Chapter 123: Beyonder Battle

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Three
Beyonder Battle

Beyond the glass window, vines grew wild in the garden, ruined and gloomy. The river flowed darkly in silence, reflecting flecks of starlight. Nearby houses, by contrast, shone with warm, cozy radiance.

Everything was quiet to the extreme, as though welcoming the arrival of night.

Tris, whose features were not particularly exquisite when taken separately, yet combined into a startling beauty, withdrew her gaze and quickly walked to the coat rack. From it, she took down a black robe with a hood.

She swiftly put on the garment, buttoned it, tightened the belt, and flipped up the hood, turning herself into an assassin.

Tris raised her right hand and wiped it across her face. Instantly, the face hidden beneath the hood became hazy and indistinct.

Immediately afterward, she reached into a concealed pouch at her waist and pinched out a handful of powder flickering with a faint glow. Cooperating with an incantation, she scattered it over herself.

Tris’s figure began to vanish inch by inch. Her outline and contours seemed drawn in pencil, erased completely by an invisible eraser.

Having completed her invisibility, she left the bedroom without sound and came to the room opposite. She pushed open the window that had not been fitted with protective bars.

With a light leap, Tris stood on the windowsill, looking down at the lawn behind the small building, down at the iron fence nearly merged with the night, down at Corpse Collector Frye as he silently climbed over the wall.

She breathed in and dropped like a feather, landing on the grass without making the slightest sound.

Frye, wearing a black windbreaker and carrying a specially made revolver, his high nose and thin lips as cold as ever, cautiously examined left and right, searching for resentful spirits or evil spirits that might appear.

He could see such things directly.

Tris approached him silently, circling behind his back. At some point, a dagger coated in “black lacquer” had appeared in her hand.

Puff!

Her strike was as swift as a gale. In one motion, she thrust the dagger into Frye’s lower back.

But at that very moment, the scene before her eyes abruptly shattered—shattered like an illusion.

Tris discovered that she was still standing on the windowsill, still looking down at the lawn and at the iron-fenced wall.

Only outside the wall, there was no longer only Corpse Collector Frye. There was also Leonard Mitchell aiming at the windowsill. And there was Dunn Smith with eyes closed, one hand pressing against his brow, his body half-bowed. Around the Nighthawk Captain, invisible ripples seemed to spread outward, ring after ring.

Tris’s pupils contracted. She understood that what she had just experienced had only been a dream, and that at some unknown moment, she had fallen asleep.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Leonard and Frye fired three shots in total, accurately striking the invisible target that seemed not yet to have awakened from the dream.

Crack!

Tris’s outline appeared. First it split, then it broke into fragments—fragments of rough-surfaced silver mirror.

Inside the house, having used a substitution spell, she turned and hurried away, following the corridor and staircase all the way down to the first floor.

Whooo!

On this level, an unceasing wind, so cold that it could freeze a person solid, blew as though it would never stop. One invisible, transparent figure after another wandered numbly and blankly through every place.

Having lost her invisibility, Tris felt her body temperature drop a little every time she passed through one of those ghost-like presences. By the time she finally reached the altar, she could no longer control her shivering.

The altar was a round table. At its center stood a statue carved from white bone.

The statue was the size of an adult man’s head. Its brows and eyes had only a vague outline, yet it seemed to depict a woman of unsurpassed beauty.

Her hair extended from her head all the way down to her ankles. Every strand was clear and thick, like venomous snakes, like tentacles.

And at the end of every strand of hair grew an eye—some open, some closed, dense and countless.

Around that sinister statue lay a messy pile of crude wooden dolls. Written upon them were names and corresponding information. For instance: Joyce Meyer.

Three candles stood upon the round table as well. In the icy, howling wind, their yellow flames tinged with green swayed violently.

Tris bowed before the statue, chanting an incantation at high speed.

Then she pushed the dolls aside, extinguished the candle flames, and picked up the statue.

Whooo!

The wind suddenly turned shrill, blowing so hard that the tightly shut windows shook violently.

Clang! Crack! One pane of glass after another shattered. The cold, lifeless wind blew outward in every direction.

Frye, who had just circled to another side and dared not rashly enter the altar’s range, immediately shuddered. He felt his blood turning cold, frosting over, and he felt his movements grow noticeably sluggish.

Just then, his ankle tightened as though some invisible thing had seized it firmly.

An even colder sensation spread upward from the point of contact. If another Sequence 9 Beyonder had been in his place, they would certainly have become paralyzed and stiff. But as a Corpse Collector, Frye was no stranger to similar states.

He turned the muzzle of his revolver toward the side of his ankle and pulled the trigger, as though he could see who the enemy was, as though he knew exactly where it stood.

Bang!

A silver Demon-hunting Bullet drilled into the wind, drawing out a shrill, tragic wail.

The invisible phantom dispersed, and Frye recovered his freedom of movement.

On the other side, Dunn Smith, who had wanted to climb to the second floor and avoid the altar’s front, was similarly frozen stiff by the spreading icy wind and stopped outside the shattered window.

Whooo!

Behind the window, the dark curtain suddenly rose, enveloping Dunn like a monster opening its mouth to swallow prey.

In an instant, Dunn’s head was wrapped by the curtain, which seemed to have gained life. It tightened further and further, outlining his nose and mouth.

On the verge of suffocation, Dunn pressed both feet down, straightened his knees, twisted his waist and back, and actually relied on raw strength to tear the curtain apart by force.

With his left hand, he seized a corner of the curtain wrapped around his head, pulled it off, and threw it to the ground.

Bang!

He lifted his hand and fired a shot at the remaining half of the curtain that still wanted to cover him from behind the window.

The curtain froze in place at once, and a smear of dark crimson quickly seeped through it.

Whooo!

On the lawn, Leonard Mitchell, who had just opened his mouth to chant a poem, was also hit by the cold wind filled with intense deathly meaning. His teeth knocked together, clattering, and for a brief moment, he could not make a sound.

At that instant, the ruined, disorderly vines suddenly spread, twining toward his ankle. A dark shadow also rode the outward-blowing gale and smashed toward him.

Leonard’s body was somewhat stiff. He had no time to shoot. He could only jerk his shoulder and raise his arm.

Puff!

The dark shadow struck his forearm, letting its own thorn stab into his skin.

It was merely a delicate, bright-red flower—a flower that had come from nowhere.

Leonard hissed in pain and flung it away, throwing the flower, now stained with his blood, to the side.

Bang!

He fired a shot at the vines twining toward him, blasting out dark-red sap.

Thud, thud, thud!

Leonard strode forward, charging toward the first-floor altar, toward the shattered window.

And where he had originally stood, the vines suddenly shrank away, as though avoiding some invisible thing.

Taking advantage of the chaos created by destroying the altar and interrupting the ritual, Tris once again completed her invisibility. She successfully fooled spirit vision, escaped the encirclement, and arrived behind the three Nighthawks.

She stretched out her right hand. At once, a cold wind blew past, carrying the flower stained with Leonard’s blood into her palm.

Tris lingered no longer. Holding the flower, she nimbly leaped over the iron fence and fled toward the Tussock River.

At that moment, Leonard, who had just been about to enter the first floor, suddenly turned his head to the side, as though listening to something.

His expression changed at once. Hurriedly, he lifted his sleeve and looked at the wound left by the flower’s thorn.

With his constitution, the bleeding there had already stopped, leaving only a slight redness and swelling.

Leonard’s expression darkened. He abruptly pinched his left index finger and, with brute force, tore the nail off.

His face instantly twisted with pain, but his movements did not stop because of it. While silently reciting something, he used the nail to reopen the coagulated wound, staining it with dark-red blood. Then he pulled out several strands of hair and wrapped them around that nail.

At the edge of the Tussock River, Tris slowed and cast her gaze toward the flower in her hand.

She murmured something under her breath. Suddenly, a black, illusory flame sprang up from her palm.

The flame wrapped around the flower and truly began burning, turning it into ash.

Only after finishing all this did Tris step into the river and sink beneath the water.

At the same time, Leonard threw out the nail wrapped in hair and stained with blood, watching it fall into a corner and burn out of thin air, releasing an unpleasant, scorched stench.

The nail and hair vanished quickly together, leaving only a small bit of dust behind.

Leonard breathed out in relief. He climbed through the window into the first floor and said to Dunn and Frye, who were destroying the altar, “The target escaped. Fortunately, our main objective was always to stop the ritual.”

Dunn sighed, looking toward the numerous wooden dolls on the round table.

“She was very alert and very powerful. She sensed our approach in advance. Otherwise… she is at least a Sequence 7 Beyonder.

“Signal Klein and have him come over.”

Through the brief contact in the dream, he had judged that the enemy was female.