The alley was narrow and deep, withered vines crawling across the stone walls on either side.
The girl's boots slipped over the wet flagstones as she sprinted through the alley with two Puchi in tow. Even so, the footsteps behind her kept drawing closer. She rounded a corner and ran straight into a dead end.
The stone wall at the far end stood several meters high. There was no way she could climb it.
She turned to find another route, but three big men, breathing hard, had already blocked the mouth of the alley.
The one in front lifted his head. His face was thick with brutish flesh, and the veins at his temple throbbed.
"Quick little legs you've got, brat!" He straightened up, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and grinned. "Run? Let's see where you run to now." The girl pressed herself into the corner, her voice trembling. "Please, let me go."
"Let you go?" The big man sneered and took a step forward. "If I let you go, who pays back the money your father owes?"
"That was a setup and you know it!" the girl shouted through gritted teeth.
"Who cares whose setup it was?" A short, stout man pushed up from behind. His gaze swept over her face twice, and he clicked his tongue. "A debt is a debt, that's only natural. Don't worry. With a face like yours, once we tidy up that mycelium a little, you'll have it paid off at our place in a few short years."
The girl's lips quivered and her eyes reddened, but no tears fell.
The three exchanged a glance and lunged at her together.
The girl directed her two Puchi into one last act of resistance.
Both Puchi shot into the air. One flung itself at the lead man's face, its tentacle-blade flashing cold. The other began charging a mushroom cannon. But while the three men were no great warriors, they were still more than a pair of cannon-fodder Puchi could handle.
The lead man swatted away the Puchi at his face. The round little body slammed into the wall, its cap badly dented, and slid to the ground. It struggled a few times but could not get back up.
The stout man hurled a throwing knife and pinned the second Puchi to the ground, killing it before its cannon was even half charged.
The girl tried to slip past in the chaos, but a hand seized her by the neck and yanked her back. Another clamped down on her wrist, and the third man locked an arm around her waist and hoisted her off the ground.
She struggled with everything she had, legs kicking wildly in the air, and her boot heel caught the man in front square on the nose.
Blood spurted from his nostrils. He staggered back clutching his nose, blood seeping through his fingers.
"You filthy little bitch!"
A fist crashed into her ribs. She let out a muffled grunt and doubled over. The second blow landed on her shoulder, the third on her upper arm. Every punch carried the full weight of his fury, and there was no telling how many bones they broke.
"It hurts, stop, please don't..." The girl's voice came in broken pieces, thick with sobs, and the tears finally spilled over. The men were unmoved and kept venting their rage one punch at a time.
No one noticed that the blood at the corner of her mouth had, at some point, frozen into frost.
"I said... stop!"
A pale dragon's breath burst from her half-open mouth. The two men facing her had no time to dodge and were swallowed by frost in an instant.
One was coated head to toe in white rime. His pupils went slack and he fell silent where he stood.
The other had half his body turned to an ice sculpture. His right arm was frozen against his side, and he barely managed to lift his left, reaching toward the last man still standing for help.
"Help..."
But the sudden sight had already terrified that final man.
"M-monster! A demon! Aaaaah!"
He scrambled up and turned to flee. As he rushed past the corner, a scaled claw reached out from around it, its sharp talons punching clean through his neck. Blood welled from the wound and ran down through the gaps in the claws.
His mouth hung open, a muddled gurgle rising from his throat. Then the claw flung him carelessly against the wall, and he slid to the ground and left a smear of blood behind. By now the man frozen on one side had gone quiet too, dead for good.
As for the girl who had caused all this, she was in no better shape herself.
She slumped in the corner, half her face sheathed in frost, her lips purple and her vision already blurring.
She dimly saw a figure glinting with silver light walking toward her. She tried to make out its face, but her eyelids grew heavier and heavier, and her consciousness sank as if into deep water until at last it fell into darkness.
---
How absurd. Automatically picking up a Dragon's Breath and the like, was that supposed to be fair?
Over the past few days, Lin Jun had been combing intensively through status panels across the United Kingdom, and he really had turned up several cases. The most outrageous of them all was this girl named Elara.
At most, the others carried something like a faint charge of electricity. Even if it were noticed, people would only assume they had awakened some ancestral bloodline.
But not her. She had to go and manifest a frost dragon's breath.
It was far too conspicuous, so Lin Jun had no choice but to send Norris to recover her into the underground city.
His recent observations had also led him to a conclusion.
This business of skills appearing unbidden only happened, just as he had suspected, to individuals parasitized by the mycelium. In other words, it really did have something to do with him. Calling it a disease didn't sit right, so for now Lin Jun named it the "Self-Study Phenomenon."
He had done plenty of observation and comparison, yet so far he still hadn't worked out any rule behind when the phenomenon occurred.
Race, age, sex, how long someone had been parasitized: none of these seemed to bear on whether the Self-Study Phenomenon struck.
What skill a person ended up learning, however, seemed tied to that person's "need."
The catch was that this "meeting of need" answered to nothing of the person's own will, and it was not necessarily a good thing for them either.
Take the [Chitin Carapace] that one host had learned to bolster his defense for battle, which had instead locked up his movements. Or take Elara. If Lin Jun hadn't sent Norris over, that single frost breath would have sent her enemies and herself to the grave together.
Even so, on the whole, Lin Jun didn't see this as a purely negative phenomenon.
By the logic of survivorship bias, the ones who caught his attention were precisely the cases that had evolved the wrong way.
If someone merely gained a minor resistance skill or the like, then even with his ability to read panels, Lin Jun would have a hard time picking them out. In any case, this was a riddle that concerned his own nature, and solving it was bound to help him understand himself better.
For that reason, gathering up the people showing the Self-Study Phenomenon for close, centralized observation had become a necessary step.
Mm. He would leave these people to Norris for now. When it came to bodily mutations, Norris had the most experience.
Elara's consciousness floated up out of the darkness.
In her daze she saw that figure again, and this time she heard its voice as well. "Oh? You're finally awake!"
The figure drew nearer and the light finally gathered around it, and the girl's pupils shrank to pinpricks.
Scales gleamed with an eerie sheen in the dim phosphorescence, the hand reaching toward her tipped with long, sharp claws, and the monster was leering right at her.
"D-demon!" Elara shrieked and shrank back as hard as she could, pressing against the inner wall of the mushroom house with nowhere left to retreat. "No! Stay away!"
"Wait, I'm not a demon, and I mean you no harm."
But it was too late.
In her panic, Elara loosed another breath on reflex. Before Norris could finish speaking, pale frost had already plastered itself across his face. He froze there in mid-reach, turned into an ice sculpture.
Crack, crack. The layer of ice splintered apart from within.
Norris shook the ice shards off his shoulders.
With [Frost Resistance LV10], Norris was hardly going to be frozen solid by a mere LV1 dragon's breath the way those feeble thugs had been. Still, looking at the girl who had once again half-frozen herself with her own breath, he couldn't help the headache building behind his eyes.
A moment later he carried over a heating Puchi and pressed it gently to Elara's face. The warm touch made her eyelids twitch, and her stiffened body loosened a little.
Norris stood and cast a glance around the area. Besides Elara, there were seven other victims of the Self-Study Phenomenon from the United Kingdom, and that number might well keep climbing.
He sighed and moved the heating Puchi to the girl's other cheek.
This new job was not going to be an easy one.
(End of Chapter)
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