The United States is vast. Its sheer land area ranked fourth in the world in Seiran Mizunotsuki's previous life.
Therefore, no matter how anxious Yusaku Kudo and his group were, driving across the state still took a considerable amount of time. In their sudden haste, and unable to secure the immediate use of a private aircraft due to the Governor's sudden airspace lockdown, time became their greatest enemy.
As time passed, night fell and dawn finally broke. Yusaku and Hahn Cliff arrived at the outer boundary of the Longleaf Pine Forest's garden area.
However, Cliff's bad premonition grew stronger and stronger with every mile marker they passed.
'What's going on...?' Cliff thought, scanning the empty dirt road. 'Weren't so many ghostly things looking for me in town before? Now, not a single one can be seen or felt.'
Under normal circumstances, Cliff would feel incredibly fortunate to be free of the supernatural stalkers. But at this moment... the absolute silence felt like the eye of a hurricane.
"Be careful," Cliff solemnly warned Yusaku, gripping the human-skin book tightly against his chest.
The sky was beautiful at this early hour. The sun had only risen halfway above the horizon. The afterglow of the dawn made the scattered clouds look like a misty, golden haze. Beneath that misty haze, a vast, untouched ancient forest should have presented a tranquil and beautiful scene.
But at this moment, the tree line exuded a chilling, bone-deep sense of wrongness.
Frowning, Yusaku stopped the car at the edge of the dirt path. He felt that something was horribly off. Those corporate-funded bastards and the Environmental Girl's mob couldn't possibly be this quiet. Since they were aggressively preparing to clear-cut the Longleaf Pine Forest last night, they should be in a frenzy of industrial noise right now.
So, what happened here...?
Hmm!? Yusaku noticed a sudden, subtle change in Cliff's expression.
At this moment, Cliff felt an indescribable surge of emotion wash over his brain. He felt as if his soul had arrived at a vast and magnificent altar. He seemed to hear a massive, collective sound falling from the sky. A chorus of rustling whispers echoed in his ears, bypassing his eardrums entirely, as if guiding him in some mysterious direction deep into the woods.
Cliff grabbed Yusaku's arm, his blue eyes filled with an inexplicable tremor. "This way!"
The two men hurried out of the car, sprinting deeper into the dense forest. But Yusaku silently activated a high-tech, live-feed surveillance camera clipped to his lapel. If anything fatal happened to him and Cliff in these woods, Chief Gray, following far behind them, could still have some actionable intelligence.
The deeper they went into the forest, the clearer the macroscopic sound became. Even Yusaku was no longer confused, because his own mortal ears began to hear the whispers too.
However, the massive bloodstains painted across the leaves and dirt along the trail made their hearts tighten in terror.
Corpses.
So many corpses.
The environmental thugs were scattered everywhere. Some were shot with heavy buckshot. Some were brutally bludgeoned. But many, many more were violently torn apart, pierced by massive claws and fangs.
Yusaku's memory and forensic processing were pushed to their absolute limits. He noted clearly that there were probably hundreds of corpses littered across the forest floor in just this one quadrant.
With heavy, terrified hearts, the two men logically longed to return to the car and await the SWAT reinforcements. But the urging, supernatural voice in their heads could not be ignored. It dragged them forward.
Finally, they arrived at a massive clearing at the foot of a towering, ancient pine tree that seemed to reach the very clouds.
One glance at the base of the tree was enough to make them hold their breath in absolute shock.
What was that…?
Kneeling in a pool of blood was a two- or three-meter-tall "werewolf."
But this werewolf was not the typical, furry lycanthrope of common Hollywood perception. It was something far stranger, far more malevolent and eldritch. It emanated a dense, dangerous black mist that killed the grass around it. Its vaguely human face was contorted in agony, its massive, elongated claws stained deep red with the blood of the mob.
"Hahn…" the werewolf spoke.
Its voice trembled with grotesque sobs. Thick, black tears streamed down its monstrous, furred face. That inexplicable, crushing sorrow weighed heavily on Cliff and Yusaku.
"Hahn… I became a sacrifice... but I..."
'...What on earth happened here...' Cliff thought, mustering his courage to step forward. He could clearly sense the werewolf's "evil" radiating through the air, but strangely, this specific evil wasn't repulsive to him. It felt tragically familiar.
"Time is running out, Hahn..." the monster wept.
What? Cliff didn't know the full situation, nor did he know what occult ritual was happening here. But...
"BOOM—!!!"
"ROAR—!!!"
The heavens changed!
An absolute, apocalyptic natural disaster!
Yusaku looked up at the sky in utter horror. It had changed in a fraction of a second. The celestial phenomena were drastically altered by a localized domain!
Massive, unnatural clouds were gathering with impossible speed, swirling like spiraling tornadoes above the canopy. Thunder rumbled violently, and crimson lightning flashed in the dark. In just an instant, the thick, heavy clouds were already pressing down directly overhead!
It was terrifying, as if the physical sky were collapsing upon the earth!
"BOOM—!!!"
The earth trembled!
That earth-shaking tremor was far beyond the pale and powerless imagination of the ignorant public. It was an absolute natural disaster! Absolute, divine power! The violent clouds, stretching for countless miles across the reserve, were preparing to sweep everything away in a storm of wrath!
Under the raging, howling winds, mortal humanity was almost as insignificant as ants.
The kneeling werewolf was undergoing a chilling, violent transformation. Its massive body writhed and snapped, bones breaking and reforming, as if some larger, cosmic monster was trying to stretch its limbs from within the flesh.
Endless black mist began to surge violently towards the werewolf, seemingly trying to cocoon it and nurture an even more powerful, physical manifestation of "Evil."
"We don't have time, Hahn..." the creature gasped, its voice distorting.
"What!?" The deafening, raging winds made it impossible for Cliff to concentrate. He was trembling violently at the cataclysmic change in the world around him. Was he finally going to die...?
"No, Hahn! I need your promise... your promise to protect this forest..." the werewolf roared over the wind.
"Okay! I promise!! Quick! We have to do something!" Cliff screamed back.
"Then, Hahn... I'll try my absolute best to control myself and prevent that Thing from coming out of me. So, everything from now on... depends entirely on you..."
'Me? I have absolutely no fucking idea what to do!' Cliff was frantic.
Faced with this cataclysmic disaster that stretched to an unknown extent across the state, what could a mortal dockworker possibly do?
"Listen, Cliff!"
At this crucial, apocalyptic moment, Yusaku reliably found the tactical direction. The detective clung tightly to the roots of the ancient tree, trying to avoid being swept away by the unnatural hurricane winds.
"He's right! We don't have much time left! These celestial phenomena don't matter right now! The important thing is HIM!" Yusaku shouted, pointing at the cocooning werewolf. "Don't let him release that damn thing into the world!!"
I'm fucking trying! Cliff was even more anxious. He genuinely didn't know how to stop an occult manifestation.
The earth-shaking, celestial changes were truly terrifying. The fact that Cliff could even utter a few complete sentences at this moment was a massive testament to his unwavering, will and composure. Even in the raging wind, he could barely see what was directly in front of him.
Perhaps his performance was too pathetic for the ancestors to watch.
The heavy, leather-bound book suddenly slipped directly from Cliff's trembling hand.
In an instant, Cliff's eyes widened.
Silence.
The world was completely silent.
No. It was more than silence.
'The world... has stopped...'
Cliff dazedly picked himself up from the ground. The world around him seemed to have suddenly turned into a desaturated, gray mass. The raging wind was gone; the grass and trees that had been violently swept up were now perfectly suspended in mid-air. Yusaku, who had been shouting at him, was frozen like a statue, his mouth open mid-word.
Silence. Absolute stillness.
Cliff looked down. He saw the human-skin book suspended in the air before it could hit the dirt.
He saw its pages turning by themselves, bathed in a soft, golden light.
And standing beside the floating book, a hunched figure was faintly visible in the gray stillness.
"Father..." Cliff murmured softly.
And the hunched figure of Hahn Rasford nodded slightly, his weary face filled with pride.
> [My child. Remember your mission. Now, it is time...]
Cliff stared wide-eyed at the floating book.
The Old English inscriptions, word by word, were neatly rearranging themselves on the glowing page. They were vows.
This was the supernatural path that Cliff had to take to fully awaken as the next Baron Lionheart...
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