-Lizard Person
Three orcs were plastered against the glass door, bellowing. It was enough to make my ears ring.
The orc I’d hit with the chair I’d thrown just moments ago was especially enthusiastic.
Thud, thud, thud!
The orc hammered at the glass door with his thick fists as if he meant to smash it to pieces. Seeing that, the male owner spat out a curse and vanished into the kitchen.
“Damn it! The world’s gone to hell. How’s anyone supposed to live with monsters running wild?”
His muttering grew distant. It seemed he was running away on his own.
Even though it was his own shop, he showed no sign of trying to do anything about the orcs’ rampage.
The woman was pressed against the inner wall of the shop, trembling.
I also took a few steps back. I was more or less ready now.
After focusing my awareness inward for a short while and controlling the waves, I could feel the mana I’d used up filling back in.
Quietly, I stirred my intent and drew up my mana.
Kraaak! Kraaak!
The orc let out monstrous shrieks as if throwing a tantrum and slammed his forehead against the glass door.
When the glass still didn’t break, the orc looked around, picked up a flowerpot beside him, and brought it down hard against the glass door.
At last, the glass shattered with a crash.
“Ah!”
The woman’s short scream was drowned out by the orcs’ roars.
Rwoooar!
The orcs forcing their way into the shop looked less like another race and more like outright monsters.
They were all clamoring to get in first. Even when the broken glass sliced their forearms and blood flowed, they didn’t care.
They definitely didn’t seem to be in their right minds.
The orcs’ eyes were bloodshot, drool dripped from their mouths, and they kept screaming incomprehensible cries.
‘Even the homeless zombie could speak just fine. Why are these guys like this?’
I remembered the mercenaries whispering that perhaps a black magician had modified the orcs.
The sight of the orcs charging in while dripping blood was more than a little grotesque.
But no matter how monstrous they looked, in a world where other races openly immigrated and lived, I didn’t think I should kill them carelessly.
So I adjusted my intent appropriately.
‘Freeze where you stand!’
The mana energy swirling through my body erupted into violent waves.
Oudin’s body reacted on its own. My fingertips stretched toward the orcs.
The hot energy that had flowed from my heart to the space between my brows transformed at my fingertips into icy coldness and extended outward.
Crack!
Frost-like cold shot forward, freezing the space in an instant.
A chill wind rose, cold enough to send a shiver down one’s spine. The shards of glass scattered across the floor were lifted into the air by that wind.
Bluish cold, carrying blade-like glass fragments within it, swept toward the orcs at a fierce speed.
After the icy coldness surged through, the orcs were frozen solid like huge sculptures of ice, their entire bodies embedded with shards of glass.
Leaning forward as they had been, arms raised, mouths still open from their monstrous screams, they had stopped as one solid mass.
The whole world was quiet.
“Ah! You were a mage? Thank you. Thank you so much for saving me.”
Only then did the woman, who had been pressed tightly to the wall and trembling, let out a deep breath and thank me.
“The orcs won’t be able to move for a while, so you can relax.”
I turned to the woman and replied. Then I looked around the restaurant.
Since I had frozen the orcs before they could fully come through the broken glass door, the inside of the restaurant was relatively intact, but the entrance was not.
Now we had to get out of here, but there was no way to leave. The orcs, now turned into giant blocks of ice, were blocking the doorway.
“What do we do? How do we get out?”
The woman asked, looking around in confusion.
That was when I suddenly thought of the owner, who had disappeared.
He had vanished through the kitchen. Maybe there was a back door somewhere in there.
“The owner went this way earlier, right?”
“Ah, yes. That’s right.”
When I headed toward the kitchen, the woman followed after me.
Sure enough, there was a small iron door at the back of the kitchen. But when I tried to open it, it wouldn’t budge. It seemed to be locked from the outside.
‘He abandoned the shop and ran off, but he was thoughtful enough to lock the back door behind him.’
A laugh escaped me despite myself.
The iron door looked quite sturdy. I had no tools on me, but even with tools, it didn’t seem like it would be easy to break down.
I decided to try magic. It was different from combat, but if all I had to do was stir my intent and activate magic, there was no real difference.
I quietly looked at the iron door and raised my mana. Then my golden vision shone, and the structure of the iron door became visible.
A latch had been fastened from the outside.
The rest was simple. I stirred my intent and moved the latch with psychokinesis.
Clack.
Just as I thought, the iron door opened easily.
“Let’s go.”
“Yes.”
When we opened the door and stepped out, unexpectedly, it wasn’t outside the building. There was a wall, and a narrow, dark corridor stretched horizontally for quite a distance.
“It’s not outside. Anyway, let’s keep going.”
I didn’t know where the corridor led, but for now, we had no choice but to go.
At the end of the corridor was another iron door. This one wasn’t locked. When I opened it, a staircase leading downward appeared.
“This doesn’t seem like the way outside either. It looks like a basement.”
“Ah…”
The woman looked back as if asking whether we should turn around. But even if we went back, all that awaited us was the restaurant, its entrance blocked by frozen-solid orcs.
I found myself quietly growing curious. I’d thought the owner had fled outside, but after following him, a basement had appeared.
And judging by the location, this wasn’t even beneath the restaurant. We had walked down a fairly long corridor. It was more accurate to say we had passed under several buildings by a back route.
‘What is this place? Some kind of underground bunker?’
I stepped onto the stairs. I would check what the space below was for and then decide what to do.
After descending about one floor along the stairs, I heard voices coming from below. A faint smell of cigarette smoke drifted up as well.
It seemed the restaurant owner wasn’t alone.
The room still wasn’t visible. The stairs continued farther down.
From then on, I went down the stairs carefully. After turning one more bend, the wall disappeared, and the interior came into view.
Without making a sound, I stood still behind a pillar and looked inside.
Several men sat around a large table, talking noisily.
Mahjong tiles were scattered messily across the table. Even though they were underground, the men smoked heavily without a care.
The space was surprisingly large.
The area where the table was set up spread out like a hall between the pillars, and from there, doors and stairways leading to various places could be seen.
‘What is this place, really? An underground social club in Chinatown?’
That was when I noticed something piled up in the opposite corner.
To my surprise, they were weapons. Things like guns and boxes of ammunition.
Thinking I might have seen wrong because it was dark, I blinked and leaned out a little to look again.
That was when it happened. A man standing near the table spotted me, tilted his head, and said,
“Who’s that?”
Then the others’ gazes also turned toward me.
“Who are you? What are you doing there?”
“How did you get in here? Huang-ge, did you bring him?”
I stepped out from behind the pillar and revealed myself. Since I had already been discovered, hiding was pointless anyway.
“I was trying to get outside, but it looks like I took a wrong turn. What is this place?”
For now, I spoke shamelessly. It was also the truth.
Judging by the pile of weapons, this didn’t seem like a place for peaceful people, but surely they wouldn’t try to kill someone out of nowhere.
“Huh? It’s that guy from earlier. Damn it. How did you get in here? I definitely locked the door.”
The restaurant owner recognized me and frowned. The people beside him asked,
“Huang-ge, who is that? Someone you know?”
“You’re opening the secret passage to just anyone now?”
At that, the restaurant owner called Huang-ge retorted irritably.
“Who says I opened it for him? I told you, I locked the door. I don’t know him either. He’s a human who ran into the restaurant to get away from those orcs.”
At that moment, the man standing near the table slowly walked toward me.
From the look of him, he seemed to be the muscle of the group. The atmosphere was anything but friendly.
As I watched him, I quietly extended my detection magic. No one was caught by the detection magic.
They were all ordinary people. Twelve in total. Among them, two were standing beside the pile of weapons.
I had to defend before a fight broke out. Thinking that, I kept my eyes on the big man, when he suddenly looked behind me and said,
“Hm? Who’s that? There wasn’t just one of you?”
He had discovered the woman who had followed me. I’d been distracted by the underground space for a moment and hadn’t paid attention to her, but it seemed she had come down the stairs after me and hidden behind the pillar.
“Good grief, damn it. Now that I look, even a lizard followed you down here. You didn’t bring the orcs too, did you?”
Huang-ge shook his head in disgust as he spoke.
“What? A lizard? What’s a filthy lizard doing crawling in here?”
“Throw it out right now!”
“Not just like that. We should teach both of them a proper lesson before sending them off.”
The men seated around the table spat out rough words.
‘Lizard?’
That word lodged itself in my ear. Huang-ge had said something like that earlier, too, the moment he saw the woman.
Hearing words I couldn’t understand again and again grated on my nerves.
I wondered if it was some kind of slang, but in any case, it didn’t have a pleasant ring to it.
“What do you mean, lizard? Who are you calling a lizard?”
I asked. Huang-ge clicked his tongue and answered.
“Who else? That woman. You didn’t know? She’s a lizard person. Tsk, tsk. You’ve been going around with her all this time without even knowing that?”
Ah. A lizard person. In other words, she seemed to be one of the other races.
But no matter how I looked at her, she didn’t look like a lizard person. From every angle, she looked entirely human.
Then how had these men realized she was a lizard person?
Anger began to creep up inside my chest. I didn’t know how they had found out, but they were insulting her right now for no other reason than that she was a lizard person.
‘Filthy? A lizard?’
My heart gradually grew hot. A trigger had been touched.
In my previous life, I had often been made fun of by the children at school because I belonged to a pseudo-religious cult.
They said I was creepy because my clothes and way of speaking were strange.
The wound in my heart was deep. All the deeper because, even while being called creepy like that, I had still wanted to go to school where the other children were.
“Bring them both over here. They stepped into the tiger’s den on their own, so we can’t just let them leave nicely.”
A man at the table said. Immediately, the big man strode toward me.
Huang-ge also tossed aside the cigarette he had been smoking and walked this way.
I was already prepared. Mana surged inside my heated heart.
My fingertips tingled with how badly I wanted to let it out.
‘Don’t kill them. They’re just bad people, that’s all.’
A thread of reason spoke to me. As the energy in my heart passed through the space between my brows, I refined my intent.
‘Freeze. Right where you are.’
Freezing magic was both offense and defense, and it was the choice to control an opponent without killing them.