Chapter 645 - 632: Foul

[Realm: álfheimr]

[Location: Dominion of Oz]

[Winkie Country]

The only thing about the interior of the tin castle that genuinely stood out was the number of Deseruit Beast corpses scattered throughout it.

They were everywhere.

What little distinction there was between the various hallways and chambers seemed to disappear beneath the number of dead occupying them. Some lay sprawled across the floors, their bodies twisted, while others had been left against the walls or partially buried beneath fallen pieces of the castle’s deteriorating structure. There was no apparent order to their placement, nor did there seem to be any particular effort to remove them.

It was an unusual sight.

Considering the condition of the castle’s exterior, Paimon had initially expected the interior to be equally abandoned. The rusted walls, deteriorating surfaces, and general lack of furnishings had certainly given that impression. However, the corpses suggested that something had happened here relatively recently.

And whatever it had been, it had not been particularly gentle.

Some of the Deseruit Beasts had been impaled by long tin beams that protruded from the walls or ceiling. Others had been pierced by shards of metal, their bodies left suspended at awkward angles where they had apparently been thrown against the surrounding structures. A few had sustained considerably worse injuries, with entire chunks of their bodies missing, leaving behind ragged openings and dark stains across the rusted floors.

There were even some whose remains were difficult to identify properly.

The damage to the beast varied, but the general impression was the same.

Something had torn through this place, leaving the dead wherever they happened to fall.

It was an odd state of disrepair, particularly for a structure that appeared to have been abandoned for so long.

Both Mikoto and Paimon noticed it as they continued through the castle.

Their footsteps carried along the narrow hallways, occasionally producing an echo. They passed through one chamber after another, finding little variation in the general appearance of their surroundings. The walls remained rusted, the floors rough, and the air carried the same unpleasant smell of old metal.

Every so often, they passed another corpse.

Paimon glanced down at one lying near the edge of the hallway. Its body had been left on its side, one of its limbs twisted beneath its weight. She studied it for a moment before continuing forward.

"These corpses look fresh," she noted.

Her voice was relatively calm.

The injuries were too recent to have been caused by the gradual deterioration of the castle, and the condition of the surrounding area suggested that whatever had happened had taken place within a relatively short period of time.

She looked farther down the hallway.

"Do you think Goiim did this? Or was it someone else who came through here before us?" she wondered aloud. "There are quite a few of them, and the damage doesn’t look like something that happened naturally. Someone must have fought them, but I can’t tell whether they were trying to defend this place or simply passing through."

Her attention briefly returned to the corpse.

"Whoever did this clearly wasn’t interested in leaving the place in any better condition than they found it."

"Not like it matters," Mikoto replied offhandedly.

His attention had already shifted elsewhere.

His red eyes moved upward, examining the darkness beyond the immediate stretch of hallway. There was something about the surrounding structure that suggested the presence of more beasts, and his senses were picking up several disturbances throughout the castle.

The corpses were hardly the only Deseruit Beasts present.

"There are still a bunch of them around," he continued. "I can sense more ahead, and there are probably others scattered throughout the surrounding chambers. Whatever happened here, it didn’t get rid of all of them."

He didn’t particularly care about the condition of the bodies.

Whether Goiim had killed them, someone else had, or the Deseruit Beasts had simply managed to destroy one another was of little importance to him. They were still dealing with an infestation of Deseruit Beasts, and the dead ones were no longer a concern.

Paimon considered his words.

She glanced down the hallway in the direction Mikoto had been looking, then back toward the surrounding chambers.

"Hm. Then maybe we should split up here?"

She adjusted her position slightly as she continued walking, thinking through the suggestion before elaborating.

"You can’t fight at full power because of the leylines, right? At least, that’s what you told me earlier. So perhaps it would be better if I handled the Deseruit Beasts around here while you continued looking for Goiim."

She looked toward him.

"I mean, there’s no reason for both of us to waste time dealing with the same thing if we can cover different areas. I can take care of whatever is wandering around these hallways, and you can focus on finding out what’s happening farther inside."

Her suggestion was a reasonable one.

Mikoto was by no means powerless in his current condition. Even with the restrictions imposed by the leylines, he remained more than capable of dealing with ordinary opponents. However, there was a difference between being capable of fighting and being able to fight without unnecessary inconvenience.

His available power was restricted, and having to deal with every Deseruit Beast they encountered would only make the journey more tedious.

There was also the matter of Goiim.

He had already managed to locate her presence again, and there was little reason to waste time clearing every hallway when Paimon could take care of things herself.

Mikoto seemed to reach the same conclusion.

"Fine. Handle the pests around here."

He didn’t offer much resistance to the suggestion.

He simply continued walking.

Paimon stopped.

She watched him continue for a moment before her expression shifted into innocent displeasure.

"That’s it?"

Mikoto did not turn around.

Paimon placed her hands against her hips, looking toward his increasingly distant figure.

"A thanks wouldn’t hurt, you know?"

Her tone wasn’t particularly serious, but there was a genuine hint of exasperation behind it. It wasn’t as though she expected some elaborate expression of gratitude, but a simple acknowledgement would have been nice.

Even a little one.

Instead, Mikoto continued walking.

There was no response.

Paimon stared after him for a moment.

Then she let out a small breath, seemingly accepting that she wasn’t going to get the reaction she wanted.

Mikoto’s figure gradually disappeared into the darkness of the expansive hallway.

The further he went, the less light reached the surrounding walls. The rusted surfaces became increasingly difficult to distinguish, and the sounds of his footsteps seemed to grow more pronounced against the otherwise quiet interior.

The smell was particularly unpleasant.

A nauseating mixture of rust, dampness, and something considerably less identifiable lingered throughout the corridor. It seemed to cling to the air, following him as he walked, becoming more noticeable whenever he passed one of the larger clusters of dead Deseruit Beasts.

Mikoto’s expression tightened slightly.

He glanced toward a particularly dark section of the hallway.

"Better not be any rats crawling around this place," he muttered.

His voice was low, intended for himself rather than anyone else.

The castle looked decrepit enough to accommodate rodents of practically every size. Its deteriorating walls, neglected chambers, and seemingly endless network of dark passageways provided more than enough places for them to hide.

The thought was unpleasant.

Mikoto had little interest in discovering what sort of creatures might have made their homes inside this place, particularly if they happened to be rodents.

He already had enough to deal with.

And he certainly had no desire to encounter some enormous, diseased rat emerging from a pile of rusted debris.

He continued walking.

Fortunately, he couldn’t dwell on the potential rodent population for very long.

Something considerably larger came into view at the far end of the hallway.

Two enormous tin doors stood before him.

They were considerably larger than the ordinary openings he had passed along the way, occupying much of the wall at the end of the corridor. Their surfaces were weathered and discolored, bearing the same rusted appearance as the rest of the castle, but unlike the surrounding walls, they possessed a more apparent design.

Swirling patterns had been engraved into the metal.

The decorative markings extended across both doors, following curved paths that intertwined and folded around one another. Although the designs had become worn with age, they were still sufficiently visible to distinguish the entrance from the otherwise unremarkable construction of the castle.

Mikoto slowed.

His red eyes travelled over the doors, examining their size and the decorative patterns engraved across their surfaces.

There wasn’t much else to suggest what lay beyond them.

However, considering the scale of the entrance and its placement at the end of the hallway, he could make a reasonable assumption.

The throne room.

It seemed to be located on the ground floor, which was consistent with the general layout he had observed while moving through the castle. The doors were large enough to accommodate someone considerably bigger than an ordinary person, and the space beyond them was presumably meant to serve some important purpose.

Mikoto stopped before them.

For a moment, he simply looked at the entrance.

Then he raised both arms.

His thick, heavy gauntlets came to rest against the two doors, one hand placed on either surface.

He pushed.

The doors moved almost immediately.

Despite their considerable size, they offered little resistance. Their lower edges scraped against the floor as they swung inward, producing a long, unpleasant metallic groan that echoed through the surrounding structure.

Then the opening widened enough to reveal the chamber beyond.

Mikoto lowered his hands and stepped forward.

Beyond the doors was an enormous, dark room.

The chamber was considerably more expansive than the hallway leading into it, its dimensions becoming apparent only after the doors had opened fully. The space extended far into the darkness, with little illumination to distinguish its farthest corners.

There was almost nothing inside.

No visible furnishings or decorations worth mentioning.

The room appeared almost entirely empty, its vastness made more noticeable by the absence of anything that might have broken up the space.

Mikoto stepped inside; he continued forward for several steps, his gaze moving from one side of the room to the other as he took in his surroundings.

The darkness concealed much of the chamber.

Still, he could see enough to establish its general layout.

His eyes continued moving; the room was quiet.

For a moment, nothing greeted him.

Then a voice broke the silence.

"Vile intruder."

The words travelled through the chamber with remarkable clarity.

They were not particularly loud, yet the acoustics of the enormous room carried them directly toward him. The voice possessed a deep, distinctly feminine quality, its tone strangely soothing despite the hostility of the words themselves.

There was no warmth behind it.

Mikoto halted.

His forward stride came to a natural stop, one heavy sabaton settling against the floor as his attention shifted toward the source of the voice.

He looked ahead.

The chamber remained largely obscured by darkness, but he could sense the presence of someone within it.

The voice spoke again.

"An Angel... in these lands?"

There was a brief pause.

The speaker seemed to be considering something, although her tone remained unchanged.

"So it was true."

Her words carried a note of recognition.

"Another Angel has truly come to this realm. I had heard such things spoken of, but I had no reason to believe they were anything more than rumours."

Another brief silence followed.

Then she addressed him directly.

"What is your business here?"

Mikoto remained still for a moment.

He had no immediate reason to answer.

Instead, his red eyes continued examining the chamber until he finally spotted the figure responsible for the voice.

She was seated on a throne.

The structure stood atop a short series of steps at the far end of the room, its rusted tin construction matching the rest of the castle. The throne itself was relatively plain, without the elaborate ornamentation one might expect from something intended to represent authority.

Yet its occupant made the arrangement considerably more noteworthy.

The woman sat comfortably upon it, her posture relaxed despite the fact that someone had just entered her domain without permission.

At first glance, she appeared humanoid.

Her overall shape was close enough to that of a human woman that there was little difficulty recognizing her as such. However, the dark scales covering portions of her body suggested that her origins were considerably different.

They were particularly noticeable along her visible limbs, contrasting against the rest of her appearance.

Her light blue eyes were fixed on Mikoto.

There was something unsettling about the way she looked at him.

They were not particularly expressive, nor did they convey any obvious emotion. Nevertheless, her gaze possessed a penetrating quality, as though she were examining him with considerably more attention than her otherwise detached manner suggested.

Mikoto studied her in return.

He did not immediately respond to her question.

Instead, he took a moment to examine the woman sitting before him.

Her presence was unmistakably powerful.

There was a substantial quantity of mana concentrated within her, considerably more than what one would ordinarily expect from most beings. It wasn’t simply a matter of having a large reserve, either. There was something unusual about the nature of her power, something that made her stand apart from the ordinary creatures he had encountered throughout the plains.

Alongside that mana was another presence.

A strange, almost static-like quality lingered around her.

It was familiar in a way that immediately caught Mikoto’s attention, resembling the kind of presence associated with a Nil or someone who possessed the Manus Dei.

The combination was unusual.

Most beings did not possess such characteristics together, at least not in the manner he was observing.

Yet that wasn’t the extent of what he could perceive.

Mikoto’s eyes saw deeper than that.

They always had.

Such was the nature of his Chthonia.

His perception did not simply stop at the visible characteristics of a being or the power they carried. It allowed him to look beyond the more apparent layers of existence when looking at power, exposing things that ordinary observation would never reveal.

But there was a cost to doing so.

The moment he attempted to look deeper into the woman seated before him, a sharp pain stung his eyes.

His expression tightened.

It was immediate and unpleasant, an abrupt sensation that seemed to strike directly through his vision. The pain was sharp enough to make the muscles around his eyes tense, but he did not immediately avert his gaze.

Instead, he continued.

He peeled away the layers.

One after another.

The familiar aspects of her existence gradually gave way, revealing something beneath them that should not have been seen.

Something that did not properly belong within the boundaries of what he understood.

And then—

["M???????????y??????????????? ???????d???????????????????????e????????????a????????????????r??????????????????????????"]

An incomprehensible voice pierced his mind.

It was not like hearing someone speak from across the room.

There was no sound travelling through the air and no identifiable direction from which the words originated. Instead, the voice seemed to force its way directly into his consciousness, appearing within his mind with an immediacy that made the distinction between thought and sound difficult to establish.

The words themselves were distorted.

Their structure was difficult to follow, and whatever meaning they carried seemed to resist being properly understood. Yet the fragment that reached him was sufficiently recognizable to make the experience all the more unsettling.

Mikoto’s brows furrowed.

For the briefest moment, his attention shifted away from the woman seated on the throne and toward the inexplicable intrusion.

("The fuck?")

The thought was immediate.

He stared at the woman, his expression becoming noticeably more displeased.

That certainly hadn’t been her voice.

He was sure of it.

The sound had originated somewhere else, or perhaps from something else entirely. Whatever had spoken to him had not done so through any ordinary means, and Mikoto couldn’t immediately identify its source.

More importantly, he couldn’t understand why it had chosen to address him.

("What was that supposed to be?")

He briefly considered whether the woman herself had something to do with it, but the voice had felt fundamentally different from her own. Her earlier words had been clear and entirely comprehensible.

This had been something else.

Something that had reached directly into his mind.

Mikoto eventually decided not to dwell on it.

Not yet, anyway.

He had come here looking for Goiim, and he wasn’t particularly interested in allowing an inexplicable voice to distract him from the matter at hand.

He returned his attention to the woman.

"What’s your deal supposed to be?" he asked.

His tone was flat, although there was a trace of irritation behind it.

He tilted his head slightly, his red eyes remaining fixed on her.

"Are you the Progenitor?"

It was a straightforward question.

He had already sensed the considerable amount of mana within her, along with the unusual qualities that accompanied it. Combined with the fact that he had found her sitting alone in what appeared to be the throne room of the castle, there weren’t many other possibilities worth considering.

Still, he preferred to confirm what he was dealing with rather than make assumptions.

The woman did not appear offended by his manner.

She simply regarded him for another moment before answering.

"I am."

Her response came without hesitation.

There was no apparent discomfort in acknowledging her identity, nor did she seem particularly interested in dressing up the answer with unnecessary explanations.

She raised one of her scaled arms.

The movement was unhurried as she brought her hand toward her face, resting her cheek against her fist while continuing to look at Mikoto.

"Electra," she introduced herself. "Mother of many Deseruit Beasts, unfortunately."

She shifted slightly against the rusted tin throne.

"These lands are mine," she continued. "And whether I particularly like it or not, the Deseruit Beasts that inhabit them are mine as well."

Her light blue eyes remained on him.

Mikoto looked at her.

His expression remained unimpressed.

"And you send them out to get slaughtered," he remarked.

His red eyes met hers directly.

He had already witnessed the number of Deseruit Beasts gathering across the plains, and the corpses scattered throughout the castle had provided further evidence that their numbers were being reduced in one way or another.

Considering that Electra had just identified herself as their mother, he found the arrangement somewhat peculiar.

"Maybe you should take better care of your animals."

Electra regarded him.

For a moment, she did not answer.

Then she spoke.

"I don’t particularly enjoy playing the part of a ruler."

Her tone remained calm;, she rested her cheek more comfortably against her fist, her light blue eyes never leaving Mikoto.

"It isn’t something I’ve ever found especially appealing. The expectations, the responsibilities, the constant need to concern oneself with what others are doing... I have little interest in occupying myself with such things."

She paused for a moment.

"And the Deseruit Beasts are not especially interested in being ruled, either."

There was a detached quality to her explanation.

"They prefer doing whatever they please. They wander, fight, destroy, and pursue their own desires without much consideration for anything else. I could attempt to impose some degree of order upon them, but I doubt the result would be particularly satisfactory."

Her scaled fingers shifted slightly against her cheek.

"So, for the most part, I allow them to do as they wish. They are mine, certainly, but that doesn’t mean I intend to spend my time controlling every aspect of their existence."

She seemed to regard the arrangement as perfectly reasonable.

Then her attention settled more on Mikoto.

There was a change in the way she regarded him, although her expression remained difficult to read.

"But you..."

She let the words linger for a moment.

"What purpose could an Angel possibly have in this realm?"

Her light blue eyes examined him with renewed interest.

"An Angel appearing in these lands is hardly an ordinary occurrence. And considering what you are, I find it difficult to believe that your arrival is without some particular reason."

She shifted slightly upon her throne, still maintaining her relaxed posture.

"Have you come here to enforce the will of your divinity? To impose the word of whatever higher power you serve upon this realm?"

Her voice remained deep, soothing, and almost entirely devoid of emotion.

Yet the question was direct.

"What exactly do you want here, Angel?"