Chapter 74: Ray Bieber

Chapter Seventy-Four
Ray Bieber

Hah. Hah. Hah.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

The enormous breathing and the violent knocking first alternated, then overlapped. In an instant, Klein and the others’ nerves were stretched taut to the breaking point, as though they had heard some evil whispering directly into their minds.

Taking advantage of the moment when El, Dunn, and Lorotta were distracted, the tailcoat clown abruptly drew a long strip of paper from his pocket.

Pap! With a sharp flick of his right hand, he snapped the strip of paper into a long whip burning with black flames, lashing it toward the space beside his own ankle.

A drifting but piercing scream rang out. The tailcoat clown broke free from the invisible shackles and flipped backward through the air.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Dunn, El, and Lorotta’s bullets all missed at the same time, burrowing into the wooden crates.

The tailcoat clown did not linger. Pressing one hand over his wound, he sprinted wildly away from the warehouse area.

He was extremely fast. In the blink of an eye, only his retreating back remained.

Before he vanished, his right hand, which had been holding his abdomen, suddenly swept toward his own left arm. The wound in his stomach disappeared with that motion, becoming as intact as before.

The place where he had swept across his left arm became a bloody mess instead, with a silver bullet faintly visible inside.

Dunn and the others did not pursue him. The breathing from the innermost warehouse had grown so loud that it made the space between their brows throb, making their inspiration warn them uneasily.

Bang!

The door of the innermost warehouse suddenly burst apart, fragments flying in every direction.

Immediately afterward, something wrapped in tattered cloth flew out and landed not far before Klein.

Klein focused his gaze and discovered that it was an arm. Its red muscles had been chewed to pieces, while stark-white bone had snapped irregularly and jutted outward.

Pap! Pap! Pap!

One thing after another flew from the warehouse. First came blood. Then an eyeball with its pupil fully dilated. Next, an earlobe that looked as if it had been torn off alive. After that came half a still-beating heart, then intestines filled with yellow-brown matter.

If Klein had not already seen the even more nauseating bloated corpse at Ray Bieber’s home, he might not have been able to keep himself from vomiting.

His emotions nearly snapped. With great difficulty, he restrained the impulse to fire into the black doorway, then ejected several spent casings and loaded fresh Demon-hunting Bullets.

Bang!

Dunn returned closer to the group and calmly fired a probing shot into the warehouse.

But the bullet seemed to enter the sea. Not a single echo came back.

Hah! Hah! Hah!

The enormous breathing grew increasingly hurried. A gray-white color filled the “open” doorway.

With two bangs, bullets from El Hassan and Borgia pierced through that gray-white, yet they still failed to stop the “color” from surging outward. Nor did they leave a wound on the other party or make any fluid spill out.

Klein held his breath and did not fire blindly. He watched as the gray-white gradually revealed its full outline.

It was a humanoid creature over two meters tall. The joints of its hands and feet were all unnaturally twisted backward, as though someone had snapped them by force.

One stark-white broken bone after another protruded from beneath its skin. Its overall gray-white surface was full of furrows and grooves, like a human brain that had been stripped of its outer shell.

A gray-white, rotten, sticky fluid flowed across the monster’s whole body. Its head was comparatively normal, with deep nasolabial folds and pale skin.

When its mouth opened and closed, Klein could see a full porcelain false tooth on the verge of falling out, several strands of bloody saliva stretched into long threads, and muscle and bone that had been chewed into crumbs.

Ray Bieber… Does this thing still look human at all?

Klein inhaled soundlessly and felt his heart lurch into a chaotic rhythm.

Bang!

Leonard’s Demon-hunting Bullet struck Ray Bieber squarely in the forehead, piercing straight through and leaving a deep hole.

Gray-white fluid seeped out and fell to the ground, where it wriggled with a sizzling sound and turned into one plump, milky-white maggot after another.

Yet the monster showed no sign of being affected. Its movement was neither fast nor slow as it pounced toward the nearest person—Borgia. Its true target, however, seemed to be the iron-black box. Sealed Artifact 2-049.

“Loss of control of Beyonder power…”

Dunn shouted in a deep voice.

“Lorotta, it looks like a spirit of the dead. Find its weakness as quickly as possible.”

“All right.”

Lorotta wasted no words. She lifted both hands and pressed them over her own eyes.

Her pupils turned gray-white, then colorless, as though she had entered the spiritual world and the kingdom of the dead, looking down at the enemy from a higher level and searching for that crucial “node.”

Seeing that normal gunfire was ineffective, Klein did not waste his own bullets. He raised his hand and lightly tapped the space between his brows, activating spirit vision to assist Madam Lorotta, the Gravedigger.

In his sight, the monster Bieber’s aura was reduced to only one color: pure gray-white. A gray-white filled with madness.

Beyond that, Klein could see nothing.

At that moment, El Hassan and Leonard Mitchell began chanting at the same time:

“Ah, dreadful danger, crimson hope;

“At least one thing is true: life flies;

“One thing is true, and all the rest are lies;

“The flower that blooms once shall die…”

…

A sleep-inducing power spread outward. The distorted gray-white monster rapidly slowed, as though even it could not resist the charm of poetry.

Just then, it opened its mouth and released a scream that ordinary people could not hear.

“Ah!”

…

Bang. Klein’s head throbbed, and he was forced out of spirit vision on his own.

He immediately felt something warm flow from his nose. Instinctively, he wiped it and saw the back of his hand covered in fresh red.

El and Leonard fell backward at the same time. Blood marked the corners of their mouths, the ends of their noses, and the rims of their eyes.

Borgia, Dunn, and Lorotta each retreated one or two steps, their faces turning pale.

The monster had only “screamed” once, yet the six Beyonders seemed already unable to endure it. They had become fragile and vulnerable.

Thud!

It drew close to Borgia, and its distorted joints abruptly swung.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Borgia and Dunn each fired two shots, yet they failed to cause even the slightest injury to the monster Bieber.

Boom! Borgia was sent flying, his long-barreled revolver falling to the ground with a heavy thump.

He struggled several times, trying to get up, but could not succeed in the short term.

Viscous liquid flowed from the corners of the monster Bieber’s mouth. It pounced toward the iron-black box.

Bang!

At the crucial moment, El Hassan fired a shot at the box, knocking it away a considerable distance. The monster Bieber failed to catch it and surged forward more than ten meters.

Cracks appeared on the iron-black box. As the thing inside hammered fiercely—thump, thump, thump—the cracks grew increasingly obvious.

“I found it!”

The black-haired Madam Lorotta finally spoke.

“I need you to control it for at least three seconds.”

“All right.”

Dunn did not ramble. He pressed a hand against the space between his brows and closed his eyes.

It was as if he had fallen asleep just like that. Invisible ripples spread outward, circle after circle.

In an instant, the monster Bieber halted. The madness in its eyes receded rapidly, and its thin, transparent eyelids began to droop uncontrollably.

Dunn’s body trembled. Beneath his clothes, something bulged in clusters and wriggled in place, as though one slick, scaleless venomous snake after another were hidden below.

Lorotta sprinted forward and rolled beneath the monster Bieber.

Supporting herself with one hand on the ground, she clenched her other hand into a fist and drove it upward like a fired cannonball, punching into the monster Bieber’s crotch.

Puff!

Ignoring the corrosive pain, she pushed against the ground with greater force. Her entire body rose a little higher, and her fist burrowed deeper.

Riiip!

Lorotta drew her forearm back, dragging out a section of intestine covered in yellow-brown filth and blood.

Within those intestines, an ancient, worn notebook could be faintly seen.

“Ah!”

The monster Bieber let out an audible scream. Its body suddenly brightened, as though melting.

“Down!”

El Hassan’s urgent shout had only just sounded when Klein saw the monster Bieber swell.

Boom!

Amid a tremendous explosion, Klein, who was some distance away, was thrown into the air by the shockwave and crashed heavily back down.

Dizzy and nauseated, he struggled to stand. He saw that the monster Bieber had turned into chunks of disgusting, rotten flesh. He saw Dunn and Lorotta lying more than ten meters away, looking as if they had lost consciousness.

El Hassan, Borgia, and Leonard Mitchell had also fallen to the ground. Some groaned in pain; others struggled but failed to rise.

Klein was just about to breathe out in relief when he suddenly discovered a familiar object two or three meters away.

The iron-black box had stopped rolling, its cracked side facing the sky.

A thin brownish arm stretched out from it.

Sealed Artifact… 2-049…

Shit!

Klein’s heart tightened. He immediately prepared to throw himself in the opposite direction, toward a place several meters away, escaping the range of Sealed Artifact 2-049.

That explosion had actually thrown the iron-black box to his vicinity!

Just then, Klein’s head abruptly buzzed.

His thoughts slowed with it.