When the Serial Killer Next Door Gained Harem System

Chapter 129: MOVE!

His shoulders shook as he threw himself forward and wrapped his arms around her legs, sobbing so hard he could barely breathe. The assassin didn’t react at all, and the white mask hiding her face made it impossible to tell whether she felt anything about what she had just done.

After a moment, the man reached into his pocket and pulled out two coins, one silver and one gold. His hand trembled as he held them out to her. He looked up while he was on both knees, directly at the woman’s mask.

The assassin crouched down, closed his fingers around the coins instead of taking them, and gently pushed his hand back toward his chest. Then she patted his dirty hair twice, stood up, and walked back toward the door without saying a word. I moved aside to let her pass.

The room stayed silent until the door shut behind her, and even then I couldn’t quite make sense of what I had just seen.

"Shit..." Ken muttered beside me.

"Yeah."

He swallowed and looked toward the door.

"Maybe you were right. We should get out of here, man."

I nodded and kept my eyes on the place where she had disappeared.

"Yeah. We should."

We left the bar as quickly and shut the door behind us. The assassin walked ahead with slow, steady steps, leaving the safe zone. Heads turned as she passed. Some people watched openly, while others avoided looking at her altogether, as if making eye contact might somehow put them in danger.

I could understand the feeling.

While everyone else was focused on her, I caught a glimpse of someone in the crowd near the entrance to the ship. It lasted only a moment. A fraction of a second.

"The air here..." Ken said, exhaling. "It feels so heavy."

He took a deep breath.

"Gods. Look at these people. They’re used to this."

I nodded. "Yeah. We should get this stupid task done. Come on."

He took another deep breath. "Right behind you."

ꨄ︎ꨄ︎ꨄ︎

And then the twentieth Junglereaper disappeared into my inventory with a faint golden glow.

That was half the task done. Now we just needed twenty Rabbit’s Thorn.

"Phew." Ken wiped his brow with the back of his hand. "That is that."

"Yeah." I looked around. "Now we just need Rabbit’s Thorn."

I turned back and let out a slow breath. In the distance, I could still make out the safe zone, though it was far enough away now that the shipwreck had shrunk into a dark shape against the strange green sky. We had wandered a little farther from it because the plants we needed were not growing anywhere near the immediate area, and while I didn’t love being this far from safety, there was nothing to do about it. If a Teleporter or something else came after us, we would have to run for it and hope we could make it back before it caught us.

"Let’s try that part," Ken said with a nod.

"Hmm."

The area ahead of us was flat and open compared to the rest of the Circle. A few trees stood scattered here and there, but most of the ground was bare dirt and pale grass with long stretches of empty space between the patches of forest. It felt exposed in a way I didn’t like at all, especially after everything we had already seen. There were no walls, no real cover, and nothing that looked like it wanted to help us stay alive.

"So," Ken said as we started walking again, "Ambly, huh?"

"Yeah."

"What about your parents?"

"They were both blessed by Vaelor, god of strength," I lied.

"Ooh. Cool." He nodded. "My cousin was blessed by Vaelor too. He could lift a whole table with two fingers."

"Really?"

"No," Ken said. "Not literally. But he was strong."

"Not strong enough to lift a table with two fingers, then."

"He was strong enough to beat my ass when I was a kid."

We kept walking in the direction he had pointed out earlier, but after a while we reached a tree and stopped to check the branches. Ken looked around, scratched the back of his head, and then sighed when he saw nothing useful.

"Nope. Nothing here. Let’s keep searching."

"Hmm."

We moved away from the safe zone and kept looking. A few minutes later we found a large boulder surrounded by small flowers growing through the dirt, and Ken dropped down onto it with a tired grunt. I sat on the ground beside it and leaned back against the stone, because my shoulders were starting to ache from everything we had done already. We had been moving for a while now, and the pain in my body was beginning to remind me that sleeping on the ground had not exactly helped.

"I’m pooped," Ken said.

"Yeah," I replied with a nod. "How are we supposed to find Rabbit’s Thorn?"

"I know what it looks like," he said. "I just can’t see any."

Then, just as he finished speaking, I heard movement behind us.

I turned my head and saw a man limping toward us with a hand pressed to his shoulder. He was bleeding badly, and his clothes were torn and dirty enough to make him look half dead already. The shoulder plate on his left side was cracked almost clean through, and the way he stumbled forward made it look like he had barely managed to keep himself upright.

"Gods..." he muttered, his voice weak and breathless. "Help... I... I can’t..."

"Oh, shit." Ken pushed himself off the boulder at once. "Are you okay, man?"

I got to my feet too and followed him toward the stranger, but before either of us could get close enough to help, four more men stepped out from behind the trees on either side of the path. They all had bows drawn and were aiming directly at us with grim, practiced expressions. The man on the ground straightened up at once and smirked as if he had never been injured at all.

"That was easy," he sneered. "Fucking idiots."

"Nothing personal, kids," one of the others said. "This is just business."

"Oh..." Ken started reaching for his bow, but the closest man stepped in and stopped him by pressing the edge of a dagger against him while shaking his head.

"I wouldn’t advise it, kiddo."

"Who hired you?" I asked, voice low.

The blue-eyed man who had spoken before stepped forward from the trees behind them. He had a bald head, broad shoulders, and a heavy suit of armor that looked expensive even through the dirt and wear on the surface. The metal had clearly seen better days, but it still looked far too well-made for some random bandit crew.

"You don’t need to know that," he said with a sneer.

"The third one," I said. "Right? The man who killed Jelda, or the one who ordered it."

The blue-eyed man gave me a thin smile. "I don’t know what you are talking about, kid."

"I think you do," I said. "You are protecting a killer."

"I am no better than a killer," he replied, taking another step forward.

"You could have killed us, but you didn’t ." I took a step as well, keeping my eyes on him. "Why?"

"I have my reasons."

He pointed at the ground.

That was when I noticed the runes.

We were standing inside a huge circle carved into the dirt, and strange markings had been cut around the outer edge. The whole thing was large enough to fit at least twenty people inside it, which meant it hadn’t been made by accident. This was a trap, and the moment I realized it, the air around us changed.

"The trap spells automatically deactivate near the safe zone," Ken said quickly, realization hitting him too. "They lured us out here away from it."

The circle lit up with a sick green glow, and the runes flashed as the spell activated. Roots burst out of the ground beneath us and wrapped around our legs, arms, and throats with frightening speed. One caught my wrist, another locked around my ankle, and a third tightened around my neck so hard that it shoved me down to the dirt. Ken was pinned just like I was, both of us trapped while the five men stood over us with their weapons ready.

Fuck. This really was not good.

"Kill them, boys."

The man who had faked the injury smiled wider. "With pleasure."

I switched my class to Warrior and activated Kingbreaker. The skill tore outward in a heavy wave, and the spell circle around us dimmed instantly as the roots began to loosen and fall away. My mouth opened on its own and a roar ripped out of my throat, and for a second the green glow around us flickered like it was being dragged apart by force.

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> Kingbreaker: -7 MP

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Cooldown: 2 minutes

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The bindings vanished.

I switched back to Rogue immediately and cast Shadow Leap toward the blue-eyed man. My body broke into dust and reformed beside him in a blink, and I brought my dagger up in the same motion as it materialized in my hand. The blade caught him clean across the throat before he even had time to react.

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> BOSS SLAIN

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> +73 EXP

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"Come on, Ken!" I shouted. "MOVE!"