Chapter 318 - Loss Of Reason
Holing up inside the abandoned obsidian castle, Michael and Razor's army was slowly beginning to fill it up once again. For once, the chambers were filled with hustle and bustle, and the soldiers occupying the place seemed more than amused by the artistry as well as the prophecies carved into the tainted windows.
"This feels like a circus," sitting on a bench in the castle's garden, Razor couldn't bear hearing another word of chatter from the folks they've gathered. Thankfully, the grave of the emperor had already made a jump away from the castle upon the arrival of the army, or else things could've been a lot messier.
'God knows where his grave is now, but at least he's not here to witness these idiots treating his domain like a park.' Not at all on board with having the adventurers and monsters over, Razor wanted them to be gone, but he knew he couldn't do that just yet.
"Oi, Michael, where are you?" He asked Michael through their mental link.
'The dungeon, trying to make the kidnapped demons talk.' Michael replied, followed by a heavy sigh.
"Interrogating, you?" Knowing full well that the elf was too soft for interrogation, Razor pulled himself off the bench and began making his way down into the dungeons. 𝙗𝒆𝒅𝙣𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒏𝙚𝙩
Descending into the dark, Razor kept marching onward until he heard a range of grunts coming from deep within the dungeons. Assuming it to be the prisoners, he continued on moving and finally reached the cells where Asuka, the demi-cats, and Greta were being held.
Standing in front of the bars looking inward, Michael had a female adventurer standing right beside him casting some sort of spell on the prisoners inside. Giving her a moment to finish, Razor kept quiet until the girl was done with the spell.
"The fox girl is level forty-seven, the demi-human cats are around the same, but that demon, s-she…" Shifting her gaze to Greta, the adventurer gulped in fear as trails of sweat drained down her nape. "One hundred fifty-five, that's her level."
Being no match against Greta, the appraising adventurer was feeling gripped with fear as if her heart itself had been clutched with cold demonic claws.
"Alright, that's enough, you can go now," although he didn't look at her, Michael could sense her fear and thus dismissed her from the dungeons.
Not wasting a second, the girl fled out of the place without so much as stealing a glance over the shoulder. Razor, on the other hand, moved closer to get a better look at the prisoners and the very first thing he noticed was that they all looked a bit delirious.
"What's the deal here?" He asked, unsure what was going on.
"Carnal curse I would assume, all demons have it, they're growing weaker with every day," Michael's answer still didn't clarify much given that Razor never cared to learn much about demons or monsters ever before. Looking at him from the edge of his eyes, Michael knew that his companions had no clue what he was talking about. "They'll die in a week if they don't get some sort of sexual outlet from a human or their own kind."
Taking a moment to just absorb the information, Riley couldn't understand why Michael appeared so worried about their potential death. After all, what did they even mean to them if not chips to bargain against a demonic tyrant?
"Then I suppose we should make our demands and have Haruki act on them before the week ends," Razor muttered, his thumb curiously resting under his chin.
Turning his head to Razor, Michael gave him a light frown.
"If they die then there's no way either of us will survive that monster's rage," Michael retorted, but once again, Razor didn't seem to care.
"Maybe I need to remind you of something," glancing to the side, Razor placed one of his hands on Michael's shoulder and continued. "I wanted to lead a normal life after the emperor's death and that's why you took me to your people, but now, they don't want you there, and that ultimately means nobody wants me either."
"What the hell are you getting at?" Brushing Razor's hands off his shoulder, Michael urged him to spit out whatever he had in mind.
"What I mean to say is that I'd rather be dead than live in a place where I'm not needed. But dying without purpose isn't something I quite long for, so if my final struggles are against a demon emperor then so be it," with no desire to live for long without purpose, Razor was more than ready to let his soul burn in a glorious finale.
At a loss for words, Michael didn't know whether to question Razor's sanity or just chalk it up to his fanaticism for the emperor. Since Atlas's death, he seemed to have grown in all manners of ways, and yet longing for death wasn't exactly what Michael expected of him at this point.
"Anyways, open the cells, I'll torture every secret out of them with reality alter," hearing Razor speak again, Michael was pulled out of his chain of thought.
Shifting his attention back to those inside the cell, he quickly unlocked the cells so the interrogation could begin.
***
"The first vessel, I used the body cells from the prototype the goblin queen created and this is what we have," staring at a lifeless body floating inside a glass vessel, Fay pressed her hand against it while explaining the creative process to the others. "What we were missing was either magic from a heavenly body or direct body cells from them, so taking a skin sample from the first god-kin the queen made finally made this creation possible."
"What about Stella, you and I both know that we didn't use anything like that when I created her body," Haruki asked, making sure not to look at his daughter looking at them with a curious gaze.
So far, everyone had tried to avoid talking about her origins, but given how fast things were moving there was no more room for any secrecy.
"That…" Turning around to face the others, Fay let her shoulders fall in defeat. "I have no clue, could've been an exception, a million in one, maybe even more."
'A miracle? I don't know if I believe in those anymore.' Keeping those thoughts to himself, Haruki stretched his arm forward and cast a spell to shoot Asmodia's soul into the alleged godly vessel.
From the outside, it appeared like a simple human girl, yet for some obscure reason the vessel alone gave off an aura of deep suffocation to the demons present.
"Finally, I don't have to share a body with you," shooting the soul through the glass, Haruki let out a tired sigh before resting his degrading body into a chair nearby.
The soul was going to take a while to conform to the new body, and in the meantime, Serena had much to fill Haruki on. From the betrayal from the demon lords to the kidnapping and the mystery behind Riley's whereabouts. Trying to keep things light at the start, Serena began by filling him in on the betrayal that Haruki had expected a while ago. Then as she was done with it, it was finally time to drop off some bombs.
"We don't have any connection with Riley and the rest of the soldiers in Feral Land at the moment, the last we heard from them was Hawthorn's report about a kidnapping," Serena explained, still holding back on the full truth.
"Kidnapping? I thought everything would be by now and the tribes were supposed to be in Margarette's care at this point," misunderstanding what she meant, Haruki complained about something else entirely.
"I'm not talking about the kidnapping of the tribe's folks, someone kidnapped our people instead, and the tribes were free as well," the moment Serena spoke out the truth, Haruki was left baffled and wondering as to who could've done it and how such a meticulous plan failed so miserably?
"Asuka, Athena, Alice, and even Greta, they were all kidnapped by the emperor's generals," tired of waiting around, Fay blurted everything out without restraint.
For a spell, none of her words registered in Haruki's head, and slowly even as it all began to settle into his head, he just couldn't believe what he had just heard. Despite there being no reason for Fay to lie, Haruki's mind just refused to listen to her, almost as if going through denial of a dear one's death.
"What did you just say?" He asked, looking right at Fay.
This time, however, she knew better than to repeat it. The look of disdain in his eyes was nothing to be meddled with.
"Stella, leave us alone for a moment," Fay requested her daughter without even glancing at her.
"Why?" Stella retorted, not wanting to leave the lab.
"Just-"
"Dungeon portal," before Fay could say anything more to her, Haruki teleported Stella through a dungeon portal that dropped her right outside the lab.
With only Serena to her aide, Fay knew this confrontation wasn't going to be pretty.
'Dammit…' Thought both the women present inside the room.