Northern Continent, United Kingdom, Hibernia, Isle of Man.
Early autumn was the finest season on the Isle of Man.
Clouds occasionally drifted in from the fog-shrouded sea, and the maple leaves on the branches gradually turned yellow.
Fireworks rose into the sky like reverse-flying meteors, painting the sky—not yet fully claimed by night—in every color.
Amid the noisy, lively music, lavishly dressed young people took to the streets and danced to the drumbeats.
Lamps were lit in every street and alley, and couples whispered sweetly at outdoor tables.
Tonight every resident of the city was a devotee of pleasure, leaving not a single space for negative emotions.
If you sat by the roadside nursing a drink in silence, a warm and beautiful young hostess would immediately pull you into a shop and coax you with sweet words into ordering a full table of signature dishes.
Tonight was the Festival of the Merchant God, a traditional holiday of Hibernia.
Yet few people still remembered the name or deeds of this deity.
People only knew that tonight was for spending and revelry.
The Church of All Saints was a monotheistic faith that recognized only the transmitted Great God Ein as the sole true god of the cosmos.
The tradition of the Merchant God Festival originated from the ancient polytheistic beliefs of this land.
The clergy naturally refused to acknowledge such heretical faith and had launched several campaigns of conversion across Hibernia, yet they could never completely eradicate the deeply rooted folk customs.
In the end they had no choice but to compromise and permit the retention of these traditional festivals.
This was thanks to the customs of the Wind Folk.
They lived by the creed that “life is nothing but a joke” and advocated enjoying the present moment.
On this land, young people neither yearned to become respected monks nor sought to become knights who achieved great deeds.
Making money and satisfying material desires were the true pursuits of the Wind Folk, and thus a flourishing commercial culture and entertainment industry had developed.
Hibernia, composed of the Wind Folk, was a nation of merchants.
Seventy years ago the Tara royal family had been unwilling to swear allegiance to Queen Christine.
Yet the wealthy merchants were seduced by the trade blueprint that encompassed the entire Northern Continent.
Under their various methods of coercion and inducement, the King of Hibernia ultimately offered the crown that had been passed down through generations to Albion.
In the years that followed, the merchant guilds became the most loyal guardians of the municipal hall system, and the feudal lords declined in power as a result.
For merchants, newly appointed poor bureaucrats were far easier to handle than those stubborn landlords.
The Isle of Man was no exception.
The young count of this city, persuaded by the merchant guilds into investments, had fallen deep into debt and finally been forced to mortgage the family castle that stood in the center of the urban district.
That castle was now a well-known high-end hotel in the local area.
Tonight, however, it was not open to the public.
Guests who came intending to dine were turned away by sword-bearing guards at the entrance, and not a trace of the carnival atmosphere could be felt.
Someone had reserved the entire hotel, yet only a single banquet table had been set.
The string orchestra was busy tuning its instruments, and the chefs carried one brilliantly plated dish after another to the table.
The host of the banquet sat at the center of the long table.
He was a rugged man with hard facial contours.
Though he had already entered middle age, his physique remained robust and powerful.
“Colonel” Coven.
It was said that he had once been a renowned naval colonel of Hibernia.
Later he had been caught in a political whirlpool and squeezed out of the military, after which he came to the Isle of Man and became a ship merchant.
Leveraging the network of connections from his naval days, he had gained control over the ship trade in these waters.
The colonel was smooth in his dealings.
He spoke loftily with nobles and wealthy merchants, and showed care and charity toward ruffians and the poor.
As a result he enjoyed considerable prestige in this city.
Municipal officials and gang bosses alike sent him gifts during festivals, hoping he would look after their businesses more.
This man, who held extremely high prestige in both the underworld and legitimate circles, had suddenly received a letter the previous week.
The moment he opened the envelope, his expression had turned grave.
It was an official document from a certain agency.
The contents of the letter were brief and direct: “Seven nights from now, our representative will travel to Man to consult you on several questions. Please reserve the time in advance and report the meeting location to the local municipal hall.”
At the end of the letter was the emblem of a ferocious three-headed hound.
Its savage face seemed ready to devour everything, sending a chill down one’s spine.
The colonel’s subordinates did not recognize the emblem and thought it was a threat letter from some cult group.
But the colonel himself understood that he had already drawn the attention of the Cerberus Bureau.
On the night he received the letter, the colonel had not slept at all.
The next day he ordered his men to hire a group of mercenaries and killers from the surrounding cities.
At this moment, dozens of gun muzzles in every corner of the street were trained tightly on the hotel.
A black automobile approached silently and stopped in front of the empty hotel entrance.
The guards at the door instinctively pressed their hands to the hilts of their swords.
Behind the windows on both sides of the street, the cold gleam of gun muzzles flashed.
The driver respectfully opened the car door, and the visiting guest stepped down.
It was actually a girl of fifteen or sixteen.
Her face was slightly pale, yet her crimson eyes were extremely sharp.
She wore a set of well-tailored jet-black military uniform.
The hem of the skirt swayed gently with her steps, and those long, firm legs were clad in black leather boots that stamped out a ringing, powerful rhythm.
On her right arm, a burning Fire Rose medal stood out conspicuously.
The gunmen hidden in the shadows silently put away their guns.
No one dared to act rashly.
When Claire alighted, her scarlet gaze swept across every sentry post where they lay in wait.
Claire followed a white-clad attendant into the hotel and sat in the seat opposite the colonel.
“…Colonel Coven, may I address you that way?”
Claire narrowed her eyes and took the folder in her hand to check against the photograph.
“Just call me Coven. How should I address you, Your Excellency?”
The colonel conducted himself with polished courtesy.
“Call me Cheshire Cat. I belong to the Fourth Agency of the Cerberus Bureau.”
“Honorable vampire miss, I know a little about the functions of the Cerberus Bureau. May I ask whether your scope of business has now expanded to ordinary people like myself?”
The colonel remained polite, yet a trace of wariness and hostility was hidden beneath.
Claire sighed and took out a credential from the pocket of her upper garment.
The black leather case bore the military emblem of a cross and shield, indicating that Claire held military status.
“Even if the Cerberus has no authority to investigate you, the military department certainly does, former naval colonel. Don’t be nervous. I only need to ask you one question.”
The colonel gave a slight nod.
He did not wish to dig up his military past, yet the other party had surely already reviewed his file, so denial would be useless.
“Interrogation is not my specialty, so let us speak frankly. In the Kent incident, the terrorist organization Mutual Aid Society used a large sailing warship to transport the demonkin from the local containment zone.”
“After verification, that ship had once been a transport vessel of the Hibernia naval fleet. After the fleet was disbanded, the Tara royal family sold the former warships at low prices to several ship merchants. You were the buyer of those four transport ships. You are suspected of having sold the ship to the Mutual Aid Society. Those terrorists cooperate with only a very small number of humans, and we suspect you are one of them.”
“Correct. It was indeed this humble one who purchased those transport ships. Later I converted them into merchant vessels, but my superstitious clients were all unwilling to take over ships that had once been used in war. They remain berthed in my shipyard to this day…”
The moment the colonel finished speaking, he sensed something amiss.
Memories that should not have existed surged into his mind.
In those memories, he had signed a sales contract for the transport ships with a buyer dressed in white robes.
He could even clearly recall the scene of putting pen to paper on that contract.
When the colonel tried to delve deeper into the beginning and end of that contract, a heart-piercing pain exploded in his brain.
His hands began to tremble uncontrollably, as if something were awakening inside his body.
“Impossible… this is impossible, vampire miss. I am willing to accept your investigation. Please take me to Londinium!”
The colonel knew that something terrible was happening to him.
He wanted to explain to Claire, yet found that even his tongue was trembling beyond his control.
“Don’t play sick. Aren’t you the big shot who walks both the black and white paths? It shouldn’t be like this!”
Claire rose helplessly to observe the colonel’s condition, yet inadvertently glimpsed a hair-raising scene.
The musicians and chefs inside the hotel were all convulsing violently, as if this were the site of some cult ritual.
Thick, constantly flowing black mucus surged from the colonel’s collar and cuffs.
Countless tiny tentacles writhed and spread, finally completely enveloping his body.
The colonel’s cloudy eyes were swallowed by profound blackness, leaving only two clusters of burning white flames.
His teeth became sharp and uneven.
Claire watched his transformation in silence, then sighed.
“So you are a member of the Mutual Aid Society?”
“This human is merely my host. I am a descendant of the Lord of Myriad Transformations! Despicable vampire, you appeared here precisely to kill me, did you not?”
The colonel’s voice had become deep and hoarse, like an evil ghost crawling out of hell.
Claire shook her head.
“Sorry. I thought this operation would only uncover your trading network. I didn’t expect to fish out a slime like you.”
The Lord of Myriad Transformations, the fourth Demon King, had been a pure elemental being that possessed the ability to parasitize other creatures.
The Lord of Myriad Transformations had once melted the limbs of hundreds upon hundreds of demonkin into a single giant body with a thousand hands and a hundred eyes, then possessed it to ascend to the surface.
After being slain by the holy sword, it had split into countless fragments.
These fragments had gained life, and this race was known as the Shapeshifters.
When a Shapeshifter underwent multiple deaths and divisions, it would lose its intellect and degenerate into the low-level monsters known as slimes.
“Proud vampire, it is not that you caught me, but that you stepped into my trap!” The Shapeshifter that had seized the colonel roared, then raised its right hand high.
Black mucus extended into sharp spikes from the tips of its fingers.
Claire fixed her eyes on the Shapeshifter’s right hand, wary of its attack.
Yet the Shapeshifter suddenly opened its bloody maw and unleashed an earsplitting scream that made Claire freeze for a brief instant.
Immediately after, the attendant behind her kicked over the chair she was sitting on, causing her to topple backward.
The convulsing musicians flung aside the string instruments in their hands, pulled long guns and short cannons from the instrument cases, and surrounded Claire layer upon layer.
In the instant before Claire hit the ground, the girl in the military uniform vanished.
In her place, a blurred figure flickered at high speed in the Shapeshifter’s eyes.
Roars, wails, the shattering of ceramic tableware, the chaotic gunfire, and the sound of blades leaving their sheaths and cutting through the air intertwined throughout the hall.
After a brief moment of chaos, the hotel lobby returned to silence.
The attendants and orchestra members who had been locked in confrontation a second earlier now lay scattered across the tiled floor.
Black mucus identical to the Shapeshifter’s crawled out of their bodies and struggled to writhe toward the Shapeshifter.
“You divided your body and parasitized these poor wretches with the fragments. A bold strategy, but human-wave tactics are useless against me.”
The girl’s cold voice rang beside its ear.
The Shapeshifter froze in place, for at that moment Claire was standing right in front of it, wiping a short blade with a blue-green edge.
It understood that in an instant Claire had used the flat of the blade to fell every ambusher present, and it had not even been able to see her movements clearly.
The Shapeshifter did not answer Claire.
It deeply feared the vampire before it.
Colleagues in the Mutual Aid Society had said that during the liberation operation in Kent, a vampire had slain the warrior responsible for covering the rear, and that warrior named Azog had been armed with steam armor.
The next moment, the Shapeshifter abruptly crushed the test tube in its hand and poured the liquid inside into its mouth.
It was still the color of a rainbow in the dark night—without question, Demon Spinal Fluid.
With a bang, its back swelled exaggeratedly.
The originally writhing tiny tentacles suddenly ballooned like the roots of an ancient tree.
Those roots wound layer upon layer around the colonel’s body, actually forming external muscles, and its figure inflated until it resembled a giant.
The Shapeshifter raised its head and let out a hoarse roar of fury, yet it discovered that Claire had already sheathed the short blade.
In her hand appeared a pistol of absurdly large caliber.
It was a Can Opener that Liz had modified, capable of loading only two rounds, yet those specially made high-explosive bullets were enough to pierce the outer shell of a Steam Knight.
The Can Opener fired two successive booms, the muzzle spitting a foot-long tongue of flame.
The Shapeshifter raised both arms as a shield.
It held absolute confidence in the strength of its body, yet in the next second fragments of black mucus flew before its eyes.
The bullets had blasted apart entire chunks of the black muscle armor, piercing straight through the colonel’s own arms and exposing pale white bone.
The next moment, on the long street opposite the hotel, dozens of guns opened fire simultaneously.
The barrage shattered the glass of the floor where Claire stood, forcing her to duck low and take cover.
Only then did Claire understand that the hosts parasitized by the Shapeshifter’s fragments were not limited to those inside the hotel.
The gunmen lying in wait on the street had long since been parasitized as well, and that roar had been the signal to awaken the fragments.
With the host’s arms crippled, the Shapeshifter no longer had the strength to continue fighting and could only take advantage of the covering rain of bullets to flee up the stairs.
By the time the Shapeshifter climbed to the rooftop, it was already midnight.
Festival fireworks soared into the air and bloomed before its eyes.
Tourists throughout the city were cheering at the top of their lungs, and without anyone noticing, the gunfire had already ceased.
The Shapeshifter suddenly looked back.
Sure enough, Claire had already appeared behind it, like an inescapable ghost.
The Shapeshifter was standing at the very edge of the rooftop.
Claire was slowly closing in again.
It had nowhere left to retreat, yet that grotesque mouth now curved into a bizarre smile.
The layers of black tentacles winding around the colonel rapidly withdrew.
The middle-aged man’s body collapsed like a kite with a broken string, and at last a pool of black mucus abruptly scattered into the air.
This was precisely the Shapeshifter’s escape route.
Behind the hotel ran a canal that cut across the island.
As long as the main body could fall into the river water, it could parasitize aquatic creatures and escape.
The rising fireworks illuminated the tumbling black mucus in the air with multicolored brilliance.
The next moment, a silver bullet struck that pool of mucus.
Only a second later did the boom of the gunshot echo through the night sky.
It was a silver bullet that had come whistling from the higher urban district.
Its speed exceeded the speed of sound, so the bullet arrived first, and only afterward did the gunshot follow.
It had been fired from a specialized sniper rifle whose power even surpassed that of the sharp Can Opener in Claire’s hand.
The enormous impact, combined with the special restraining effect of silver bullets against demonkin, caused the Shapeshifter to lose all vitality in an instant.
It fell powerless onto the hotel rooftop like a pile of mud.
What the Shapeshifter had never expected was that the rooftop itself was the final trap.
Claire’s mission had only been to drive it here.
Claire collected the unresponsive Shapeshifter into a jar, then raised a thumb toward the direction from which the bullet had come.
The fireworks blooming in the night sky also illuminated the upper city district.
On the terrace of a restaurant, Liz lay on the balcony railing, savoring coffee that was still giving off steam.
Her white dress fluttered in the night wind, and beside her sandals stood a large-caliber rifle.