Right as Ryan was busy dispatching his target, the man and woman engaged in secret discussion downstairs had, naturally, noticed the commotion above.
This black market fair was, after all, a carnival ground for bandits. For men this used to running wild day after day, a petty dispute erupting into bloody murder was hardly out of the ordinary.
A fight at that scale wasn't the sort of thing that would ordinarily catch Basil's interest — he didn't much care what had set off the fight upstairs.
But its sheer speed did genuinely catch him off guard. Frankly, the show hadn't been nearly as entertaining as he'd hoped.
"Well well... over already, up there."
White Wolf Basil took a long swig of his drink, smacking his lips, muttering, "Though that assassin's stealth wasn't half bad — didn't seem like a rookie. How'd he get killed in a single exchange? I was expecting at least a few rounds of back-and-forth. Hmph. Disappointing."
The woman beside him remained expressionless, saying nothing at all. A fight between two first-stage Transcendents genuinely held no interest for her.
By all rights, that should have been the end of it.
But right then, something else happened.
A faint, lilting flute melody drifted down through the air.
In the empty, silent Hyacinth Tavern, that eerie, haunting melody stood out with unnerving clarity.
Hearing it, the woman's eyebrows lifted slightly, a note of genuine surprise creeping into her voice. "Huh... there's a Hypnotist here too — a Mind-type Transcendent..."
Basil, too, had already picked up on the faintly disorienting flute melody, a flash of alertness crossing his eyes. "Tch, tch. Now this is getting interesting."
Mind-type Transcendents were a genuine rarity in day-to-day life. And of all the coincidences — one showing up right in the middle of their negotiation?
Thinking it through further, Basil wondered — the commotion upstairs, seemingly unrelated to him, might that have been a diversion all along?
The thought took root, and he turned to look at the Ormar Grand Princess beside him, his expression darkening with suspicion.
...
Ryan had transmigrated into this world barely a year ago, and had spent nearly the entire time confined to the Weasel Gang's training base — his worldly experience was still shallow.
He'd heard of mind-type Transcendents possessing all sorts of strange abilities, but had never actually witnessed one in action. Naturally, he had no idea that psychic magic could be channeled through sound waves at all.
Just as Ryan struck down Wolf in a lightning-fast blow, he'd assumed the people upstairs had likely already noticed the commotion. Counting on the delay before they could react, he figured he had a solid chance of putting enough distance behind him — once he melted into the crowd at the market grounds, he'd be more or less safe.
But the instant he burst through the door, before he'd made it more than a few steps, that lilting flute melody slipped into his ears.
*Woo... whoo... hoo...*
Like some kind of celestial melody drifting up from a hollow valley, the tune left every pore in his body loosening with pleasure, his mind slipping, unbidden, into a daze. And then, in the blink of an eye, the world around him transformed — he found himself standing in the middle of an endless grassland, blue sky above dotted with drifting white clouds, riding free on horseback through open wind, an exhilaration beyond words...
That blissful sensation pulled him under instantly, and he had no desire to wake from it.
...
*Clack. Clack. Clack...*
The rhythmic tread of boots on the staircase echoed steadily.
A few seconds after the flute began, Pisces, his face dark as a storm cloud, emerged from around the stairwell corner alongside a dark-skinned woman playing an ocarina.
Pisces looked at the blood pooling by the doorway. Hard as it was to believe, he had no choice but to accept the truth: if 9527 had walked out of that room, it meant Wolf, assigned to watch him, was dead.
This blood, of course, belonged to his old friend Wolf.
His weathered face darkened until it looked like it could wring out water, and as he turned his gaze on Ryan, standing rigid, eyes glazed and unseeing, his expression only grew uglier.
He'd expected the boy to try to run — but how in the world had a freshly-awakened Awakened One managed to kill a Transcendent with years of experience like Wolf?
Never mind. With the Hypnotist here now, there'd be no secrets left to keep hidden anyway.
Without dwelling on it further, Pisces turned to the dark-skinned woman beside him. "Ms. Circe, if you'd be so kind — please hypnotize this boy for me. There's some information I need to draw out of him..."
"Mm. No trouble at all."
The dark-skinned woman, her face covered in strange tattoo-like patterns, nodded. "He's already under my hypnosis. Ask whatever you'd like — he won't be able to lie to you..."
Satisfied, Pisces nodded, opening his mouth to speak...
But before he could get a single word out, something went very wrong.
Ryan, who a moment earlier had been standing there like an unresponsive puppet, utterly lost to the world, suddenly twitched a single finger, pulling a ripcord hidden inside his sleeve.
*Hiss, hiss, hiss...*
A sound like leaking gas.
In the very next instant, before the shocked, confused looks on Pisces and Circe's faces had even fully registered, a cloud of green toxic gas exploded outward. It was, unmistakably, the "gas bomb" concealed against Ryan's chest, now detonated.
...
Rewind three seconds.
Ryan had no idea he'd already fallen victim to the ploy.
Still galloping across that dream-grassland, he suddenly heard the AI Core's warning tone cut through.
【Ding! Abnormal unconsciousness detected. Executing preset protocol...】
The system then took over his neural responses, activating a fail-safe prepared in advance: the last gas bomb left behind by Baron Morin.
This was Ryan's final trump card. Should he ever fall into an abnormal unconscious state, this gas bomb would detonate, blanketing an area of over three hundred meters in a lethal field, killing every enemy nearby.
After all, this green toxic gas was potent enough that even Quinn, a third-stage Demon Hunter, would go out of his way to avoid it.
By the time Ryan came to, the world around him was already a thick haze of green mist.
*What is this...?*
Ryan stared at the bodies of Pisces and the unfamiliar dark-skinned woman lying on the ground, his expression turning strange. Even with the gap in his memory, it wasn't hard to piece together what had just happened, and a chill of retroactive fear ran through him.
The AI Core's real-time log also carried a corresponding entry: 【Ding! Mental faculties compromised by acoustic hypnosis. Voluntary consciousness lost. Executing preset protocol...】
Reading that log, Ryan finally understood just how close he'd come to death's door a moment ago.
Had he not anticipated exactly this kind of contingency before setting out on this escape attempt — had he not set up the AI Core's protocol in advance, and injected himself beforehand with the antidote Morin had left behind —
The consequences didn't bear thinking about.
*Sound-based hallucination... I fell for it completely without even realizing! Mind-type illusion magic really is something else...*
With the enemy's corpse lying a mere two meters away, Ryan felt an overwhelming wave of relief at having survived.
And with Pisces dead, Ryan suddenly felt lighter than air. The boulder fate had been grinding into his chest had finally shattered under the hammer's fall, and he'd come through unscathed.
At last — no more of that suffocating sensation of fate's fingers closing around his throat.
A small hiccup along the way, sure, but the goal had ultimately been achieved. The long, miserable stretch was finally behind him, and he could practically feel like celebrating.
Just as he was basking in that satisfaction, gathering up Pisces's storage ring, preparing to step into his bright new life of freedom —
Disaster struck again.
...
*BOOM!*
The next instant, a massive explosion tore through the air without warning, leaving his ears ringing.
Like a musket barrel bursting, the tavern's ground-floor sheet-metal walls blew apart with tremendous force. The blast was violent enough to feel like an earthquake, tearing half the entire steel-framed tavern to pieces.
*Holy hell, what now?*
Ryan stared, stunned, at the tavern collapsing in on itself.
Thank god the shockwave had been directional — otherwise, had it reached him, would he even still be breathing?
Ryan swallowed hard, momentarily doubting his own sanity: *Did the gas bomb's potency somehow trigger some kind of chain reaction, setting off the tavern's steam boilers?*
Clearly, that wasn't what had happened.
Looking through the massive hole torn in the floor, the truth became obvious at once.
Twenty meters away, a three-meter-tall wolf standing fully upright glared murderously at a disheveled figure crawling out of the wreckage nearby.
The giant wolf spoke in a human tongue, his voice dripping with the venomous fury of a man who'd just been betrayed, roaring, "Damn it all, you Ormar royals really don't have an honest bone in your whole rotten house!"
*A werewolf? One of the Ten Legendary Demon Hunters — White Wolf Basil?*
Recognizing the burly figure's identity, Ryan's stomach dropped, his mind going completely blank.
...
"It wasn't me..."
Ambushed and gravely wounded, Yumir crawled up out of the rubble and spat out a mouthful of dark blood.
A second earlier, she'd been baffled as to why Basil had suddenly turned on her without warning — but the instant she caught sight of the familiar royal retainers materializing all around them, everything clicked into place.
In the end, the woman said nothing more.
At this point, any explanation would have rung utterly hollow.