Chapter 118:
His complexion turned even paler than it already was from the cold.
’W-what is happening to me—’
The thought dissolved before it could finish. Through the haze of pain, something reached him. A sound. Distant and wrong, like the wailing of a newborn.
With great difficulty, he forced his head to turn toward his companion.
And what he saw made his blood run cold.
"C-Chloe... what’s happening to you?"
The woman beside him was already on the ground, her body locked in violent convulsions. She was shaking faster and faster, blood running from her nose and ears just as it was from his, but where his condition was deteriorating, hers was doing something far worse.
Not only was her complexion rapidly deteriorating, but her body itself seemed to be stiffening second by second, as though she were aging before his very eyes.
The man nearly forgot his own pain, forgot the pressure building in his eardrums that felt ready to burst, and stared at her face, frozen, eyes wide open, blood streaming freely, while a layer of that strange ice began forming across her body, spreading faster than before, branching outward from multiple points at once.
Yet none of that was what shocked him the most.
What truly made his mind go blank...
...was seeing her abdomen begin to swell at an astonishing speed.
Rapidly. Grotesquely. As though, in the span of a single second, she had become heavily pregnant.
The moment it happened, the sound returned, louder this time. No longer confined to the inside of his skull. It resonated in the air around them both, and as it did, the pain assaulting the man intensified even further.
Until...
Splash.
His head exploded.
His lifeless body collapsed into the snow, staining it crimson as blood poured from the mangled remains of his neck.
But the blood did not spread the way blood should. It moved. It gathered itself with a purpose that had no business existing, crawling toward the woman who was no longer quite human, wrapping around her, encasing her in what could only be described as a cocoon shaped like a person.
And this was not happening only here.
The same phenomenon was unfolding in several other areas nearby, wherever unfortunate souls had been dragged into this place through the spatial rifts.
Every one of them met the same fate.
Whether they wanted to or not...
They had all become part of something they couldn’t even begin to understand.
Farther north, deeper beyond that enormous chasm, other phenomena had begun to manifest.
Each one was different.
Each one unfolded in its own grotesque way.
Yet they all seemed to serve the same purpose.
The further north one looked, the more the frozen earth was losing its color.
White giving way to grey. Grey giving way to black. Until the ground ahead held a darkness so complete it resembled the void itself, fractured by wide and narrow violet cracks that seemed to originate from enormous craters, from which countless colossal chains rose into the air.
They coiled around a gigantic black sphere, winding tightly around it as though imprisoning it.
Its surface was nearly smooth, faintly luminous, pulsing with a color that hovered somewhere between black and a deep, unsettling green.
Seraphine, who had only just finished terrorizing Evan with the full weight of this world’s history and the reality of his own situation, seemed to perceive something.
She turned her head toward the north.
Her brow furrowed, just slightly.
Evan noticed immediately, and followed her gaze. He saw nothing. Only the vast, unbroken expanse of snow stretching into the distance.
And yet... He could feel it.
Some kind of force.
Something... calling him.
’And now what. Don’t tell me this damned place can’t wait to walk me into some new disaster and skin me alive?’ he thought, trying to ease his growing tension with a little bit of dark humor.
"Is something wrong?" he finally asked the goddess in front of him, who seemed to have completely forgotten that only moments ago she had been filling him with every conflicting emotion imaginable.
Seraphine didn’t answer. She remained focused for a few seconds longer, seconds that felt considerably longer from Evan’s side, with nothing to do but stand there and wait.
Just as he was considering whether to say something else to break the silence, she looked away from the horizon.
"You know, your luck truly knows no bounds," she said, with a smile that held absolutely nothing good inside it.
’...Was that sarcasm?’ he thought, already sensing that whatever she meant couldn’t be anything good.
"Oh really? And what is it?" he asked, still holding on to the faint hope that it wasn’t anything too bad.
"Nothing much," she said, with the casual fluidity of someone commenting on the weather. "Just an Abyss Divinity that seems to have developed quite the crush on the two of us."
Evan: "..."
’Woman, could you please be serious for just one moment?!’ he screamed inwardly.
What did she mean, an Abyss divinity had developed an interest in them?
Had they been discovered? How? And if they had, why in the world were they not already running?
Evan had countless questions.
He was just about to voice them...
But once again, Seraphine beat him to it.
"Come now, don’t be a coward," she said, shifting effortlessly into the performance of a damsel in peril, one hand raised delicately to her cheek.
"A beautiful woman is standing right in front of you."
"Don’t you want to protect your dignity and prove to her what kind of man you are..."
"...even before adversities like these?"
"To hell with beautiful women," Evan blurted out instinctively.
"They don’t keep you alive."
"They only contribute to a man’s downfall."
Only after the words left his mouth did he realize his mistake.
He had said them out loud this time.
Not just in his head.
"A man, you say...?" Seraphine murmured thoughtfully, her gaze slowly drifted downward.
Just a little lower.
"I wonder..."
"...how much of one you really are."