186 Chapter 186: Break in (2/2)
”!!”
”What should we do about this dude?”
”Barbarians…” the staff dude spat. He was evidently a high-ranking Dark Church agent…maybe a priest, considering his elaborate robes, absurd staff and weird, clearly stylized golden hair that hung from underneath his hood. I didn't know priests went to a saloon to get their hair permed like that, but whatever. He was glaring at me, his lips curling into a sneer. ”Kicking the door down and barging in like that…to think you would even bring an animal indoors…do you not have even a modicum of civility?”
I raised an eyebrow. ”Civility? I don't want to hear that from a criminal organization that executes schemes of genocide…bastards who lure and unleash hordes of monsters on cities to kill innocent people.”
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”The world must be cleansed of humans!” the staff dude bellowed as he raised both his hands dramatically, mana crackling around him. The guy was getting ready to release a spell. ”It's the only way Earth will survive!”
Earth will survive? With alien monsters pouring out of dimensional rifts and infesting her surface? What was this guy on about? I wanted to know what he had been sniffing.
Nah, no point reasoning with a lunatic like him. I tilted my head while finishing the casting of another summoning spell.
”Richard.” Behind me, Anastasia issued a warning silently. ”There's another person in the room.”
”I'll leave her to you,” I replied, already aware of the second, invisible presence. She smirked and I shrugged. ”We're partners, right? Can't have me doing all the work alone, right?”
Anastasia grinned in return. ”You got that right! Leave her to me!”
”Oh, shut up, the both of you!”
The staff dude blasted us with a torrent of flames…
…or tried to, but his flames were snuffed out in an instant. Instead, Leo pulverized him with a paw and crushed him against the ground. The staff dude cried out as the concrete cracked underneath him, his staff careening out of his grip and spinning away. Blood began leaking from his face and filling the cracks in the ground, pooling beneath his body.
”Whoops. Did I go overboard?” I asked as I stroked my chin. ”I didn't even get to use Regulus.”
At that moment, an Assassin descended upon me, her sword slicing toward my neck.
Her attack was flawless, executed from my blind spot. Normal people wouldn't have sensed it, and my head would have rolled off before I even realized I was dead.
Normally. I could probably react, but I didn't because I knew I had someone reliable watching my back.
”?!”
Anastasia's kick took the Assassin out, her foot catching my would-be killer in the stomach and diverting her off course. Spinning around, Ana kicked the Assassin's face with her other foot, causing the hooded figure to spin head over heels before crashing untidily onto the floor. Before the Assassin could react or cry out in pain, Ana continued forward, raising one leg high (though how she did that in such a long, frilly skirt, I had no idea) before stomping on the Assassin.
Blood spurted into the air as the Assassin coughed.
”Thanks, Ana,” I told her as I turned around to face the new threat. She shrugged and shook her head.
”You didn't need me to protect you. You were perfectly capable of taking her out on your own even if I wasn't here.”
”Even so, I still appreciate you helping me out.”
”You're too polite.” Anastasia shook her head before she approached the fallen Assassin. Her voice turned cold. ”Your mistake was to target my partner instead of me. I knew you were debating, you know? You were probably deciding who to eliminate first. You finally judged Richard to be the more dangerous target and moved to take him out, but that meant opening yourself to my counterattack.” She smiled frostily. ”You underestimated me. Richard left his back to me, and I don't intend to let him down.”
”Gah…!”
The Assassin continued to cough. When Anastasia noticed that the mask had fallen from the Assassin's face, she suddenly realized she knew who the person was.
”Adeline!”
”…who?” I blinked in surprise. ”A colleague of yours?”
”That's right.” Anastasia nodded. ”She was deployed together with me to Jing Tian City that night.” she turned to me. ”You should know her too…you defeated her along with me.”
”Ah…the last survivor. I failed to shoot her down when she fled.” I nodded, remembering the third and last member who managed to escape even though I had fired Vega at her. She was glaring at me hatefully, gritting her teeth in frustration.
Suddenly I realized that Anastasia was mistaken. This Adeline didn't choose to eliminate me because she judged me as the bigger threat. She chose to strike at me because of a personal vendetta.
I didn't know at that time, but I was the one who had taken her arm off. of course I didn't realize it because they had cast healing magic on her and regrew her arm, so I never knew that I had destroyed one of her arms with Vega that night. But Adeline remembered, and she continued to nurse the grudge.
And when she saw me today, she saw the opportunity to take revenge.
Anastasia must have noticed the venomous gaze in Adeline's eyes, and she shook her head as a complicated expression came over her pretty face.
”Adeline…” She then took a deep breath and composed herself. ”I'll restrain her. Richard, please go tie up that Dark Church priest over there.”
”All right.”
Honestly, I didn't see a need to tie the poor guy up. He was pretty banged up by Leo's paw. Again, I realized how I overdid it. Meanwhile, Anastasia was murmuring something to herself.
”To think I admired you for being able to escape after Richard captured me…I always thought you were the strongest among us, the most skillful…I never thought there would be a day where I would defeat you and restrain you.”
She moved quickly to shove something into Adeline's mouth before she could bit a poison capsule and kill herself, or bite her tongue off. Being from the same Veneneum Sect, she was aware of the methods they undertook to self-terminate them upon capture. She would have done the same if Feng Hai didn't deprive her of her toxin capsule.
Divesting herself of irrelevant thoughts, Anastasia quickly returned her attention to restrain our newly captured hostages.