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章節 10: City

Lokus sighed. There really wasn't anything he could do about it. Maybe he could find an antidote or something once he entered the city.

Speaking of…

Lokus hauled himself to his feet, scooping up the bag of demon claws the cloaked woman had given him along with the fire poker and eyeing the demon's remains.

'This would probably be worth some coin in the city. Or claws, I guess. Too bad I can't carry all of this on my own. Or can I?'

Lokus went to the pile of bones, scratching his chin as a plan slowly formed in his mind.

'First thing's first,' he thought, bending down.

He took the twenty claws from the demon, each of which was around the size of his index finger, and set them into a pile. If these things were the currency in this world, he didn't want to break them if he could help it.

Next, he pulled the demon's ribcage out of the pile of bones, inspecting its condition before giving an approving nod and reaching for the piles of fur.

Because he had stopped cutting into the meat a few bites in, the hide was mostly intact barring the first incision and the stomach area. He laid this fur on the inside of the rib cage, filling in the gaps between ribs and creating an area largely devoid of holes.

It was an ugly creation, and the hide didn't fit properly within the rib cage, leaving many parts of it poking out or drooping down, but it would do.

Next, he began stacking the other bones inside of the rib cage, spending over an hour finagling them so they all fit inside.

When he finished, the furry hide bulged out in between the ribs as bones pressed against it. This, along with the small pieces of meat still attached to the hide and bones gave it a grotesque appearance, but Lokus wasn't going for aesthetics.

With that done, he stuck his fire poker in between some of the bones and placed the demon's claws and the bag containing more claws at the front of his haphazard tower, for easier access.

Taking a step back to examine his work, he grimaced. It smelled horrible, although truthfully that might have been him, and it looked just as bad. But if it worked, that was all that mattered.

He grabbed the thing by the protruding spine and started to pull. He used the hill the demon had come from as a reference point to orient himself, dragging his creation along behind him and hoping that the spine wouldn't fall apart.

...…

'Finally.'

As the strange green sun began to crest the horizon, Lokus finally laid eyes on his destination.

Against his expectations, it wasn't some sinister construct of towering black, blood-soaked walls with pike-mounted heads in front, nor did it have moats of blood and snapping, angry abominations standing guard at the gate.

If anything, it almost looked… normal.

The walls were tall, yes, but instead of a grim black, they were the light gray of average stone. There were no mounted heads or chained abominations in front of the gate, chomping at the bit to devour unruly passersby, only a calm and orderly line that stretched back from the gate for a few dozen meters.

While guards manned the top of the walls, and everyone in line, including the scant few children, had some manner of weapon at their hip, everyone was quite relaxed. Lokus couldn't help but wonder, was this because they were so close to the city? Or because they had faith in their own strength?

He stepped into line, dragging his makeshift sled behind him. Those in front of him glanced back with wrinkled noses, but when they saw the mountain of bones and fur next to him, the white hair that was so out of place in the assembly of otherwise natural hair color, and the bloody appearance he bore, they wisely turned away and said nothing.

It was two hours before Lokus got to the front of the line, and when he did, the two guards at the gate scowled distastefully as an unpleasant smell assaulted their noses.

There were two of them, each wielding a spear. They were unarmored, save for a bowl-shaped helm, but they oozed the authority and confidence of someone with an entire city's power behind their decisions. They didn't even pause to gawk at Lokus' hair, they were so sure of this power.

"Fucking hell, kid," the older of the two said, looking Lokus up and down. "What did you do, cut your way out of some demon's stomach? Ever heard of a bath?"

"How much to get into the city?" Lokus asked the guard, ignoring the pointed questions. He didn't feel like regaling them with the tale of how he slew this beast.

"Ah, one of those ones," the guard grunted, shaking his head. "We stand out here for hours at a time, you know. The least you could do is humor us when we try to start a conversation. This idiot here isn't exactly a master with words."

"Hey, that's just not fair," the other guard protested. He was much younger than the first, perhaps only a few years older than Lokus. "I have loads of stories."

"Your weekly visits to a brothel don't count as 'conquering a woman,' you dope," the older guard sneered, before turning back to Lokus and leaning on his spear. "Now, tell us. What happened to you? It got anything to do with that corpse you're dragging along?"

"It attacked me. I killed it."

"I take it back," the older guard said to the younger one. "You're not the worst storyteller I know anymore." Turning back to Lokus, he said, "Five lesser Prince claws for entry."

Lokus extracted his bag of claws from the sled and tugged open the drawstring, peering inside. Taking five out at random, he proffered them to the guards, who gave him a blank look.

"You do know how to tell the value of a claw, right kid?" the older guard asked him.

'Oh,' Lokus thought. He had forgotten about that.

"We aren't an accounting service," the younger guard said. "If you can't give the correct amount, we'll have to ask you to step out of the line until you can."

Lokus grimaced, recalling the hours-long wait, but since the guards didn't look like they were going to change their minds, he reluctantly stepped out of line.


章節 11: Fall

Lokus chided himself as he walked. How had he forgotten something like that? Had his encounter with the demon shocked him that much?

Maybe, but Lokus wasn't a fan of excuses. No amount of pushing the blame onto people or circumstances would change the fact that he had just wasted hours of his own time all because he had forgotten that he needed to unleash his Domain.

'That's a good spot,' he thought, eyeing a particular point on the side of the road that was far enough away from the city to be largely left alone, but not too far as to be unsafe. 'I'll sit here and-.'

BOOOOOM!

Lokus was thrown forward, earning himself a mouthful and eyeful of dirt as the earth quaked underneath him like a bucking dragon.

 Dust and dirt were kicked up into the air, obscuring everything in a haze of brown and preventing him from seeing more than a few feet in front of himself even after rubbing the dirt out of his eyes.

He struggled and failed to stand while the ground continued to rumble and rock him like a boat in a storm, feeling like a toddler trying to learn how to walk as he fell again and again. It was infuriating.

It was at least ten minutes before the earthquake passed, and another five minutes of feeling around in the brown before the dust settled and he could see again.

What he saw, or rather, what he didn't see, left him wide-eyed with shock.

The city, that towering monument of human ingenuity and adaptability even in hell itself, was nowhere to be seen. In its place, a gargantuan hole, kilometers long, stood. Even from so far away, Lokus could tell it extended down far deeper than it was wide, a bottomless chasm reminiscent of a hungry god's gaping mouth.

Another, similar hole was just barely visible over the horizon, but Lokus was much more concerned with the first.

'All those people…'

What a cruel trick of fate, to so callously snuff out so many lives. There had been families, livelihoods, and children in that city, but the universe had swept it all away with all the fanfare of a breeze blowing out an already dying candle.

But Lokus' shock would soon be renewed, as the ground shuddered once again and cracks raced across the grassy floor around him.

With a deafening sound, the ground opened up underneath him, and he began to fall.

...…

SPLASH!

Lokus' long, long fall was suddenly interrupted by a collision with some kind of liquid. He opened his eyes after having instinctively closed them during the impact, but his surroundings were pitch black.

'I must have fallen for at least four kilometers.'

But if that was the case, how did he survive? No liquid he knew of would be able to remove the lethality of such a fall, and he doubted his Endurance stat was great enough for such a feat.

He kicked his feet, intending to surface and find dry land, but he didn't move.

With a frown, he tried again, only to face the same result.

He was stuck.

Lokus forced his panic down as best he could, knowing that it wouldn't help him here. But despite his best efforts, his chest still constricted and his heartbeat became erratic a looming sense of dread took root in his mind.

'Think, think, think,' he thought. It had to have something to do with how he had survived the fall. This liquid, whatever it was, was robbing him of his ability to move.

So then, how did he leave its watery embrace when he couldn't move?

Thinking of a solution while simultaneously stifling one's panic was not an easy thing to do, and every idea he tossed aside only made his brain foggier, his lungs tighter, and his panic grow.

Lokus attempted to take a deep breath to calm himself, only to forget that he was in whatever this liquid was and gain a mouthful of it for his troubles. He choked and gagged, which only made it worse, and it took every ounce of his willpower to calm himself down.

'What am I supposed to do?' he thought. He couldn't move, he couldn't breathe, he could hardly think at this point. The deafening silence and infinite darkness that surrounded him left him fully aware of the drum-like pounding of his own heart.

What could he do? He had no tools at his disposal, except for…

His Frost.

But would it work? He didn't have any other choice. It HAD to work.

Lokus did his best to ignore his light-headedness and pulled from his Sovereign Gateway. Waves of cold began to radiate out from him as he activated Freezing Aura, and true to its name, it started to solidify the liquid around him.

Not by much at first, but the room-temperature liquid slowly dropped to something even he could feel with his Frost affinity, and this time when he kicked his feet and swung his arms, he moved.

Not because the drop in temperature made the liquid less viscous, but because with the constant cold Lokus was pumping out, the liquid was too busy trying to rob the momentum of the freezing waves to rob all of Lokus' momentum from him.

It was still only slighter easier than swimming through gelatin, and his limbs burned under the strain, but soon…

"Pwah!"

Lokus was overwhelmed with relief as he flopped onto the rocky ground with a wet slap. He looked up above at where he fell from, his chest bouncing up and down as he took one massive gulp of air after another.

His surroundings were so dark that he couldn't even see his hand in front of himself, but up there, miles above where he lay now, was the faintest pinprick of light. It was the only sign of the surface, and to Lokus, it felt so, so far away.

'No use in moping around,' he thought as he sat up and crossed his legs. 'Let's hope my Domain is enough to see in this place.'

Closing his eyes, he cast his senses inward.


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