SSS Gacha Master: I Can Only Gacha Bikini Warriors-Chapter 50. It Didn’t Kill Anyone, but It Took Them

They walked through what had been the main street in a loose formation, weapons ready, with silence all around them.

Glacielle had a frost fan in each hand. Octavia’s tentacles were partially out, spread out in a wide sensing array, feeling the ground and the foundations.

"Tunnels," Octavia said. "Or there were. Something moved underground after the attack, clearing traces."

Marshal was crouched next to a door frame. "The way the damage happened is consistent with creatures coming in from the outside and moving in a coordinated sweep."

"This wasn’t random predation, but it was planned..."

"They took... everyone," Glacielle said.

She was holding a child’s wooden toy, a small carved horse that had fallen by the road and not been picked up. "It seems like he doesn’t care about anything that has happened."

She spoke in a calm and controlled way. "All of them are gone, even the kids."

She said, "We have to figure out what they want and how to stop them before they strike again," and her voice shook a little.

The heaviness of her words hung in the air, a haunting reminder of how urgent their situation was.

They found the survivor in a root cellar below what had been the innkeeper’s building. He was hidden under a false shelf that a careful search would have found eventually, but a quick-moving operation didn’t bother to check.

She was an old woman with white hair who was shaking with fear that was so strong it was almost like a physical condition.

They brought her out into the light carefully. Octavia produced water and food.

Marshal sat back and let Lucian handle the conversation, which was either a tactical decision or trust, and he’d stopped trying to distinguish between the two when it came to Marshal.

Senna was the name of the woman. She held the waterskin with both hands, as if someone might take it from her.

"You are safe now," Lucian said.

He intended his words to be a statement of truth rather than a means to comfort her, as comforting someone typically requires telling a lie, and she appeared to be a woman who had ceased to believe in such falsehoods.

"We’re not going to leave until you’re ready."

She stared at him. Then she looked at Marshal, who had crossed his arms and stood against the far wall, watching the door instead of her. Then back to Lucian.

"How many of you are there?"

"There are four of us here... I’m Lucian; Marshal; Octavia, who brought the food; and a fourth person outside to keep an eye on things."

Senna took this in. She drank a little bit of water, then a lot more. She said, "The others who came." "Before you, were they yours?"

"No."

"They moved quickly... and I heard them leave."

"We look closely," Lucian said.

A long pause happened.

To her credit, Octavia had moved back to the door and was watching the village—what was left of it—with the calmness of someone who knew that some conversations needed to be private.

"It came at night," Senna finally said. "A living thing."

Lucian nodded. "Can you tell me about it?"

She looked at her hands. "It had more than one head."

She stopped. "I’m not sure what the number is, but it kept changing..."

"It sounds like what you saw," Lucian said.

Her expression shifted; it wasn’t quite relief, but rather a release of tension as she stopped bracing herself. "It moved through the village with a purpose," she said, "not like a hunter."

"It’s like someone who knew where every house was and needed to check each one." She paused, then resumed her thoughts. "It had mouths on its hands."

The fire that Octavia had made outside crackled in the wind. Marshal hadn’t moved.

Senna put the waterskin down on her knee and stared at nothing for a while, and Lucian waited. He was adept at being patient. It was probably the most helpful thing he did.

"It didn’t kill anyone," she finally said. "But... it took people."

"And almost all of them went through some kind of portals. It was a purple portal, like a hole torn in the air."

"I heard screaming from inside them, and then I didn’t hear anything." She looked at her hands.

"This was the fifth village," she said. "In two weeks."

"The people who ran from the other four came through here and said the same thing happened in all of them...!"

"They weren’t killed, but they were taken."

Lucian glanced at Marshal, who was already calculating the numbers. Five villages in two weeks. If each village averaged two hundred people and Corvus was using human lives as fuel for mythic summons—just as Octavia had recognized and named when he had described it to her...

"One mythic summon needs about a hundred sacrifices," Octavia said in a low voice.

It was clear that she was answering a question he hadn’t asked out loud. "That’s magic that was banned after the Third Abyssal War."

"Corvus has been using the villages to stockpile." She stopped. "Assuming the estimates are right, he has enough fuel for ten mythic-level summons."

"If he’s been smart about it, he might have more."

The sounds of the forest went on as if nothing had been said.

Glacielle’s frost fans were in their holsters, and she stood very still with her hands clasped in front of her. This was how she stood when she was hiding something that would have been visible, and her hands were closed at her sides.

Octavia’s tentacles, which had pulled back when they found the survivor, slowly moved outward again. Lucian had begun to realize that this was how she expressed her anger when she was trying to hide it.

He knelt down in front of Senna and took her hands.

"Don’t you worry, ma’am," he said. "We’re going to stop him."

"I don’t have the words to make a promise like that right now that doesn’t sound empty. But I mean it..."

Senna stared at him for a long time. Her eyes had seen too much in the last few days to be easily impressed or comforted.

Then she nodded once, a quick, sure motion, as if she had made up her mind.

They gave her two weeks’ worth of supplies, the rest of the medical supplies that she didn’t need for combat, and directions to the nearest refugee column. She was able to walk, and she said she would.

Lucian set the pace himself on the main road, and it was faster than Marshal’s marching speed. No one said anything about it.

The capital was ahead of them, and smoke rose above it in columns that could mean a hundred things and probably meant all of them. Lightning moved in slow arcs through the thick clouds that had been building up since morning.

The deadline for the emergency quest was less than eighteen hours.

Lucian looked at his warriors.

Glacielle walked next to him with her jaw set and her eyes clear. The softness of the morning was gone, replaced by something harder and quieter that he knew was grief turned into purpose.

The wind blew through Marshal’s cape as she walked ahead and to the left. The Banner of the Unbroken Sun was strapped across her shoulders, and both Dawn Reapers were behind her.

Octavia walked at the front, fully present in a way she wasn’t when she was playing casual. Her posture was straight, and her tentacles were half-visible at her lower back, neither fully deployed nor fully hidden.

He thought about the people who lived in those purple portals.

He thought about a man who had spent months grinding resources to power an upgrade that let him use innocent lives as fuel for mythic summons. This man had called himself someone who just wanted to test his limits.

He thought about the second chance he had been given and what it was supposed to mean.

"I told myself this was about proving I could matter in this life," he said, mostly to himself, but the others heard. "Proving that I wasn’t going to waste the second chance."

Glacielle looked at him.

"It’s still about that," he said. "But mattering is bigger than I thought it was."

"That’s the difference between becoming competent and becoming necessary," Marshal said without looking back.

"We’re going to get those people back," Lucian said. "All of them! No matter what!"

And no one disagreed.

They ran the road straight toward the horizon and the capital beyond it, and they did it at a speed that left no room for doubt.