The reverse rotation had already begun.
The initial shock had passed. The pulsing, the hesitation, that first tremor of something overturning inside—those were already things of the past. What remained now was the sensation that followed.
The poison, having lost its direction, was wandering within.
The lump of power I had forced into myself on the battlefield of the light zone clung to that poison as if tearing into it, refusing to let go. Two alien things gnawed at each other inside me, trying to create a new pattern.
Pain like my eyeballs were being twisted and wrung out from within shook my skull. Following the reverse rotation of Ouroboros, the inside of my pupils throbbed.
The tips of the swarm’s legs crawling over my scales dug in deeper, but even that sensation arrived late. The inside was collapsing before the outside.
“Ghhhhh…”
It was the murky sound of a beast made when flesh and breath were crushed all at once.
One insect forced its jaws into the gap in my wound, as if prying it wider. A cold, hard sensation scraped along the inside of my flesh. Legs covered my scales, and tentacle-like tips tore at my bare skin.
If it had been earlier, that attack would already have ended me.
And yet this time, I did not collapse at once. Instead of spreading, the poison was being drawn somewhere deep inside me.
Thump.
This time, not only my heart but my entire torso shrank inward in rhythm with the beat. I had no bones, and yet it felt as though my bones were twisting. The severed blood vessels writhed with the smell of burning, as if searching for a new path.
Then I heard an auditory hallucination.
—You must abandon it to live.
My master from my previous life. The old voice that had always struck my ears when I swallowed the Yodan, when I ran rampant.
But this time, it was distant. Blurred, as if speaking from beneath deep water.
Something else overlapped it.
Run.
Trample them.
Eat.
It was all three.
The memories of a modern man said that if I was surrounded on all sides, I should first look for a gap. If I wanted to live, I should slip away. That was common sense.
The arrogance from when I had been a Taoist could not accept that. It could not allow the sight of being crushed to death beneath such lowly things.
The serpent’s instinct flicked its tongue as if mocking both. Anything that burrowed in was to be bitten off. Chewed, torn apart, absorbed, and turned into strength.
It was not hunger. It was gluttony.
The three tore into one another. For a very brief moment.
And then, strangely easily, they looked toward the same place.
I do not touch first.
But if I am touched, I leave nothing behind.
I flee from the strong.
To survive, I swallow anything.
“I survive.”
The moment that one sentence fell, my master’s voice no longer continued.
Crunch. Crack.
My insides began to split in earnest.
Fluorescent poison qi and the remnants of rough demonic energy mingled with the black-boiling poison and peeled away like shed skin.
The scales revealed beneath were different from before. They were white. Not a perfect pure white. A cold, achromatic color that died into gray when touched by light.
The shape of my jaws had changed as well. My head had shortened, and my torso had been compressed into something slender and flexible.
Before the feeling of becoming smaller came the sensation that all excess had been stripped away.
As if one insect noticed the change first, it immediately drove in its jaws.
Crack.
It did not hurt.
I was already no longer in the place that should have hurt.
Just before its jaws dug between my scales, my body lay low, twisted, and flowed first. A thin line of trajectory was drawn, and only the result remained.
Crunch.
My jaws severed its throat first.
Black fluid burst out and soaked my scales. A terrible stench. This time, the smell was not merely disgusting.
I could read the flow. Which one’s poison was stronger, which individual bound the structure of the swarm together.
It came to me even though I had not forced my eye technique open.
I sensed the thickest line.
In the middle of the swarm. At the highest point of the wall. The others were rushing in, but only one remained motionless. An individual with an especially large cluster of eyes and thick chitinous segments.
It, too, noticed that I had changed.
The moment it dropped from the wall, its weight was different. Thud—the floor rang. Its cluster of eyes opened all at once and sprayed black fluid.
This time, I did not retreat.
Eye technique.
As the pattern turned once, slowly, the creature’s massive body appeared to overlap faintly. An afterimage half a beat out of sync lay atop its main body.
The creature’s eye cluster was aimed slightly beside where I was.
That half beat was enough.
I lowered my body. The floor sizzled and melted where the line of poison grazed past. I slid beneath it as though riding along.
One of its legs fell, trying to stamp down on my head.
The gap where segment joined segment stood out like spreading ink.
I twisted my body and burrowed into its inner side. In my golden eye engraved with the Ouroboros pattern, its vital point came into focus with unbearable clarity.
My jaws closed.
Craaaack.
It was severed all the way inside. The eye cluster twisted all at once and trembled madly.
The surrounding insects froze in unison.
I did not miss it. As I twisted my jaws deeper, the segment separated, and the creature’s huge body crashed into the floor.
For the first time, a gap appeared in the movement of the legs covering the entire wall.
I can live.
I did not fight any further. I still did not know how long this new body would hold out.
I turned my body.
Beneath the gap opened by the dead individual, at the place where the wall and floor met, a narrow metal groove was revealed.
It was not a natural cave. A smoothly worked metal path. Grooves continuing in regular intervals. A faint vibration resounding from very far away.
A sleeping road.
I threw myself in.
The instant I slid into the narrow metal gap, dozens of legs behind me gouged at the entrance all at once.
They could not follow me to the end. With my previous body, it was a space my head would have gotten stuck in first. Now, my smaller body seeped through like water.
The sound of legs scraping against metal continued for a long while, then soon grew distant.
Darkness swallowed me once more.
It was not the wildly scattered structure of contamination like on the surface. It was the stem of a dead road stretching straight ahead.
The Ouroboros pattern was turning more quietly than before.
—-
The battlefield near the boundary of light was losing its form.
The red-eyed one’s gravitational field poured downward once more.
The Irregular knight’s liquid-type armor surged from within, trying to withstand that pressure. Black energy seeped out from inside the spiral mask.
The red-eyed one did not wait.
One step. The distance between them was erased.
The next moment, his hand was gripping the knight’s mask. He did not press down, nor did he try to crush it. He merely held it.
The armor screamed.
From the part touched by his grasp, it caved inward. The liquid exoskeleton hardened from the solid side first, and the hardened places shattered as they were.
Crunch.
One of the knight’s arms fell away from the shoulder joint. Then the other. Wherever the red-eyed one’s palm passed, the joints seemed almost to surrender on their own.
The spiral mask crumpled within his grasp.
One handful.
Something black-red burst out through the gaps in the mask and wet the floor. It was neither blood nor energy, but a mixture of the two.
The red-eyed one released his hand.
The remaining armor collapsed to the ground.
The battlefield came to a halt for a moment.
It was right after a knight-class had been torn apart without putting up even one proper act of resistance.
The swarm of contaminant bodies, driven mad by that reverberation, reacted first. They rushed in, covering every remaining space.
Using that opening, the red-eyed one’s daughter, who was bleeding red, and the remnants on the one-eyed side vanished into the smoke.
A long-range warhead dropped from high altitude, descending straight down.
Kwaaaaang.
With the explosion, light and dust mingled together and swallowed the remaining traces. All the forces left behind scattered.
Silver hair swayed.
Rin looked down at the collapsing afterimage without saying a word. The dragon’s illusion had long since vanished. By calculation and by sensation alike, the flow that should have remained within it could no longer be grasped.
It was too clean.
That was precisely what she disliked.
Her gaze caught on one side.
Beyond the wreckage of the explosion, the red-eyed one stood where he had torn the knight apart. Amid the dust, he was slowly raising his head.
His gaze reached Rin.
There were no words. Only the air grew one layer heavier. The levitation barrier of the flying artifact Rin rode was pushed back faintly. The gravitational field was reaching even this far.
How dare you.
A single word was transmitted without sound.
Rin did not lower her gaze.
However, she quietly moved the artifact one stage back. Outside the range of the gravitational field.
The red-eyed one turned his head. He withdrew his gaze.
The corner of Rin’s mouth twisted faintly.
This was as far as today would go.
From inside the cryogenic healing device loaded at the rear of the flying artifact, a faint vibration rang out.
The fingertips of Karin, lying inside, trembled weakly. Her pale lips parted and closed.
“Still…”
Rin’s gaze turned that way.
Beneath her half-closed eyelids, Karin’s eyes shifted hazily. She had not regained consciousness, nor were her words clear. And yet her voice was close to certainty.
“It hasn’t… been severed.”
Rin did not answer.
Karin drew in another ragged breath. Icy breath clouded the inside of the glass.
“Even if it’s grown distant… it’s still there.”
A brief silence flowed.
Rin’s eyes sank faintly. She was neither surprised nor denying it.
As if she had been waiting for that reaction from the beginning, she looked down at Karin once, then lifted her gaze again toward the darkness beyond the battlefield.
“As expected, my intuition wasn’t wrong.”
Her voice was low and dry.
She had never been interested in mere illusions from the start. It was only the way the real thing had disappeared, that excessively clean severance, that bothered her more.
Nothing could be seen.
And yet the fact that what should have been there was absent was, once again, clear.