Chapter 134: Little Bug, Are You Tired of Living?
The girl was slight — flat would be the more accurate word. She looked eleven, maybe twelve. Not tall. Green hair, striking enough to draw the eye.
Her pale green eyes were fixed on Zōken with undisguised contempt — the look a person gives something unpleasant they've stepped in.
The comparison was unkind but accurate.
Despite appearances, Zōken did not underestimate her.
Not for a single second.
He could feel it — a killing intent radiating from her, dense and immediate. A sense of lethal danger that had nothing to do with her size or her age.
Extremely dangerous.
And she was floating. Hovering in open air without any visible means of support. Whatever she was, she was not ordinary.
What disturbed him most was the absence of anything he recognized. No magical energy signature. No Prana. No circuit activation.
Not a magus?
Then how—
A Heroic Spirit? At this stage of the timeline?
Everything about her was wrong in a way he couldn't categorize. In five hundred years of encounters, he had never felt so thoroughly unable to read a target. She was stranger than he was, and he had given up being human centuries ago.
He swallowed once, quietly. His feet shifted back a half-step. Just enough to improve his angle.
He composed his expression with practiced effort.
"My dear mysterious young lady," he said carefully, "I don't believe we've ever met. I can't think of any reason we'd have cause for conflict." He let a deliberate pause fill the air. "I certainly don't recall offending anyone with green hair. That look on your face — I wonder if perhaps you've mistaken me for someone else?"
He was stalling, and he knew it, but the question behind the words was genuine. He had no idea who she was or why she was here. He had not provoked anyone fitting this description. He had not provoked anyone at all. For years he had kept his head down, moving quietly toward the next Holy Grail War.
"Our family has conducted itself honorably for generations," he continued. "We have no enemies worth speaking of. If there's been some misunderstanding here, I'm quite willing to—"
The hand he had placed behind his back had already been working.
A small wound in his palm, and through it — worms, carefully deployed. Grotesque, many-legged, bred for this purpose. A thin pulse of magical energy. Just enough.
He hadn't even finished the deployment when everything changed.
The air around his hand solidified.
Not physically — but the pressure was as real as stone, and it came from every direction at once, compressing inward with absolute precision.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack—
One by one, each worm burst. Green fluid sprayed across his fingers. His hand twisted at a wrong angle, the joints deforming in ways he could feel but not process as pain — his pain receptors had been vestigial for a long time.
He looked at his hand with genuine disbelief.
How did she see that. I had it completely behind her line of sight.
No pain. But a feeling that hollowed him out anyway — helplessness. The specific kind that came from encountering something you had no framework to oppose.
If my body weren't already this degraded — if my soul weren't this eroded — a girl like this would never—
And what did my descendants do to bring this down on me? Those useless—
The stalling tactic was clearly pointless. She hadn't engaged with a single word he'd said.
"My, my~ what a revolting smell of decay." A second voice, from another direction — unhurried, lightly amused. "Look what I found: a little bug hiding in a dark corner. If something like you existed in Gensōkyō, I would have exterminated the lot of you long ago."
Zōken's pupils shrank again.
Another one.
He turned.
Floating on the air — or rather, seated on the edge of a gap that had opened in the fabric of space itself — was a woman with long golden hair, a parasol open over one shoulder, expression placid and entirely at ease. Inside the gap's dark interior: dozens of crimson eyes, blinking slowly.
A spatial magus—
No. That wasn't right either. The gap wasn't magical space theory. It wasn't anything he had a name for.
"A body assembled entirely from insects," the golden-haired woman continued pleasantly. "Does that mean when your palm gets crushed by telekinesis, you feel nothing at all? How novel." Her tone sharpened just slightly at the edges. "A pathetic imitation of immortality — this sort of thing would only be good for kindling in Gensōkyō. Five hundred years, and you thought you had the standing to lay hands on our dear little Sakura-chan?" She tilted her head. "Little bug. Are you tired of living?"
Sakura—
Sakura-chan? What was this woman talking about? Why did she know Sakura's name? Why did any of this make sense to anyone but him?
Zōken's internal monologue had devolved into pure noise.
"Gurararara!" A third voice, from somewhere beyond the collapsed wall — male, older, carrying a laugh that shook the air even at a distance. "The Conqueror's Haki didn't put him under? Though he does look like he's running on fumes — the old man has something to him after all! Though, five hundred years and this is all you've got? In five hundred years, this old man could have blown up a planet."
They know I'm five hundred years old.
The thought landed like a stone.
That was supposed to be a secret. That had always been a secret. No one alive should know that. If they knew his age, they almost certainly knew his real name. His real history.
Zōken's face had gone rigid.
He understood, suddenly and completely, that he was in serious trouble.
What he did not understand — what he could not begin to understand — was why.
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Hollowborn
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you