I'm the Only One With a Different Genre - Chapter 156

Chapter 156

Return Lian!

***

At the moment when the Necromancer was being soundly defeated by Jess and Iris, Noah was in a pit dug about three meters deep, gasping for breath, staring hopelessly at her blood-soaked hands.

“Hah… Hah…”

Her breathing was harsh, her throat tight with fear, anxiety, and sheer terror. Her whole body felt as if it had been submerged in ice water, growing cold and numb.

Once neat and orderly, her hair had become a disheveled mess, and her face was smeared with dried tears and dirt. Her lips were cracked and bleeding from how hard she’d been biting them.

“Ugh… Hah…”

A mournful cry seeped through her parted lips as she bent forward, her back curling in on itself. The sheer weight of misery and guilt bore down on her spine.

Memories of past horrors—long forgotten in the peace she’d grown accustomed to—came flooding back, scattering her thoughts in cruel and chaotic fragments. Regret settled over her like a tightening noose, suffocating her without mercy.

“…”

At some point, Noah had stopped clawing at the dirt with her broken nails, no longer letting out groans of pain. An eerie silence settled over the space, the only sound being the cold wind blowing past her.

Thud.

Her bloodstained hands pressed down against the dirt floor mixed with tree roots and rocks.

“Ugh…”

With a small groan, she staggered to her feet. The brilliant green of her eyes had lost its luster, now clouded and gleaming with dangerous resolve.

In the past, when she still lived in Cardishian, Noah would have wallowed in endless despair, dragging herself into her own personal hell. She might have even, in the peak of her anxiety, tried to harm herself.

Noah knew now that such actions were nothing more than attempts to alleviate her own guilt. She was no longer the foolish child drowning in tears.

Her gaze, which had been fixed downward like a blade on a guillotine, slowly lifted toward the sky. At the same time, a terrifying aura began to unfurl around her.

Boom – …

The trees outside the pit swayed violently as if caught in the throes of a hurricane, while the invisible force of Noah’s magic spread throughout the entire forest. The overwhelming amount of mana surveyed every inch of the surrounding area, bringing the information back to Noah.

‘I need to find the cause…’

The hotter the anger burned, the deeper the despair, the colder her mind became. Only by chilling her mind could she make rational decisions. The principle that had never worked in front of Lian was finally proving effective today.

Noah quickly went over the information in her head.

At first, when she had been frantically digging through the dirt, Noah had believed that the ‘unknown monster’ had used the plant-type monster ‘Raphl’ as bait, and that ‘Raphl’ had used something that mimicked a human appearance as another bait.

If she had thought about it logically, it would have been easy to realize how absurd that theory was. However, after seeing Lian disappear right in front of her eyes, Noah hadn’t retained even a shred of rationality, and it took her far too long to understand.

‘Something is controlling the entire forest. That thing swallowed Lian.’

A chilling, murderous aura spilled over her otherwise expressionless face. Her cold, inorganic eyes rolled downward, gazing at the ground. Maxing out her mana had heightened her senses to the point where every unnatural energy that filled the forest became apparent to her.

Her power spread faster than a shot arrow, picking up the movements of Nero and Lily as they moved with a few knights, Jess and Iris pausing amidst their conversation to glance around in response to Noah’s strange aura, and even the Rangers fiercely battling monsters.

But none of that mattered to Noah, whose mind was set on one thing and one thing only: rescuing Lian. She ignored everyone else’s presence as she extended her power further and further.

It wasn’t until she had the entire forest nearly enveloped that—

Boom!

“!”

At the edge of her expanding reach, a revolting energy, too thick and sticky to describe in words, was detected. It was nauseating, like the stench of maggots writhing on a decayed corpse.

“…Found it.”

Noah’s eyes turned a cold, dangerous shade of blue.

Boom!

In an instant, Noah leaped out of the pit and shot forward at a terrifying speed. Watching the trees blur by, her already split and bleeding lips were bitten once again.

‘If only I’d used my full strength from the beginning… I could have saved Lian.’

Noah believed that Lian was lost because she had failed to act decisively, but that wasn’t the truth. The real reason she could draw so much power now was because she was in the midst of a partial berserk state.

Noah’s mind, consumed by a mixture of sharp guilt and festering rage, only fueled her further down the spiral of self-blame. The berserk state progressed rapidly.

Thud! Thud!

As she rushed forward, the trees were knocked down, bushes smashed underfoot. After sprinting for a while, the fog around her began to thicken.

The closer she got to the heart of the forest, the fog grew heavier and more disorienting. Noah expelled the fog around her with her mana, held her breath, and kept charging forward.

Crack… Boom!

A barrier that the Necromancer had constructed stood in her way, but it tore apart like a mere piece of paper before Noah’s overwhelming power.

Breaking through the fog, the sight before her opened up to a wide, open space. The first thing she saw was a huge lake, glowing red like blood, and the strange creature standing atop it.

“Khh… Grr?”

It—the master of the forest—had taken the grotesque form of a stag. Its large, gnarled antlers were full of holes, as if they had been gnawed upon by insects, and the head attached below was halfway rotten, with part of its skull exposed.

Its back had melted away as though rotted, yet its legs remained strangely intact, still covered in hide and fur. Fetid black energy oozed from its hollowed-out head and decayed back.

Even Noah, who had seen her fair share of corrupted beings during her time in Cardishian, felt revulsion claw at her throat from the sheer foulness of the creature’s aura.

The corrupted energy that poured out of the monstrous creature’s body constantly dripped into the crimson lake. Its hideous appearance was enough to stir primal fear in humans, but that wasn’t the worst part.

“Krrrr…”

The being had once been a revered spirit, long dedicating itself to guarding the forest. Its dignity and sacredness, however, had transformed into a suffocating sense of menace and strangeness after it had fallen into corruption.

The power exuded by the creature was so overwhelming that an ordinary person would’ve fallen into shock or died of a heart attack on the spot. Even Noah broke out into a cold sweat.

Every instinct she had screamed at her simultaneously: Run. Get away from that foul and terrifying thing!

“…Give him back.”

Noah, willingly suppressing both her instincts and reason, took another step forward.

“Give Lian… back!”

She shot forward, sword now tightly in hand. Her mana-clad feet skimmed across the surface of the lake as if it were solid ground. The energy from the corrupted lake made it possible to run with even a small amount of mana.

The glowing sword zoomed towards the neck of the forest master. The creature slid backward as if gliding, but that alone wasn’t enough to escape the sword’s range.

Crack.

Its neck bent grotesquely to avoid the deadly blade by a mere hair’s breadth.

Splash!

From the creature’s stripped back and head, the foul energy gushed up like a massive rock thrown into a pond. Noah stepped back, gritting her teeth, as she stood her ground against the overwhelming aura emanating from the forest master.

Thus, the battle began.

***

Meanwhile, at that very moment, Lian was searching for a way to escape the underground with the Duke.

“Looks like there’s no choice but to break through the ceiling.”

“…That really does seem like our only option.”

Suppressing his unease, the Duke reluctantly responded to Lian’s suggestion.

“Ugh… We can’t just break through it carelessly since it might collapse… Oh, would you like another drink?”

“Please.”

Pour.

Lian had pulled out a small white tea table from his bag and seated himself in a sturdy wooden chair. The chair, seemingly of high quality, gave off a pleasant fragrance, and intricate designs were carved into its surface.

On the tea table rested a set of elegant cups and a teapot full of a fragrant tea that neither the Duke nor anyone else had ever tasted before.

‘…I’ve never had anything like this. And it’s clearly high-quality. Where on earth did he find such a tea?’

It was nothing more than a barley tea Lian had summoned using his gag filter, but to the Duke, who had never tasted a roasted grain tea before, it was a shockingly novel flavor.

‘Why do I keep wanting more? And… how in the world does that bag hold so much? How expensive must it be to fit so many things in there?’

Although space-expansion bags were fairly common, their price wasn’t cheap. The larger the interior space, the more astronomical the cost—but Lian’s bag seemed to be able to produce an endless supply of items.

Before long, they had transformed the underground chamber into a rather well-equipped campsite.

End of Chapter