Monster - Chapter 14
Chapter 14: Madman or Demon
"Lin Sandie isn't all that great…"
After two days of observation, Lou delivered her assessment. She was dissatisfied with Lin Sandie's performance in every way. Although she hadn't given up on the idea of getting Lin Sandie to sleep with her, she was still disappointed by what she'd seen.
"I think she's remarkable. To not have collapsed under this kind of pressure… you probably don't know." Miu the crow also offered its opinion. For the past two days, it had been circling above Lin Sandie's house and the wine company. Lou was observing Lin Sandie through its eyes, so it had formed its own views on the matter.
"Don't know what?" It was late at night. The shops on both sides of the road had already closed. Lou and Miu were on their way back to the hotel. The surroundings were silent, save for Lou's shadow and the occasional car speeding by.
"Her mental power is higher than yours."
"Impossible~" Lou drew out the word with confidence.
"According to the evaluation standards of our Main World, her mental power was at 243 points when facing Yan Ting. You're at 242. Caw caw caw, you're one point lower than her!" Miu cackled, which thoroughly annoyed Lou.
"That was her peak. This is my average. There's no value in comparing them."
"But because of this Lin Sandie, I've suddenly discovered something interesting," Miu continued. "The people in this world who mutate into monsters tend to have low mental power. And among the mutated monsters, those with higher mental power are the most likely to hide after doing evil. It's what they like to call high-IQ crime."
"What's Yan Ting's mental power?"
"Her average is 98."
"She's not good enough for Lin Sandie."
"Her mental power drops even lower when she's facing Lin Sandie, but among the mutated monsters we've seen, hers is considered quite high."
"The higher a person's mental power, the less likely they are to be infected by the virus. But as you know, mental power is never static. Lin Sandie's has become this high because of everything she's been through. She really is more charming than you!"
"I've noticed that ever since I met Lin Sandie, you've been trying to drive a wedge between us!" Lou wasn't a complete idiot. She sensed Miu's intentions and narrowed her eyes at the crow, which had landed a short distance away.
"It's because I don't want you to focus all your attention on her. We have a mission to complete!"
"I know, but I have to find a way to get her into bed." Lou slapped the back of her left hand against her right palm, putting on the helpless look of a scoundrel.
"Are you sick in the head?"
"She's gay." Lou paid no mind to Miu's last comment. She skipped down the street in the dead of night, her face full of joyful anticipation.
Their recent observations had revealed that the partner Lin Sandie spoke of was none other than Lou's next investigation target: Yan Ting. This meant Lou wouldn't have to go through the trouble of bribing the other party to leave Lin Sandie. She just had to kill her after getting the information she needed.
Lou naively believed that eliminating Yan Ting would win her Lin Sandie. In Miu's eyes, this was basically idiotic.
"By the way, Little Crow, did you really not notice a particularly nice scent on Lin Sandie?"
"No. Her attributes probably lean toward a Guide's, so what you're smelling is her Guide essence. But aren't you immune to that stuff?"
Guide essence was crucial for every Sentinel, typically used for tracking and identifying Guides. When ordinary Sentinels undertook dangerous missions, their intense empathy could cause them to get lost or lose control. Furthermore, Sentinels were creatures who tended to act on intuition and instinct. Guide essence could be used to stabilize a Sentinel's emotions and pull them back from a lost state.
However, Lou had always been a bizarre Sentinel who constantly jumped back and forth between being lost and out of control, which, paradoxically, made her extremely stable. Before partnering with her, Miu had heard that Lou never needed Guide essence to stabilize her mind or emotions, nor had she ever been captivated by any Guide. For her, the substance so vital to other Sentinels was as good as useless.
"I just think she smells really good, so I want her."
"Heh."
"Of course, that doesn't mean she's more charming than me," Lou declared solemnly.
"You don't even dare to appear in front of her!" Miu scoffed. Although Lou was full of lewd talk in private, it had been three days since she first saw Lin Sandie, yet she still hadn't dared to show herself. This surprised Miu somewhat.
Based on its understanding of Lou's personality, she should have been the shameless type. In Miu's imagination, for instance, Lou would have tied Lin Sandie up and "defiled" her by now.
"I need to find a scenario that will leave a deep impression on Lin Sandie, so she'll fall in love with me at first sight too! But then I'll tell her sternly: Sorry, woman! I'm a lesbian who comes and goes like the wind. I'm not destined to belong to any one woman!" Lou deliberately lowered her voice. "But I can be merciful and play a little game of love with you. How about it?"
Miu only wished its wings could flip her the middle finger.
"Right, what are Lin Sandie's other stats like?"
"Normal human level. Are you thinking of taking her out of this world?"
"If she falls madly in love with me and doesn't want to just play house, I'm not against taking things further." Lou took the hem of her long skirt, spun in a circle, and walked backward, her eyes shining as she looked at Miu.
Her current attire somewhat resembled Lin Sandie's usual style, and she automatically pictured Lin Sandie spinning in a skirt.
"You should get a grip. Don't let the appearance of another 'you' go to your head. I can guarantee that if you go to another world, Lin Sandie won't be able to handle it. Her mental power is unstable. She's just an ordinary woman."
"I was an ordinary child once, too."
"No, you weren't. You've always been a madman." After partnering with Lou, Miu had read her file. Although the information wasn't one hundred percent accurate, it provided some insight into Lou's background.
It was said that Lou was born in a chaotic, insane, primitive, and twisted lower world. She was originally an orphan from a matriarchal clan, which probably explained her lack of the sense of shame unique to modern, civilized societies. She could always openly admit her desires without seeing any problem with them. It seemed that clan reproduced by buying men or using male prisoners of war, after which the girls were kept and the boys were sent away.
But one day, that world underwent a drastic change. An external technological civilization, along with its decay and bloodshed, swept through her clan. To survive, she did almost everything, tempering herself until she was invincible. Later, she was noticed by a Main God of the upper world, who assigned her various missions. As Lou continued to grow, those missions became increasingly difficult and bizarre.
Miu had once chatted with a friend who said that based on the merits Lou had accumulated, she had been officially confirmed as the successor to Pie, the god who controlled time and space. In other words, when Pie passed away, Lou would ascend to become one of the Main Gods of the upper world.
Miu was, on one hand, wary of Lou's capabilities, and on the other, found the idea of such a bizarre Sentinel becoming a Main God and guiding others… the mental image was so ridiculous it could hardly believe it.
"Playing house~ playing house~ I want to play house with Lin Sandie~" Lou continued to mutter.
"This will be the first and last time I work with you." Miu truly had no idea what Lou ate to turn out like this. It was also curious about the person who raised her. One could only imagine that her guardian must have been a shameless madman as well.
Just as it finished that thought, Miu sensitively detected an unnatural fluctuation.
"Killing intent!" The moment Miu spoke, a car that had been driving normally on the road suddenly swerved onto the sidewalk, heading straight for Lou.
Lou's reflexes kicked in instantly. She dove to the side without a second thought. Without needing any direction from Miu, Lou, with her rich experience of being hunted, rolled twice on the ground and scrambled behind a car parked by the roadside, simultaneously drawing her silenced pistol.
Her frequent activities in recent months had finally attracted someone's attention.
The car that tried to run Lou down had accelerated too hard and crashed into a shop with its metal security gate pulled down. The quiet street erupted with the sharp sound of impact and the harsh screech of tires on pavement. Before the car had even come to a complete stop, the door was kicked open by a man in a black suit. Without a word, he raised a machine gun and sprayed fire in the direction where Lou had taken cover.
"Bang! Bang! Bang!" A furious volley of bullets vented toward the car shielding Lou, riddling the vehicle's body with loud thuds that seemed to pound on everyone's heart in the dead of night.
"This brazen?!" Miu flew higher, somewhat astonished.
Miu knew the upper echelons of this Tower World wouldn't turn a blind eye to their actions, but it hadn't expected them to retaliate so fiercely from the start, without even trying to conceal it, by ramming Lou with a car in the middle of the street.
The killer advanced toward Lou's hiding spot, firing continuously, attempting to use suppressive fire to close the distance between them.
Lou mentally calculated the remaining bullets in the killer's machine gun magazine and her distance from him. She calmly crouched and moved to the next car, using the vehicles parked along the road as cover. She didn't make a single sound, nor did her figure reappear in the killer's sight. In the dead silence of the night, her stealth gave the killer the illusion that his bullets were hitting water.
The killer couldn't help but stop firing. He pulled out another handgun, his steps slowing as he became more cautious.
Miu landed on a shop's LED sign, its deep red eyes fixed on the assassin.
In this world, one of their few supernatural advantages was that Lou could see from angles outside her own field of vision by borrowing Miu's eyes. But right now, Lou wasn't using this skill.
To put it bluntly, she wasn't a Sentinel who really needed a Guide. She was more than capable of handling any problem on her own. It was just that the Main God refused to believe it and assigned her a Guide partner every time. Then, after the mission, the Guide would leave in a huff. This cycle repeated, and both the Main God and Lou, who loved to anger Guides, never tired of it.
"He has another gun," Miu offered as a reminder.
The night grew more tense. The killer finally reached the side of the car where Lou had first taken cover. The adrenaline spike made him reckless. As soon as he stepped into what he thought was the right position, he started firing again.
The spray of bullets hit nothing. Lou was still nowhere in his sight.
The killer's heart pounded harder. He began to move forward again, searching for his target between the cars.
"Ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-nana! Ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-nana!" (Note 1) A bizarre children's song suddenly rang out sharply in the night sky. The killer practically jumped, instinctively raising his gun and firing toward the source of the song until the machine gun made an empty "clack-clack" sound.
The piercing children's song that had echoed through the quiet night came to an abrupt halt.
This was the moment Lou had been waiting for. After the killer had emptied a round from his machine gun, she poked her head out from the opposite direction of where the phone had rung. She fired her pistol, and the muffled shots of the silenced bullets sank into the killer's thigh and shoulder.
The killer's handgun and empty machine gun fell to the ground.
Lou walked over to the killer, first kicking his guns away before picking up her recently purchased phone. It was riddled with holes, and the little blue rabbit charm hanging from it was slightly damaged. She glanced unhappily at the killer, who was lying on the ground, groaning incessantly.
"He killed one of ours," Miu said after scanning the killer, who was bleeding profusely on the ground.
This assassin had also mutated into a monster, and a Stage 3 one who had killed before. Besides the signature faceless head with only a mouth full of sharp teeth, four long, thin, spider-like arms grew from his back, their surfaces covered in fluff like festering dark clouds.
"That skilled?" Lou holstered her pistol, crouched down to detach the little rabbit charm from her phone to salvage it, then walked back to the still-breathing killer. She grabbed his wrist and dragged him toward a more open area of the street.
The blood from the killer's wounds left a long, red streak on the ground as his body was dragged along.
"This world doesn't allow for any magic, only hand-to-hand combat and firearms. Those other Sentinels were probably too used to worlds where they could use magic, so they underestimated the enemy and got themselves killed." Miu was still a little shaken by the killer's recent actions. Without the aid of any supernatural abilities, such a violent method of pursuit could have easily killed them.
"Oh," Lou replied simply. She let go of the killer's hand and walked over to his car.
"What are you doing?" Miu saw Lou get into the driver's seat and start the car, not understanding why she would suddenly want to drive the killer's vehicle.
"He hit me just now." Lou rested her hand on the back of the passenger seat, looked behind her, and yelled with some indignation.
Lou slowly reversed the car, straightening its front. In the process, the wheels ran over the groaning killer on the ground, producing a dull sound, like fruit being crushed.
"Shouldn't the correct course of action be interrogation?" Miu asked.
"More people will come to kill us. I'll interrogate them then."
After reversing over the killer, Lou continued to back up a little further before slamming on the accelerator, running over the killer's body heavily once more.
The car jolted violently a few times, and the sound of cracking bones erupted from under the wheels again. Lou's smiling face appeared in the rearview mirror. Her usually cute canine teeth now looked so menacing that she resembled a demon sucking human blood.
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