"In that case, we'll keep you company here a little longer—we don't have anything else to do next anyway." Geno laced his hands behind his head. He felt a faint twinge of melancholy at Yanagi Tsukishiro and Jane's departure, but it hardly amounted to some tearful farewell.
After all, they'd swapped contact details with one another—it wasn't as if they'd never see each other again, so why make such a fuss.
"Has anyone ever told you that you're really good at killing the mood?" "Thanks for the compliment." "I didn't mean it as a compliment..."
Twiggy slipped quite naturally into bickering with Geno. Faced with a boyfriend whose hide grew thicker by the day, Twiggy had clearly long since grown used to it.
But it was precisely because of Geno's antics that the somewhat sorrowful mood dissolved in an instant.
"All right then, we'll be in your debt. As it happens, my colleagues will be coming over—when they do, I'll introduce them to you all."
A smile played on Yanagi Tsukishiro's face; she was more than happy to let her companions make these new friends.
The several girls clustered together, chattering away. Though each of them came from a different background and a different line of work,
in this moment, what existed between them was nothing more than a pure and beautiful friendship.
And as the only man present, Geno had no choice but to grudgingly give the ladies some space to themselves. It absolutely wasn't because Twiggy had snapped at him.
Absolutely not. "Ah well, Rat, looks like you're the only one left to keep me company."
"...It's Mole. Never mind, whatever makes you happy."
The Mole, prisoner that he was, was still numb all over right now.
Not as a figure of speech—he was genuinely numb, seeing as he was still strung up on the streetlamp and hadn't been let down.
Still, compared to him, their ringleader, the few dozen rebel underlings of his were in considerably worse shape at this moment.
"Aaargh! Boss! It hurts!"
The soldier Geno had knocked out last was, sure enough, the first of the whole group to come to. The moment he woke, he saw that he and his several dozen brothers had all been tied up.
And their boss, the Mole, was at that very moment hung from the streetlamp, being humiliated.
"Sir! This is outrageous! A warrior may be killed but never disgraced!"
Mistakenly believing his superior was being shamed, the rebel soldier struggled to rise, but with his hands and feet bound he had no means whatsoever of fighting back.
"Damn it! I can't put any strength into it."
Unable to move, he felt despair and fury. In the end, was his fate never to be in his own hands after all?
"Damn Hollow, damn Ethereal, damn Ether Corruption! Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!"
The soldier vented his rage through ceaseless cursing, along with his loathing for this unjust world.
If there had been any other road to take, why would he ever have fallen to such a state.
He hadn't been born wanting to become a rebel.
Not long ago he had even been suffering the torment of severe Ether Corruption, and now, after being saved with such difficulty, his fate was once again held in another's grip, beyond his control.
"Damn it! You vermin! You all deserve to die! This world is already rotten to the core!"
As he cursed, the killing intent in his eyes grew ever thicker, and just as he was about to lose his sanity, a voice rang out from the depths of his mind.
'Poor child, the Lord will watch over you.' "Who's there!?"
'You don't need to know who I am. You only need to know that I can give you power. The power to change the world...'
"The power to change the world..." Listening to the voice in his mind, the soldier slowly sank into calm before long.
His grievous killing intent dispersed bit by bit, replaced by a visible coldness and serenity.
Though outwardly he appeared unchanged, this soldier's soul had already returned to the embrace of the Ether Sea.
Immediately after, without anyone noticing, an unknown transformation appeared in the soldier's body.
No—it wasn't that no one noticed.
"Hm? A strange smell."
Geno's nose twitched. He seemed to have caught a whiff of a familiar and nauseating odor.
Where had he smelled this scent before...
"Was it back at Weifeidi? But what on earth is this smell?"
Geno dredged up this familiar odor from his memory while searching for its source.
He found it soon enough—that soldier who had already lost his soul.
"It's this guy! Has this guy not bathed in three days?! How is he this rank!"
When Geno pinched his nose and tracked down the source of the stench, the light in that soldier's eyes had already utterly vanished.
Geno's commotion drew the attention of Twiggy and the others.
"What's going on?"
"Can't you smell it? That awful stench."
Watching Geno pinch his nose and make such a show of it, Twiggy and the rest all wore blank, baffled expressions.
"No? We don't smell anything at all."
The words had barely left her mouth when the soldier behind Geno suddenly jerked his head up—his eyes clouded, his face rigid, like a corpse.
"O Lord, I shall bring You everything You desire."
A hoarse voice forced its way out of the soldier's throat, and then his body began to swell violently.
Great quantities of Ether crystals and a dark red breath began to squeeze out from within his body, and only then did Geno finally remember why he'd found this stench so familiar.
"Filth?! Why would Filth appear here!?"
Geno was utterly astonished, and the others realized something was wrong as well, each snapping into a combat stance.
Number 11, the most impatient of them, decisively swung her longblade at the soldier who had already begun to mutate. Yet before the blade's edge could even touch his body, it was knocked back by the dark red energy of the Filth.
"Ungh!"
Number 11's body took a heavy blow and was sent flying outright. Trigger and Anby hurriedly caught her, and then something even more terrifying happened.
The Ether and Filth surging out from the soldier's body wrapped up the remaining soldiers along with him, and then, beneath the violent, agonized screams of several dozen soldiers, an enormous dark red cocoon appeared before everyone's eyes.
And to Twiggy and Geno, this was nothing if not all too familiar.
"A Filth Cocoon?! How is that possible?! Is it the Praise Cult again?!"
Geno knew this thing before him all too well—he had once completed his first true transformation inside one of these.
Of course, that was also how he'd come to suffer the Filth's corruption.
And now, what Geno and the others faced was a brand-new Filth Cocoon.
Unlike before, what this cocoon enveloped was not some low-grade Ethereal like himself or a Dullahan.
But rather a Sacrificial Demon, meticulously crafted by the Praise Cult, possessing a wholly new power.
____
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