I whispered, “Coming from you? That speed was unreal. I couldn’t react at all…”
Whip was bleeding heavily from the blow I’d landed on her neck, while my right shoulder had been ripped open by the parasite’s jaws. We’d both taken lethal hits and run out of strength at the same exact moment.
Celestia hurried over and cast healing magic on us. Before my eyes, the wounds knit closed at astonishing speed. Whip and I bumped fists, acknowledging each other’s performance.
“Listen up, you lot! There’s someone here who can push me, leader of the Hidden Insect Corps, this far! The future of the Aros Temple Cult is bright!”
Her proclamation of a shining future for the Aros Temple Cult sent the believers into an uproar.
I caught scattered comments praising the fact that she’d been forced to bring out “Milk-chan” in our very first match, and from the sound of things, my performance was being rated rather highly.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Joanne’s expression, like she was holding something back with all she had.
From her point of view, winning was a given… Is that it?
Her wolf-cut swayed as she turned around and vanished into the blizzard.
Basking in the satisfaction of having pried out new intel on the insect-people—and the dull ache of wounds that hadn’t fully healed—I slipped away to a quiet spot to cool off my overheated body.
We’d cracked the mystery of the parasite species. Ridiculous power and speed, chitinous armor wrapped around the host’s vital points, attacks that slipped past conscious awareness… Maybe Whip’s setup was a special case, but what I did know was this: it was safer not to think of them as humans at all.
If I could fight Whip to a draw on our first encounter, then with the insecticide in play, I had a decent chance of taking her down in a rematch.
Right after our bout, I tested my homemade insecticide on the bugs in the breeding yard, and those things went down in one hit.
I still didn’t know how much the hosts themselves would be affected by the insecticidal compounds, but if I could get the stuff circulating through their bodies, there was no way they’d walk away unscathed.
Now that I had a way to pin down the insect-people, the idea of killing Stella Belmont stopped being a fantasy and started to feel disturbingly real.
The destruction of the Northeastern Branch was no longer an impossible dream.
I’d already picked out a likely date for the operation. One week from now, the forces of the Northeastern Branch were scheduled to attack the mining town of Jade. In the chaos of that battle, I’d have to wipe out their elite unit and kill Stella. There was no other way.
All that remained was to share the plan with Joanne and Alex and set it into motion.
I clenched my pendant in my hand. The little accessory that had defined my relationship with Joanne gave me a strange kind of calm just by being there.
That was when someone stepped in, casting a shadow over the flickering torchlight. Karatena.
Her hard-soled footsteps clicked sharply against the stone as she approached.
“Your battle earlier was splendid,” she said. “To think you’d make Whip Funny Task eat dirt like that.”
She laced her hands behind her back and took up a spot beside me. With the hallway torches at her back, her expression was lost in shadow.
“It was almost as if you were testing Whip,” she went on. “Or rather, it would be more accurate to say you were testing the properties of her parasite, wouldn’t it?”
“Find the weak points, give your partner a chance to shore them up, then all of you keep sharpening yourselves. That’s what full-contact training is for, isn’t it? If you’re not going in like you mean to kill, what’s the point?”
She didn’t so much as twitch. A strangely viscous darkness clung to her face, hiding every nuance of her expression.
I shrugged at her roundabout wording, and that little display of easy confidence must have gotten under her skin. Karatena clicked her tongue in irritation.
“You’re trying to win everyone over and use them to get rid of me, aren’t you? Instead of taking the long way around like that, why not just come at me directly? Or is it that, just like dear Fuankilo-sama, you’re a non-combatant who couldn’t possibly win in a straight fight? Or maybe you’re great at handing out torture but can’t stand getting hurt yourse—”
“If you’re going to talk, at least spare me the endless backchat,” she sissed.
“You know, you and I might actually be pretty similar,” I went on. “You’re obsessed with risk elimination, but once you make up your mind, you charge ahead like a runaway cart. Your thought process is practically written on your face.”
“Do not lump us together!” she spat.
She let out a sharp breath, and the air seemed to twist; the flames in the wall sconces wavered, their shapes jolting, the angle of their light shifting.
And in that flickering glow, I finally saw Karatena’s face as she leaned in toward me—twisted, saturated with madness.
“Traitors are always struck down by divine judgment in the end,” she said. “You’d do well to tremble in anticipation of it.”
Her beautifully clear, willow-slit eyes gleamed with a steel-cold light.
An ordinary person would have been overwhelmed into silence by that unnatural, almost inhuman beauty. But I shoved her back, hard, by the shoulder. I drove her all the way to the wall and glared at her face from right in front.
“That narrow field of vision, that way you make pointless enemies… It’s exactly like your beloved Fuankilo-sama.”
At that, the smile pasted on Karatena’s face began to twitch violently. “Enjoy acting tough while you still can,” she hissed.
“You really are as narrow-minded as you look. Try not to get your legs swept out from under you.” I deliberately jabbed at her appearance, flicking a glance at those long bangs that hung low enough to cover one eye. Karatena bared a canine at me and fixed me with a venomous glare.
Then her pale pink lips parted ever so slightly, and she spat. It happened so suddenly that I couldn’t react. Something translucent splattered under my eye, and the lukewarm, filthy sensation made me click my tongue in disgust.
Wow. She really does hate my guts… That resignation lasted only a moment before a strange crawling sensation on my cheek made me freeze.
Right under my eye, it felt like ants were swarming across my skin, right where her spit had landed.
I wiped it with the pad of my finger, almost absentmindedly, and my blood ran cold. On my index finger, inside the saliva, a tiny insect with ten legs was squirming, and it wasn’t alone. There were dozens of them writhing in the gob of spit Karatena had launched at me.
Every single one of them was alive, their indistinct heads—or tails, I honestly couldn’t tell—wriggling furiously as they stretched and contracted, groping blindly for something. Parasites.
I moved on reflex, thrusting the part of my face her spit had touched into the flame of the nearest torch, scorching it clean.
“Karatena, you—”
Karatena said nothing to me as I somehow managed to avert disaster. Her eyes, the screws in them completely blown loose, bored into me.
In the depths of those irises, I saw the faint shadow of a larva drift by.
“Well then. Excuse me.” The ash-haired woman turned on her heel and walked away.
From that moment on, the paths Karatena and I walked were irreversibly, decisively divided.