Chapter 292

Chapter 292: Ignorance Is Bliss

The spell they cast through the symbiotic pact, using the forbidden knowledge shared by the Abyssal Demons, did nothing at all. Compared to a corpse that had woken early in its coffin, this bizarre failure of the spell shocked the two Annihilators at the scene even more.

Besides, the Death-Omen Bird was one of the Abyssal Demons whose Spells were strongest in the first place.

The gaunt, sharp-faced woman in the black dress stared in disbelief at the Revived One standing calmly in front of her. Black chains spread from her collarbone, and uneasy smoke drifted over their surface. At the same time, she sensed something wrong with the Death-Omen Bird bound to her by the symbiotic pact. The Abyssal Demon kept sending out signals of extreme danger. It even wanted to cut off its link to its Master and retreat back to the Abyssal Deep.

She finally reacted. She grabbed the chain at the Death-Omen Bird’s feet with one hand. Her other hand closed on empty air as she stared hard into Duncan’s eyes: “Something is wrong… you are not this dead man… who are you?”

Duncan looked at the woman, then at the silent man standing not far away, still keeping his distance and gripping the crowbar-like Gatekeeper’s cane. He said: “You tell me who you are first. Let me guess… first, you two are obviously not Envoys of the Death God. You fooled that Warden with… hmm, so?called ‘disguise tricks’. You came for me—or rather, for the body I am using right now. I’m not wrong, am I?”

The woman in the black dress parted her lips. Her mouth moved as if she were saying something, but Duncan did not catch it. The next second, she suddenly raised the right hand she had been holding in the air. Her low, muffled murmur turned into a strange shriek!

The Death-Omen Bird Demon perched on her shoulder spread its wings at the same moment. Under the control of the symbiotic pact, the Abyssal Demon had to fight against its instinctive fear and launch an attack at Duncan.

A heavy pressure suddenly fell. Then the ground underfoot began to shudder and twist in an unnatural way. The earth around Duncan rippled like liquid, and several huge black thorns, like bone spurs, shot up from the soil and coiled toward him.

Yet Duncan made no move to dodge. Mainly, this awful temporary body really could not handle any nimble response. He only watched calmly as the thorns reached him and wrapped around his body.

Then a grand spirit form flame rose from the thorns. In an instant, the thorny growth conjured by the spell turned into a field of pitch?black ash. Tiny leftover sparks drifted away on the wind.

“I told you, you might as well swing that bird on your shoulder and smash it into me. That might actually startle me.”

Duncan sighed helplessly, but as soon as he finished speaking, he felt something wrong with his body.

He raised his hands without thinking. The next second, he stared in shock as crack after crack opened on them.

These were not wounds from the thorns just now, but splits that appeared on their own. Under Duncan’s gaze, the cracks kept spreading, as if this body’s skin and flesh had suddenly lost all life and elasticity and were drying and splitting in the cold, dry air.

Very little blood seeped from the cracks. Instead, dry, broken fragments kept falling from the wounds onto the ground. In just a few seconds, Duncan clearly felt this already weak body grow even more fragile.

He watched the strange change on his body in surprise. Then he lifted his head and looked at the woman in the black dress: “Is this also the power of a spell? It worked this time?”

The woman in the black dress still had not recovered from the shock of the thorns failing so completely. Her face had gone very pale, and the Death-Omen Bird on her shoulder drooped its head weakly. But when she heard Duncan’s words, a slight smile suddenly appeared on her face: “Ah. It seems this body is almost at its limit… that will make you much easier to deal with.”

“At its limit?” Duncan asked without thinking. He seemed to have guessed something from her tone and words. But just as he was about to say more, the woman in the black dress spoke in an icy voice: “Do it.”

As soon as she finished, the thin, quiet man beside her moved. Expressionless, he looked at Duncan. The Abyssal Demon floating in the air beside him, shaped like a Smokewisp Jellyfish, swelled and shrank. A mass of dark substance, spitting thick smoke, spat out from its body and shot at Duncan like a cannonball.

But the “acid shell” turned a faint green halfway there. Before it even touched its target, it broke apart and vanished without a sound.

Duncan watched the mass of darkness burst apart, helpless: “I told you, that thing doesn’t—”

He did not finish. The smoke and sparks in midair faded away, and when they cleared, he saw the silent man not far away already raising the Gatekeeper’s cane at him. The Gatekeeper’s cane had split open. A dark, wide gun barrel jutted out from the break.

“Bang!!”

Fire burst from the barrel, but the sound did not travel beyond the mortuary slab. The woman in the black dress had already raised a finger in a hush gesture.

The large?caliber bullet tore through the air, making only a low rumble inside the silenced area. Duncan’s eyes tracked the last part of its path, but he did nothing. He only glanced from the corner of his eye at the silent man who shared a symbiotic pact with the jellyfish?like Demon.

In the next second, his vision fell into brief darkness.

The special bullet’s impact ripped his head to pieces. Everything above his neck was gone.

Duncan’s body swayed. It stood there for a moment as if thinking, then lifted a hand and touched the space above its neck. When it found nothing, the body raised its hand toward the woman in the black dress and the silent man and gave them the middle finger. After that, it fell straight backward.

The woman in the black dress stared fixedly at that strange and terrifying headless body.

She had watched her companion blow its head apart with one shot. Then she watched the body raise a hand to touch the missing head and make that bizarre gesture. No body that had lost its head could move like that.

Whatever it was, the thing that had taken this body had not died. It had only left. This was only a temporary banishment.

Knowing it would be dangerous to stay, the woman in the black dress had already decided to give up tonight’s operation. She looked up at her companion at once: “We’re leaving. We’ll signal the other two after we get out of the graveyard. Something is very wrong tonight…”

The silent man holding the strange Gatekeeper’s cane did not move for a moment, as if he had not heard her.

He simply stood there. On the black chain that rose from his throat, a tiny green spark of fire flashed and vanished.

That ember had already flowed along the chain into his flesh.

His heart had already been burned to ash.

“Hey, did you hear me?” The woman’s voice came again, stern and impatient. “We need to leave. If that Warden notices, there has been way too much noise tonight!”

The thin man with the Gatekeeper’s cane nodded and slowly turned around.

“What was with you just now?” The woman in the black dress stared at her companion, then quickly looked away. “All right. We have to leave at once, Duncan.”

“Of course,” Duncan said with a smile. “This is no place to linger.”

The woman in the black dress nodded and started to turn toward the path. But at the instant she began to turn her head, the Death-Omen Bird that had been resting on her shoulder suddenly let out a sharp, eerie scream. The bony plates all over the Abyssal Demon rattled, and black dust and smoke billowed from it. Then it whipped its head around and locked its gaze on Duncan, its wings twitching as it made a series of strange clicking sounds.

Behind Duncan, the jellyfish?shaped Abyssal Demon suddenly burst into roaring flame. In the thick black smoke and fire, the bodiless jellyfish Demon burned away in seconds, as if from nothing. The chain that linked it to its symbiotic pact partner gave off a harsh clatter and fell to the ground as a pile of broken links.

The woman in the black dress stopped dead.

Through the chain between them, she felt the Death-Omen Bird’s immense fear and its warning that brushed right against death.

She even vaguely sensed the Death-Omen Bird’s visual signal. When the Demon on her shoulder turned toward Duncan, a sharp pain like a spike pierced her brain. Her retinas seemed to burn, and indescribable twisting light and shadow filled her reddening, darkening vision.

Ordinary Abyssal Demons had no heart. They moved only by instinct. When great danger appeared, they would not, like Dog, worry about their Master’s mental health.

“Ugh—” The woman in the black dress let out a low cry. In pain and dazed, she stumbled back two steps and grabbed the nearby streetlamp for support. She stared in horror at the thin figure standing in the crisscrossing light and shadow under the lamp, a figure both familiar and strange: “You… what are you?”

Duncan glanced at the ugly skeletal bird on her shoulder [much uglier than AI], then turned to look at the little patch of black ash on the ground behind him. He sighed with regret.

“Ignorance is bliss,” he said, shaking his head. “You were not blessed with much.”