After settling his own situation, Rai looked again at the man's corpse.
Since Marie had dragged them into this flesh-and-blood labyrinth by some bizarre means, it was obvious the Voodoo witches' underlings had also been sent in here to hunt them.
This was the enemy's home; they had to enjoy some kind of advantage.
Rai didn't know whether the man had found him through exact intel or just stumbled upon him, but he was sure of one thing: when that man was here, these meat walls hadn't attacked him.
With that in mind, Rai hoisted the corpse and dragged it to the pulsing wall of flesh at his side.
The wall didn't react to the corpse at all; instead, it kept "favouring" the living Rai further back with grasping arms.
"Some kind of identity check?"
Slashing off a new wave of pitch-black hands that lunged for him, Rai was about to put the corpse down when the meat wall in front of him suddenly shook hard.
Under his startled gaze, the wall split open down the middle to reveal a passage.
Not the kind that tried to swallow you, but a corridor that literally tunnelled through to the space beyond the wall.
"What is this, administrator privileges to the maze?"
Rai's face lit up.
With this body, he didn't have to blunder around like a headless fly anymore.
He could even follow the corridors all the way out.
Uh… and Marie was still outside. Maybe don't step out just yet.
He scanned around and noticed that in the area around the corpse, the walls had stopped pressing inward.
With that danger gone, he decided to find Zoe, Madison, and the others first.
How were they doing?
Hopefully not in trouble.
—
Meanwhile.
A good dozen walls away from Rai, in another corner of the maze.
Flames roared all around, licking the walls.
Zoe, shotgun cradled in her arms, sat in the centre catching her breath.
She hadn't run into any Voodoo witches, but the pitch-black arms that lunged out at all times from everywhere had drained her strength badly.
Without Rai's physique, she had no choice but to halt the search for Rai and the others for now and rely on fire to hold the walls at bay while she recovered.
--
Elsewhere
A pitched fight was exploding in one corner of the labyrinth.
Telekinesis, flames, and mind control.
Madison threw all three onto the field and soon put down a Voodoo witch she'd run into.
"Hah! Know your limits."
Experienced in real fights, Madison tossed the fallen witch a dismissive glance.
Then…
Head high, she literally stepped over the body and strode on, not even bothering to check her kill.
If Rai had been here, he'd have pulled a face.
Compared to Zoe and Madison's barely acceptable situations.
Queenie, who neither liked to land killing blows nor got lucky with who she ran into, had crossed paths with a strong Voodoo witch and was already captured.
"If the Voodoo Queen hadn't ordered me to keep you alive, I'd kill you right now, you turncoat."
A Black witch whose face was painted full of blood-red sigils spat coldly at Queenie.
Queenie's lips moved. Finding nothing to say, she only sighed and lowered her head.
Among the four young witches, Nan had the weakest combat power.
Her mind-reading let her hear thoughts within a certain range and avoid some Voodoo ambushes in advance.
But the same power also made her hear the endless shrieks from the flesh-walls, the countless hands, the tide of voices pounding her skull.
With her head about to explode, Nan dropped everything, clapped her hands over her ears, and ran toward where the noise was weakest.
She arrived only to be swallowed by the wall.
Lucky, in a way: wrapped in flesh, the noise finally eased.
Her ultimate fate was digestion, but in this spot, it seemed slower than elsewhere.
The rest would come down to time.
—
When the fog fell, it hadn't taken only Rai and the four young witches; Fiona was in it too.
But Fiona was not inside the flesh maze now. She still stood before the ruins she herself had levelled; the earlier black-red fog was gone, and Chantal, who had tried to block her, lay unconscious.
"Looks like it's just you and me now," Fiona said mildly, looking at Marie.
"You don't seem worried at all." Marie looked Fiona over, puzzled by her calm. "The young blood of Salem has been thrown by me into a flesh-and-blood elsewhere and is being hunted. An entire generation is about to be cut off. And you're not anxious?"
"Oh, I see now."
Without waiting for an answer, Marie drew out the vowel and needled her: "I knew you were selfish, but I didn't expect you to be this ruthless."
"You're dying; otherwise you wouldn't have come to me asking about immortality." Marie chuckled. "I've dealt with plenty of Supreme Witches and I know how your succession works."
"You're using my hands to kill those potential Supreme candidates. Very you, Fiona!"
Fiona's lids lowered; her voice went cold: "You're imagining things. If you've got that much time, use it to think about how you'd like to die."
Marie didn't care. "You want me dead? Plenty of time for that, let's wait. In a bit, those little witches will be corpses."
"Oh, and do you want to know the cause of my immortality? I can tell you now."
For a heartbeat, Fiona's heart shuddered. The hand she'd been raising dropped; fire blazed in her eyes. "What is it?"
Marie laughed at the dropped hand.
Fiona knew why she was laughing.
But compared to immortality, everything else was trivial.
If she got what she wanted, tonight's events could be buried forever.
Fiona pushed the killing urge down deep and asked again, "What is it? A Voodoo Queen doesn't go back on her word, does she?"
"I'm not you."
Marie snorted, but answered plainly. "I'm immortal because I signed a pact with a Great Being. It gave me eternal life, and I…"
"And you what?" Fiona pressed.
"I only have to pay something small each year." Marie's voice dipped on that line.
Fiona didn't notice.
Seeing the light of immortality at last, her eyes were ablaze. "A Great Being? A god? A demon? Whatever immortality is what matters. Tell me the name!!!"
"Its name is…"
"Say it!"
"It is…"
"Ahahahaha! You really thought I'd tell you its name? Let my enemy be immortal too?"
"Hope you can see but never touch!" Marie jeered. "That's the best revenge for you, an arrogant, blood-soaked, dying old hag!"
Marie's laughter cut Fiona like a knife.
"When you're in my hands, I'll make you spit it out, word by word," Fiona said through her teeth.
She moved.
BOOM!
A muffled thunderclap.
It was as if the sky shifted. Fiona pointed, and a colossal wave of telekinesis, made solid, surged at Marie like a flood.
"Don't you know everything you have, you learned from us?"
Marie reached out, contemptuous; an equally surging force of will shot forward.
Space wavered. The two powers collided, and a searing friction blasted outward.
Like a thousand birds screaming at once, the sound flayed the ears.
The dying ground split like a spiderweb from the impact point and raced outward in cracks.
When a fissure ran to her heels, Fiona tapped her stiletto and a flood of flame coiled into a regal dragon, racing along the rents in the earth straight for Marie.
She tossed back, casual, "Human origins may be in Africa, but that doesn't change the fact you were shipped here as slaves."
The fire came too fast for Marie to answer.
Her face flickered. She yanked a little poppet from her belt.
A childlike, eerie wail sounded; Marie vanished, and the poppet swelled to human size and took the flames in her place.
"Got you."
With divination and foresight, she had already fixed Marie's position. Fiona smiled thinly and swept a hand. Broken timbers, bricks, bits of furniture, all the wreckage flew home like birds to roost and bound Marie tight.
Fiona walked toward her, chin lifted, all hauteur. "So this is the famed Voodoo Queen? Seems those centuries of 'immortality' haven't built your power up; they've leeched it away. That's the price?"
"That's inevitability, not a price," Marie said, unmoving and unpanicked. "And even if I'm not at my peak, I'm still not someone you, a Supreme Witch with one foot in the grave, can beat."
She opened her mouth, and an ancient, uncanny ritual song poured out.
Fiona's face changed. She started to raise her hand when suddenly her vision slipped: men and women in leaf skirts and animal hide capes, ancient, savage, and mysterious, ringed her. Some held bone knives, some fire pans; snakes coiled on others' shoulders. They danced and sang a skin-crawling hymn, closing in.
They neared; the dead-white ritual paint on their faces came clear.
As they raised their "holy" tools and swarmed to make her the offering, Fiona's eyes changed, becoming calm as an icebound lake.
The vision shattered.
She cut the phantom hymn and came back to reality.
Right then, Marie wriggled free of her bonds, lips curling.
"Round two."
—
Elsewhere.
While the apex of the supernatural world clashed in the open, Rai was shouldering the man's corpse and moving from wall to wall, opening passage after passage.
In a spot he'd passed once before, he found scorch marks.
His eyes lit up; he quickened his pace.
Another wall split as usual. Rai lifted the corpse into the opening and stepped in, only to find a stranger right in front of him.
Perfectly timed, the stranger was moving through the same "privileged" corridor from the opposite direction.
A Voodoo witch.
She saw the dead man's face first and froze in reflex.
Rai didn't. He lifted his kukri and said hello.
"Ahhh!!"
The witch's scream ripped out.
Before she could get a second one, Rai's follow-up strike fell.
Unlike the reflex swipe just now, this one, aimed, was true. The Black witch's head parted from her shoulders as she howled.
She hadn't even had time to resist killed, just like that.
Only the new page that opened in the Grimoire of the Eternal Prison and the 80 points recorded there testified to how "valuable" she had been in life. "Much obliged."
For the first time, taking down something "supernatural" this easily, Rai cheerfully waved at the glaring head.
He dropped 40 points into Spirit, pushing it to the first cap at 2.0, and stashed the remaining 40.
Just like how hitting Physique 2.0 had awakened [Health], reaching Spirit 2.0 awakened a power called [Spirit Sight].
[Spirit Sight]: lets you perceive abnormalities ordinary people can't detect.
Perfect for ghost-catching.
Rai opened it and saw little wraiths keening inside the flesh walls.
Suddenly..
One of them lifted its head and grinned at him, feral.
Rai jumped.
He blinked; it was gone like it had never been.
"Weird."
He muttered, glanced around, saw nothing else, then looked up.
The meat walls were under three meters. Above that was the black-red fog he'd seen earlier.
He'd tried to climb and probe the fog before.
But right when he reached the lip, a kill-warning hammered his heart, and he backed off.
You only get one life; when your instincts yell at you that loud, you don't get stubborn.
Now, with Spirit Sight on, he looked again and saw something else entirely:
The black-red fog had thinned; in its place ran rivers of blood and a hellish, sunless miasma.
Beyond that lay pure void.
From time to time, a silver-white ripple so dangerous you felt it in your bones even from afar tore space and flickered through the emptiness.
Rai had never seen a scene like this.
In just a few seconds, Spirit Sight chewed through his energy and strained his eyes; he shut it down and thought.
He'd assumed the fog hid the real world; apparently not.
The flesh maze, however, was absolutely real, not a dream, not an illusion.
The two new pages in the Grimoire proved that.
And since he'd landed here the instant the fog fell over him, there was a very good chance the fog was a transport with a fixed destination.
Meaning he'd been shifted into some extra-worldly elsewhere.
He already knew Hell, in a literal sense, existed not for universal judgment and reincarnation, but as the turf of wraiths and monsters, so he wasn't shocked.
Still, he had to admit: the Voodoo witches had serious reach. They'd somehow seized and worked this place.
A thousand-year tradition does keep its secrets.
But what about the Church?
The biggest faith in the world, and holy water and the cross do nothing?
He still remembered the scene where the evil spirit slapped both the Bible and the cross out of his hands like they were toys.
With the situation now clear and nursing a faint grievance against the Church, Rai pressed on.
Who knew how many Voodoo cultists had been sent into this place?
Before long, rounding a corner, Rai ran into another Voodoo witch.
The man's corpse, he'd been carrying up front, the trick that had worked so well last time did nothing now.
Compared to that green, young voodoo witch who'd died under two quick cuts, this old crone was far more seasoned. In the very first instant, she dropped all pretence of dignity and rolled, didn't care if she snapped her old back, and vanished from Rai's line of sight.
Rai frowned, dumped the corpse, clenched his big kukri in his right hand, and sprinted after her.
Squelch.
With no warning at all, a bloody hole opened in Rai's right arm, spraying bright red.
Pain shot up; his fingers loosened; the kukri clattered to the floor.
What the hell?
Rai's face changed hard.
He hadn't seen any attack, so why the sudden wound?
That old crone was playing dirty?
Not bothering to grab the kukri, Rai whipped around the corner at top speed.
And there he saw, not far off, the old witch clutching a straw-woven doll in one clawlike hand, its right arm pinned with a silver needle.
Seeing Rai show up empty-handed, she cackled twice, raised a bottle of sinister, dark-green liquid to her mouth, and drained it in one go.
In the instant that followed, her whole body shuddered like a seizure; then all signs of age fell away. She blurred, ghostlike, flickering to different spots around him.
Experienced as she was, she gave Rai no chance to lock on with his gaze.
Not only that she produce another silver needle and viciously stab the straw doll's right leg.
Squelch.
At the same time, a spurting line of blood burst from Rai's right thigh.
"A Voodoo doll?!"
Rai's face tightened as he took it in.
With a human-shaped Voodoo doll living in the house, he knew exactly how nasty this art could be.
But unlike Queenie, who'd slit her own throat without blinking, this old hag was oddly fussy… or simply limited.
In the instant that thought flashed by, Rai's thigh muscles bunched; he clamped the wound under control and charged the old witch without losing any speed.
Thanks to the system's refit, his Physique wasn't just powerful; he had fine control over every part of his body.
A Voodoo-doll backlash that would cripple a normal person didn't count for much, short-term, against him.
Seeing Rai still coming full tilt, the old crone's face changed; a cruel light flickered; she raised the new needle, aiming straight for the doll's head.
An invisible force stopped the tip.
She knew what that was: the target's own power resisting.
Queenie's doll-craft was freakishly overpowered. Leave that aside. Normally, unless the gap was absurdly large, you didn't just pin the head for a one-shot kill. You worked the limbs and body to grind the target down, then finished the job.
She hadn't expected two pins to still not be enough to finish the job. She didn't want to do it, but she had no other choice. She pointed the needle at the doll's left leg and, as she stabbed…
Her eyes went vacant; the hand holding the needle paused.
Rai's voice followed: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, there won't be a third."
Clarity snapped back into her eyes.
Her face had only just changed when..
Whoomph!
Flames sprang up on the Voodoo doll and, in a blink, reduced it to ash.
No time to mourn it, the old witch bolted.
Too late.
While she'd been hesitating over that "one-shot" that wouldn't take, Rai had finally fixed her position, hit her with Mind Control for a beat, then summoned flame and destroyed the doll that posed the real threat.
With her trump gone, she was just an overamped old lady, easy to handle.
Crack!
A neck-bone snapped.
Catching up, Rai twisted, breaking her neck in one move. A fresh page opened in the Grimoire.
[+120 points]
Seeing the far larger haul than from the man and the young witch, Rai felt downright cheery.
Setting everything else aside:
In a brief span, he'd downed three sorcerers, banked a month of breathing room, and collected over two hundred points. This place was a gold mine for him.
Under normal conditions, when would he ever run into this many lone witches?
And Voodoo witches preferred the shadows, snakes, roosters, cords, fetishes; eerie dance and chant to curse you from afar, not bare-chested frontal assault like this.
But Marie, the Voodoo Queen, had created all this.
Honestly, Rai had to thank her.
In a cramped, twisting maze like this, sometimes a blade beats any spell.
"Next up: seize this once-in-a-lifetime chance and be a proper witch-hunter." Cold light flashed in Rai's eyes.
He checked the Grimoire. Nothing in the new entries would boost him instantly, so he dumped all points into Physique and Spirit.
When a lion hunts a rabbit, it still goes full force.
And in this labyrinth, closing fast and killing clean was the best play.
[Physique: 2.0 → 2.6]
[Spirit: 2.0 → 2.2]
After 2.0, each 0.1 costs 20 points.
Counting what he'd stashed, he'd had 160 in total; most went into Physique.
As his body refined again under the system's "stat points," new surges of power bloomed. Rai clenched his fists, excited.
And those Voodoo-doll wounds? As his body upgraded, they began knitting and soon stopped affecting his movement.
"Didn't expect Physique points to come with some healing."
He hadn't gained a formal "Regeneration" or "Rapid Heal." His baseline recovery beat normal, sure, but not like this.
Clearly, the points are at work.
"Looks like I should keep a reserve top up mid-fight if I'm hurt."
He eyed the two corpses on the ground: the old witch and the Black man.
With the lesson of the old hag's quick reaction learned and with the man's body actually hurting his ambush game, Rai had no interest in lugging a whole corpse anymore.
But he still needed the walls to open for him and the grabby hands to ease off.
He thought it over, retrieved his kukri, and took the man's head.
When did I get this calm? He wondered, toting a dripping head, when once he hadn't been able to watch a chicken get slaughtered.
He shook his head.
In a world this warped, surrounded by people just as warped, if you don't want to die, you adapt.
Head in hand, he walked up to a meat wall.
As before, a passage split open within.
So be it, travel light, with just the head.