A Common Nostramo Rainy Night (1)

"The key to a successful hunt lies in silence."

Perched atop a massive bronze gargoyle, Wraith listened quietly to Kael. He was indeed born with an innate wealth of knowledge, but it did not include the lessons Kael was currently imparting.

He was still too young, too young to grasp the rules that governed the world beneath his feet. Being born with knowledge only brought him more confusion.

"As you can see, there are tens of thousands of gangs within Quintus. Their territories are divided with extreme precision, down to the most obscure little alleys. This means that if you aren't quiet, the sounds of your slaughter will be heard by other gangs."

"Are they not already accustomed to slaughter?" Wraith asked, puzzled. "Would they even care about noises coming from another gang's territory?"

"The sounds made by civilians and gang members when they die are different, Wraith."

Kael bared his teeth in a cruel smile.

"Civilians die and that's that; few of them have any attachment to life, and suicides are common enough. Where do you think the corpse incinerators get so many bodies without wounds? Do you think they all died of illness?"

"As for the gang members—you've killed them. Tell me, Wraith, what sound do they make when they die?"

"Curses," Wraith said after a moment's thought. "They curse me and say that someone will avenge them."

"Not just that."

Kael flicked his left hand, the smile on his pale face deepening.

"Gunfire, Wraith. They will keep firing their weapons. If you cannot mask the sound as I do, you had better stay quiet."

"Then why do you not mask those sounds for me?"

"Because this is your solo hunt."

Kael flexed the muscles in his shoulders and neck, his eyes narrowing.

"Listen, I will die one day. I am just an ordinary man; I cannot tear apart an armored vehicle with a wave of my hand like you can. And you, Wraith, you clearly share a common goal with me to some extent."

"So, I must teach you everything I know, so that even if I die, you can still change this hellhole. If that happens, I will be very happy, even in death."

Kael shrugged after he finished speaking. Wraith listened to him quietly, his expression calm.

He kept nodding, yet his expression clearly revealed a truth: he still could not fully understand what Kael meant.

Once again, Kael Lohars felt a sense of extreme irony at this innocence.

You naive little monster, why did you have to appear on Nostramo of all places?

Kael shook his head with a smile.

"Go," he said. "A gang—wipe them all out."

Wraith reached the edge of the gargoyle, but just as he was about to descend, he suddenly stopped.

He turned his head and said to Kael, "Slaughter cannot solve problems, Kael. That is what you told me."

"Yes."

"Then why do we keep purging these gangs?"

"Finish the mission. Clean them out without being discovered by other gangs, and I will tell you the answer."

"Really?"

"I have never lied to you."

Wraith did not hesitate further; he nodded and leaped from the top of the gargoyle. Kael watched him until the tall shadow completely vanished into the night, then let out a sigh.

"Only eighteen months old," he muttered to himself. "What kind of perverted lunatic created such a monster and threw him into Quintus?"

"The Skraivok family's coroner is dead," a bald man said.

He had no lips, and his face was so riddled with piercings that it was difficult to look at.

He was shirtless, with chains emerging from his wrists, buried deep into his flesh and extending to his waist, looking both eerie and terrifying.

The piercings were nothing; many gang members liked to add things to their faces to show they were different. Body modification was the same; sadists who craved pain were everywhere here.

But the missing lips were the point of the matter.

It meant he belonged to Tremor-Tooth.

It meant he belonged to a noble family in the upper levels of the hive city.

"I heard that woman had a custom-made metal arm, powerful enough to smash the head of a Sharp-Tooth Ox with one punch—how did she die?"

In the candlelit room, another woman asked.

She wore an ostentatious white dress, layer upon layer. Her waist was slender, and her exposed chest was soft and fair. She looked beautiful, but around her neck hung a necklace meticulously crafted from human bones.

The bald man glanced at her impatiently, his tone harsh.

"Are you just talking for the sake of it, Guvas? Everyone knows the Skraivok family is filthy rich; as long as you're willing to be their dog, you can have anything. Does it matter who killed her? What matters is where her body is!"

"Oh my, who knows, Konjar? Perhaps I really am just talking for the sake of it—but you had better speak to me with a bit more respect."

The woman smiled charmingly, her lips stained red with human blood slowly stretching wide.

"I recently acquired a batch of hallucinogens from the upper levels. If you don't want to wake up one day and find yourself hung up by your own subordinates, ready to be skinned, you'd better show me some respect."

The bald man known as Konjar let out a cold snort, raising his right hand to stroke his exposed teeth. His free left hand incessantly pierced the flesh of his thigh with sharp, pointed fingers.

He needed a little physical pleasure to remind himself—not to lose his mind.

"That's enough."

Inside the hall, another person who had remained silent finally spoke. Compared to Guvas's flamboyant court dress and Konjar's brutal style of body modification, he looked like the only normal person here in his black attire.

He said expressionlessly, "We have no connection to the Skraivok family; such matters are not for us to worry about."

"But the Skraivok family is always generous with their rewards, Prey," Konjar said. "Are we really not going to take a slice of the pie?"

"Anyone with the guts to murder a Skraivok coroner on the eve of the Great Purge is not someone we can handle."

Prey shook his head calmly.

"Besides, even if we were lucky enough to find her corpse, how would we resolve the questions the Skraivok family would throw at us next? They would certainly want to know who murdered their coroner."

Konjar nodded thoughtfully, a sharp contrast to the irritability he had shown while speaking with Guvas earlier.

"So, are we to announce a curfew?" the beautiful Guvas asked.

She squinted, and as she spoke, she took a syringe-like instrument from the handbag on the table.

Through the transparent casing, one could clearly see the intoxicating crimson color within.

"Not for now—and take less of that. The Type III Blood Mixture is far too addictive; you'll burn your brain out. Look at your lips; you're already addicted to human blood, aren't you?"

Guvas licked her lips, savoring the taste of blood, and nodded absentmindedly.

Merely gazing at the syringe caused her vision to blur; her breathing grew rapid, and a flush of red spread across her cheeks.

Konjar, watching from the sidelines, sneered.

This was how addicts of the Type III Blood Mixture behaved; at any unpredictable second, they would suddenly fall into the frenzy of a coming craving.

If they did not drink blood or inject a dose of the Type III, this state of madness would persist for several days.

Seeing this, Prey irritably picked up a gold-inlaid plate from the long table and threw it, knocking the syringe from Guvas's hand.

The woman's first reaction was not anger, but an instinctive, dog-like scramble to search the carpet, trying to retrieve the syringe.

Her behavior continued until a pitch-black leather boot stepped onto her right hand.

Guvas looked up and saw Prey's expressionless face.

"I really shouldn't have agreed to let you run the hallucinogen business," Prey said in a low voice, his left foot beginning to press down, grinding hard into Guvas's palm.

The bald Konjar grinned; Guvas's face turned pale with pain, yet she dared not move.

"You have absolutely no self-control, and that would be one thing. Your usual indulgences are irrelevant, but this is a life-or-death moment, and you're still thinking about a fix?"

Prey, frustrated by her lack of discipline, kicked out, sending the woman flying to the other side of the long table. He finally lost his patience and began to curse.

"Never mind which godforsaken family's private army that damn wraith belongs to, just look at the deaths of the Priest and the Razor! They were torn to pieces and dumped in that hellish church, and we're the ones who have to clean up the mess!"

"The Great Purge is coming soon, Guvas!"

Prey stood up from his chair, glaring fiercely at the bleeding woman. Her first reaction was not to stop the bleeding, but to incessantly touch her bloody nose with both hands, bringing the blood to her lips.

Her face was filled with a look of intoxication.

A look of undisguised disappointment finally appeared on Prey's face.

He looked at Guvas and spoke again. Because of this, he missed the black shadow that flickered past the window outside the room, and he ignored the faint sounds continuously coming from the rain.

Those sounds resembled flesh being torn apart.

"Konjar has made connections with Tremor-Tooth, which means we finally won't have to offer tribute to survive this Great Purge. Yet you are drowning in hallucinogens, unable to pull yourself out."

"Look at yourself. Even the dying 'black-lung' wretches in the factories are better than you—"

"...Prey?"

Konjar blinked, not understanding why Prey had stopped.

He was certainly happy to see Guvas punished or even stripped of her power and thrown out of the gang; he would have been delighted to teach this fool who dealt in hallucinogens a lesson. However, Prey's pause stopped everything.

He turned his head to look at Prey. Then, his eyes widened.

He did not see Prey.

To be precise, he did not see Prey's head.

A headless corpse stood swaying by the window, the foul-smelling rain pouring in, yet they had not noticed when the window had been opened.

Konjar stood up abruptly, drawing his gun while trying to shout, calling for the gang members waiting outside to come and help.

Unfortunately, he was destined not to do so.

A slender, pale arm had already moved first, gripping his throat.

"Goodbye," the wraith said politely. "Also, your window is very easy to open."

A dull thud sounded the next moment, and the last thing Konjar saw in his life was a piece of white bone stained with crimson blood.

Half a second later, as his consciousness began to fade into darkness, he finally recognized what that bone was.

It was a piece of a spine.

Whose was it?

With this question, he descended into an eternal, dark slumber.

Wraith tossed aside the head, still trailing a segment of the spine, and turned to glance at Guvas, the only one left in the room.

He had heard every word of the conversation between the three gang leaders from outside. He knew her name, and he knew of her addiction to blood.

In fact, the latter could be perfectly deduced from her current behavior.

No normal person would be sprawled over the corpse of a companion, ravenously sucking down blood.

Wraith walked toward her without a shred of pity.

Outside the window, the torrential rain continued.