest had softened his nerves.

Bringing up the curious up-and-comer on the Edge Line—some talk of a black magician—would have been useless.

The chief quietly lowered his head. The man spoke again.

“As I said, send the Recovery Team. But don’t strike the Edge Line directly.”

“Yes!”

The researcher answered; the man turned and left as if he had no more business there.

Just before leaving the lab, he paused and spoke one last time.

“Also. Make sure the traitor sees how our company hunts. Got it?”