Hunter of the Perished World

'Demon blood!'

My head rang, but Jean held on. Drinking the blood of demons is like taking a demon's breath. Gin drains your life just by ingesting it. Absorbing the blood of demons is not just the concept of eating it.

It means it absorbs the source of life that Leona has, and it means it cuts down her lifespan. Even in small quantities, it definitely takes life.

Gene remains calm, clutching his twitching hand. But Leona also noticed that Jean's condition was unusual.

"Oh, why is your face..."

"No, it's nothing. Tell me why."

Gene calms down and asks something else.

'You're not a vampire and you're excited about the blood.'

Gene felt a slight tingling sensation. Leona frowns at the thought of the nightmare she had and whether she felt nauseous inside. Then I became numb as if I had realized something.

"I had a nightmare.... Now that I think about it.... I don't think it's a nightmare."

"Not a nightmare?"

While sleeping, she thought it was just a nightmare, but now that she's awake, she's convinced that what she saw wasn't a dream. Leona points under her feet.

"I was down here watching the ants die...."

Leona's nightmare was showing thousands of ants twisting and dying in a plague. Monsters who twisted, twisted, and died in the plague loved and hated the monsters, so it was horrible for them to leave.

When Leona woke up, she thought it was not a nightmare, but what was happening now.

"I can still see half of it."

Leona mutters with a blank expression. It's not as obvious as it used to be, but Leona is feeling the way the monsters around her are suffering. It was being clearly sensed and explained to Leona, but not accurately.

'An expression of empathy.'

Whether many monsters are dead or it's time to awaken, Leona is becoming aware of her abilities as a witch. Through this process, Leona will become a real witch.

"Why do I look like I don't want to see...?"

Leona grips her temples, frowning and muttering. Leona is Leona, despite the witch's Awakening ability. Leona is furious with the pain of the monsters she doesn't want to know about. Leona mutters, scolding if the migraine is causing trouble. I realized something.

Leona focuses a little more on the pain that is being inflicted on her. And I focused a little bit, a little bit more on the subject that was feeling the pain.

Not long ago, I was able to do things I couldn't do at all.

Leona was able to sense a giant creature much larger and heavier than the other ants.

Leona has a good memory.

'It's a shame about the queen's chips. I can't help it.'

After that thought, Leona raises her head.

"Mister."

"… why."

"I think I found the queen."

It was natural for Jean to be surprised by that.

"No."

But naturally, Gene said no before Leona said anything.

"I think you're extracting chips from the queen, but the tunnels are complicated, so I can't afford to go in there."

But Leona remembered another thing Jean said.

'The cave where the termites come and go is not wide enough for me to pass by, if you will.'

"I'll go."

"What?"

"I can go. I can walk, can't I? And now I see what an anthill looks like."

By feeling the bodies of the ants, and sharing their consciousness there as an indicator, Leona was almost sharing her perception of the anthill. The witch's power was not a simple force to explain that it was merely domination.

Gene shakes his head in ridicule.

"Don't say anything weird. There's an epidemic down there."

Now, the anthill is saturated by an infectious disease, and as soon as it enters, it is exposed to the disease and dying.

"Even you can become immune to the plague...."

But Gene said that and forgot to say that. The epidemic that is spreading now is a shaman, and the shaman epidemic can be immune enough if it has an axillary membrane. So the epidemic doesn't matter. But Gene shakes his head again.

"No, no. Even so, the ants that are still alive might attack you..."

"Did you forget?"

Jean laughs.

"Monsters don't attack me."

Leona is a witch.

A witch trying to extract chips from the corpse of a dead monster? Gene keeps seeing Leona's suspicious expression and realizing something's fishy.

"No matter how much I think about it, this isn't it."

Gene finally sticks the first shovel where Leona designated it. But apart from his heart, Gene was digging the ground at a terrifying speed. In the beginning, the epidemic was not a problem because the immunity against epidemics was hundreds of times higher than normal.

Lardass!

As I dug the ground in an instant, the way down to the anthill collapsed, and the heat inside the cave howled up. The second thing that surprised me is the oysters' nest just below what Leona said. Gene comes up to the top of the pit and looks at Leona.

"I'm going to be a hunter, too, but if you're going to teach me a skill, I need to show you something I can use. Don't worry. If the tunnel doesn't collapse, we'll pay for it."

I wasn't wrong. As Leona predicted, it's a very simple mission to extract chips from a dead corpse.

Leona chirps her side as if nothing had happened to her, even though Gin's expression was unsettling.

"Do you really want to be a hunter?"

Leona stares at Gin like it's ridiculous.

"What, did you think I was just saying that?"

"……."

"I'm going to be a real hunter. How comfortable are you? The monster will come to die on his own."

A predecessor to the Awakening of Witch Power. Gene has never seen or heard of a witch with such a bizarre mind.

Eventually, Gene handed Leona a a chip box, an extractor, a lantern, and an automatic shotgun with a substitute punch. Leona frowns with an automatic shotgun.

"Ugh, so heavy..."

"Remember, anything happens, you come right up. Come out as soon as the oyster tries to collapse, becomes difficult to breathe, or becomes abnormal. If a monster suddenly tries to attack you, it shoots a shotgun, but if you get hit in the jaw or face by a recoil, don't just aim and shoot."

"Worry not, why should I worry about the sky falling?"

Leona shakes her head in horror as she sees the camp picking up worries like a nag. As you finish preparing to go down the tunnel, you look up at the camp at the top of the pit and smile.

"Still, it feels good to worry about you."

Although he was finding the automatic shotgun as a fairly plausible foam, to be honest, the automatic shotgun was a dangerous and reflexive weapon for a child to use. But Leona jumps into the cave as if she has nothing to worry about.

Boom!

As a witch, you don't have to worry about monsters, the contagious disease is blocked against the liquid barrier, and you won't be short of oxygen as wide as the oysters are, and you won't be at risk of collapsing once the termites have dug them out.

"……."

However, Gene could not take his eyes off the cave where Leona had gone down.

Oh, that smells like shit.

Of course, as soon as Leona went down, she was grumbling in a voice with no fear.

Leona's mind was already filled with a clear map of the anthill as if it had been injected. It was a pretty strange experience. He was a monster, not a man, but the experience of other creatures continues to become his knowledge.

I still can't figure out how to be proactive, but once Leona had a connection, the knowledge of the ants was embedded in her head as if it were a brand.

Knowing where the egg is, where the food is, and where the queen's room is. Leona makes her way down the anthill, looking around for the flash.

And of course, the termites that fell and died from the plague were placed in each passageway uneasyly.

To be precise, termites resembling giant earth puppies were flaky and dead. The corpses of the ants were miserable, and in addition to the miserable corpses, there were ants trembling on their legs.

The passageway is narrower as it gets wider, and even narrower, it is high enough for Leona to walk through.

'Real magic usually requires this kind of ritual, but it won't be memorable.'

'Cause the consequences are worse than the consciousness itself. The results will be more memorable.'

And Leona was going through the widening, narrowing passages and facing the miserable face of the ants, realizing in real time what Jean meant by that.

The corpses of numerous monsters were as potent and hideous and disgusting as they were. When a cow became a shaman's offering, Leona thought it was a waste, even if it wasn't her own.

But now, I feel like it just doesn't make sense that something like this happened to a sick cow. The smell immediately paralyzed Leona's body, already drenched in the hot heat and moisture.

It wasn't hard enough to breathe, but it was hard enough for Leona to climb down the anthill. Since the termites can climb or descend fairly steep oysters on six legs, it was quite difficult for Leona to walk upright on those paths.

Fortunately, there was a place with the queen not far from the entrance where Leona came in.

"Ugh!"

Glug glug!

Eventually, Leona stumbles on her feet and rolls a few times down the steep ramp. Leona wakes up from a full-blown pain.

"Shit... I shouldn't have come."

Now I have to regret it before I'm late. Leona notices that the slope she fell is quite steep, and she has no idea how to get back up there.

In the middle, Leona crossed the nest of ants, where she trampled on the corpses of ants piled up like a mountain, and passed the place where the dead ants had already been colored black, and even passed through the warehouse where the meat piled up, which is the food of ants, smelled rotten.

The sane person would have already run away, panicked, peed and not taken a step.

But Leona occasionally spits out insults, and if she's not tired, she doesn't stop or panic.

Leona's mother was a coward.

And Leona hates cowards. Fear and fear are only an obstacle to survival. Leona wanted to castrate those parts of her feelings.

I'm not afraid.

Leona doesn't stop because there's more to fear than fear and cruelty. So when Leona reached the giant cavity with the queen, she was not surprised to see the giant.

Shhh... Shhh...

Reality is more humble than I thought.

A queen that is a hundred times larger than a normal ant is just an insect with a large belly to look at as a boss monster.

Overwhelming in size.

But that's it.

"He's not dead yet."

And because of the giant, she's breathing hard, but the queen is not dead yet. Large ships, and relatively small breasts and heads, were quite in contrast.

The eggs from the buttocks of that massive ship turn into frogs and build a massive underground network.

The Queen Dove's arms and legs were like chopsticks compared to a giant ship, and of course they wouldn't move.

The queen will eat the meat loaf brought by the termites and lay eggs. If all of the termites die, it is clear that the queen will die without any ant to take care of them.

According to the ruler of the nearby mountain ranges, the queen was just a machine that lay eggs in Leona's eyes.

Mechanically lay eggs, the eggs will grow and become termites, tending to the queen, gathering food.

The queen was looking at Leona. Because the insect didn't have a face, Leona couldn't figure out what the queen was thinking and what she saw.

However, I felt it.

Fragments of emotion are being conveyed. Of course, nonverbal monsters were merely conveying emotions, and they were re-linguished within Leona.

'I want to live.'

'My children.'

'The colony is dead.'

'It hurts.'

'Great one.'

'I don't want to die.'

'Help me.'

'Great one.'

Even though Leona was unconscious, just by looking at the queen, she felt those feelings rushing towards her like waves. Just as contagious, Leona feels that sadness is contagious, not someone else's.

"Well, what the... Shut up. Shut up..."

In a strange feeling where emotion itself is contagious, Leona felt sorry for the queen in front of her eyes without even knowing it. I felt sorry for him, and at the same time I felt sorry for him.

The more outstanding a witch is, the more perfectly she empathizes with the monster. Like a colonial ritual, a witch becomes the ruler of collective intelligence and controls monsters. It's like every monster is who they are, and every monster is who they are.

Leona, who does not yet know the stages of domination, seems to be getting weaker and weaker with this compulsory empathy.

'Great one.'

"Help me."

Do I really have to die? What have they done wrong? Monsters are just monsters. The reason why thousands of colonies have to die for a few pennies of chips...

And as Leona's thoughts spread to the area, she called out in a seizure, as if to cut off the strangeness of the accident.

"Shut up! This sucks."

Chop chop.

Leona has red eyes, loaded and aimed an automatic shotgun. Leona screams and pulls the trigger.

"I'm not a monster!"

Kuang!

Yuck! Yuck!

With the flames, the queen's boat exploded.

"Ugh!"

With a recoil, Leona whirs for a moment, but she pulls the trigger as she gets closer. The handgun was fired faithfully, one by one, each time Leona pulled the trigger.

Kuang!

Boom!

Every time the shotgun bursts into flames, the queen's abdomen explodes with an egg on her side.

Leona blows one last shot into the agonizing queen's skull and smashes the queen's skull to bits.

"So fuck off, don't get in my head."

Leona smashes the wreckage of the queen's skull with a skull shaft and severs the wrecked head completely from her torso. The queen is completely breathless.

Leona digs through the queen's flesh, finds the core and sticks an extractor in it.

Seeing the blue crystals being extracted, Leona breathes out a harsh breath.

I don't empathize with monsters. I don't pity monsters. The monster just has to spit out the chip and die.

As Leona declares, she looks at the body of the queen ant and says,

"I decide what I am."

Leona stares at a pile of extracted chips.

As if injecting into yourself, Leona adds last.

"I'm a person."

Just like Gene is suffering and determined to look at Leona.

Leona also suffers and commits to seeing monsters.

You don't have to stay human.

Not long ago, Leona didn't care about nothing. But it's different now.

You have to be human to not be alone.

Leona, who extracted the chips from the queen's corpse, was a small, but insignificant hunter.

The rugged expression resembles Gin, sadly.