Chapter 151
Her light brown hair shimmered in the sunlight like ripe barley.
It was closer to gold than brown, but it was hard to call it the same perfectly bright blonde as Cecilia's. Depending on the angle, it could easily seem like a different color.
“…….”
Her bun-style hair, with ends curled like a croissant, fluttered lightly in the wind. Ian tilted his head and stared down at her for a long moment.
‘She mentioned Walter. She’s a woman connected to Laplace.’
This was the second time he had come face-to-face with someone from Laplace. The first had been Eddie, and though it had been somewhat difficult, he had succeeded in cutting off the bastard’s head. He was still making good use of that head.
It wouldn’t matter much if one more were added here. Rather, since he hadn’t been able to gouge out Eddie’s eyes, if he captured her and extracted her eyeballs, he could even verify the proper effect of a dying eye.
Or he could put a leash around her neck through the Book of Contracts. The conditions were a little strict, but it wasn’t impossible. Using only the Circulator he had already summoned, he could easily bring someone like her to the brink of death.
‘For now, should I subdue her first and think about the rest later?’
Kill her or capture her. Either way, now that he had realized she was a magician from Laplace, he couldn’t just pretend he hadn’t seen her and let it go. First, it would be right to knock her out and then decide her fate.
After gathering his thoughts, Ian summoned the Deep-Sea Compendium and conveyed his will to the Circulator.
It was telepathy that could be used only while a grimoire was active. He couldn’t hear the Circulator’s thoughts, but one-sided communication was more than possible.
‘The human in front of you—capture her and knock her out. Don’t eat her.’
[Krrrk!]
The Circulator nodded and immediately charged at Marian. Marian, who had already anticipated Ian’s identity, snorted.
“As expected, you were a magician. Your type is summoning—”
KWAAAANG!!
Before she could even finish speaking, Marian and the Circulator collided head-on. Marian’s body was hurled away without resistance and slammed into the wall.
The impact was strong enough to burst an ordinary human’s body apart. But there was no blood left on the ground, and the voice had not disappeared.
“—It seems so. Still, I’m not sure what it’s based on. A sea creature? Something aberrant derived from one?”
From the collapsed building, where Marian had been slammed and stone dust and concrete debris were scattering, a calm voice drifted out. Ian let a faint smile form as the voice echoed like it was coming through a microphone.
“Your voice has turned aberrant. Don’t tell me you transplanted an aberration’s vocal cords?”
“……And you’re still perfectly fine after hearing this. Your mental fortitude must be impressive.”
Crumble……
Through the gap as the shattered outer wall caved in, Marian walked out unharmed, her clothes only slightly torn.
Her only injury was an arm twisted halfway around. She looked far too neat to have collided with the Circulator. Ian immediately realized it was because of the magic on her clothes.
It was probably a spell that made the clothes take the impact along with her.
With magic intricately woven into every thread, blocking simple physical force was more than possible. If the Circulator were an entity with some unusual ability like the other beings of the Outer Sea, it would be different. But as a type that simply brute-forced things with raw size, it had to be vulnerable to a defense like that.
The Circulator grew larger every time it died, and in the process lost the abilities it had when it was smaller.
But no matter how formidable the defense, if you kept hammering at it, you could eventually tear it apart.
If an arm was wrecked by nothing more than a single body slam, could it really stay intact in an actual fight?
Of course not.
“Go. Tear her apart.”
Ian said as he got down from the Circulator’s back.
The Circulator split its mouth into a wide grin. Black seawater, blood, and saliva dripped together, forming an ashen red. Marian stared at the sight and sprayed her shattered arm with healing spray.
“It’s not an aberration. I can tell now that I’ve made contact with it once.”
Sshhk.
The red liquid from the spray soaked the wound. Then blood, flesh, and bone began to regenerate once more. Seeing tissue recover from nothing was gruesome, but the Circulator let out a low laugh at the sight of its prey healing on its own.
[Krrr……!]
“……Are you laughing? Do you actually have enough intelligence to laugh? That’s another interesting fact—”
Before she could finish, the Circulator moved at high speed, clamped down on her regenerated arm, and shook its head roughly. Saw-like teeth instantly severed bone and muscle, and the Circulator gulped down the arm that had gone into its mouth.
[Krrng!]
Even if she was a magician who had modified her body, it was still flesh that had once contained ether. Tasting magician flesh for the first time in its life, the Circulator exuded blood-red steam from the blood vessels bulging all over its body and drooled like mad. Ian sat on a nearby bench, watching the fight, and took out a cigarette.
“Don’t kill her. I’ve got something I want to try.”
The Circulator didn’t answer. Instead, it scraped the floor with its feet and glared at Marian beneath it. Marian clicked her tongue and bit off her own tongue with her teeth.
Crunch!
Blood splattered. The blood spreading in all directions wrapped around Marian’s entire body. In that instant, her body turned into red paint and flowed away. The blood-red liquid seeping into the floor crawled quickly toward Ian.
She was ignoring the Circulator and going after the magician first.
It was the textbook way to deal with a magician who controlled a summon. Marian converted the liquid back into flesh and swung a fist at Ian.
“Got you.”
A fist carrying enough force to casually split most rocks. If he stayed still, his head would burst like a watermelon, but Ian didn’t even look back at her.
Instead, he pulled the trigger.
BANG!!
With a tremendous roar, a hole was punched through his coat, and the lead bullet pierced Marian’s hand. Unable to overcome inertia, her body spun once along the bullet’s path, and bone and muscle were crushed and scattered in all directions.
“Wizard’s secret technique. Fireball.”
Hoo.
Ian exhaled smoke with a grin. Marian, who hadn’t expected him to use a gun, twisted her face in fury.
“You filthy mongrel magician……!”
“How absurd. This is orthodox magic, passed down in America.”
Rat-a-tat-tat!
Ian clamped the cigarette between his teeth and fired a fanning shot at the fallen woman. The hammer struck the cylinder in rapid succession, and the muzzle spat fire again and again.
With a series of popping thuds, huge bullet holes opened one after another in Marian’s body. But Marian did not die; instead, she swallowed her own blood and chanted a spell.
“O idol of mystery. As your master, I command you: devour the creature here!”
A spell spoken in French. One of her eyes melted away, and a huge eyeball floated in the sky.
An eyeball as if replacing the sun. Ian felt a violent jolt of PTSD and ordered the Circulator.
“Get that thing out of my sight.”
[Krrr!]
The Circulator leaped at once and tore the floating eyeball apart with its claws. The transparent crystal fluid burst with a pop and rained down in a shower, and the Circulator swallowed the pouring blood while chewing up the split eyeball fragments.
“Hah?”
Marian, who had never imagined her magic would be broken by such a crude method, twisted her face as blood streamed from her eye sockets.
As she paid with her own body, the power of the magic she used was truly tremendous.
A one-hit kill spell that, the moment you looked into it, shredded the witness’s eyeballs and transformed the brain into a giant eye. It was a spell that worked on humans, animals, and mysteries alike, so she had used it to finish things quickly even if she had to take damage. And yet the magic vanished without showing any effect at all.
“I, I’m Marian! I never gave you permission to counter my magic like that!”
She shouted in French, sounding wronged.
It didn’t matter to Ian. He stomped on Marian’s head, slamming her face into the ground, and pointed at her knees and shoulders with his fingers.
“Cut here, cut there.”
[Krrng!]
The Circulator immediately moved its jaws at his command. After devouring all four limbs in an instant, the Circulator belched in satisfaction, and only then did the woman who had lost her arms and legs tremble with fear, her one remaining pupil quivering.
‘This is dangerous……!’
Marian, who had naturally assumed she would win the battle, chattered her teeth as blood poured from the severed ends.
Marian was an elite who had always maintained top-ranking results at the Clock Tower. She had never even experienced defeat in battle, and those results had continued unchanged even after leaving the Clock Tower.
But that record was broken for the first time today.
“Why, why didn’t the magic activate!”
She raged.
Firearms? They could be used. After all, there were a few magicians who used guns in the first place, and he had fought against them before.
However, none of them had ever torn her skin and clothes apart with a gun. Guns were merely a means of supporting combat. There was no way they could land such a decisive blow—
“Ah.”
For a moment, she realized why the gun had worked and coughed up blood.
“The magic…… was gone. It had been destroyed……?”
It hadn’t been destroyed by the gun.
Before that.
Most of it disappeared when she first collided with that monster, and even what had remained when her arm was torn off had been blown away.
That was why the gun had worked.
To think magic that had been developed with billions would vanish after only two attacks.
“…….”
It was absurd. The magic woven into the dress was a near-national-treasure-class spell, painstakingly crafted thread by thread by a famous magician, with enough power to survive even one collision with an airplane. And that, that summon, destroyed it by itself? Did that even make sense?
“……Kuhk.”
But reality was telling her otherwise.
What you think is impossible has already become reality.
“Ah, ahh……!”
Fear settled on her face.
She had lived as if death didn’t exist, and for the first time she truly felt her own death. As the blood drained away in real time and pain crawled up from the severed ends, she felt her body grow cold and somehow managed to move the lips pressed into the asphalt as she screamed.
“P-please save me! Please save me! I’ll do anything! Please! Don’t kill me!”
At the completely unexpected plea, Ian tilted his head in curiosity.
“Should a noble magician really be saying that? If it were me, I wouldn’t.”
“Please save me! Please save me! If you want me to suck you off, I will; if you want me to spread my legs, I will! Please……!”
“Now that I look at you, you’re not noble at all—you’re a vulgar magician.”
Ian clicked his tongue and ground out the cigarette he was smoking against the crown of her head. Marian groaned in pain, and Ian stopped the Circulator from trying to flay the skin off her back with its claws.
“That’s enough. If you torment her any more, she’ll bleed to death.”
[Krrr…….]
“No need to be disappointed. You’ve already eaten plenty. Delicacies are meant to be eaten in small amounts, understand?”
[Kruk.]
The Circulator nodded, took a step back, and sat down like a puppy. Ian crouched beside Marian’s head and rummaged through her belongings.
There wasn’t much worth taking. Just a bag of drugs, two bottles of recovery spray, and three blood-regeneration pills that Yuna had used.
Ian put the spray in his bag and forced the regeneration pills into her mouth.
“If you want to live, eat them.”
“Mmph!”
Marian hurriedly chewed and swallowed the pills. Ian looked down at her, pitiful to the point of seeming tragic, and said.
“Choose. Do you want to be left with just your head and become my material? Or do you want to pass out? If you pass out and wake up, your personality will be adjusted a little.”
“…….”
Marian’s chewing movements came to an abrupt halt.
Whichever way she chose, it would only end in the worst outcome.
It was a hellish either-or.