Chapter 111: Luring the Enemy Deeper
If you had to sum up Feitan's situation in a single sentence, it would be this: minimal actual damage, maximum humiliation.
As a Phantom Troupe member who took whatever he wanted without a second thought, Feitan had always been on the robbing end of things. Since when did something that should rightfully belong to him vanish right in front of his eyes?
The humiliation was beyond words.
Others might not fully grasp what Feitan's state was like in that moment, but if he had a rage meter, it would have been running the same mode as the Blood Rage state in Samurai Shodown.
And if the situation itself weren't degrading enough, the whole thing had been witnessed by a fellow Troupe member from start to finish.
The Phantom Troupe had thirteen members. With the leader as the undisputed anchor, everyone else had their own preferences for who they grouped with. As someone with a short fuse and a genuinely terrible temper, Feitan was not easy company by any measure. The only person who could tolerate him was No. 5, Phinks, and the two of them had, somewhat unexpectedly, developed a workable dynamic over the years.
Now Nobunaga had watched the entire humiliating spectacle with his own eyes. That fact pushed Feitan some meaningful distance past the edge of his self-control.
No fighting among members? Get out of here.
Feitan wanted to vent, and Nobunaga obviously wasn't going to stand there and absorb it.
So two spider legs went at it across the Grand Cemetery, now fully open with the invisible BOSS room walls gone.
From Ross's god's-eye view, this was an unexpected bonus.
At first, Nobunaga still had enough goodwill to think something along the lines of: well, I did just watch him embarrass himself, might as well let him get it out. His hand stayed off his sword. But Feitan, with nothing left to lose in the face department, came at him in pure venting mode. Each strike harder. Each one more lethal.
"Hey."
The low growl carried real heat. Nobunaga's hand was already on his sword hilt, stance dropping into the standard ready position for a draw-cut.
At the same time, an En formed around him — small in range, just enough to encompass the full arc of a drawn blade. Two meters across.
Within that two-meter circle, Nobunaga was confident he could cut through anything that tried to come near.
"Last warning. If you don't pull yourself together—"
What came next didn't need saying.
They had known each other since the earliest days of the Troupe. The years between them were long. But if Feitan was going to keep misdirecting his anger at others just to protect his pride, then Nobunaga wasn't going to hold back the draw-cut.
After all, Feitan threw the first punch. If the leader came looking for answers later, Nobunaga had ground to stand on.
The killing intent was real. And having vented enough to partially clear his head, Feitan had actually come back to himself the moment he saw that stance. He simply refused to admit out loud that what he was currently doing was the genuinely stupid act of taking it out on someone who had nothing to do with it.
What Feitan didn't yet realize, though, was that his rage hadn't suddenly reached overflow. It had been building from the moment he first set foot inside Castlevania, through Ross's deliberate, patient management of it.
The moment Ross confirmed the four-person group, he had zeroed in on Feitan immediately. In terms of personality, Feitan was the most manageable target in the bunch. Not even close.
Based on that read, throughout the entire harassment phase, Ross had clearly funneled the majority of his aggravation resources toward Feitan specifically. The rage hadn't detonated out of nowhere. It had been loaded bar by invisible bar, the whole way through. The item deletion was just the trigger.
Feitan had figured this out now. He was not going to apologize. Not today. Not ever.
So after a long silence, Feitan turned around and charged toward the far side of the Grand Cemetery's BOSS battle zone — the route that led deeper into Castlevania — and disappeared from Nobunaga's sight in seconds.
Nobunaga let the draw-cut stance drop and let out a long breath.
As the member of the Troupe who valued his comrades most, he hadn't wanted things to reach this point either. The draw-cut had been genuine. If Feitan had kept coming, he would have delivered it with full intent to cut the man open.
That said: even a clay figure has its breaking point. Feitan's misdirected anger had gotten under his skin. Setting aside the fact that the whole embarrassment was Feitan's own doing, and that Nobunaga himself wasn't the type to go broadcasting other people's worst moments — even so, having it redirected at him without any justification whatsoever was irritating.
Enough to change his mind. He had originally been thinking of following to keep watch. He wasn't doing that anymore.
Let the short-fused little hothead wander this bizarre castle on his own.
What Nobunaga had absolutely no idea about was the expression on Ross's face, in his floor-200 fighter's room at the Sky Arena far away, at the exact moment they split apart and he decided not to follow.
And when Ross watched Feitan hit the fork and choose the route leading toward the Clock Tower, Ross's eyes actually caught the light.
"Heaven offered you a road and you walked right past it. Hell had no door but here you come anyway."
The murmuring sub-landlord started setting up and swapping out the Clock Tower's guardian BOSS.
Creator Authority or not, there were basic rules to observe. Each area could only have one guardian BOSS — otherwise Ross would genuinely have crammed all four Saint Beasts into the same zone and won by pure numbers.
But one-for-one was enough. Ross had chosen the entity most suited to the Clock Tower and, more to the point, most suited for dealing with Feitan.
Assuming Feitan didn't quit halfway.
Deleting the Skeleton Warrior's drops had carried a real downside: Troupe members who came here for treasure would lose their reason to press on if the loot simply didn't exist. Their whole purpose in coming was to find things worth taking.
If Nobunaga relayed what had happened to the others, the exploration would probably stop cold.
Right now Feitan was still running on pure spite, still looking for something that could move to use as a target. That was Ross's window, and it was the best one he was going to get.
Better to cut one finger clean off than leave scratch marks on all ten. What Ross needed to do, before the Troupe figured things out, was take one of those spider's legs entirely.
The Clock Tower terrain was famously punishing, and that held true across nearly every entry in the series.
Height differentials, gears, spike traps, giant pendulums: the full lineup of features that had turned back more than a few players over the years. Pure venting energy and casual curiosity alone wouldn't carry anyone to the Clock Tower's top. You needed a concrete reason to press on.
"Old Drac, I'm raiding your private stash."
After offering one entirely ineffectual prayer of apology, Ross used Creator Authority to gather up the money bags scattered across other areas of the castle and stuffed them selectively into certain monsters inside the Clock Tower.
Feitan, who had been taking his frustration out by smashing a patrolling hollow suit of armor with his umbrella — the rapier blade was broken, but the rest of the umbrella still worked fine — suddenly discovered that a small, noticeably heavy bag had dropped from the patrol armor's chest cavity.
He poked it with the umbrella tip. A bright metallic clink rang out from inside.
He opened it: more than a dozen gleaming gold ancient coins, unknown denomination, packed in together.
The hard line between Feitan's brows eased open.
And judging from the sounds drifting down from above, there seemed to be quite a few more of those patrol armors up there.
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