Count Kai was in an exceptionally good mood. His tail behind him swayed from side to side in restless excitent.
He and his n would be the first to set foot on the human continent. So much glory and reward awaited him if he returned victorious.
Humans, to him, were nothing more than insects that would inevitably be crushed beneath their claws.
"Forward!" he ordered his troops.
At his command, several spider-like Calamities began spinning threads that hung suspended in the air.
Count Kai was the first to place his claws upon them and walk forward. Behind him followed ten barons and a hundred minor Calamities.
Count Kai did not share the duchess’s lineage. He and his n looked more like scorpions , four pairs of legs, two pincers adorning their heads, and a segnted tail tipped with a venomous stinger.
The webs extended as they advanced.
When they finally reached the coast, the threads dissolved on their own, and for the first ti, they set foot on human soil.
"There’s no one here. Keep moving, and kill anything you see!" shouted Kai to his subjects.
"Yes, my lord!" they replied, bowing before scattering in search of human life.
Kai didn’t stay put either. His senses spread outward as he began to search the area himself.
While Kai and his n dispersed, none of them noticed that soone was secretly tailing them, hidden beneath a veil of invisibility. Conrad.
He waited until the Calamities were far enough away before taking out his radio.
"My body’s tingling all over more than a hundred places where you can touch . I’m searching for the climax."
Conrad’s face flushed a deep red. He felt such embarrassnt at his own words that he almost wanted to stab himself.
The radios had a limited range barely a hundred ters so the candidates listening to his ssage were forced to repeat it word for word down the chain until everyone received it.
Each of them wore a different expression as they relayed Conrad’s coded ssage.
A few minutes later, a response ca through his radio.
"Keep touching , but don’t go too fast , I might lt."
"Don’t worry, my touch is divine," he muttered, then hit his forehead against a rock in despair.
From that strange exchange, he understood he had to keep following the Calamities while staying out of sight.
("Once this exam is over, he’ll pay for this no matter what.") Conrad swore to himself, pushing his vengeance against Sirius to a later ti.
---
anwhile, inside the cave that served as their hideout, Sirius sat alone beside his radio.
"My body’s tingling all over more than a hundred places where you can touch . I’m searching for the climax."
("More than a hundred of them... That must be scouts or their vanguard,") he thought, picking up the stones beside him and arranging them on the map he had drawn on the ground.
Seashells already marked the positions of each candidate and their hiding spots.
When he finished, he took the radio again.
"Keep touching , but don’t go too fast I might lt."
Almost imdiately, the radio crackled again.
"I... I’m about to co, I can’t hold it anymore!"
"How long before you’re done?" Sirius replied calmly.
It took so ti for the ssage to be relayed back and forth before the answer finally reached him.
"...Five minutes."
Sirius studied his map, locating Team 5, then grabbed his phone.
"A candidate’s been spotted by a Calamity near Team 5’s hideout. Can you take care of it?"
"Yes, yes, yes..." moaned Ronel.
Sirius almost told him they no longer needed to use coded speech since they were talking directly by phone, but he held back.
The strategy he’d designed was simple: the candidates handled detection, and Ronel handled elimination.
If Ronel was too far away, other teams would move in to provide backup, even if it ant taking down just one Calamity.
Sirius’s caution ca from a simple fact: he couldn’t determine a Calamity’s rank by sensing its ether the way one could distinguish an ordinary human from an Initiate or an Interdiate.
After all, Calamities contained no ether at all. As long as they didn’t reveal their true forms, one could easily mistake a Marquis-level threat for a re minor Calamity.
Because of that, Sirius had to take multiple precautions , even if it ant sending ten Initiates against a single minor.
A few minutes later, Sirius’s phone buzzed.
"Eliminated."
"So, just a minor?"
"Yes," replied Ronel.
"Good. Keep hunting."
Ti passed like this, and after two hours:
"This ti it was a Baron. With what the others have taken down, that makes three already."
"Understood. Next ti, try to keep one alive we need information."
---
Count Kai was growing impatient. It had already been over two hours, and he hadn’t seen a single trace of humans.
Yet his pincers kept picking up fragnts of strange voices.
And whenever he tried to make sense of them, he was stunned by their obscenity.
"I don’t understand... The sounds are coming from everywhere, and yet whenever I approach, there’s nothing."
("Are humans truly this depraved?") he wondered, baffled.
He assud these conversations were the result of humans mating, since there were multiple, distinct voices.
"How can I hear them if they’re not nearby? Are they hiding?" he muttered, scanning the area again without success.
Just as he was about to give up, another voice echoed this one much closer.
"I’m about to co, I can’t hold it anymore!"
"Show yourselves, filthy humans! Ether-filled bags of flesh!"
("Ether bags?")
"Yes... humans are nothing but ether bags," he realized.
If humans are bags of ether, then if I find where the concentration is strongest, I’ll find them there.
Grasping that obvious truth, he uttered:
>
His elongated body straightened, shifting into a humanoid shape.
In this form, it was far easier to manipulate ambient ether and therefore much easier to sense the "bags" that contained it.
It didn’t take long before he detected Conrad’s presence, invisible though he still was.
"There you are at last, you filthy, shaless, indecent insect!" he roared, his pincers snapping violently leaving no doubt in Conrad’s mind that he’d been discovered.
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