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Chapter 313: Jura's Fear
Jura snapped his head up, roaring at Ryuu across the cavern. His face twisted violently, unable to maintain his façade of composure any longer.
"Look! Look at my shaking hand! Look at how it trembles!"
He thrust his remaining left hand high into the air. It was quivering like a leaf in the autumn wind. "This is all because of you! Because of you, the woman who practically killed me! You scared the absolute piss out of me, and you still do!"
Beside him, the young werewolf companion was horrified to finally realize that the stiff smile Jura had been wearing all this time wasn't confidence—it was a fragile, fake mask he had used every ounce of his strength to force onto his face.
Hidden beneath that smile was a boundless, bone-deep terror that had long since festered into a living nightmare.
"I remember, Lion! How could I forget? I could never forget!"
Jura's voice spiked into a shrill, bloodcurdling shriek, as if trying to rip his very soul out through his throat. "Four years ago... in that blood-soaked headquarters... the way you... the way you slaughtered everyone in that mountain of corpses... Even now, it's still burned right into the back of my f*cking eyelids! It won't go away!"
"I still dream about it! Every single night! I haven't had a single good night's sleep to this very day, can you believe that?! Five whole years! I've been living in your shadow for five f*cking years!"
A flicker of emotion passed through Ryuu's emerald eyes.
Four years... has it really been four years already?
Faced with Jura's sudden, hysterical emotional purge, Ryuu simply stood there in silence. Like the coldest of bystanders, she watched this enemy bare the ugliest, weakest depths of his soul right in front of her.
"Back then... I hid myself beneath the piled-up corpses of my comrades..."
Jura shuddered, his eyes unfocused. "My consciousness was fading, but I still held my breath for dear life. I listened to your insane, monstrous roars. I felt the wind pressure from every swing of your sword. Until... until you used that damn magic to blow our entire headquarters sky-high... Even then, I couldn't believe... I couldn't believe I was still f*cking alive."
Jura's eyes—deeply sunken from chronic insomnia—bulged wide. His expression was so warped one could easily glimpse the sick, diseased emotion driving him.
It wasn't just the phantom pain of his missing right arm; even his remaining left arm seemed to have an excessive, violent, almost visceral reaction to the very existence of Gale, convulsing uncontrollably. To him, Ryuu Lion was the physical embodiment of his trauma, the living definition of his life's greatest nightmare.
He feared this elf more than anyone else in the world—the elf who had severed his arm, sliced off half his ear, and pushed him straight to the brink of death.
"Just standing in front of you makes me wet myself! It's pathetic! I can't fight! I can't fight you at all! That's why—"
His voice pitched up sharply, his terror instantly twisting into the most venomous brand of madness.
"—That's why my most beloved servant will take my place! It'll fight for me, for the me who can't fight! I'll let my strongest, most absurdly powerful, most precious monster tear you apart!"
The tamer, unable to overcome his own dread, screamed at the top of his lungs while his body shook violently, cracking his long whip once more.
CRACK!
The crack was an absolute command. The Lambton's six pairs of glowing crimson eyes locked onto Ryuu once again.
With an ear-shattering roar, its massive body uncoiled like a released spring, shooting forward with its maw wide open to devour her. The specialized collar around its neck flared with an eerie red light, as if harmonizing with its master's lunacy. A primal, far more violent power was forcibly awakened within the giant snake, its muscles rippling and bulging to grotesque proportions.
"Dragging this guy all the way up to this floor took a hell of a lot of effort, you know!" Jura kept goading Ryuu with his mad laughter.
The Lambton reacted instantly to the echoing whip crack. Flexing its long, massive body like a cannonball firing from a barrel, it launched an apocalyptic assault. Ryuu once again blurred into a green gale, dodging and weaving through the minuscule gaps of the lethal onslaught.
"Sure, this guy's a natural-born burrower, but with a body this huge, it was bound to get spotted eventually! So, every time it slipped up and exposed itself, I made it swallow every last one of those nosy, meddling adventurers who happened to see it! Left no witnesses!"
"But the hardest part was definitely sneaking it out of the Artificial Labyrinth! The security in that place is ridiculously tight..."
Artificial Labyrinth?!
That unfamiliar term struck Ryuu's mind like a bolt of lightning.
Dodging the giant snake at high speeds, Ryuu's expression grew intensely sharp. Her instincts were screaming at her—this place, this "Artificial Labyrinth," had to be the true stronghold where the Evilus remnants had been hiding all these years.
Jura seemed to realize he had let something slip in his excitement. He clamped his left hand over his mouth, letting out an exaggerated, entirely insincere gasp.
"Oops... Looks like I accidentally said something I shouldn't have. But... that's fine." His expression instantly flipped from theatrical regret back to a visage of raw, murderous madness. "As long as you die here, it won't be a problem."
Those words completely ignited the physical manifestation of rage Ryuu had kept suppressed in her heart for years.
The enemy was right in front of her. One of the murderers who had killed Alise, who had killed all her comrades, was standing right there. The blood-soaked memories, the cries of despair, the twisted faces she had personally decapitated on that rainy night... Everything broke through the high walls of revenge and forgetting like a bursting dam.
She... couldn't hold it in anymore.
Now.
Following another savage tail sweep from the Lambton, there was a fleeting moment of stiffness caused by the sheer bulk of its body. Seizing this window—one lasting less than a hundredth of a second—Ryuu moved at blinding speed.
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