Chapter 360 Volume V - Chapter 78: The Body in the Cocoon
"Ugh…"
A slight tremor spread through my body, accompanied by a slight ache.
It wasn't bad, though. It wasn't even something I should take seriously.
I opened and closed my eyes several times to clarify them, trying to sit up from where I was lying.
The first thing I saw was... darkness. Darkness with no end in sight.
Immediately after that, something fell on my face... a drop of cold water.
For a moment, my whole body froze, my eyes widened. I remembered where I was, why I was in this situation.
I stood up as fast as I could, turned to the cocoon of vines, and took a defensive position.
There were about twenty-five meters between me and the cocoon. It had completely disintegrated, the ground was covered with a strange liquid that looked like water. A body was barely visible among the fallen vines. It was lying on the ground. Part of its body was covered with vines, so I couldn't tell what it was, but... it looked like a woman.
I swallowed, kept my position, and checked my surroundings.
Lucia was not far away. She must have been thrown backward like me, but she was closer to the cocoon. She must have woken up at almost the same time as me because she was holding her head.
I approached her with slow, careful steps. But my eyes were always on the body emerging from the cocoon. I would react at the slightest movement.
So, I reached Lucia and spoke in a low voice.
"Are you okay?"
Lucia's whole body froze in an instant. She looked at me and then at the cocoon with widened eyes. It took her a short time to calm down, though. She slowly stood up, although the worry and uneasiness on her face did not completely disappear.
"I... I'm fine. You?"
"I'm not injured."
I tore my eyes away from the body in the cocoon for a brief moment and turned them to the blur not far away from it. It was still the same, impossible to perceive what it was.
"Did you see where my spear flew?"
Lucia shook her head from side to side as I sighed slightly.
"Then... I will approach the cocoon again, we need to understand what happened, stay behind me."
She opened her mouth for a moment as if to protest, her eyes had left the cocoon and turned to me. But then she paused, closed her mouth again.
"Okay..."
And both our focus returned to the body in the vines.
We moved slowly at first, quietly at the same time. Because whatever it was... we didn't want it to wake up. It was best if we could sneak up to it without it noticing anything.
And so we continued, the distance between us decreasing and decreasing, more and more details emerging.
First of all... the body was definitely that of a woman. She was naked except for the vines that vaguely covered her. She seemed to have long black hair that stuck to her body and the ground because it was wet, but it was impossible to see her face. She looked to be in her early twenties.
And... she looked completely human. She didn't have any features that resembled a creature. She was just... a simple human being.
I couldn't help frowning as I continued to approach her.
Am I under an illusion or is there something else involved...
What's a human being doing here?
I wouldn't be so surprised if we were in an Alius-type dungeon, but... this was a Recta. The only things found inside Rectas were creatures. There might be some that resembled humans, of course... but a real 'human'? I'd never heard of such a thing in my life.
And that made me even more alert than I usually was.
"Huh?"
I paused when I heard Lucia's voice coming from just behind me. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and saw her eyes widen. She was staring at the body with dilated eyes.
My brow furrowed even more.
"What happened-"
But she didn't even wait for me to finish, she didn't even focus on me. She took a slow step forward, then another.
"Lucia, don't get ahead of me. You have to stay behind me. Tell me what happened."
She didn't listen to me, she accelerated her steps even more. It was only when I moved in front of her that she finally gave me a reaction. Her red eyes met mine, her whole body trembled.
"A- Adrian... that thing..."
I clicked my tongue and moved to the side, making sure the body in the vines was in my line of sight.
"What? What is that thing? Did you notice something?"
"S- she looks like Sue..."
I looked at her with a blank expression, not quite understanding what she was saying.
Ah, I must have misheard...
"Say it again...?"
Lucia raised her hand this time, pointed to the body lying on the ground, and repeated.
"Sue... That thing looks like Sue..."
I slowly turned my head toward the body, this time really focusing on it.
Her height, the length and color of her hair...
The look on Lucia's face became my own as I processed more details in my mind.
"Bullshit."
I started moving forward again, this time not caring too much about my guard. I finally reached the vines of the cocoon, but I trampled them without a care in the world. There was no reaction, no hostile feeling, my ring was silent...
"Impossible..."
She was lying on her side, her hair hiding her whole face. But I didn't care, my ring was still quieter.
From my dimensional inventory, I took out one of the spears I kept in reserve just in case, and using the pointed end, I slowly pulled aside the hair blocking her face. I did no harm, not even a scratch on her skin. Finally, when her face was fully exposed... I just stood there.
"W- what is this...?"
Lucia came to my side immediately after my words. She looked at the face of the body, and her reaction was the same.
Because... she was right.
But she was also wrong.
The person in front of us certainly looked like Sue, but... was also very different from her.
Sue had an ordinary body and face. Her eyes were perhaps the only thing that stood out about her. Otherwise, she was just one of those girls I'd see walking down the street.
But the person in front of us was... different.
Her hair was much more vibrant than Sue's, both in color and type, although I couldn't tell because it was wet. The tiny freckles and moles on her face were all gone. Her features were sharper. She seemed to have lost some weight, even her body was far from 'ordinary'.
She gave off a Lucia-like air around her. Almost... almost as attractive as her.
"This is bullshit..."
I clenched my fist, clenched my teeth, gripped the spear tightly in my hand, and prepared to attack the... thing... in front of me.
Because it was impossible.
It couldn't be possible.
It was just an illusion... or a hideous creature mimicking her appearance. It was the most logical thing it could be.
But, then, I paused. Suddenly, something moved in my head and the pieces of the puzzle fell into place as if they had been put together.
With that sudden thought in mind, I turned around and looked at the ground, or rather at the trail of blood that led here.
The spot where they started... didn't it look like what would happen if someone fell from too high up?
My eyes widened, my mind filled with a hundred different thoughts at once.
But... how had she survived?
Judging by the bloodstains, her fall hadn't slowed in any way. No, on the contrary... she had fallen in such a way that she should have died immediately.
How had she managed to keep crawling even after losing so much blood? Even if somehow, by some miracle, she had survived, crawling for almost three hundred meters was... impossible.
It simply wasn't humanly possible.
So... a creature using her body, perhaps?
A parasite-type creature that had invaded and used her lifeless body?
After all... how could she enter a 'cocoon' and come out like that?
It's not like there aren't parasite-type creatures that evolve their hosts.
As these and other thoughts continued to occupy my mind, I felt anger rising inside me.
If what I was thinking was true...
It was not enough that she had fallen this far, that she had died in despair... her body had been used by a creature.
My vision blurred for a moment, I gripped my spear again. I didn't use mana, I didn't reach for the ordea, I just attacked her out of pure rage.
At least that was my intention.
But... I couldn't.
I couldn't attack.
Because there was a tiny, little hesitation in me.
What if... when she wakes up... what if it's really Sue?
What if I kill her a second time?
I was scared, I was scared of making another mistake.
But... if this thing was really the kind of creature I thought it was, it was most likely to be the boss of the dungeon.
That meant it would be at least a B grade, maybe a B+ grade.
It wasn't going to be a simple fight.
I couldn't make up my mind what to do, I was going back and forth between the two options... when suddenly I paused. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a change and my eyes became clear again, shifting back to the body lying on the floor. More precisely... the index finger.
Because I saw a tiny, small movement in that finger.
And I soon realized that I was not mistaken.
The same finger moved again, this time a little more distinctly. Her eyelids flickered through her hair, then slowly opened.
They were the same eyes. The same dark blue eyes... but much more beautiful than I remembered, just like every other detail about her.
And I... after seeing her eyes... forgot everything in my mind. My spear slipped through my fingers and fell to the ground. I could only look at the person in front of me.
And then, she also looked back at me.
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