Editing Sorcery Hacker:Volume1 Phase4 (section)

===Part 4===

This was a dimly-lit space.

Choosing a location that required artificial lighting may have been a mistake.

“Phew.”

Someone slowly let out a breath to drive the sticky rusty sensation from her vision.

The woman had glossy red hair, floating Expansion Armor resembling horns, wings, and a thick tail, and red leather clothing that bound her body. Nirvelphany, who had been feared as the Zodiac Bright Eater in the distant past, slowly exhaled while deep, deep underground.

There was no injury.

It had already been forgiven by that kind old man, so there was nothing to worry about.

She could not seem to contact the unlicensed craftsman who had made the anti-dragon rifle for her. She could no longer have him perform maintenance on her gun or construct the giant bullets that hardened the surface of the mist mana into a solid film…so now the handmade side of it was rearing its ugly head. It was designed differently from the mass-produced commercial models, so it’s special – or overly complicated – design meant the maintenance took a lot more time than it should have.

She could not afford to dull her mind during that work, so she had put off taking her painkillers. Plus, the very fact that medicine made by humans even worked on her was proof that her Demon Lord body had lost its poison resistance.

“This body really is a pain in the ass.”

An oozing, pus-like heat and dull pain crawled around below her skin. While she fought that unpleasant sensation passing through her right shoulder and spine, she pushed in a mana-conducting silver spring and attached a few exterior parts. That kind old man had given her forgiveness, but she still felt a lot of pain when the gun’s recoil hit her where that diagonal wound had been.

The other day had been the first time in her ancient life she had relied on painkillers, but it had honestly been the worst feeling. The pain had not actually gone away. She had only been distracting herself from one form of harm with another. That said, she wanted to remove even the smallest bit of background noise before this crucial battle, so she would have to rely on it.

Once the anti-dragon rifle had regained its original shape, she placed it inside a long and narrow fishing rod case and glanced over at the remote-printed newspaper spread out on the dusty floor:

“The Temple Moving Ceremony will be held today. The Forturiana Church’s High Priest plans to denounce the name of Thomas Robergin as a great evil and present his head to the king as proof of their righteousness.”

“…”

She grabbed the paper in both hands, balled it up, and tossed it aside.

Good and evil could both eat shit as far as she was concerned.

After swallowing some painkiller pills from a brown bottle, she walked through a fairly large space. A rusty smell surrounded her. Metal ducts crawled along the ceiling like serpents and rusty steel beams supported the weight of the bedrock, but the terrain did not wholly explain the smell.

Something unnatural sat in the center of this space.

It was a white refrigerator, one of the most stereotypical of sorcery tools. It was a small model with just one door and it only came up to Nirvelphany’s skirt-wearing hips. Also, a sticky, dark red liquid was leaking out from the bottom of the door like drool from a misbehaving child’s mouth.

“Hm, hm, hm… Was that long enough?”

That general-use coolant was used by ice cream salesmen and in the radiators for sorcery vehicles, but she had needed to make sure it suited her needs first. It had to freeze the guillotine of course, but that would be useless if it also killed the old man bound to the device. Human bodies were fragile and the situation would not allow for even a single failure. So theoretical calculations were not enough; she needed real testing to determine the borderline values.

After placing the bottle of painkillers atop the short refrigerator, she opened the door so casually you would think she was looking for some water to help her swallow the pills. But there were no glass bottles or veggies inside. It only contained a large hunk of meat half-buried in frost.

“Hee hee, hee hee hee hee hee hee hee.”

That was not laughter.

It was no more than the cold-induced convulsions of his diaphragm moving his lungs. The mysterious poultices around his neck were frozen solid. The bald and bearded man’s limbs were folded up and trembling while his eyes rolled in his head to look at Nirvelphany. Not a single part of his body was uninjured. He knew staying in that small space would mean his death, but his mind was no longer functioning enough to think about shoving her aside to get out.

This was Dagregor Bull Gerlos.

He was a white hat hacker who had been given the title of Knight.

He was a mass of ugly muscles grown with drugs, so they were no use at all in combat. He could not protect anyone, so he was a knight in name only. He was a clever but unsightly human who had taken advantage of the collusion between the Celedileka royal family and the Forturiana Church.

“I gave it a lot of thought.”

A few words slipped from between Nirvelphany’s lips.

If not for this man’s actions, that tremor would not have run through central Light Castle Brightio. If the earth core had survived, she could have freed that old man from his cell.

“I racked my brains trying to figure out what I could do to forgive you. Would tearing out your teeth be enough? What about crushing your eyeballs? Or severing all four of your limbs? Maybe pulling out your internal organs? How about flaying your entire body? I really did agonize over this question.”

“I…I…I am…eek…a Knight…”

“But I’m sorry. I couldn’t find an answer.”

She sighed.

Then she reached on top of the fridge and grabbed something other than the painkiller bottle.

“I just can’t think up anything that would let me forgive you. And you know what that means, don’t you?”

“Eek!”

Before he could say anything, she held the bottle of strong liquor upside down and swung it down like a club. The glass shattered as soon as it crashed into his half-frozen bald head. More than the pain, it was the dramatic change in temperature that made the white hat hacker knight scream.

“Abwah!! Abgwaahgah!? Gweh, gheh, gbwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”

“The alcohol stings, doesn’t it? That drink includes an anti-freezing agent, so it remains a liquid even below the freezing point. That makes for some interesting possibilities. If I close this door, your fate is sealed. Or can a Sorcery Hacker make a comeback from here?”

“…”

Dagregor trembled so hard it looked like he was trying to separate his flesh from his bones and foam built up at the corners of his mouth, but he still managed to form words.

“Please…”

“Yes?”

“Please give me time to think about it. I just need a smoke to calm my nerves…”

She laughed, crouched down, and pulled out a poison made by the humans. She tossed it inside the refrigerator and watched as he grabbed it like some great reassure and held it in his mouth. Then his trembling hand grabbed a lighter that did not use mana. It instead used simple flint and silk floss soaked with oil.

He lit it.

Just as Dagregor shut his frozen eyelids in satisfaction, the alcohol vapors in that closed space erupted into flames.

“…”

He gave a belated scream, but Nirvelphany’s reaction to that human torch was to raise her high-heeled foot despite her tight skirt and kick him back to shove him fully inside the refrigerator. She had the look of someone shoving a stack of paper into an incinerator. She had said she could find no way to forgive him, so she did not feel even a ripple of emotion while watching his fate.

Not even the old man’s kind words entered the back of her mind.

“Now, then.”

She decided that was enough “fun”, so she shut the door with her long leg and left the refrigerator as it spewed dark smoke. She carried the fishing rod case containing her anti-dragon rifle and its spare magazines over her shoulder, grabbed the painkiller bottle, and checked over all her tools while putting them away in her pockets or cleavage.

“That just leaves…the Linkage Plug war pick and the three crystal dice for the Linkage Monitors.”

The painkillers were not quite as effective as before. She was growing accustomed to them. She dragged her body along through the weariness, pain, and sticky illusion and she walked to the exit of that vast but oppressive space.

That exit was only the entrance to another space.

Once the artificial lights were gone and she was surrounded by darkness, the sticky feeling completely left her.

She faced forward.

(The fire, wind, and earth cores have been destroyed, so the largescale supply of mist mana to central Light Castle Brightio has been disrupted. …That means there are no giant fan blades or artificial winds in the underground pipeline. It should just be an empty tunnel.)

Her anti-dragon rifle was extraordinarily powerful, but she could not get into the central area with it even when that area was open to the public. Her plans would go up in smoke if she was caught at an inspection point or sorcery detection gate.

So she had never planned on using the main entrances.

(The Free Audience Restriction barrier is down for the day. I could get in pretty much anywhere, but I might as well use the route that piece of shit opened up.)

This was a giant circular tunnel of never-ending darkness measuring 20 esoule<ref>Approximately 24 meters.</ref> wide. It was located directly below Earth Castle Town Grouviv.

That subterranean tunnel was passable for the moment, so the ancient Demon Lord used it to return to the battlefield.

So she could rescue a descendant of the Hero whose role had ended.

“Wait for me, old man.”