Chapter 235 – #53_Night Of The Homunculus (2)
#233
1.
“M-M-Master, M-M-Master…”
Siwoo’s outline began to distort.
His skin and muscles melted away, as if covered in a landslide.
At the same time, the scenery of the room was split and shattered into hundreds of pieces, like a kaleidoscope.
Eloa watched the scene until the end, still holding her sword.
The scene, rippling like a lake in a storm, scattered into pieces, revealing the true identity of Siwoo, or rather, what used to be Siwoo.
-Kuurururuk…!
It was a homunculus.
You could tell immediately, even without seeing its three gleaming eyes.
No animal like that existed in reality.
Three eyeballs, buried in an unidentified mass of flesh, floated in the air.
Below them, black tentacles, like the arteries of a rotten animal carcass, hung down in clusters.
From a slightly open mouth in the flesh below the eyes, something like saliva dripped, and when she came to her senses, Eloa’s body was also sticky with that liquid.
Eloa had traveled the world and hunted countless homunculi.
As someone who had received a lot of information from the Location Point, she immediately recognized the identity of her opponent.
The monster in front of her was a nightmare demon.
-Kkuu..! Kkuu…!
The monster frantically wriggled its tentacles as if Eloa had regained her senses.
There was no reason to feel disgusted or anything like that.
If the opponent was a homunculus, there was only one thing to do.
Hunt it.
It wasn’t even a battle.
The nightmare demon was too weak to block Eloa’s sword strikes.
-Hwoong!
Eloa held her contract sword straight and slashed diagonally upwards.
The sword strike, refined to the extreme without any excess, bisected the homunculus’s core diagonally without even a sound of cutting flesh.
-Kkieeeeek!
With a bizarre scream like twisting a crow’s neck, the nightmare demon’s body was cut and tumbled onto the bed.
Naturally, the otherworld barrier that had extended from the nightmare demon also slowly disappeared.
“……..”
Eloa looked down at her naked body and the homunculus’s corpse, which was disappearing as if melting into the air.
Although the battle itself was ridiculously simple, it was a very dangerous moment.
One’s strength and danger are not always directly proportional.
The nightmare demon was just a homunculus with three eyeballs, but it had a history of assassinating two witches.
Of course, it was almost impossible to assassinate a witch who was over the 15th level.
Even when they were sleeping or unconscious for some reason, autonomous defense was always activated.
When they felt hostility, when a hostile target touched their body, when a surprise attack came.
The autonomous defense system inherent in the mark defended, intercepted, and counterattacked.
The nightmare demon was a homunculus specialized in breaking through such autonomous defenses.
It crawled into the dreams of sleeping witches, delved into their mental worlds, and merged with their magic to neutralize their autonomous defenses.
It then took the lives of the defenseless witches.
If Eloa had been late in noticing, there was a high possibility that she would have been beheaded on the bed without any defense.
Eloa used magic to eliminate the unidentified liquid that was stickily smeared on her body.
And then she suddenly realized.
Siwoo was in danger.
“Siwoo…!”
Eloa’s body moved like the wind towards the balcony.
The nightmare demon was famous not only for being the only homunculus that could assassinate witches.
The nightmare demon was also well known for being employed by the ‘Cowardly Witch’.
The recent accidents and incidents lined up in her head.
The cloned homunculus that she had been reported by Ms. Sua, the human heart modified with offerings that came out of it.
The white knight she had encountered on the rooftop, which was exactly the same shape as the enemy knight.
And the mass slaughter that had occurred at COEX.
Finally, the ‘nightmare demon’ that had attacked Eloa today.
From the beginning, Ms. Sua had linked this incident to the Cowardly Witch, Paola Sochitl.
Although they had not been able to find the whereabouts of the Cowardly Witch, who was famous for her excellent hiding skills.
With a clattering hallucination, all the clues fell into place.
The series of events that had recently occurred in Seoul were orchestrated by the ‘Cowardly Witch’.
She didn’t know what she was doing it for.
However, Sochitl was called the Witch of a Thousand Hands because she could handle many homunculi at the same time.
The important thing here was that she could handle ‘many’ homunculi ‘at the same time’.
In other words, while Eloa was distracted by the nightmare demon, there was a high possibility that black hands had reached out to Siwoo and Evergreen as well.
“Siwoo!”
Eloa broke the locked living room window and entered the house.
But even after checking Siwoo’s room, Evergreen’s room, and even the bathroom and kitchen just in case, she couldn’t see either of them.
Just because there were no signs of battle didn’t mean she could relax.
In the first place, homunculi hunted by deploying otherworld barriers, so there was a possibility that they had already been killed and the barrier had been withdrawn.
“Ah……”
As soon as she was sure that the two were not here, Eloa felt a shock as if a lead weight had fallen on her chest.
At the same time, nausea-like fear and terror instantly consumed her body.
The dark room, the ominous silence.
It forcibly revived a memory from the past.
The day she lost Lapi, that painful memory.
“No… No, no, no…”
Her mind just went blank.
The color drained from her face, her hands and feet turned cold, and she trembled.
She couldn’t lose them again.
She couldn’t lose him due to a moment of carelessness and mistake while doing nothing like this.
Eloa hurriedly took out her cell phone.
She pressed the buttons on the portable terminal, which she had never gotten used to even after using it for years, and made a call.
She called Siwoo first, but…
He didn’t answer.
Even after several rings, the call was not connected.
“What do I do… What do I do… M-Ms. Sua, Ms. Sua…!”
This time, she called Ms. Sua, the branch manager of the Location Point.
But it was the same.
No matter how many times the ringtone repeated, she didn’t answer the phone, and an automatic voice message came on.
Sochitl’s familiar suddenly attacked.
Siwoo and Evergreen disappeared.
Ms. Sua was not answering her calls.
This was not normal.
Something ominous was happening.
Eloa clutched her chest and collapsed to the floor as if she was having a hyperventilation attack.
“This can’t be… This can’t be happening…”
Eloa, barely supporting her collapsing body, firmly grasped her sword and stood up again.
Her eyes were filled with a murderous intent and determination.
She forcibly pushed away the trauma that was resurfacing, as well as her worries and concerns.
She would find them.
She would definitely find them and protect them.
This time, she would not repeat the mistakes of the past.
“I contract.”
The 12 characters engraved on the side of the contract sword all began to shine.
A storm of magic erupted, stirring up the surrounding area.
The magic power unleashed by a 23rd-level witch at full power was a wave so intense that a weak witch would faint from being crushed by the highly concentrated magic.
Eloa was a case where she had modified all of her magic for ‘combat’.
Therefore, she could not handle precise tracking magic or search magic.
If so, she would just stir up the entire area.
Eloa’s body shot out of the window.
She began to run through Seoul at a speed faster than the wind.
2.
There were no particular results in today’s homunculus search either.
After finishing the two-hour search, they checked into a hotel.
After the passionate and heated, or as Sharon put it, the healing act, the two were lying on the hotel bed, rolling around.
Since Sharon was paying for the accommodation, it wasn’t a very good hotel.
It was a place on the outskirts of Hongdae that was better than a motel but ambiguous to call a proper hotel.
Unlike before, when they would get intimate whenever their eyes met, their sex time was now concentrated to one day every three days.
They spent so much time together that they ended up rolling around until almost dawn.
“Haa… That was good again today.”
Sharon, who had finished showering lightly, was clinging to Siwoo’s chest, naked.
Her breasts, which Siwoo had been sucking and sucking on just a moment ago while he was thrusting his dick into her, were softly touching his bare skin.
Sharon smiled happily and showered Siwoo’s cheek with light kisses.
“You say that every time?”
“Because I feel good every time? Especially you, you don’t seem to get tired these days.”
“Really? Is it because of training?”
“I guess so.”
Sharon chuckled lightly and snuggled in even more.
Her whole body was already almost completely in contact with his, but she got even closer.
Sometimes, at times like this, he thought that he was living a life that was truly blessed.
In the past, he could never have dreamed of living with Sharon, who had such beauty, not worrying about money, and not having any particular anxiety about the future.
It felt very strange to think that all of this was a snowball that had rolled from his Gehenna slave life.
He had been warned that he could be attacked by homunculi and that the public enemies were also eyeing him, but…
Honestly, he had to feel it to believe it.
Although he was being careful, in the peacefulness that continued every day, he couldn’t feel that such a crisis was approaching.
It was like how Koreans didn’t fear the danger of war every day just because they lived in a divided country.
“I’ve been a little disappointed since the Duke came. Before that, I could do it with you whenever I wanted. Now I can’t do it as much as I want because I’m watching my step. Aren’t you?”
“I’m disappointed too. But I need to get stronger. You never know when something might happen.”
“I know that too… I’m just saying I’m disappointed.”
Sharon pouted her lips and expressed her dissatisfaction.
And then, with her lips still pouted, she stared intently at Siwoo.
“Why?”
Pretending not to know, she tapped her lips.
“Uum… Uuum…. Hurry…”
As expected, it seemed to be a signal for a kiss.
She still wasn’t satisfied.
Actually, Siwoo also thought, ‘Was it a bit short today?’
Usually, when they stayed at a hotel like this, Sharon would keep attacking him as if she was going to pull out his pillar.
Just as they were about to heat up the dawn again after another kiss.
Magic began to spread faintly around them.
“What is it?”
Siwoo quickly got up and looked around.
The sensation of touching his skin and the unique magic pattern he could see.
Because he had encountered it so many times, he could recognize the anomaly even before the barrier had fully spread.
An otherworld barrier was engulfing the entire hotel.
“W-What is it? Huh?”
“It’s a homunculus. Probably.”
Sharon, who had been flustered by Siwoo’s wary gaze, also realized something was wrong when the barrier was fully formed.
Shadows wriggled from Siwoo’s body and covered his entire body.
The wriggling objects soon became armor, a shield, and a long spear.
Even if he had been specially trained by Tiferet for the past few weeks, he wasn’t stupid enough to challenge a homunculus hunt with his bare hands.
Sharon also wrapped her naked body in a witch’s robe and prepared for battle.
She held a wand with a large emerald embedded in it at an angle and looked around.
A strange tension was formed as they were suddenly thrown into the battlefield.
“It’s been a while since we hunted.”
“When we try to find them, they never show up…”
Sharon clenched her wand tightly and looked around, as if she didn’t like having her hot night interrupted.
-Slap!
“Huh?”
As they continued to be on guard and were about to move towards the window to check what was outside.
Both Sharon and Siwoo tilted their heads at the sound of water coming from under their feet.
This was a hotel room.
But now, it was flooded with water like a swimming pool.
The water, which was only high enough to wet the soles of their feet, was a very dark color, as if it had been drawn from the abyss.
It was so dark that they couldn’t see what color the floor originally was.
“I’ve been training hard this time. Shall we see the results? If it doesn’t work, we’ll run away.”
Siwoo didn’t think much of it.
It wasn’t blood, just water, so he just thought that there was probably a homunculus nearby that was just spraying water.
Sharon’s hand went up to Siwoo’s shoulder as he spoke lightly to ease the tension.
Sharon had been constantly accessing the Location Point’s homunculus database.
Therefore, she could immediately recognize the identity of the homunculus that showed such signs.
“Siwoo… Don’t do that… We, we should run away.”
‘Drowned Witch’.
A familiar of the Cowardly Witch and a powerful homunculus that had drowned three witches so far.
No matter how she thought about it, it was not a level that Siwoo and Sharon could handle.
“What? What’s going on?”
-Slap slap slap
At the same time as Siwoo asked what was going on, the sound of fast footsteps was getting closer from outside the door.
The footsteps were accompanied by a thick sound of water, as if they were stepping on a puddle of blood on marble.
-Creak
And.
The hotel door, which had a lock, opened without any resistance.
