Chapter 22
*
At that very moment, Julian was pushing silver bullets into the cylinder.
Erica, who had fallen to the floor, gently bit her lip as the cold sensation pressed against her cheek.
A fishy, metallic taste spread throughout her mouth.
‘How pathetic.’
She wanted to be of use.
To the only person who had acknowledged her in this trash of a world.
Of course, this situation wasn’t caused by any fault of hers.
She had done the best she could for someone her age.
She had simply been up against the wrong opponent.
But the heart of a young girl could not easily accept reality.
Tears blurred Erica’s vision.
She couldn’t bear how the red blood scattered across the floor felt like useless filth.
Blood trickling down her forearm.
The revolver falling to the floor.
The sneer of the white-faced clown looking down at her.
For a moment, everything felt like a story from another world.
Then a warm, gentle voice reached her ears.
- [— Child.]
It was a woman’s voice, somehow wistful yet carrying an authority she could not disobey.
- [Don’t let them take away your most precious thing.]
The voice seemed to guide Erica.
Following that sweet guidance, Erica brought her lips to her torn wrist as if possessed.
Lick.
The blood touching the tip of her tongue was hot as it slid down her esophagus.
Her lips began reciting a sentence against her will.
“「Bones upon the throne of bones,」”
Erica staggered to her feet.
The skin on the backs of her hands bulged upward.
It tore through her skin, and white fragments pushed out
“「For those who offer them, a replacement…」”
They were too short to be claws and too blunt to be thorns.
The white fragments took shape like something closer to knuckles.
Julian’s eyes widened when he saw them.
Because it was unmistakably a magical incantation.
“「And thus, with my remains, I shall break their pillars.」”
Swish.
She swung her fist, aiming for the left side of Kaski’s neck.
The white-faced clown, distracted by Julian’s gun, was slow to react to the attack.
The spikes on her knuckles tore through the clown’s neck.
“Ghk…!”
Kaski screamed and staggered backward.
Kaski felt at the wound on his neck.
Whether that was fortunate for him or not, the wound was transferred to one of his subordinates.
The clown breathed a sigh of relief and sneered at Erica.
“I-I was a little surprised. But th-that sort of thing won’t… heehee… and anyway, I still have claqueurs….”
Then Kaski’s words began to tangle.
“Huh, huh…? My tongue… why is it doing this…? My subordi… ordinates… are still here….”
His pronunciation came out slurred, like someone who had received an anesthetic injection.
One corner of his mouth, pulled taut, drooped limply as it lost its strength.
Only then did Kaski realize that something was wrong with his body.
“I… I can’t mo… m-move….”
He hurriedly felt at his face.
There was no sensation on the left side of his face.
Before long, the grip of his left hand around the jackknife loosened.
Thud. The knife fell to the floor.
Kaski lost his balance, staggered, and dropped to one knee.
“U… uh…?”
Kaski drooled and staggered like a broken doll.
The terrified man’s eyes darted between his paralyzed body and Erica’s weapon.
Erica, too, looked down at her crumbling snow-white knuckles with a dazed expression.
“Huh…?”
“It’s magic.”
Julian stroked Erica’s head.
He looked at Kaski rolling around on the floor and pieced together his symptoms.
Hemiplegia. Dysarthria. Facial paralysis.
The classic symptoms of an acute cerebral infarction caused by an embolism.
Julian knew of a magic that could cause this phenomenon.
“A magic that manipulates bones….”
It was most likely arcane magic.
He didn’t know which family’s magic it was, though.
‘Its performance is vicious.’
From the way the construct was collapsing despite not having struck anything, Julian could understand the purpose of the magic.
Judging by its durability, those knuckles were not meant to fight spears or swords.
Rather, the spell was designed for them to collapse the instant they were created.
The crumbling knuckles injected bone fragments and marrow into an enemy’s blood vessels the moment they passed through them.
And as those bone fragments and marrow traveled through the blood vessels, they acted as a most vicious poison that no antidote or healing magic could treat.
‘A magic that causes embolisms….’
Fat embolism.
A disease in which bone fragments or fat travel through the blood vessels and block vital organs.
Erica’s magic artificially caused that kind of disease.
Having finished his deduction, Julian’s crow mask turned toward Erica in concern.
“Erica. Did you handle exceptions?”
“Huh? Wh-what? Handle exceptions?”
“I see.”
He took a syringe and a small vial from inside his coat.
The vial sloshed with clear liquid and bore the label [Heparin].
Julian pulled Erica’s arm toward him and inserted the needle into her vein.
“Ow, that stings!”
“Let’s keep giving you heparin regularly for a while. The fight isn’t over yet, so there is a risk of bleeding, but your magic looks far more dangerous to me.”
“Why? Did I break imperial law?”
Erica looked at Julian with a miserable expression.
She still didn’t understand what Julian was talking about.
Julian chuckled at her adorable reaction and shook his head.
“It’s not that. It’s because you didn’t handle exceptions.”
“Exception… handling?”
“Magic only activates according to what’s written in its formula. It never comes with a function that automatically avoids you and your precious people.”
Every spell can bring about its own side effects.
Fire magic carries the risks of burns and elevated body temperature, while lightning magic carries the risks of electrocution and nervous-system disruption.
That was why <Exception Handling> was a concept every mage had to learn before casting magic for the first time.
It was the most basic of basics: writing a condition into the formula to exclude oneself or one’s allies from being targeted.
In coding terms, it was like learning conditional statements before inserting negations.
But there were always people who handled magic without going through that basic process.
“Novice mages without teachers don’t know that. That’s why they often suffer irreversible disabilities during their first magic demonstration.”
Erica’s magic contained that same kind of danger.
Apparently, she didn’t know much about exception handling either.
So just as she had caused Kaski to suffer something like a stroke, she herself was at risk of suffering one too.
“Then I….”
“You don’t need to worry. I gave you medicine, didn’t I?”
Julian said that while pressing firmly on the injection site.
The worry that had briefly colored her expression faded, leaving her looking much more at ease.
That was when he was carefully examining Erica’s condition.
“Te… teacher….”
The white-faced clown called for the crow doctor while drooling.
“S-save me too….”
“….”
The lenses of the crow mask stared silently at the clown.
“M-me too, hea… healer….”
“… I understand.”
Julian nodded, filled a new syringe with medicine, and approached Kaski.
*
Just as he had with Erica, Julian administered heparin to the white-faced clown.
Feeling the prick of the needle in his right arm, the clown secretly rejoiced.
‘As expected, a healer who comes down to a cesspit like this would be just like this.’
Kaski’s boss—Narenkönig—had said that healers with beliefs like this were the most profitable.
Could it be because of that hopelessly naive belief?
If you locked them in a room and sent patients in, they would treat them without refusing.
There was no need for threats or persuasion.
Even if you kidnapped them and merely put shackles on them, they would obediently do whatever you wanted.
‘Hehe. What should I make him do first?’
Kaski’s thoughts grew deeper.
Should he have him fix the ones accidentally damaged while carving works of art?
Fixing the ones who had been resold after being damaged didn’t seem like a bad idea either.
It also seemed promising to secretly send him to VIP nobles who absolutely didn’t want anyone to discover their vile hobbies.
Ah, come to think of it, he had repaired the piece they had just made in an instant.
Since he seemed well versed in that field, asking him for advice on how to make their artworks didn’t seem like a bad idea either.
“Th-thank you… Teach….”
Kaski thanked Julian while drooling like an idiot.
Once the paralysis wore off, he could take this naive, foolish doctor back to H Sector.
“But, Teacher… why would you treat someone like him….”
Over Julian’s shoulder, Erica stared at Kaski with a stunned expression.
The clown forcibly moved his facial muscles and sneered at her mockingly.
“Heehee….”
Whether or not he knew what Kaski was thinking, Julian looked down at him and whispered.
“But did you know?”
“…?”
“There is actually no research showing that heparin is effective against fat embolism syndrome. In the old days, it was administered as a desperate measure, but even that was removed from twenty-first-century guidelines.”
“Wh-what does that mea…?”
“Heparin is for prevention, not treatment. To put it more simply, unlike Erica, time is the medicine for you.”
Having finished his explanation, Julian stood up.
One hemisphere of Kaski’s brain was still paralyzed, so he couldn’t properly understand what Julian was saying.
Julian checked the time.
Then he looked outside the clinic and continued speaking.
“Of course, that is, if you have any time left.”
“Huh?”
Thump.
Immediately after Julian’s hand left him,
A heavy hand settled on Kaski’s shoulder.
It was a rough, brutish touch devoid of any courtesy or dignity.
“Hey. Even at the bottom, there’s such a thing as professional courtesy. Don’t you think messing with a clinic is crossing the line?”
It was a voice Kaski knew.
His head creaked as he turned it backward.
“Tao… Chen….”
“Listen to that pronunciation, you bastard.”
Boss Tao Chen.
A bead of cold sweat ran down Kaski’s forehead.
Behind Kaski, the claqueurs who remained hurriedly raised their weapons.
The Boss swept his gaze over the claqueurs.
“Enough, you lot. I’m tired.”
Without hiding his annoyance, he took a leather pouch from inside his coat and emptied it onto the floor.
Rattle-rattle.
Eight red noses, blackened and stained with fresh blood, rolled across the floor.
That alone crushed the claqueurs’ morale, and they lowered their weapons.
“Why’d you plant so many clown bastards along the way?”
“Eek…!”
Kaski’s face also went pale.
“H-how… did you take that many… down… so e-easily?”
“Hey. What, is Tier 1 some family’s pet dog? You think you can stop me with nothing but a physical enhancement procedure and numbers? Don’t you have any shame?”
The Boss grabbed Kaski by the back of the neck.
Kaski struggled.
Naturally, the Boss didn’t budge an inch.
So Kaski pulled a jackknife from his sleeve and swung it.
His target was the back of the Boss’s neck.
But the Boss didn’t even dodge the jackknife, simply letting it strike his neck.
“Ow, that stings.”
The knife bounced away pointlessly.
Faced with a scene beyond common sense, Kaski was rendered speechless.
“Magitech… no good….”
“Oh, give me a break. ‘Magitech doesn’t work’? You think I won the title of D Sector’s boss by drawing lots?”
The Boss brushed the knife away as if it tickled and twisted Kaski’s wrist.
“Gyaaah!”
“Shut up, punk.”
Then he picked up the knife from the floor and spoke to Otto, who was already leaning against the entrance and looking this way.
“Hey, buddy. Thanks for helping clear the way. But this guy was the one who made your face like that, right?”
Otto, panting heavily, nodded with difficulty.
The Boss chuckled and brought the knife to the corner of Kaski’s mouth.
“Hey, clown. You know my method is famous, right?”
“Aah… aaah!”
Splurt.
Fresh blood splashed across the clinic wall.
Kaski struggled in the Boss’s grip.
He resisted about four times, but after blood spurted four times, he stopped resisting on the fifth and went limp.
The Boss tossed Kaski, who could no longer move, aside and said,
“Sorry I’m late, Teacher. The clowns wouldn’t let me through.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“I thought we wouldn’t need to escort you to the exit because Mr. Otto was here, but I was too careless. I didn’t think those stray dogs would be this troublesome…. For now, go wait at my restaurant. I’ll protect you until we secure the area.”
Only then did Julian return the hammer he had cocked to its original position and let out a sigh of relief.
He took two silver bullets from the revolver’s cylinder and returned them to his pocket.
‘Good thing I didn’t have to use these.’
Silver bullets.
Bullets that could be obtained only from temples and nullified all magical miracles.
Each of these bullets cost as much as eight houses, so even Julian couldn’t fire one casually.
‘Honestly, the price alone is enough to make me hesitate.’
No matter how precious a life was, if saving it meant crashing a Rolls-Royce, anyone would hesitate for at least a moment.
Julian was no different.
Silver bullets were a measure he really didn’t want to use.
Fortunately, because the Boss arrived in time, Julian didn’t have to fire a shot worth eight houses.
Julian closed the empty cylinder with relief.
Then, instead of bullets, he took out a notebook with communication frequencies written in it and said,
“Um, if you have a communication orb, could I borrow it?”
The special bullets he possessed weren’t limited to silver bullets.