Before he knew it, Zel was already on the move. The tiny blade she swung down was as brutally sharp as he expected, and it pierced right through his palm where he caught it. But Zel paid the pain no mind as he swept his other arm toward the men.
“Huh…? Agh!”
The man groping the woman’s breasts over her ripped shirt flew backward and loudly plunged headfirst into a tall, spiky bush.
“Wha-?! Gah!” Surprised by his partner’s sudden departure, the other man jerked his head up from trying to pull down the woman’s pants. Zel grabbed his throat and squeezed out a toad-like croak from his crushed airway. He lifted the man off the ground by his throat as he flailed his short, puny legs.
“Who do you work for?” Zel asked in a low growl, slightly easing the pressure of his fingers sinking into the man’s throat. His canine teeth gleamed behind his thin lips.
“Guh! Ach!”
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll crush your throat. Or would you rather I break your jaw? Messin’ you up so bad you can only eat tofu the rest of your life is no problem for me either.”
“S-Somebody…h-help me!”
“Oh? Your dick completely deflated, y’know? Would you like me to crush it along with your throat?”
“I’ll tell you! I’ll speak s-so…d-don’t k-kill me! P-Please…”
Zel’s lips quirked into a smirk under the black specs he wore despite the dark. “Wow, you’re filthy. Don’t drool on me, you piece of shit. Spit it out already!”
“We’re called Insects…we ain’t no more than Vermis…”
Vermis referred to small-time gangs made up of no-good punks, not much different from a group of delinquent street kids who never learned better. Basically, they were thugs who did subcontractor work under big-time crime syndicates until it went to their heads and they smugly gave their insignificant ragtag group of gangs a name.
“Vermis? Is that true? You aren’t Inferni?” Zel asked, dropping the name of the syndicate that viewed him as an enemy.
“I-I…dunno… What’s I-Inferni?” The man trembled and tried to shake his head as though he truly didn’t know.
“Doesn’t matter if you don’t know. Then why’d you assault this woman?” Zel gestured toward the woman with his chin. He glimpsed that she had somehow succeeded in pulling together her ripped clothing as she looked up at him from where she still sat on the ground. She probably couldn’t move yet.
“I dunno that either…! A man named Shank hired us to rape and kill the woman who was going to pass through this area just before rainfall… We were gonna be paid in Nightz. We accepted the job because he said he’ll give us a shitload of Nightz!”
“Hmm…”
Zel didn’t recognize the name Shank. In all likelihood, it was a fake name, and the man ensured that they never saw his face. These men really didn’t seem to have a connection to Infernum, the syndicate the Inferni were members of, so Zel lost complete interest in them. He was about to throw the man into the brush like the last one, when he suddenly got a deep whiff of a putrid odor. It was the stench of a Bijour getting excited.
“What else do you know? Tell me everything! Right now!” Sensing the Muta’s bloodlust in the darkness, Zel dug his fingers into the man’s throat.
“Ack! I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you everythin’! That woman’s probably a member of some syndicate, don’t ya think?! She seems like the easiest target to knock off so that’s why she was picked!”
“Syndicate?”
“Y-Yeah. But I dunno the details. I was seriously only a hired man!”
Just what kind of syndicate? A different syndicate from Infernum? She’s awfully naïve for syndicate life.
“Anything else?”
“Nothing! I mean it! Spare me!”
“Hmph. Then return to your employer and give him the message to never go after this girl’s ass again. If you say it’s from Zel, he’ll know who you mean.”
“Zel…? O-Ok. I promise. I’ll never go for her again.”
“Good. Hm?”
Zel heard the grating sound of metal moving. He shifted his eyes to the parked semitrailer, where he saw the automatic shutter doors rolling up. Inside the container was pitch-black.
Two glowing red lights ominously appeared within the darkness.
The forest Muta, Bijour.
Tch. I screwed up.
“I guess your buddy woke up?”
Danny sneaked around to the other side of the semitrailer, wormed his way into the driver’s seat, and opened the container from inside the truck. The shutter door hadn’t rolled all the way up yet, but a small crack was more than enough space for the slender creature.
As soon as the Bijour slipped outside, the other man stepped on the gas and hightailed it out of there without his accomplice. The semitrailer looked like a panicked metal animal fleeing from danger.
“O-Oi! …OI! Wait! Wait! Danny! Danny!”
The man’s cries were the trigger.
The beautiful wild Muta lunged through the air with enough jumping power to captivate a person. It leapt with the confidence of a predator that had marked them as easy prey. The pair of red eyes soared right above Zel’s head like warning lights of death.
In the next moment, the Bijour would flawlessly knock down its prey with its powerful hind-legs, and then rip out the soft windpipe with its sharp, curved foreleg talons.
But it was the lithe reptile that got flipped over and slammed into the ground. The Muta’s only weakness was said to be its long, thin neck. Zel grabbed it there, then shoved it, neck and all, against the ground as its long tail and powerful hind-legs jerked wildly through the air.
This Bijour might’ve been a youngling as its size was no bigger than a petite human, but a Muta was a Muta. No ordinary human strength was capable of holding one down with a single hand, but Zel was no ordinary human. The paralyzed man on the ground beside Zel had fallen on his hands and knees, none the wiser about how he got there—Zel had chucked him aside to seize the Bijour.
“I wanted to take it alive, but, the situation is what it is,” Zel remarked casually, as if he had only caught a stray dog, not a creature capable of taking down armed men. The Muta raged under his hand in a desperate struggle for life. Zel lifted his other hand to remove his black-tinted specs.
A pale glow emerged in the dark. His eyes were filled with a gleam more frightening than the Muta’s evil red eyes.
The raging Bijour temporarily stopped moving, as if captivated by the glow. The uncanny sound of bone snapping echoed through the plains. Both legs of the violently struggling Bijour suddenly twitched then spasmed two or three times before thudding to the ground.
“Well, that sucked. But how could I have transported it? The trailer took off, and it’d be visible in my car—Oi… C’mon now.”
“S-Somebody! Save me! Monster! There’s a monster!”
When the gaunt man on the ground met Zel’s eyes, he scampered backwards on the ground to get away. The moment the puny man had managed to clamber to his feet, he made a stumbling streak for the bright freeway, falling over himself. The shameful sloshing sounds coming from his pants hinted that he was wetting himself along the way.
Tch. He ran away. What a pain… But I don’t care enough to chase him. Oh yeah. Zel turned around as he remembered the other human.
He had forgotten all about the woman too afraid to stand, watching him from the ground about 10 mols from where he stood. The young woman clasped her torn shirt in front of her chest, but her pure white neck and shoulders stood out vividly to his night vision.
“You’re still here?” Zel sneered coldly as he put his specs back on.
Had the woman not been paralyzed with fear, she would’ve seen his fingers were trembling.