Hyungkeshni, seeing the situation worsen, began to prepare to flee from her hideout.
This hideout can be recreated easily.
Though it’s a bit regretful to leave everything she’s gathered so far, it’s nothing compared to her life.
Hyungkeshni prepared to flee far away. With just a few belongings, she would leave without hesitation. The cowardly witch would do what she always did—run away from a scary place.
But this time, it was too late.
It wasn’t too late to say that the consequences of everything she had built were coming back, but the deeds she had committed were tightening around her neck.
Dakota had thoroughly prepared to make sure she wouldn’t escape.
Layer upon layer.
The preparation wasn’t just to avoid mistakes, but to ensure that even if there were mistakes, she could fix them somehow.
Even if Hyungkeshni ran away, she would have no time to close her eyes, as long as she was alive.
If she ran into the forest, the forest would be surrounded. If she went to the city, they would check everyone and make sure there was no place for her to hide.
Normally, when such a siege is set, the person escaping gets tired, but so does the person enclosing them.
Eventually, a gap would appear.
But not this time.
Because the people participating in the witch hunt were all smiling.
For various reasons.
There were priests from the Outer God Church, burning with the mission to catch the real Hyungkeshni.
There were those who simply enjoyed the festival of witch hunting.
There were people happy that things were selling well at the market because many came to the city.
And there were people glad that the saint of the Outer God Church had come from a faraway place.
The only ones who weren’t smiling were one type of person.
Those who had lost someone to Hyungkeshni.
People like Dakota, who had survived by chance.
Dakota deliberately chose people who had a grudge against Hyungkeshni. Because she believed that they would do the job properly when she asked them.
And her judgment was correct.
Dakota coordinated the people at the top, while those beneath her gradually took on the tasks. The will of the superior was unified, and the subordinates found joy in it.
What would happen then?
The followers of the Outer God gradually strangled Hyungkeshni’s breath.
Until the smile on her lips spread across her whole face.
It took exactly three months.
At first, when Hyungkeshni realized that the Outer God Church was hunting her down, she immediately began to think.
Hyungkeshni was very intelligent.
Having learned magic from witches long ago, she developed it independently.
And if you’re one of the few witches who survived in the present age, you’d know without being told.
Of course, it was Hyungkeshni who created the prejudice that witches are evil.
Because of that, many witches died.
Once a prejudice forms, it takes tremendous effort to undo it. But before that could happen, most witches were killed for various reasons.
Because of this, Hyungkeshni survived longer than most witches, but that wasn’t the only reason.
A woman with a personality that killed people as if twisting a toy could survive because of her skills.
But even those skills weren’t enough to overcome many enemies.
So, whenever people came for her, she had always smiled and fled.
She fled, trembling in fear of dying.
If she could have killed many people in an instant, Hyungkeshni, with her personality, wouldn’t have fled. She would have mocked them, playing with them.
In any case, Hyungkeshni, who didn’t have the ability to defeat many people, confirmed that the Outer God Church was after her and decided to head west.
To the Adu Jungle in the north.
To the Skard Stone Desert in the south.
Culturally, there is a significant difference between the eastern and western regions here.
Once, the Holy God Church was the majority religion in the east, but it never managed to spread west beyond these two regions.
Hyungkeshni, thinking that the Outer God Church would do the same, decided to flee west.
Hyungkeshni left her hideout and began to run in the spring.
She passed the thawed waters, sometimes disguised as an animal, and sometimes hiding in the mud. This forest was almost like her territory, so she managed to survive for three months.
But the fear of being chased led her to make the wrong choice.
To Hyungkeshni, who knew the vegetation of the Adu Jungle very well, the jungle was a place to gather food and materials for magic, a strategic location for obtaining ingredients.
But as people closed in, she had no choice but to go farther away.
To a place where her knowledge no longer worked, far away.
By instinct, she chose an easily penetrable place to escape to. As she went, it turned out to be east, not west, but she didn’t care too much about whether it was west or not.
After all, as long as she survived, it was her victory.
But that was the trap.
Blessed people, even without abilities, were superior in every way to ordinary people.
Being blessed meant that their minds were sharper.
An old person who had never been educated in their entire life could learn entirely new magic just by receiving the blessing of a better memory.
Such people gathered and prepared to kill one person.
If graduates of Seoul National University put their heads together to create a game where they rob a gamer’s wallet, isn’t it only polite to pay?
Hyungkeshni wasn’t foolish, but rather, she was intelligent.
But she couldn’t defeat numbers.
Wherever she went in the city, the witch hunt festival was being held.
The people living in the city didn’t think they were actually going to kill Hyungkeshni. They just thought, “Oh, it’s the festival we had recently, again?”
But from Hyungkeshni’s perspective, the whole city seemed to be working hard to catch her.
If she had more time or could ask someone, she would have known that it wasn’t really such a dangerous situation.
But until now, she had always acted alone, making her own judgments. And the three months of continuous pursuit had worn down her mental state.
Everyone seemed like an enemy.
She looked here and there, and everywhere, people were blaming her.
At that moment, if anyone saw a girl holding a grotesque skull staff, what would they say?
“There’s a witch here!”
Hyungkeshni instinctively slit her throat, and that became a sign revealing her location.
And once she killed, it was over.
Immediately, the city turned into a place where they would tear it apart like a rat hunt to find the real witch.
The trap worked perfectly.
Hyungkeshni fled, smiling widely.
Laughing loudly, she acted like the "Witch of Joy" as she always did.
In truth, she was terrified, and her old trauma, almost forgotten, was triggered.
But it was too late to blame it on that—she had committed too many sins.
And sins must eventually be repaid.
Not everyone is like that, but Hyungkeshni wasn’t one of those people.
In the end, those who blamed her appeared in front of her.
With spears, swords, bows, and staffs. They attacked her.
No matter how old Hyungkeshni was, she couldn’t fend off so many attacks.
In the end, her left arm was severed from the elbow by a sword, and her right hand holding the staff was crushed by a hammer, up to the forearm.
Both her legs were deeply wounded, and large spikes with chains were pierced through her left knee, right thigh, and the upper part of her right lower abdomen and pelvis.
This wasn’t an attack aimed at a human.
It was like hunting a giant beast.
And the final moment arrived.
A man, filled with the hope of revenge, tried to stab his sword into her neck.
Dakota stopped it.
“Stop!”
The blade barely missed and struck the sand next to her neck.
Hyungkeshni, with a face full of smiles, lifted her head.
There, standing, was a beautiful woman with blue skin. She had encountered her several times while fleeing, so she knew her well.
She was the saint of the Outer God Church, Dakota.
Subtly looking around, Dakota was making the people who attacked her step back, stopping them. A genuine smile bloomed amid the fearful one.
There was hope of survival.
"Hehe, Saint? I’m just a poor witch. Please, please have mercy. I haven’t done anything bad."
And so, she begged. Trying to survive, Hyungkeshni opened her mouth, enduring the pain all over her body.
"I was just scared. They suddenly called me a witch and tried to kill me, I was just scared and ran away like this."
She defended herself, saying she wasn’t the bad one.
Dakota approached Hyungkeshni, who was covered in chains and stuck to the ground, squatting beside her head. She looked directly at Hyungkeshni’s face and asked.
“Hyungkeshni, do you remember the day the Outer God died?”
“Yes! Yes, of course! It was when those filthy Holy God Church bastards destroyed the Outer God, right? I remember everything!”
That was truly one of the most satisfying moments for Hyungkeshni.
A monster that shouldn’t have come into this world appeared because of Yasle’s mistake.
She didn’t know what the Outer God’s warmth meant, but anyone could see that a person who had been deprived of it wouldn’t die properly.
Especially with the ominous purple hair. She hated that so much, so she tried to kill it as much as she could. But ominous imaginings tend to become reality.
The Outer God came back into this world.
Hyungkeshni, terrified, surrendered, begging for her life, and was forced to write down the method by which she had summoned the Outer God.
And she wrote it down.
But after being with the Outer God for a few days, she realized that the Outer God was dumber than she had imagined. He was more like a powerful idiot. When she tried twisting the magic she wrote in the book to test him, he didn’t understand at all.
She could deceive him.
So, she twisted the summoning spell. If summoned, the spell would seal him for eternity.
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And the plan worked. The Outer God was banished from this world. At first, she thought he was completely dead, but as more people tainted by the Outer God appeared, she realized it wasn’t so.
But still, the Outer God never returned to this world. Even though the number of humans who had become sacrifices had far exceeded that of the past, he didn’t come back.
Or, perhaps, he couldn’t come back.
Hyungkeshni felt wronged. How could he do this to her after she had killed the Outer God?
But that was that.
She cursed the Holy God Church as hard as she could to survive. She hoped that by acting like a worthless witch, they would spare her life.
She begged Dakota for mercy.
But then Dakota said something strange.
“Do you remember the house with a terrace that overlooks the plaza, where someone died?”
“No! I don’t know at all! No! I never killed anyone! Really! They suddenly tried to kill me, that’s why I did this!”
Hyungkeshni couldn’t see Dakota’s expression. The sun was behind her, casting a shadow over her face.
Dakota spoke.
“We’re taking the Witch of Joy to the headquarters of the Outer God Church.”
Hyungkeshni thought she had survived.