52. Why Are You Coming Out Of There?

I was startled for two reasons. The first was that I’d run into this face somewhere I’d never expected to; the second was that this face should never have existed here at all.

The grotesque armor he wore had sharp blades driven into every joint, and behind his back dozens of strands of steel thread stretched out, slashing at the empty air. He was a demon who tormented his prey on threads tied to his fingertips until, at the very end, he cinched them tight and plucked out the joints one by one: the boss I’d faced until I was sick to death of him, and the one I’d hated more than any other in my player days.

Lucius, the Joint Collector.

The very edge of the line between human and demon.

Lucius’s head cocked at an unnatural angle.

“Crick, crack, crrrick… the sound of joints bending is just so… beautiful….”
“Lucius?”

When I called out, Lucius tilted his head crookedly. His unfocused eyes swept over me.

“…I have to… collect… more… fingers….”

He didn’t recognize me. No, that wasn’t quite it. He was aware of me, but his sense of self seemed to have broken down somewhere. He was like a doll mouthing the same words over and over, a tape recorder stuck on a loop.

“What the hell did you go and eat while I wasn’t looking?”

Dozens of threads came spewing from Lucius’s fingertips. I readjusted my grip on my sword.

In the future, House Arne would fall into utter corruption for one reason or another, transforming from the Empire’s guardian into the Demon Knights.

The title of ‘Four Heavenly Kings’ had originally referred to four individuals who each wielded enormous influence over the world. The players, though, made an exception for House Arne and counted the entire house as a single one of the Kings. Unlike the usual format, where you bring down one boss and it’s over, this raid pitted you against the house’s key figures one after another.

Phase 1: the Joint Collector, Lucius.

Phase 2: the Invincible Legion Commander, Valerian.

Final Phase: the head of the Demon Knights, Kairon.

To clear the raid, players had to drive deep into the heart of the citadel and topple all three monsters. Given that absurd difficulty, nobody objected to bundling them together and calling the lot a single one of the Four Heavenly Kings.

There was one exception, though: the house’s eldest daughter, Seraphina. She’d broken with the family long before its fall and walked her own path as a Knight Commander of the Empire, so she never appeared as a boss in the Citadel of the Fallen Lion.

Not that this means Seraphina didn’t fall to corruption, mind you.

That was a story for another day, one that would surely come up again sooner or later.

Even among them, Lucius ran the dirtiest, most underhanded patterns of the lot. He never once fought you head-on; he ran circles around you, choking the life out of you with invisible threads strung across the entire field. Worse, the players said that once Lucius got hold of you, he’d puppet you on those threads and turn you against your own allies.

None of that applied to me, since I’d always played solo. But the me standing here now wasn’t alone.

Ting!

Lucius’s thread struck the green barrier where Lillian and Seraphina stood and bounced off.

Thank god he came out here alone.

Demonified, Lucius was a far harder opponent than even Cerberus. If Cerberus had been a mid-boss you just passed through, Lucius in this form had climbed to the rank of a proper boss. That was exactly why managing an NPC right before demonification mattered more than anything else, because the moment full corruption set in, they became the most troublesome enemy of all.

Crash!

Even so, the situation was a lot like ‘back at the Blood Lord.’ I was the guy who’d thrown himself at Lucius and died hundreds of times over to clear this raid. Which meant I knew every last one of his patterns.

“Hihi… crick, crick….”

Lucius laughed grotesquely and flicked his fingers.

Pwing—!

A sharp, splitting sound tore through the air.

A beat ahead of Eve’s warning, I ducked.

Shhk—!

The stone floor was sliced clean through, like tofu.

Why was that bastard’s byname the Joint Collector? Because of the death scene that played on game over. With all four limbs bound in his threads, you had to sit through the torture of every finger joint being snapped and plucked off, one by one.

What pissed me off even more was that you couldn’t even skip it.

The character I’d played in the game, the one that bastard trussed up and whose fingers he snapped so hideously, had the very face Eve wore now.

…

With that, all the loathing for Lucius I’d forgotten came roaring back to life.

Sssshk!

The threads writhed like snakes and closed in around me. I kept my footwork calm, weaving between them. There was no need to panic, not when his patterns, his habits, even the rhythm of his breathing were all burned into my mind.

The problem is that I can’t kill him.

If this were a game, I could just stab his weak point and be done with it, but I couldn’t very well process him like any boss that showed up in one. Lucius hadn’t fully awakened into a demon yet, and besides, bad blood or not, he was family.

I have to subdue him.

His threads were harder and sharper than steel, far beyond anything the ordinary sword in my hand could cut. But if I closed the distance to knock him out, the threads strung all around looked ready to slice me to ribbons.

Lucius grinned and crossed both hands. The threads clamped in all at once, trying to cage me like a prison, but I forced the broad flat of my blade into them, pried open a gap between one thread and the next, and slipped through. Then I flipped the sword into a reverse grip and ran straight at Lucius.

The ten minutes I promised Seraphina will be up soon.

I meant to knock Lucius out before then. The closer I drew, the more threads he spewed out. But for all their hardness and edge, threads were useless if they couldn’t reach. I read where each one would strike and broke straight through.

And then, at last, I was right in front of him.

“Snap out of it already!”

I cracked the flat of my blade hard against the side of his head. With a dull thud, his eyes rolled back, and without so much as a scream he toppled over backward like a scarecrow. I caught him as he fell so he wouldn’t get hurt any worse, then laid him down gently on the floor.

Eve looked glum as she said it.

Going by everything I’d been through, I knew I’d been a frog in a well. What if Lucius’s patterns had differed from my memory by even a little? What if he’d mixed poison and concealed weapons into his attacks and come at me unpredictably? What if he’d fully awakened, his power greater still? I’d have had a far, far harder time of it.

“What happened here?”

The promised ten minutes must have passed, because Seraphina and Lillian were looking back and forth between me and the collapsed Lucius, and the eyes they turned on me were not friendly.

“…I didn’t kill him.”

It felt strange, making excuses like this. Was this how a wrongly accused prisoner felt?

“I’ll explain.”

I’d said I would explain, but honestly there wasn’t much to it. I’d stepped out past the barrier, Lucius had been standing there out of nowhere, I’d offered a greeting, and he’d suddenly attacked.

“So I had no choice but to knock him out, that’s all.”

Having heard the whole story, Lillian carefully laid Lucius’s head on her own knees and pressed a hand near his heart.

“I can feel it. This is… the poison that ate away at my body.”

Lillian’s voice trembled. She’d spent more than ten years studying DV in self-imposed quarantine, so she seemed to grasp the true nature of that energy more precisely than anyone.

“It’s not just smeared on the surface. It’s already sunk its roots deep into his heart. At this level….”

She looked up at me, fear etched into her eyes.

“His sense of self has already been devoured. What’s moving Big Bro right now is the will of this poison.”

Lillian understood the nature of DV perfectly, in her own way. It wasn’t merely a poison or a curse. It was a Demon Seed, one that latched onto humanity’s most vulnerable emotions, inferiority and anger and fear, and fed on them. Every time the host felt a negative emotion, the seed sprouted, sent out its stem, and bound the soul fast. And in the end, the instant it crossed the critical point, it erased the person’s humanity and filled the hollow shell with a demon’s instincts. Right now, in Lucius’s heart, that horrific blossoming was already drawing to a close.

Lillian’s voice broke into a sob.

“Why did it have to come to this before anyone….”

“I knew he had gone missing.”

Lillian lifted her head and glared at Seraphina, an anger that ran deeper than grief in her eyes.

“Why didn’t you go looking for Big Bro before it came to this?!”

At Lillian’s cry, Seraphina answered without so much as a flicker of expression.

“He may have gone missing, but leaving the manor was this child’s own choice. If the household and I did not go searching for him, it was simply out of respect for his decision.”

It was a cold but reasonable answer, very like Seraphina, yet hearing it only twisted Lillian’s face into deeper sorrow.

“Respecting…? Is that what you call it?”

She stroked Lucius’s cold cheek and murmured, her fingertips trembling faintly.

“Then… when I left home ten years ago too… is that the reason you never came looking for me?”
“…”
“Out of respect for my decision? Or else….”

Lillian paused a moment, then went on.

“Was it because it didn’t matter whether I was around or not?”

Having spent two years inside Lillian’s trauma, I knew that even while she’d shut herself away in that forest for ten years, some corner of her heart had gone on hoping someone would come looking for her. Breaking free of the forest hadn’t wiped away the wounds of her past entirely.

Seraphina was silent for a moment, then answered, composed.

“Back then, I had no interest in anything but the sword.”
“…”
“I only learned afterward that you had left at all.”
“…I see.”

Lillian dropped her head and smiled bitterly.

The mood turned cold and heavy. Wounds that had festered under the name of family were splitting open into the light.

Feelings like family and love weren’t my area of expertise. They say keeping quiet at least gets you halfway there, so I just read the room, not knowing what to do with the uncomfortable silence either.

“Arden.”

Lillian called my name.

“Just like before, when you took on my poison… could you take on Big Bro’s poison too?”

She was asking me to absorb the demonic essence inside Lucius’s body in his place.

I thought back to the last time, when I’d taken on Lillian’s poison. In real terms only a few hours at most had passed after I fell asleep, but trapped inside her trauma, I’d lived through more than two years in there.

It’s a good thing I got out.

If I’d lost my way in there, I might have wandered through Lillian’s nightmare forever.

But this time it was Lucius.

DV 99%.

A trauma far deeper and far more vicious than Lillian’s would be waiting for me. If I got sucked into it, there was no telling how long it might take. Worse, I couldn’t even be sure I’d make it out alive.

Eve held me back, unease on her face. If this went like it had with Lillian, she wouldn’t be able to follow me in.

“Arden… please.”

Her eyes were desperate and trembling. If I refused now, she’d fall apart, and Lucius would stay a monster forever.

“Let’s give it a shot.”

At my answer, hope bloomed across Lillian’s face.

Recruiting Lillian was for exactly this kind of situation in the first place, anyway.

The truth was, getting trapped in the trauma wasn’t what really worried me. Ten years in there or a hundred, my mind could take it. The problem was the uncertain stretch of time it would eat up. Right now, of all times, I was in a race with Valerian. Never mind the heir’s seat slipping away; losing at a game was something my pride would never allow.

I have to finish this as fast as possible.

I was just about to roll up my sleeves.

Crash!

A roar boomed from the darkness beyond the barrier, and the people who emerged were the last I’d expected to see.

“Haah… hah….”

Leo was there, drenched in blood, gasping for breath as he sank to the ground.

“Y-Young Master!”

Elli came staggering after him, shield raised, calling out to me.

And striding past the two of them came a man, commanding and triumphant. He looked down at the limp Lucius.

“No!”

My cry came out almost as a desperate plea. It changed nothing.

“Pathetic weakling.”

The man spat the words out.

And at those few words, the eyes of the unconscious Lucius snapped wide open.

Crrrack!

His body shot up into the air.

“You don’t need to say it.”

At that one remark from Valerian, Lucius awakened into a complete demon.