Monster - Chapter 115
Chapter 115: Dream Castle - Guide
Lin Sandie watched Lou walking ahead of her. She had changed her clothes and put her long hair up, its surface catching a faint sheen in the dim light.
After leaving that room, they walked down an arched corridor. The walls were lined with rough bricks, and small lightbulbs appeared at regular intervals, making the path easy to follow.
This aligned with Lou's speculation about Enzo: the underground passage was primarily built as an escape route, and perhaps for some debauchery, so it was unlikely to be filled with traps.
Lin Sandie's expression was distant. The sounds of Lou's panting and moaning from fifteen minutes ago still echoed in her ears, like an auditory hallucination. Her heart fluttered, soft and tender, refusing to calm down even after some time had passed. Although the Scorpion continuously devoured these feelings, she could still feel an endless wellspring of love for Lou surging within her.
They walked down the long, dark corridor, the only sound being their mutual footsteps. After another ten minutes or so, they saw a brighter light ahead.
"My Line has no sight; it can only identify things through contact," Lou's voice broke the silence. She seemed normal, though perhaps a bit more detached. "The feedback from the Line indicates many rooms ahead, with no people. But my Line can't cover the entire space, so I can't be certain it's truly empty."
"Okay." Lin Sandie snapped out of her daze, tensing her nerves as she drew the Carmen's Thunder Gun.
Lou had just told her the gun's origin—it was one of Enzo's Remnants.
Name: Carmen's Thunder Gun
Rank: A-Class
Also known as the Judgment Gun, a Thunder Gun left to Enzo by his teacher.
Positive Effects:
Immensely powerful, with a maximum range of 300 meters. For targets within 100 meters, it can hit without aiming as long as the user visualizes their appearance; the more detailed the mental image, the higher the accuracy.
Negative Effects:
If the intended target has committed crimes less severe than the user's, the Thunder Gun will automatically turn on its wielder.
So far, Lin Sandie hadn't committed any major crimes. But as long as she was with Lou, she knew she would inevitably have to kill, whether she wanted to or not. As her body count rose, so would the weight of her sins. If she kept using this gun, it was only a matter of time before it fired at her.
That was why Lou had warned her to use it, but sparingly.
They walked a little further and reached the source of the light. Peeking over Lou's shoulder, Lin Sandie saw a wider, brighter passageway. It was a section with three rooms on each side, all six doors shut tight and facing each other. Beyond it lay an even more spacious area, but it was too dimly lit to make out any details.
"The rooms on either side are empty," Lou said, having sent her Line ahead to investigate. "Further in, there are more rooms. One of them contains a few dead bodies, but they're too mangled for Tree to use." Her Line couldn't cover a very wide area, so she slowed her pace and scanned their surroundings.
"Right." Lin Sandie caught the strong stench of blood and had a bad feeling. Trusting her intuition, she put on the temporal bone. The white bone mask immediately covered the upper half of her face, revealing only her nose and mouth.
The first section was about fifty paces long, and they passed through without incident. At the entrance to the second, larger space, she saw an area roughly the size of a basketball court. Here, there were five rooms on each side, all with their doors closed. In the center stood a magnificent long table flanked by two rows of chairs, resembling a conference room or an aristocratic dining hall. Suspended above the table was a large, rectangular glass tank filled with rippling, pale blue water. The water looked remarkably pure, refracting the dim light and casting flickering shadows across the room.
But this luxurious scene was marred by what looked like the aftermath of a blood rain. A closer look revealed it was covered in bloodstains and chunks of flesh, as if several people had exploded in the room.
"Let's go," Lou said, her expression grim, and stepped forward first.
Over an hour had passed since they entered the secret passage. Aside from the absurd encounter in that one room, nothing had happened.
The rippling light from the tank above the table made Lin Sandie uneasy. She stayed close behind Lou, suddenly wondering if the castle's collapse had affected the secret passage. The path ahead could be blocked. After all, they had already seen sections of the wall that had crumbled from the stress.
With that thought, Lin Sandie glanced up at the ceiling and froze. Clinging to the surface amidst the dim lights was a person, whose pair of grayish-white eyes were fixed on her.
Those grayish-white eyes staring down at her were as lifeless as a corpse's, and the sight made Lin Sandie's mind go blank. Without a second thought, she raised the Thunder Gun and fired at them.
Lin Sandie was fast, but the owner of the eyes was faster. Sprawled on the ceiling, he scuttled aside like a spider, his limbs splaying out to dodge both her shot and the Line Lou had sent stabbing toward him.
His movements were inhumanly agile.
"Hehe, did I give you a scare?" the unsettlingly bizarre monster asked in a hoarse voice, laughing as it dodged Lou's attacks.
After several of her attacks missed, Lou knew this was no ordinary foe. She ceased her assault and watched as the figure dropped from the ceiling.
He was a young man of about twenty, tall and thin, and covered in blood. His medium-length hair was tied in a topknot, and a large tattoo covered his neck. But his eyes were lifeless, as if he'd been dead for a long time. To Lin Sandie, he was clearly another severely mutated monster.
"Tree," Lou said, seeing the true entity hidden within the male corpse.
"Mhm-hm. While you two were making your way here, I went to great lengths to find a body that could at least put up a decent fight against you."
"Then let's get on with it. We're in a hurry," Lou said, pulling a sharp cleaver from her space bag. Without waiting for Tree to move, she lunged, slashing at him.
"Seeing you reminds me of the old days. Pie once had such high hopes for me, and I tried so hard to please Her. My feelings for Her were… akin to a mortal's adoration." As he spoke the last sentence, his voice remained completely steady, unaffected by his physical movements, as if the voice and body were separate entities.
These tentacles are a real pain. Lou thought, ignoring his words. In her eyes, the body Tree was using was mutated differently from the monsters she had encountered before. A Stage 3 monster typically grew four thick, black-furred, spider-like limbs from its back in addition to its normal arms. But this body had six boneless appendages, powerful as tentacles, that could strike at her from multiple directions at once.
With the current strength of her recovered Line, restraining such powerful tentacles was proving difficult.
The original owner of this body must have left behind a Remnant that enhances physical strength… Lou deduced. She switched to a more technical fighting style, methodically severing Tree's tentacles one by one to reduce his offensive capability.
"Do you even know what adoration is?" Tree continued. "Hmm, you don't look like you do, you little brat."
Lin Sandie slowly retreated to a corner. With her limited combat experience, the only thing she could do was stay out of Lou's way. The two figures before her moved in a blur of motion, so fast she could hardly track them. From what she could tell, Lou and Tree seemed evenly matched.
Normally, Lou should have had the upper hand, but Tree was only using a proxy. He could fight without any regard for the consequences to his vessel. Lin Sandie watched him twist the body into impossible angles to continue his assault. Any of Lou's attacks that would have been fatal to a normal person were useless unless she completely severed a limb; otherwise, the possessed body would just counterattack, feeling neither pain nor fatigue.
Lin Sandie understood. Back when Lou was fending off the zombies in the basement, she had realized that the only way to deal with Tree's puppets was to use a weapon capable of dismemberment, which was why she had prepared the cleaver.
Lin Sandie considered using the Thunder Gun on Tree, but for two reasons, she couldn't. First, he and Lou were moving too fast for her to get a clear shot. Second, the gun's auto-aim required a clear mental image of the target's face, but the puppet's features were obscured by blood.
What's the point of Tree blocking our path just to fight Lou?
Is it just to spout all this nonsense? He probably wants to kill Lou out of jealousy, but even I can see that he has no chance of succeeding here. Not a shred. The most he can do is injure her a little…
At that thought, an idea struck her. Lin Sandie drew a regular pistol and fired at the large glass tank. The glass shattered. As if on cue, Lou suddenly grabbed Tree's hair and slammed his entire body into the broken tank. Gushing water washed the blood from his face. Lin Sandie, who had been watching their every move, switched guns.
The Thunder Gun was now in her hand. The face of the body Tree was possessing was now clear in her mind's eye. Lin Sandie pulled the trigger.
BANG!
The upper half of the body Tree was possessing exploded into fragments.
Lou threw herself aside, but she was still splattered with bits of blood and gore.
"Nice teamwork," the severed head of Tree's puppet praised with a smile as it rolled across the floor. Then its eyes closed.
Lou stared at Lin Sandie, dumbfounded.
"Should we go?" Lin Sandie asked, also stunned by the gun's power, and looked blankly at Lou.
"Yeah. Yeah."
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