"My action of fleeing Ruen right now will face a lethal threat related to Tina Edith."
While walking down the street, Ais performed another divination. The coin landed tails — meaning as long as she handled it correctly, there was no lethal danger.
She exhaled slightly, and privately considered who might be following her:
"No sign of financial exposure. Could it be someone who saw me and got ideas — then felt quite confident I'd be an easy target?"
She didn't suspect her material purchases — wild-rage herb was a very common material, and light-drawing dust, while less common, had other uses beyond the invisibility spell. Even Leel knew this, which was part of why she'd felt comfortable buying it openly.
Whatever the source of the follower's confidence, Ais didn't hesitate. She made straight for the church.
If this had been before, she would have tried to probe her pursuer's strength first. But having been through everything she had, she now defaulted to caution. If she were somehow outmaneuvered and the pursuer happened to be someone with objectionable intentions — Ais felt she might lose control on the spot and become a monster. Getting a period had already made her regret her choices for four days. This wasn't something to take lightly.
She took the most populated route to the church. The pursuer's tracking was skilled — she rarely had the feeling of being watched. Without the divination, she might never have confirmed the tail at all. Throughout the journey she heard no unusual footsteps, indicating the person had at minimum the ability to silence their own movement.
She reached the church without incident, and spent an hour there with eyes closed in apparent prayer.
"Should be gone by now. Someone purely motivated by attraction wouldn't have the patience for this."
Ais left the church and headed back toward Joyewood — and was surprised to find the divination telling her the tail was still on her.
"Is this a genuine obsessive? Or someone with a particular aim? Could it be that some Witch cult follower is so thoroughly blinded by fantasies that they identified me as a Witch purely based on my figure — not even my face?"
Whatever the case, with no sign of the pursuer giving up, Ais ran out of patience for evasion.
The church had given her no formal identification, and her track record was only known in detail to the North District Watchers. She couldn't summon a Watcher in the West District. Her best option was to take the underground to the northeast portion of Joyewood on her side of the Tasok River.
Near the Holy Wind Cathedral — the Storm Church's Beklund headquarters — if anything unusual happened there, the Punishment Vessels' response time would certainly be faster than any West District Watchers. And even if she couldn't handle the pursuer, escape would be easier.
It was now early evening. Ais gradually drifted from the busier main roads toward less-populated areas.
Just as she turned into the shadow of a building, she suddenly had a premonition of danger. Ais instinctively began to dodge — and then found herself frozen mid-roll, as if someone had pressed pause.
She had the sensation of being bound — but there was nothing around her.
With her elevated intuition, Ais sensed the constraining force was coming from the shadows behind her — shadows that were suddenly moving like dark water.
Exploiting the moment Ais was immobilized and briefly unable to act, a figure leaped out from the living shadows and lunged at her.
Crack!
The Ais frozen on the ground suddenly became a shattered piece of mirror, suspended upright above the floor. At its center, a patch of phantom black flame burned.
The mirror double having freed her, Ais witnessed an extraordinarily disturbing sight: the man attacking her from behind had his upper body split open from skull to abdomen — as if he'd intended to swallow Ais whole by this method.
The tearing, predictably, also destroyed the upper half of the hooded robe, exposing constantly writhing flesh at the split — but with no blood flowing.
Since Ais had become a mirror, the man, moving unstoppably through the air, transformed bizarrely into writhing viscous flesh. The thick mass split around the center to avoid contact with the black flame still burning there.
His shoes hit the ground first. The flesh, clothing, and the shattered mirror landed together shortly after. But the viscous mass behaved like water, rapidly seeping into the floor.
At that moment, Ais sent a black flame streaking toward it. The targeted flesh caught immediately and burned in place on the ground. With Aura Vision quietly activated, she saw a large mass of fire-red spiritual energy moving rapidly beneath the surface, retreating away from her.
As she picked up the small patch of flesh being burned by the black flame, the larger viscous mass reassembled into human form a short distance away. The spiritual energy — which had been entirely fire-red — shifted back as the body reformed to the mixed colors of an ordinary person's aura.
Ais closed Aura Vision. The man who should have been naked was now wearing a peculiar flesh-colored robe, revealing a handsome face.
As the man's vision returned, the first thing he saw was a black flame rising in Ais's palm — with a piece of his own flesh being consumed inside it.
"Curse!" Ais's clear voice rang out.
The man doubled over at the pain in his chest and lungs and began coughing. But after only one cough, his chest opened a hole on its own — flesh writhing to push out a sphere of tissue from the body. Before it reached the ground, the sphere cracked open from the internal black flame burning it, scattering fragments of heart and lung tissue across the floor.
The chest sealed immediately. The man looked up at Ais with open hatred, voice hoarse:
"You should be grateful you were fast enough to use the double. Otherwise I would have shown you what it means to beg for death."
This person is remarkably difficult to kill. Ais looked at the man she'd never encountered before and calmly asked:
"I'm not from the Witch Cult. Is this attack because of my supernatural pathway?"
The man, who had already been dissolving back into shadows, solidified again at Ais's first sentence. He fixed her with black eyes and rasped:
"How do you prove you haven't joined the Witch Cult?"
Seeing her guess confirmed, Ais glanced at the half-destroyed hooded robe at her feet — an exact match to the one the gathering's organizer had worn.
"The Shadow Amalgamation."
The man's strange physical transformation and ability to move through shadows fit perfectly with the church Watchers' descriptions of Shadow Amalgamation members.
The Shadow Amalgamation was a cult that worshipped an entity called the "True Creator." Ais only knew that their supernatural pathway was formidable — members were volatile and prone to losing control, and could use shadow manipulation, blood-and-flesh magic, and certain methods to simultaneously employ multiple pathways' abilities.
Yet strangely, the church's attitude toward this organization — which by any measure seemed highly dangerous — was nearly neutral: so long as Shadow Amalgamation members showed no signs of causing trouble, they were monitored rather than apprehended. Reportedly because the organization had become considerably more restrained since the war.
A strange justification, but that was what the Watchers had told her.
The man growled with displeasure:
"Answer my question first!"
Ais remained unimpressed:
"I can answer. But how do I know that after learning this, you won't tip off the Witch Cult to use them to get rid of me?"
Author's Note (this chapter):Yet strangely, the church's attitude toward this organization — which by any measure seemed highly dangerous — was nearly neutral: so long as Shadow Amalgamation members showed no signs of causing trouble, they were monitored rather than apprehended. Reportedly because the organization had become considerably more restrained since the war.
Adam's mind came back.The Sea of Chaos receded, the pollution shut off, so the intelligent Adam retook the high ground. ·