Ch.9292. Goetia

Naberius charged with a thunderous roar.

Torso, the buffalo tanker, easily withstood the three-headed hound’s charge.

“You’re as tough as you look! My arms are tingling for the first time in ages!”

As if to show he wouldn’t be outdone in aggression, Torso pushed Naberius toward the wall. Naberius pushed back with equal force.

Torso won this charging battle.

Among the beast-folk, Torso was a buffalo beastman with the strongest charge.

Even though Naberius was a powerful demon, he couldn’t help but be at a disadvantage in a pushing contest against Torso.

Naberius cleanly acknowledged his defeat and kicked away the shield, using the recoil to retreat backward.

Then, the middle head among his three heads, the one with blood in its mouth, suddenly flashed its eyes.

“Cough!”

Immediately after, Torso coughed up blood and fell to his knees.

The party members were bewildered by this unknown power.

However, they prioritized rescuing Torso over identifying the ability.

Clang!

“Torso! Close your eyes!”

While Amon blocked Naberius’s claws, Torso squeezed his eyes shut.

Torso became excited at the sight of blood due to a side effect from his procedure.

Repeated treatment procedures, rehabilitation, and medication had alleviated it, but it hadn’t been completely cured.

The mute sniper filtered out the blood using optical camouflage technology as usual.

Meanwhile, the positive mage pulled the fallen Torso away.

While Sonia treated him, the mute sniper expressed concern.

[What kind of attack was that?]

“I don’t know… My insides suddenly felt twisted, and I coughed up blood.”

The party members became even more confused by the tanker’s explanation.

They couldn’t even guess the nature of the ability, let alone identify it.

The only fact they knew was that Naberius had kicked the shield.

Amon recalled this fact and dealt with Naberius by dodging rather than blocking his attacks.

Just then, they heard the forgotten neigh of another demon.

“Prrrr- You haven’t forgotten about me, have you?”

“Sonya, duck!”

At Kathy’s shout, Sonia lowered her head.

A spear passed over Sonia’s head, following Kathy’s gesture.

The spear targeted Orobas, the horse demon who had been aiming for Sonia.

“What an interesting technique you use!”

Orobas deflected the spear with silver knuckles.

Kathy manipulated the deflected spear to target Orobas again.

After parrying the spear several times, Orobas suddenly began to use boxing footwork.

“Have you seen something like this before?”

With those words, Orobas disappeared.

Kathy’s eyes turned backward. Immediately after, Orobas appeared behind her.

She abandoned her flying spear and took out a close-combat spear to barely block the attack.

While blocking the punches that seemed to embody a horse’s kicking power, she let out a groan.

“No way… space stepping?”

“Seeing how you blocked it with that reaction, you must have seen it somewhere?”

She had seen it many times.

It was a technique Amon frequently used.

Amon had explained it as a technique that achieved near-teleportation speed by repeatedly striking the air in a short period, applying Sky Step.

Having experienced it often while sparring with Amon, she was barely able to react.

But Kathy didn’t tell Orobas this fact.

“Did you think I would tell you that?”

“My, what a narrow-minded young lady.”

She swung her spear while returning the words Orobas had said to her earlier.

When Orobas dodged, her watching companions joined the fight.

Since they were also familiar with it thanks to Amon, they could react to Orobas’s space stepping.

While attacking Orobas, they all had the same thought.

‘He’s slower than Amon.’

Moreover, unlike Amon, his movements were larger, making it somewhat predictable where he would move to.

A manageable speed.

That was their assessment of Orobas among themselves.

Orobas was bewildered when the companions reacted to his space stepping.

‘How can they react to me when I’m among the top-tier space steppers even in Goetia?’

Then Orobas spotted Amon, who was using the same space stepping technique while fighting Naberius.

Amon was toying with the three-headed hound using incredibly fast space stepping.

Watching this, Orobas couldn’t close his mouth.

‘What the…’

Amon’s space stepping was abnormal.

In terms of speed alone, it would rank second among Goetia’s demons, but the process of stomping his feet to accumulate speed wasn’t visible.

The space stepping activated suddenly with just a slight twitch of his ankle.

On top of that, he even possessed the insane technique of changing direction mid-space step.

Speed, stealth, unpredictability.

It was perfect space stepping with all three elements.

‘How is that even possible?’

It defied common sense.

In human terms, it was as if Amon was moonwalking at running speed while freely changing direction.

It was impossible to comprehend with common sense.

“Argh!”

Naberius, seemingly aware that something was wrong, could only scream without properly responding.

Moreover, wounds inflicted by Amon’s sword weren’t healing.

‘Is that his ability?’

While meaningless against humans, it was fatally effective against demons who relied on their regenerative abilities.

Finally, Orobas made a decision.

“Naberius! Release it!”

“I was just thinking the same thing!”

With those words, mystic power erupted from the two demons.

Despite facing overwhelming mystic power, Amon and Sonia weren’t surprised.

They had seen demons do something like transformation when cornered before.

Amon warned his companions who couldn’t sense divine power.

“They’ve powered up. Be careful.”

As soon as the warning dropped, Naberius roared.

Pain like having eardrums hammered struck Amon and his companions.

The pain gradually worsened, reaching a level that caused dizziness and nausea.

Clutching her throbbing head, Kathy shouted to Amon.

“What ability is that?!”

“I don’t know!”

“Isn’t it in the Bible?”

“Demon records are from Solomon’s diary! Not the Bible, so I don’t know!”

Even Amon didn’t memorize all 72 demons.

He knew some notable ones by heart, but coincidentally, Naberius was an obscure demon.

How obscure? Despite being a higher species, he was less famous than Cerberus. That’s how obscure he was, so Amon had no way of knowing Naberius’s abilities.

“Still, try to think of something!”

At Kathy’s urging, Amon tried his best to deduce the ability through his throbbing headache.

Suddenly, he recalled how Naberius had kicked the buffalo tanker’s shield.

Combining that with the current situation, a scene from a game came to mind.

“Pain! It’s pain control!”

Amon deduced Naberius’s power.

Among demons, some have the power to control pain and suffering. Naberius was one of them.

There was only one way to resist this power.

“Kill him first.”

Just endure it by gritting your teeth.

To be precise, there is a protective spell that blocks such powers, but it takes a long time to prepare and leaves one defenseless during preparation.

Protective spells are meant to be cast before being cursed, so the timing was too late.

Feeling the lack of information, Amon gripped his sword tighter.

Holding the sword in reverse grip and exchanging glances with Kathy, he charged at Naberius.

[Amon, I’ll create an opening!]

Kathy instructed Amon using a combination of precognition and telepathy.

Of course, if she sees the future, Naberius, who also has precognition, will see her future as well.

But that was exactly what she was aiming for.

[You aim for his back!]

It would be foolish to hesitate when holding a joker card.

She was exploiting the weakness that while demons could peek at Kathy’s precognition, they couldn’t foresee Amon.

Naberius moved according to Kathy’s intention.

While Naberius was completely focused on her, Amon instantly got behind him using space stepping.

But what happened next was completely different from what they expected.

Thud!

“Ugh!”

“Amon!”

Suddenly, Naberius turned around, grabbed Amon, and threw him to the ground.

He had been turning his body even before Amon got behind him, as if he knew the future.

Kathy was bewildered and looked into the future again.

At that moment, the color of one thread of fate began to change.

‘?!’

She realized she had been deceived.

‘He deceived the future?’

Naberius’s second power was lying.

She had been misreading the future from the beginning.

What she had foreseen was a false future shown by Naberius’s lies.

She bit her lower lip, falling into self-contempt.

‘Such a mistake…’

Her self-contempt gradually intensified, approaching self-loathing.

Just before being consumed by past trauma, she realized something was strange.

‘Why is it suddenly going that far?’

She slapped her cheek to regain her senses.

Looking around, she could see her companions trapped in their own past.

‘Could it be…’

Naberius’s third power: despair.

Kathy figured out the powers symbolized by each head.

‘Pain, lies, despair.’

She hurriedly shared this via telepathy.

She helped her companions escape from self-loathing that way.

But she forgot that Naberius in reality was still fine.

“Did you think I would just watch?”

Naberius swung his claws.

Kathy barely managed to gather her wits and resist, but the triple debuff of pain, despair, and lies overwhelmed her.

Even she couldn’t properly respond to Naberius at full strength in this state.

Kathy was immediately disarmed. Naberius swung his claws toward the defenseless Kathy.

At that moment, Amon blocked those claws.

“Grrrr…”

Amon gritted his teeth, enduring the nausea from the pain.

Seeing this, Naberius genuinely admired him.

“How are you still fine?”

Amon didn’t answer.

There was nothing to answer.

He was simply enduring with his insight that saw through lies, an unshakable self that couldn’t imagine self-contempt, and sheer grit and toughness.

“Aaaa men!!!”

Forgetting the pain with a war cry, Amon swung his sword. The sword clashed with the claws repeatedly, withstanding the attacks.

But he was just enduring; it wasn’t that the attacks weren’t affecting him.

Gradually, Amon’s offensive weakened.

Defeat was certain at this rate.

‘Damn it…’

But there was nothing he could do.

Nevertheless, he continued to swing his sword, doing what he could.

*

Meanwhile, it wasn’t just Amon who was in a dire situation.

“What is this…?”

When Naberius suddenly entered phase 2, and Sonia escaped from the triple combo of pain, self-contempt, and false visions,

She realized her companions were nowhere to be seen.

Still pressing her throbbing head, she glared at the one who had brought her here.

“Speak, horse-head.”

As soon as she was separated from Amon, her speech became rough as if she had changed masks.

The horse-headed Orobas neighed and answered.

“My, what a rude young lady. Well, I suppose I can answer you.”

While Orobas hadn’t answered Kathy’s questions, he began to answer Sonia’s kindly.

In fact, he was excessively kind, beyond mere politeness.

“Originally, our goal was to spread a somewhat special drug to people using a fat regulator. To summarize briefly, we planned to induce violence and provoke war.”

But when that operation failed due to Amon and Sonia’s activities, he decided to cleanly abandon Neville Pharmaceuticals.

“After all, money will be meaningless when ‘that person’ arrives.”

Like a true demon, he had no interest in money or power. Instead, Orobas had other interests.

“But it was a shame to give up a Megacorp just like that. So I wanted to get my money’s worth before abandoning it.”

“?”

“Don’t you understand? Your companion isn’t the only one who can use precognition. All of this was to make you come to this building and be alone with me.”

Of course, the plan almost went awry due to Amon’s activities, but it barely succeeded by bringing out phase 2.

Toward Sonia, who still couldn’t believe it, Orobas extended a one-sided greeting.

“Welcome, Astaroth.”

Hearing those words, Sonia let out a deep sigh.

“I’ll say it again, I am not that person.”

“…What?”

Orobas adjusted his monocle in confusion. Then, with wide eyes, he said,

“Ah! I thought something seemed subtly different! Still, since there seems to be a connection between that person’s whereabouts and you, I should read your memories.”

Sonia raised her index finger.

“Don’t associate me with that woman.”

With those words, she entered combat.