The power flowing through Garina’s body from her runes sputtered. She was far too experienced to actually let herself get completely off guard, but for the briefest instant, even she couldn’t keep surprise from driving into her gut like a physical punch.
This couldn’t be right. Her senses were never wrong. She’d come here for a runaway Rank 7 — not the brass little demon girl that had actually managed to win an argument against her.
My prey was here. There’s no doubt about it. I feel the disturbance.
A trick, then? Someone trying to exploit a weakness to catch me off guard? I don’t know how they even would have figured this out, but anyone who thinks something like this will bring me low is about to be very sorely mistaken.
Her senses exploded outward in every direction. Garina could have been anywhere within the entirety of the baby kingdom around her should she have willed it. Her mind could stretch from one end of it to the other, so digging through one burnt up forest was nothing to her.
Nobody in this little backwater corner of the world could match Garina. Any Rank 7 that dared to try and hide in wait for an ambush, no matter how much information they’d managed to dig up about her, would be found and summarily dealt with.
Out you come, pup.
The corner of Garina’s lip twitched up in anticipation of assured victory.
Then it fell flat again.
She found nothing.
There were traces of a Rank 7 — a disturbance centered directly on top of the Fish Demon and the group around her — but there wasn’t a single Rank 7 rune in this forest other than Garina’s.
Her eyes twitched in anger. This was impossible. She refused to accept it. Letting one Rank 7 slip out of her grasp was bad enough. But now, after preparing for so long, having it happen again was like someone spitting straight into her open mouth.
“Where are they?” Garina asked, her voice as sharp and cold as black ice.
“Who?” Fish Girl asked, glancing around.
“Don’t play games with me,” Garina snapped.
She regretted it instantly. Yelling at a weak little creature was below her, and that only made her annoyance grow even further. That was twice now that she’d been bested in words by a goblin-adjacent child, and the 2nd time, it had only taken a single word to break her.
“You know who,” Garina snarled. “I was called here. This was no mistake. I’m not a fool, girl. Whatever they paid you — whatever you think you’re going to get out of this — you won’t. Disobey me and die.”
“I think you might be hungry.”
I am hungry. I don’t even want to be here. I should be eating a sandwich with Fredrick right now, not hunting some idiot Rank 7 that thinks it would be a good idea to yank at my chain. Fuck the rules. I’m going to rip this idiot in half when I find them.
“The only people here are us,” the scruffy-looking man beside Fish Girl said. His features were narrow in suspicion. He put a hand on the massive book on his back as if he were planning to try and hit her over the head with it. “How did you get here and what do you want?”
That’s odd.
He’s not wrong about that... or the Rune Oaths. I’m being too clumsy. Revealing myself to a bunch of weak magelings like this is already bad enough. Seeing the Fish Girl threw me for a bad loop. Damn it.
“I don’t believe you. There was a Rank 7 here. Don’t even try to tell me there wasn’t,” Garina said, striding up to Vermil so they stood nose-to-nose. She wasn’t sure why she’d singled him out over the still-mute Rank 6, but there was something about him that pulled at the back of her mind incessantly. “Where. Did. They. Go?”
Vermil raised his eyes to meet her gaze without so much as blinking.
The goosebumps on the back of Garina’s neck intensified. A cold hand brushed over her back as her senses shifted in unease.
His eyes were wrong.
It was so subtle that she never would have even noticed were they not so close. The difference wasn’t even something a mortal could detect through anything other than sheer instinct, but reaching Rank 7 unleashed an entire new layer to the world that nobody weaker could ever hope to witness. It revealed truths that permeated the universe and laid one’s soul bare to unleash its power — and in turn, it granted sight into the souls of others.
And the soul of this mortal did not belong in his body.
It didn’t belong at all.
Deep within his eyes lurked something familiar. A heavy, oppressive aura of an immense Divine Rune, a power that she had only borne witness to on very rare occasions. Disbelief welled within her, but it was stemmed by the still-growing unease.
There was something else in the man’s gaze.
Something ancient — and something deeply wrong.
“That power... I know you.”
Vermil’s veins turned jet black in an instant. He thrust his hand forward, driving it straight into Garina’s gut. The blow didn’t even register. Her body was so reinforced with magical energy that she may as well have been struck by a fly.
But the magic within the strike was another question. Garina felt, for a flicker of an instant, that familiar sensation in Vermil’s eyes intensify by a hundredfold.
Her gaze snapped up.
A black spear plummeted down toward her like a falling star.
Garina thrust her hand upward. The spear slammed to a halt an inch away from her nose. Slowly, she turned to look at the man. She’d had her domain deactivated to make sure that she wouldn’t crush anyone on accident, but just her body alone should have been enough to stop any attacks from in this weak, backwater kingdom.
And yet Garina knew without a doubt that if the spear had hit her, it would have left the slightest of cuts upon her skin.
Her gaze lowered back to the man. Her fist tightened. The spear shattered.
“You were right under my nose this whole time. I can’t believe it. You’re the one that he’s looking for.”