Chapter 156: Thorns' Inspiration Was a Massive Success!

The game never mentioned that these four behemoth sisters would actually attack Thorns… ‘I mean, seriously, where was this in the wiki?’ I looked down at Thorns. His shoulder was a bloody mess, and his golden eyes were glazed over in a daze. Time to intervene. I brought my left index and middle fingers together, rotated my wrist in a smooth, semi-circular arc toward the pink-haired girl, and pressed my fingertips against my forehead.

There were no flashy special effects. No deafening explosions. To an outsider, it just looked like a normal, lively white-haired Liberi striking a ridiculously cool pose.

But following the exact trajectory of my fingers, the Originium traces embedded within the behemoth’s body surged to life. The jagged black crystals erupted through its flesh, tearing through the air in perfect synchronization with my gesture. The violent bloom shattered bone and shredded meat, forcefully decomposing its biological information. A massive cluster of semi-circular crystals blossomed across its torso, instantly halting the behemoth’s desperate attempt to abandon its shell and flee.

It was trapped. At this terrifying rate of energy decay, if it dared to resist again, it would instantly calcify into an eternal Originium statue the second it left my line of sight. The pink-haired girl blinked with immense difficulty, her movements grinding to an obedient halt. “It hurts…”

I completely ignored its pathetic show of weakness. I turned my back to the monster and waved a hand vigorously in front of Thorns’ face. “Hey? Wake up! Snap out of it, man!”

Thorns jolted violently, as if he had just been dragged out of a deep nightmare. His entire body trembled, and his golden eyes finally regained their focus, darting around before landing on me. “Doctor? Why are you here? I just…”

‘Honestly, it is hard to say whether a massive drop in SAN value is a buff or a debuff for this guy.’ His intellect might be a bit loose right now, but his eccentric, hyper-pragmatic intuition more than made up for it. Just like at this very moment.

Relying on his brief state of low-sanity Spiritual Vision, Thorns had somehow managed to briefly surpass even my oldest, most perceptive subordinates. Kal’tsit, Amiya, Mlynar—people who had followed me for years. Yet Thorns understood me deeply in this fractured second. When I stood before him, it was as if all the terrifying uncertainty of the world was overwritten and firmly anchored. The unknowable became merely the unknown. The indescribable became simply hard to put into words.

In his hallucinations, my figure must have been as blinding as a burning sun, so radiant that the moment he broke free from the vision, he experienced a brief bout of blindness. And right behind me, he had hallucinated a towering figure with a completely different appearance, yet radiating a strangely familiar, powerful aura.

“Doctor?” Thorns subconsciously reached out, desperate to tell me exactly what he had just witnessed to confirm my identity.

I ruthlessly cut him off. My mask hid my expression perfectly, but I made sure my eyes conveyed absolute, unadulterated displeasure. “You just left your fragile, defenseless boss all alone at the concert.”

“I am sorry, Doctor, but I saw…”

My expression shifted to one of deep grievance. “Do you have any idea how many people were out there? Such energetic, chaotic kids mosh-pitting everywhere! Did you consider my safety even once when you were squeezing your way forward to the front row? I am absolutely going to give you a hard time at work when we get back to Rhodes Island!”

Thorns stared at me, his pragmatic brain buffering. “Doctor, you are not that kind of person… no.”

‘Damn it.’ Since ancient times, absolute directness has always been the ultimate counter to schemers. Since he trusted my character so implicitly, I genuinely could not think of a single reason to keep scolding him.

“Is anyone listening? It hurts so much.” Seeing my sudden silence, the completely ignored pink-haired girl assumed our little heart-to-heart was over and eagerly resumed her calls for help. “Why are you all so unwilling to talk to us properly?”

Thorns turned around, his combat instincts flaring back to life. He was visibly startled to see the pale, light blue blood practically soaking the wooden boardwalk. He stared at the girl, who now looked like an exquisite, horrifyingly bloody Originium art piece. “What exactly is going on here?”

I turned my head as well, looking down at the poor behemoth I had tossed aside, and shook my head in mock pity. “A victim with a shell, but absolutely no spirit. It was not them who trapped you in that hallucination earlier. They were also contaminated.”

Having just experienced the maddening whispers of the ocean himself, Thorns naturally understood exactly what I was talking about. He tentatively leaned in. Seeing that I made no move to stop him, he strode forward, closing the distance to examine the girl’s ruined structure up close.

Originium…

Thorns spotted the most glaring abnormality on her body at a single glance. He turned back to me, his tone completely flat and honest. “Doctor, can your secret be researched?”

“Then what about the other things?” I countered.

“Whatever.”

‘Behold, the most straightforward dialogue in the history of this world!’

Thorns nodded, instantly dropping his obsession over the impossible source of my Originium Arts. Completely ignoring the massive tear in his shirt and his bleeding shoulder, he calmly used the tip of his sword to scrape up a small sample of the pink-haired girl’s blue blood. He carefully preserved it in a sealed tactical bag, stowed it away, and then immediately began the interrogation. “What exactly are you?”

The pink-haired girl was not ordinary either. She smoothly accepted the grim reality of her capture and effortlessly looped back to the previous topic. “Are you better now? I think you should be better.”

Thorns did not hesitate for a fraction of a second. He lifted his sword, casually reminded me to step back, and aimed the blade directly at the creature’s other, intact shoulder blade. With cold, calculated force, he slowly drove his strangely shaped, black-and-yellow longsword deep into its flesh, paying it back tit for tat. “Now I am better. So, can we start the interrogation?”

The behemoth did not show a hint of anger. Instead, she nodded slowly, revealing that uncanny, skin-crawling smile once again. The expression looked exceptionally eerie on a face that was now mostly eroded by jagged Originium crystals. “You may. This is fair, fellow kin.”

“My name is Aya. We know, as the sea knows, that you are called Aegir. You dance beautiful dances, spreading bone, flesh, and blood flat upon the sea.”

“Who told you that?” Thorns narrowed his eyes, feeling more and more that something was fundamentally wrong here. What did ‘the sea knows you are called Aegir’ even mean? Did the ocean itself possess a collective consciousness?

The girl—no, Aya—continued speaking to herself, her voice echoing with an unnatural cadence. “The sea has acknowledged your names. Can you dance too? Will you dance for him, just as we dance for the sea?”

‘Huh? Me?’I certainly did not expect to be dragged into this weird oceanic roleplay.’I mean, it would be absolutely fantastic if Gladiia could dance for me… but what about Thorns? What is he going to do, a pole dance with his sword?!’

Thorns frowned deeply. He truly had zero experience in formal interrogation, especially against an eldritch monster that did not fear pain and understood absolutely nothing of human morality. He could only continue to press his blade in as a warning. “Stop talking about irrelevant things.”

Aya cooperated, nodding her crystal-studded head. “Then can you let me down? We seem to be dying. We do not want to die, so we walked from the ocean to the land.”

‘Ah, I am incredibly familiar with this trope. The key lore dump has finally arrived!’

I finally tapped my terminal, turning on the voice recording function. “Alright, thanks for skipping the cryptic preamble for me. Let us get straight to the point.”

I stepped forward, my mastermind persona sliding perfectly into place. “You left the ocean, did you not? Then do you remember the exact population density of normal marine species when you left? What about the expansion speed of the Seaborn over the past few years, and the specific patterns of salinity changes in the water? Also, please describe in exhaustive detail the geographical location, salinity levels, ocean currents, and exact temperature of the place where you first felt danger. Do you hypothesize that the creatures driving you ashore were more material in nature, or strictly spiritual? In your collective perception, by what exact percentage has the definition of ‘we’ shifted?”

I did not give the creature a single second to breathe. “How do you judge your relative distance from the sea? Is it through tactile feedback, auditory tracking, or visual cues? There are numerous different classifications of Seaborn; which specific morphological type do you fear the most upon visual contact? Electromagnetic disruption, extreme thermal fluctuation, or blunt physical collision—which of these vectors is statistically more effective against their biology?”

Aya stared at me. “?”

The pink-haired girl managed a deeply strained, overwhelmed smile. “You truly are… as indescribable as the sea…”

‘Well, yeah.’I thought to myself, holding back a dry laugh.’To a girl band with an average education level of high school dropouts, an actual doctoral degree is indeed something completely indescribable.’

[Rhodes’s Note:

Enjoying the operation so far, Doctor?

(This daily grind literally pays the landship’s rent!