Chapter 199: Plucked Eyes Are Still Eyes
"Are you newcomers?"
A man in a striking red uniform walked in from the direction they had just come. He raised a pair of sharp eyebrows, his gaze sweeping over Haruto's trio. It lingered on Youmu for a few extra seconds, a flicker of excitement surfacing in his eyes.
"None of your business," Haruto snapped, stepping in front of Youmu to shield her from the man's view. He glared, pulling his parasol from the dark void of a gap that opened beside him and pointing its tip straight at the man's throat.
The sharp-browed man clearly hadn't expected such an aggressive response. Pulling a weapon without a single word of warning? Logically, any player who had survived long enough to earn a red uniform shouldn't have such a short fuse. Seeing the genuine threat in Haruto's posture—the unwavering point of the parasol suggesting he would strike at any moment—the man's bravado instantly evaporated.
He let out a dry, placating laugh. "Sorry, sorry. It's just been a long time since I've seen someone so… cute and beautiful. You're a lucky man, brother."
Having managed to survive this long, the man was no fool. Even though he could tell they weren't the same players who had been here before, he had no intention of starting a fight. He wasn't willing to risk his life for no reason; if he lost, he died, and if he won, what was the reward? Nothing.
"Who's your brother? Don't go around claiming relations you don't have," Haruto said fiercely, his voice low and menacing. "Watch yourself, or a palm might just suddenly appear from the sky and send you to meet King Yama on the spot."
The sharp-browed man's brow furrowed. An inexplicable chill surged up from the soles of his feet, coiling in his gut. For a terrifying moment, it felt as if a colossal hand really was hovering in the air above him, ready to slap down and extinguish his life instantly.
He took a deep, steadying breath, forcing the anger and fear back down.
'I'll be leaving this damn place soon anyway,'he thought,'so why bother arguing with a bunch of newcomers who probably won't live long?'
He moved past Haruto and the others, his gaze shifting to the sluggish, miserable beastmen working on the assembly line. His expression immediately darkened.
"Slacking off, are we?!"
The man yanked a short, cruel-looking whip from his waist and lashed out.
Crack! Crack crack—
The sharp, ugly sound of the whip echoed through the workshop. It bit viciously into the beastmen's bodies, tearing through their tattered clothes. The half-human creatures trembled in pain, their stifled cries turning into incessant screams as one bloody welt after another blossomed on their skin.
One of them tried to dodge, but his leg shackles caught, sending him tumbling to the floor. This only earned him even heavier lashes. He could do nothing but scramble back to his seat, his hands moving with desperate, forced speed.
The man in red whipped them harder and harder, one vicious strike after another. It was as if he were venting all the frustration he had just bottled up from his encounter with Haruto, pouring it out onto these helpless creatures.
A pig-man, his face a mask of agony, shot him a venomous look. The man noticed it, but the defiance only seemed to fuel his cruelty. He whipped the pig-man with even greater enthusiasm, his face glowing with the perverse pleasure of retribution.
Finally, under the relentless assault, the pig-man collapsed heavily to the ground. A small pool of blood began to spread out from under him on the grimy floor.
The sharp-browed man was about to give him two more lashes for good measure when his eyes caught something in a nearby corner—a scattered stack of ghost coins. They were the large-denomination red bills.
Haruto and Kaguya saw them too, but neither of them moved. The trick was far too old, a classic honey trap. Money didn't just lie around waiting for someone to pick it up for free.
The man in red, however, had already lunged for it. He greedily scooped up all the ghost coins, his fingers fumbling as he counted them. Wild, unadulterated joy flooded his face.
"I'm rich! It's the real deal… so many ghost coins!"
His triumphant cheer was cut short. In the middle of the stack of bills, he found a transparent glass bead, only about the size of a thumb, glimmering faintly in the dim light.
"What's this? A ghost artifact?"
He leaned in for a closer look but couldn't detect anything unusual about it.
"Whatever. It must be something good."
Just as he was about to stuff the ghost coins and the bead into his pocket, his entire body suddenly froze solid. Then, as if his very soul had been snatched from his body, he keeled over and fell straight to the ground with a dull thud.
Clatter…
The ghost coins and the small glass bead scattered across the floor.
Haruto's eyebrows twitched. He noticed the man's eyes were completely vacant, just like the animals they had seen earlier—the ones that had lost their sanity.
He cast a shallow, cautious glance at the glass bead and immediately understood.
'That's not a glass bead,' he realized.
It was an eye. An animal's eye.
"Don't look at that bead," Haruto warned his companions quietly. "It's an animal's eye."
Animal Zone Rule 1—Do not maintain eye contact with animals for long periods.
Haruto hadn't expected that the rule would still be effective even if the eye was plucked out of its socket. If that were the case…
'Heh. If you plucked the eyes out of all the animals here and scattered them in various corners, you could turn this entire Animal Zone into a forbidden area for most players.'
His gaze fell back on the sharp-browed man. He still had breath and a pulse, but his eyes were dim and lifeless, completely devoid of vitality.
"Did he swap identities with one of the animals?" Haruto muttered to himself. 'It looks more like a soul swap, but it likely wouldn't work on me. If it could, my innate intuition as a Boundary Youkai would have triggered a sense of crisis by now.'
If it didn't work on him, then Kaguya and Youmu were even less of a concern. For them, the first rule was effectively non-existent.
An animal missing an eye wouldn't be hard to find.
Haruto was just about to see which animal this poor fool had been swapped into—to see if he still possessed human emotions or was just like the other mindless beasts—when the pig-man on the floor began to wobble as he climbed back to his feet.
He slowly, deliberately unwrapped the filthy bandages around his right leg, exposing a gruesome wound beneath. The entire leg was nearly severed, held on by little more than a few strands of flesh and sinew. Even the bone and blood vessels were clearly visible. With the limb now free, he slipped the heavy iron shackle off what was left of his ankle.
He stood up, hopping on his one good foot. He grabbed a long wooden stick from against the wall to use as a crutch, then began to limp toward Haruto and the others.
Youmu's brow furrowed, her hand already resting on the hilt of her sword.
Haruto, however, wasn't nervous at all. He saw no hostility in the pig-man's eyes.
The creature crouched in front of the sharp-browed man's motionless body. He carefully picked up the glass bead, blew the dust off it, and then tucked it safely into a pocket in his tattered trousers.
Next, he hoisted the man's body onto his shoulder. Limping step by agonizing step, he headed toward a path on the left, passing by Haruto's group without a glance.
Haruto hesitated for a moment before deciding to follow. Kaguya and Youmu fell into step close behind him.
Five minutes later, they arrived in another chamber. In the center stood a large, industrial machine that looked disturbingly like a meat grinder. A domestic pig was tied to the conveyor belt leading into it, screaming frantically. Its right eye was a bloody, empty socket, and a fresh stain of blood streaked down its face.
Seeing this, Haruto could already deduce the cause and effect of the entire event.
The pig-man tossed the sharp-browed man's body onto the conveyor belt beside the squealing animal. Then, he took the eyeball out of his pocket and brutally forced it back into the domestic pig's empty socket. The intense, sudden pain made the pig's screams even more shrill and desperate.
The pig-man himself then sat down in the middle of the conveyor belt. He raised a trembling hand, as if to place it on the pig's head in a final, strange gesture of comfort, only to let it drop back down to his side.
In the end, he simply flipped the switch in silence.
The machine roared to life, and the conveyor belt began to slowly turn.
He remained motionless the entire time, allowing himself and the screaming pig beside him to slide together into the giant, grinding maw of the machine.
Haruto let out a soft sigh. He reached into a gap that shimmered open at his side. When he pulled his hand back out, he held a stack of ghost coins—the very same stack the sharp-browed man had just picked up.
Youki surged from his fingertips, and the ghost coins ignited with pale, ethereal flames, sending up wisps of blue smoke.
With a casual toss, he threw the burning money into the meat grinder as well.
He wasn't short on this little bit of cash. He might as well treat it as burning spirit money for this rather pitiful pig-brother.
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