A Cold Message from the Darkness
Irene remained silent for a moment, unable to speak at all.
Cynthia’s words made no sense to her.
“……What do you mean? No face? Then that can’t be Wilhelmina, right?”
“The back view was definitely Wilhelmina, but the front was just a streak of red. Doesn’t that seem odd? Human hair is brown in the back, but can it be red in the front? And the part where the face should be was completely blank and smooth like a shiny red egg.”
Irene had been listening intently, but her head suddenly felt heavy.
What kind of creepy summer ghost story was this?
“Maybe she just saw something weird? Or someone told a scary story as a joke and it got messed up.”
“No. The maid who saw Wilhelmina stayed up all night telling everyone what she saw, and by morning she had fainted cold.”
“That’s how the rumor started spreading.”
“If she had just fallen over and stayed down, none of this would have happened. After the sun came up, people went to the place where Wilhelmina was supposedly seen, and……”
Cynthia’s voice dropped lower.
“There were long streaks of red blood on the hallway floor.”
“……Bloodstains remained?”
“Yes. That’s why the whole place is in chaos. From morning, the fortress staff have been blocking off that area and investigating.”
The fact that they were investigating a supposed hallucination left Irene lost in thought.
‘If someone is doing this on purpose, it would be the usual suspicion, right?’
But no matter how hard she thought, there was no reason to play such a prank.
Why fake the disappearance of a person? If caught, they’d be suspected of being the killer in the missing person case.
And it wasn’t even creating a believable image of someone alive—just a faceless, formless ghost with a red streak.
No one would gain anything from such a chilling prank.
‘Then…… what if it’s real?’
If the monster the maid saw truly existed.
In that instant, Irene’s mind flashed back to the monster she had seen inside the Distortion Dungeon.
The monster that had looked like gray clay and copied Michael’s appearance.
‘Could it be similar to that one?’
Before she could finish the thought, she shook her head.
That was a monster. This place was the safest spot for purifiers to live, built at the fortress.
Monsters couldn’t survive long outside dungeons anyway, so what kind of monster would wander around here alone?
‘To keep a monster alive outside the dungeon requires an enormous amount of preparation.’
Scholars who once studied dungeons had learned the method, but now it was mostly forgotten because there was no need to keep the monsters alive.
And even if the method remained, no one in the fortress would dare bring a monster inside without going insane.
“The trail leads out through the window and then disappears. I don’t know what happened, but stay away from the area where you’re alone.”
“I understand. Thank you for telling me.”
Watching Cynthia tremble as if the story itself was terrifying, Irene smiled softly.
After all, the fortress staff were already investigating it, so it would be resolved soon.
***
The next day, Irene was examining the contract she had received from the Hand of Appraisal in her room.
“Some characters have changed. This must be probability……”
Comparing the paper she received from the Hand of Appraisal the first time with the second one, she saw that a few letters here and there had been altered.
According to Michael, the contract could instantly kill the opponent at a certain probability.
Like the Remedy of the Nameless, the probability probably increased over time as it absorbed demonic energy.
“But…… since I can’t read the numbers, I have no idea what percentage the probability is.”
Michael had used it that day and got lucky with the activation.
To figure out the probability, Irene deliberately caught a large bug and counted the numbers while tapping the end of the contract with it every day.
On the first day, nothing happened even after a thousand attempts.
The next day, the day after that, and the day after…….
She hadn’t been able to do it every day, but today was already the seventh time she had tried it.
She had released the previous bug she caught and now a new, larger one sat on the table.
A bug that attached to people and caused dizziness after sucking their blood, so she had no hesitation and began tapping the end of the contract with it.
After about five hundred taps.
“It’s getting boring……”
The bug showed no reaction, as if tapping it was now too much trouble for it.
‘How did Michael come up with an idea like this?’
She had no idea what had happened in the dungeon, but he seemed well-versed in this contract.
And yet it was a cursed artifact with an extremely low probability, and he had used it right away without any delay.
‘Should I take it back to Michael and ask him?’
Just as she thought that.
Thud!
The bug in front of her suddenly exploded with a loud bang.
“Ah!”
Startled, Irene dropped the contract and crouched down.
After a moment, she slowly raised her head.
The moment she looked at the table, she covered her mouth with her hand without realizing it.
“Ugh……”
The bug was completely shattered into pieces. The table was covered with its fragments and body fluids.
“This…… it activated?”
It was supposed to kill the opponent instantly upon activation.
Recalling the scene from the dungeon, it looked like it had torn whatever it faced to pieces and killed it completely.
Irene picked up the fallen contract, brought a cloth, and carefully wiped the edge before immediately sheathing it.
‘I should give this to Michael.’
Having such a dangerous and difficult weapon was not something she should carry around.
After thinking for a moment, she placed the contract in her bag and stood up from the chair.
There was nothing special to do today anyway.
‘Michael must be coming back soon after finishing the dungeon raid.’
Then it would be fine to go out and meet him directly after a long time.
***
After tidying the table, Irene left the room.
It was summer, and there was still plenty of daylight left, yet the purifiers’ living quarters felt unusually cold, as if no one had been there for a long time.
After the Distortion Dungeon incident, half the rooms had been left empty.
Some purifiers had died inside the dungeon, and others had lost their paired knights, unable to bear the shock and left for home promising to return next year.
As a result, the figures of the maids who used to walk the corridors so often in the past were almost nowhere to be seen.
‘That rumor…… It’s strangely terrifying.’
The fortress staff had already begun an investigation, but the owner of those bloodstains still hadn’t been found.
Of course, no one suspected who had done it.
‘Still, the living quarters of the purifiers were thoroughly searched from top to bottom, so it should be fine.’
As soon as the incident occurred, the knights and fortress staff had searched the entire living area first, from the rooftop to the basement, without letting even a single bug escape, and even brought the Eye of Exploration to scan the area for traces of the dungeon.
But, as expected, nothing was found.
‘Still, it feels unsettling.’
Nothing came out, but the Eye of Exploration had circled the spot with the red bloodstains for a long time.
‘There really is something there……’
Thinking this, Irene turned the corner of the corridor.
“……”
Irene froze in place.
At the end of the dark corridor, something was moving.
Blink. Blink.
To be sure, she slowly closed her eyes and opened them again, but the swaying at the end of the corridor was still clearly visible.
It was no hallucination.
With her breath held, Irene waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness at the end of the corridor. After a moment, the moving figure became clear.
‘That’s……’
Irene’s eyes widened as she confirmed the identity of the distant figure.
She knew exactly what it was.
“That…… tentacles?”
The monster that had crawled quickly from the dungeon and grabbed Michael.
The last time she had seen it was after its body was cut off and it had fled away again.
Now it was swaying at the end of the corridor corner, as if greeting Irene shyly.