"N-no way."
Illiana lay collapsed on the ground, staring blankly at the scene unfolding before her.
CRASH—!
A man crushing Yang Jin-hak with an axe made of blood.
The presence she sensed from him was utterly unremarkable, but that seemed to make no difference at all.
A strength that could not be defined by human standards.
Illiana knew of one such being.
"A Vampir."
An easy mission where all they had to do was kill one human who had wandered in by mistake.
That was all she had thought it amounted to.
"That doesn't make any sense."
But what was actually unfolding before her surpassed anything Illiana had imagined.
"Why is a Vampir here?"
If anything they had earned the Vampir's favor; they had done nothing to warrant being purged like this.
"Guhk."
While Illiana trembled in fear, Yang Jin-hak fell.
By contrast, the being before her showed no wounds at all.
"Whew. You're next?"
Soaked in blood, Garam walked toward Illiana.
The blood drenching his body began seeping in and being absorbed bit by bit.
[Absorbed the blood of the individual: Yang Jin-hak.]
[Plundering a skill.]
[Normal Skill: Body Reinforcement Art (B) Lv 1 acquired.]
"Not bad."
The System window before his eyes carried a message that he had obtained Yang Jin-hak's skill, the Body Reinforcement Art.
The Body Reinforcement Art was a simple skill that only strengthened the body, and for that very reason it was all the more effective.
"Now I just take her down and go into the cave."
Garam slowly approached Illiana, who had been blankly watching his fight with Yang Jin-hak all this time.
"V-Vampir! Why are you suddenly attacking us?"
As Garam approached, Illiana slammed her head to the ground and wailed.
Because she was prostrate she couldn't see his face.
[What's with her?]
'R-right?'
Garam, looking down at her, wore a flustered expression.
'These bastards seem to think I'm some superior of theirs.'
Judging by how she specifically said Vampir, the superior Illiana had in mind was a Vampir.
"As the Vampir commanded, we have brought the Chimera Project to the brink of completion. If this is about the rate of progress, please, grant us time......."
Her manner, which looked almost desperate, made clear how much Illiana feared the Vampir.
'Played right, I could put this to good use.'
[What are you planning?]
At Carmilla's question, Garam smiled and moved toward Illiana again.
"Hey. You."
"Y-yes!"
"Did you think I came here for such a thing?"
Garam looked down at her, affecting a solemn voice.
[Pfft, what is that? Why are you lowering your voice?]
'Be quiet. She won't be fooled otherwise.'
Objectively speaking, Garam's acting wasn't very good.
Even so, perhaps because she was consumed by fear.
Illiana's body trembled even harder than before.
"Th-then what brings you......."
At her question, Garam quietly raised a finger.
He pointed at the cave they had come out of.
Illiana carefully raised her head and looked in the direction he pointed.
"I came to remove the one inside."
"You mean P-Pyo Dae-rim?"
At the name Pyo Dae-rim, Garam's face hardened.
'So it was Pyo Dae-rim inside after all.'
He had half expected it from the moment Illiana and Yang Jin-hak were here.
And sure enough.
'Then he's the one who reduced the Windswept Plateau to this state too.'
It was highly likely that Pyo Dae-rim was behind the Chimera Project and held the Blood Script as well.
"That's right."
Garam's answer was short but certain.
That was enough.
Enough for Illiana to decide to abandon Pyo Dae-rim.
To the Vampir, the Worshippers were nothing more than useful tools to begin with.
Expendables that a slight whim was enough to discard.
'I have to run. I don't know why, but the Vampir have abandoned us. Fighting a Vampir only gets me killed.'
She had a bond with Pyo Dae-rim from working alongside him.
But a bond wasn't going to save her life now.
And hadn't she just watched the fight with Yang Jin-hak?
He was a true Vampir.
Chimera-ized as they were, they could never stop him.
'Then I'll humor him as much as I can and slip away in secret.'
While Illiana was making that resolve, Garam approached the cave before him.
"Why is this blocked?"
"It locks automatically without our biometric authentication. Shall I open it for you?"
"Open it."
"At once."
Staggering to her feet, Illiana laid a hand on the boulder blocking the cave.
At that the boulder wavered like a mirage and vanished.
"SHAAAA!"
While Garam was watching the boulder disappear.
Illiana hurled herself at the ground in an instant.
Her earthworm-like lower body shattered the bedrock and carried her underground.
"Hm?"
Witnessing Illiana's escape, Garam lightly snapped his fingers.
"Hardening. Crimson Flame."
Flame settled over a blood spear like the ones he had thrown at Yang Jin-hak.
Garam gripped that spear and hurled it at Illiana.
SQUELCH!
Piercing flesh, the spear buried itself in Illiana's chest.
"GAAAAH!"
Screaming in pain, Illiana still didn't give up her escape.
"Thrashing like that will only make it hurt more."
WHOOSH!
Garam's axe swung fast.
But Illiana was a little faster; his axe only managed to shave off a bit of her tail.
[Is it all right to let her get away like that?]
'I'd like to kill her right now, but there's nothing for it.'
If he used his power properly he could certainly catch her, but that would cost more than it gained.
Garam looked down at his own body.
Fighting Yang Jin-hak had spent more power than expected.
The blood itself had been restored by absorbing Yang Jin-hak's.
"But my body can't take it."
He was in the state of an overheated racing car.
Fighting while drawing up the Vampir's power had left his blood channels feverish.
"It won't be a problem right now."
But catching Illiana too could cause problems when he fought Pyo Dae-rim later.
"Pyo Dae-rim is strong."
Even when he saw him in the Deep Crystal Cave, he was more than a match for the current Yang Jin-hak.
And there was every chance he had grown stronger while running that Chimera Project.
"I'll conserve as much strength as I can."
Besides, Illiana wouldn't be a serious problem.
"Because I have this."
Garam picked up a piece of hard outer hide from the ground Illiana had dug through.
"Illiana's hide."
At the same time he threw the spear, he had swung his axe and cut off part of her body.
If he gave this to Hae-rang, catching her wouldn't take much time at all.
She was a master at catching the likes of Worshippers.
"Then shall I go and catch the Pyo Dae-rim inside?"
The cave, now fully open.
From within it came a smell of blood on a different order from the surroundings.
"How many people did they grind up for this?"
Inside the cave were corpses beyond counting.
All of them long dead, and decaying.
"This crosses the line pretty damn hard."
Honestly, he had little interest in whether people around him died or not.
In eight years as a porter he had seen more people die than he could count.
He wasn't the sort to be shaken now by the deaths of people he didn't even know.
Separately from that, though, revolting was revolting.
"Completely insane bastards."
The corpses, discarded like half-used trash, were every one of them dried up like mummies.
"They used them as material for the Blood Point Stones."
Blood Point Stones were made from the blood of living people or monsters.
And the reason so many corpses lay in a Worshipper hideout needed no explaining.
"So this is it."
Arriving at the end of the cave, what Garam saw was a laboratory fitted out with cutting-edge equipment.
A laboratory that made it impossible to believe this was a cave inside a gate.
And at the center of that laboratory stood Pyo Dae-rim.
"Ho, you brought down Yang Jin-hak and Illiana? Impressive."
A frame of easily two meters and skin glowing green.
And a pair of enormous arms attached to Pyo Dae-rim's back.
And a Mid-tier Blood Point Stone embedded in his chest.
'I had a feeling when I saw the others with stones driven into their bodies.'
To think he had actually driven a Mid-tier Blood Point Stone into himself.
This was a jackpot.
"Looks like you've been working out hard. You've changed so much from when I saw you that I almost didn't recognize you."
"You're that one from before, aren't you? The Vampir bastard who got in my way."
"You don't fear me the way Illiana did."
"Heh heh. That bitch has never laid eyes on Him, so it's no wonder she'd fear a Vampir."
Him?
So their superior was a Vampir after all.
"Anyone might quail at a Vampir of unclear affiliation like you. But I'm different."
Pyo Dae-rim slammed his hammer down at the floor.
BOOM—!
That alone sent a shockwave strong enough to rattle the body through the area.
"I was chosen by Lord Rumania, by Them!"
"Is that why you stuck orc arms on your body?"
Since they called it a chimera, Pyo Dae-rim appeared to have grafted an orc's body onto his own.
With a hammer bigger than a grown man in one hand on top of that, he hardly looked human.
"You recognize it. I had a time of it getting this finished."
Saying that, Pyo Dae-rim drew a small silver pen from his robes.
Garam knew the moment he saw it.
'Carmilla. That's the Blood Script, isn't it?'
[It is.]
An alien power that could not possibly be thought of as a human's.
It felt very much like the Blood Chalice through which he had first gained Nosferatu's power.
"I-is someone there?! If you're a hunter, please, save us!"
What roused Garam, whose attention had been taken by the Blood Script, was a voice from the side.
In what looked like a small prison, about fifteen people were confined.
'There were still people alive.'
They appeared to have been abducted only recently.
'I'd like to save them if I have the capacity.'
But watching Pyo Dae-rim walk toward him without sparing the hostages so much as a glance, he thought it would be difficult.
"Gwahahaha! Today you croak right here!"
Pyo Dae-rim, beginning to give off his presence in earnest, was frankly overwhelming.
"B-Grade, and at a level not even comparable to Yang Jin-hak."
The gap between the two of them was wide enough to make the Yang Jin-hak he had just fought feel like a newborn.
As he was now, the man was hopelessly out of reach.
A hundred fights, a hundred losses.
An insurmountable power with a win rate of zero.
That was the chimera-ized Pyo Dae-rim.
"Whew. So my ability alone won't cut it right now?"
In that case.
There was nothing for it but to use a bit of a cheat code.
"True Progenitor Form."
WOOOOM!
He drew up the power lying latent deep within his body.
An overwhelming power that craved blood and yet subjugated it.
'Is it because of the First Molting?'
Little by little, the outline of just how tremendous the power latent inside him was took shape.
'What I've been using until now was no different from scooping a single cup of water out of the sea.'
Power of roughly A-Grade.
At first he had thought even that was a tremendous power.
But even after the First Molting, the power he felt was so vast that he could barely make out its outline.
That was the True Progenitor's power.
'And originally I couldn't even use that A-Grade power properly.'
Now that he had gone through the First Molting, he realized that the power he had used before hadn't reached A-Grade.
The total amount of power was indeed A-Grade, but what I was actually using was about B-Grade.
Instinctively he had used only as much power as his body could endure.
'It's different now.'
Having gone through the First Molting, he felt he could draw out the A-Grade power he had originally imagined in full.
SHOOOOOP.
The True Progenitor's power flowing from Garam's body spread across the floor.
Like a mist made of blood drifting through the air.
Garam walked forward through that mist.
"Wh-what's this. You reckon I'll flinch just because the mood's changed?"
"No. You're going to be afraid either way."
What stood before him wasn't some mere Vampir.
It was the real thing.