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Mount Kumotori Campsite Convenience Store.
The convenience store at this moment had completely lost the brightness and normalcy of yesterday.
The shelves filled with goods had disappeared, replaced by a rusty metal operating table. The LED lights on the ceiling were dim, and amidst the irritating noise of a diesel generator, emergency light bulbs emitted a faint orange glow, illuminating the red patterns drawn with unknown material and large black stains on the operating table, making them very conspicuous.
The convenience store windows were boarded up, and the glass door side had a roller shutter pulled down directly. It wasn't the thin, ordinary type of roller shutter, but a steel one for disaster prevention, with a thickness and price equally substantial.
At this moment, the convenience store had become something akin to a sealed room.
Hoo, hoo.
The sound of a knife being sharpened on a whetstone was as if it had some kind of Magic. Even the noisy diesel generator's sound was penetrated by it, clearly reaching the ears of the survivors huddled in the corners of the room, making them tremble even more violently.
"What a good knife."
The camping ground owner appraised the gleaming chef's knife in his hand, then glanced at the survivors huddled like quails in the corner: "This way, they'll suffer less."
It wasn't that the survivors hadn't thought of relying on their numerical advantage to take him down—in fact, after being tricked into the convenience store and realizing they'd been fooled, some hot-headed travelers had tried to act.
Then, in front of the other survivors, they were distorted into pretzels by some invisible, bizarre force.
This was not an exaggeration, but literally, they turned into human sticks like pretzels, with blood and internal organs splattered everywhere like squashed tomatoes.
The scene was so exaggerated that several timid travelers fainted directly from fright.
As several women among the survivors were cursed, shedding their human skin in front of their relatives and loved ones, and joining those distorted, invisible monsters, the remaining survivors completely lost their last bit of will to resist, leaving only the bottomless fear of the owner after their Sunny plummeted.
Thump, thump, thump.
The rolling shutter door was knocked on.
The owner stopped sharpening his knife, his eyes showing some surprise.
Immediately after, a sneer curled on his lips. As he softly chanted strange and obscure incantations, the invisible force instantly tore off the wooden planks nailed to the side door, and the owner also put down his chef's knife and quickly walked out through the side door.
"Oh, isn't this the energetic young guest from this morning? Where's your JK travel companion?"
Looking at the young man standing in front of the rolling shutter door, the owner's face showed a highly deceptive, amiable, and simple smile as he advised: "Could it be that she was caught in a mudslide? That's truly unfortunate… In any case, it's safe back here. My convenience store is certified by the disaster relief department, hurry inside."
Asakura glanced at him with a half-smile, then made a 'this is the last time' gesture towards the rolling shutter door (Note).
Flames burst forth, burning a two-meter diameter hole directly into the reinforced steel rolling shutter door, which was said to be able to withstand even natural gas explosions, revealing the bizarre scene inside.
"Oh, this is too safe."
Asakura said sarcastically, his smile not reaching his eyes.
Although Muggles couldn't see them, he could clearly see the Yamanokemono; some were entrenched in the dark corners of the room, some crawled on the walls like geckos, and some lay at the entrance, eager to move. Their limbs were not entirely the same, and their sizes had subtle differences, but their malicious gazes were identical.
"...It seems you were behind the disappearance of the two previous Divine Envoys? Kid, how did you find out?"
The smile on the camping ground owner's face vanished instantly, replaced by a fierce glare at Asakura.
"Everything was too obvious. Mount Kumotori is a tourist spot, yet there's no signal at this camping ground. You must have destroyed the nearby base station, right? Besides, the muffled sound before the landslide… it was probably explosives or something. Those things don't look like they'd bury explosives, which means there must be human 'accomplices', doesn't it?"
Asakura said nonchalantly: "Of course, what really convinced me was that you said you'd already called the police, but until now, let alone a search and rescue team, not even a single police car has appeared. People down the mountain don't even know what happened. You even notified the foot of the mountain about the landslide through wired means to prevent anyone from entering the mountain and discovering something amiss, right?"
[Dark offspring residing in gloom, mother of myriad thriving things, ruler of the formless whip—
"Snake"
The camping ground owner rapidly uttered strange, obscure language incomprehensible to ordinary people, while Asakura looked at him coldly, speaking only one word softly.
"Hmph… Ga-ah!"
The next moment, the camping ground owner's incantation was interrupted. His tongue turned into a small Snake, flicking its forked tongue, making his voice sound indistinct, as if he had a large root in his mouth.
Perhaps due to a Magic backlash or some other reason, the middle-aged man coughed up a large amount of black, foul-smelling viscous fluid, and even the whites of his eyes were stained with black blood vessels.
He struggled to control the small Snake still connected to the root of his tongue, roaring out a hateful yet terrified, indistinct command: "Sa… Kill him!"
Thus, the Yamanokemono, which had been poised, squeezed out of the hole Asakura had burned, like a pack of wolves, and lunged at Asakura.
And the owner himself, using both hands and feet, fled frantically and embarrassedly into the convenience store through the side door.
The terrifying monster Yamanokemono, which was incredibly dangerous to ordinary people, posed almost no threat to Asakura.
Intense, vibrant red bloomed around him.
The [Candle], which would have quickly extinguished without 'fuel', now clung to the [Scale] covering Asakura's body, giving the originally formless [Scale] the appearance of a wide, crimson, flowing robe.
Asakura, now clad in blazing fire, looked less like a wizard and more like a reaper harvesting lives—those monster Yamanokemono, capable of easily killing adult males, would be burned to ashes by the [Candle]'s flames the moment they touched his fiery robe.
"Even in the Magic Tome, there's no description of combining these two Magic… In that case, I'll call this move 'Cursed Flame Scale Armor'. It has the beauty of a limited-edition strength."
Asakura spoke nonsensical words casually, walking leisurely into the convenience store where the entire rolling shutter door had been melted by the Cursed Flame Scale Armor.
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