The Elusive Sorcerer

Chapter 150

After agreeing to the deal and taking the advance payment, Zavi hurried out of the bar.

The conditions outside were still the same. A yellowish-white fog continued to blanket the streets, while Zavi had already regained his perspective as a human after watching people pass by in front of him.

As he left the alley where the bar was located, Zavi suddenly remembered something.

'Is it because I hadn't gone deeper into Ource before?'

Zavi only realized that when he first arrived in Semilir, several hundred meters from the Ource station stop, the fog hadn't been this thick.

Going from one bar to another had given him a brilliant idea, yet strangely enough, Zavi hesitated to carry it out.

Eventually, several dozen minutes later, Zavi arrived at a hidden tavern concealed behind bamboo curtains and shells that clinked whenever someone passed through.

He sat in the same place as before, but first he ordered something so the employees wouldn't throw him out.

A glass of red wine, peas cooked with beef, salad, and pudding. Though inexpensive, the quality of this establishment was beyond doubt after Zavi himself had devoured the lamb liver and pecel lele specialty from Nature Province.

After receiving everything, Zavi used his clever idea and asked for covers to conceal the food he had ordered. As for the bottle of red wine, he left it untouched, allowing the dust and fog outside to contaminate the drink.

As the day grew brighter with each passing moment, Zavi prepared himself before letting his head fall onto the table, his face pressed against its surface.

His body froze for several seconds before Zavi's clone appeared several meters away from the tavern. From other people's perspective, his original body merely looked asleep with its face resting on the table. A simple strategy to avoid exposing the fact that he was a Receiver. Nothing more than that.

The idea sounded ridiculous to others, but Zavi still wanted to try it out of curiosity and to see how effective it would be to descend to the scene while his original body remained far away from his clone.

Zavi made his clone move through the yellowish-white fog, retracing the streets in search of the bandit leader whose detailed information had been provided by Luis, the man who had hired 'James Moriarty.'

The sun had set several hours ago. Night's darkness mixed with the evening fog, resulting in Zavi finding no trace of criminal activity in those troublesome narrow alleys.

The bandits and their leader were not such simple targets. They would strike after observing their victims from afar, determining whether the target was poor or wealthy.

If the target was poor? Whoever was captured would be given two choices, neither of which could truly be chosen. One, a painless death. Two, torture at the hands of a group of bandits, being forced to drink alcohol until their stomach burst.

If the target was wealthy? The bandits would wear exaggeratedly joyful expressions as if celebrating a victory, knowing that ransom money would soon arrive. They hardly cared about money anymore once the rich person's envoy appeared carrying the payment.

The security forces of Ource remained completely inactive while their citizens were terrorized by those vicious and cruel bandits.

Turning a blind eye, acting only in pursuit of fame, while the citizens were oppressed by their leaders and protectors without any means of resistance.

Zavi knew all of this. The bandit group known as Scratch Kesele committed acts that cruel and ruthless. Zavi had even compared their atrocities to those committed by Receivers or within the Hollow beyond, where side rituals existed that allowed one to fulfill the requirements for advancing abilities or strengthening contracted creatures.

However, comparing two evils did not make either one good.

Zavi knew all this because he had witnessed it with his own eyes, in western Ource, a deserted area that served perfectly as a criminal headquarters.

Although it was still connected to the neighboring territory beside Ource, Penplan, the road in front of the warehouse with its rusted iron roof worn away by time was extremely deserted.

The murmurs of conversation from inside the building ahead caused the air around Zavi's clone to grow cold.

The surroundings were dim, relying solely on moonlight that struggled to penetrate the dense fog of the night. Meanwhile, the streetlights could barely illuminate anything due to their fading energy, making the border road stretching fifty meters between Ource and Penplan feel like a place that stirred one's survival instincts with every step.

Yet Zavi's clone, perched atop a tree that had nearly turned to dust, leaving only a dry trunk and brittle branches, was not intimidated in the slightest by the surrounding conditions.

'So, I need to wait for someone to pass by and become a witness to James Moriarty's madness.'

Zavi's clone nodded at the order, patiently observing the surroundings, aware that the location where he stood could not be seen with the naked eye.

Minute after minute passed. Several bandits came and went, while Zavi remained silent, waiting for someone to pass by.

As the night grew later, Zavi let out a long sigh before moving forward.

With his revolver, Zavi instructed the clone to aim precisely at a rusty barrel on the left side of the building near the concrete fence.

Bang...

Those inside were startled. One of them came out to investigate.

In the blink of an eye, the man wasn't even aware of what had happened to his body.

Drip... Drip... Drip...

"Excuse me... is your boss here?"

The pale arm piercing the man's heart pushed even deeper inside. The man spat blood from his mouth. He wanted to say something, but his throat refused to cooperate. At that moment, he could only glance weakly upward, vaguely seeing a pale-faced man wearing a bamboo hat and an indifferent expression.

Zavi ordered his clone to pull its hand back, bringing the man's still-beating heart along with it.

Thump... Thump... Thump...

If he hadn't been a Prisoner Receiver specializing in surprise attacks, Zavi wasn't sure he could have kept the man conscious while holding his still-beating heart inside his body.

The moment the heart was torn out, the man was unquestionably dead.

Zavi ordered his clone to step over the corpse while continuing forward toward the sound of approaching footsteps that grew closer with every passing second.

Several seconds after moving through the building's waiting area, illuminated only by candles hanging on the walls and dim chandeliers, Zavi found several people standing ahead. Each carried a firearm aimed directly at him, ready to kill.

"Who are you?"

"Be careful! He might be someone sent by another bandit group," said a man with a serious gaze.

"Prepare to fire!"

Each of them raised their firearms. The muzzles of pistols and revolvers held by eight people were aimed at different parts of his body.

However, without their knowledge, two of the most venomous creatures in the sea and the world, transparent blackish-purple box jellyfish covered in a grayish-white aura, had manifested near the neck of the man standing at the front and the woman three steps behind him.

Slowly but surely, the box jellyfish stung eleven people, including the woman, with their soft tentacles.

Zavi immediately ordered his clone to advance, aware that they were not the target, merely the dogs serving the leader of Scratch Kesele.

The intruder's indifferent face ignored both their presence and their earlier questions, causing the man standing in front to hurriedly pull the trigger of his pistol.

Yet that attempt never came to pass as he felt a violent pounding in his chest.

The venom injected through the tentacles worked with terrifying speed and aggression. It attacked the heart, nervous system, and skin cells, turning the skin blue within seconds.

The cellular damage instantly released massive amounts of potassium into the bloodstream.

The extreme potassium surge triggered cardiovascular collapse and cardiac arrest.

Under normal circumstances, this fatal condition could occur within two to five minutes after being stung, but because those jellyfish were far from ordinary sea creatures, they could stop the hearts of all eleven victims within mere seconds.

Zavi let out a short sigh and continued walking as he heard a series of thuds behind him.

After circling the building, he encountered more of the bandit leader's dogs, making his effort to find and kill the leader drag on even longer.

'Is the bandit leader not here? Or has he already escaped on his own?'

Zavi speculated that the bandit leader was still inside the building, hiding in a secret room.

That assumption proved inaccurate when Zavi ordered his clone to inspect each room one by one.

The effort failed. He turned back with a long sigh, intending to blow the place apart.

One step away from the large door standing three meters high and one and a half meters wide, Zavi's clone paused for two seconds as it exchanged glances with three people standing beneath it.

"Who are you?" asked a man wearing a round-brimmed hat with a fierce expression.

"I've never seen you before, and why is it so quiet around here?" another man asked in confusion.

The man in the bowler hat grinned and said, "Does Sir plan to do some gardening at night?"

Zavi made his clone smile as the manifestation of the box jellyfish appeared.

"Yes. I got lost while trying to walk to my garden."

"What fruits or vegetables do you grow?" the man asked again, unaware that he was in danger.

While the bowler-hatted man's attention remained fixed on Zavi's clone, the two men beside him had already died from cardiac arrest.

Zavi's clone smiled faintly.

"Human-heart vegetables. Human-head fruits. They're excellent for your health!"

The bowler-hatted man's pupils widened.

"What did you say?"

Only then did he realize he hadn't heard any response from the two companions who had been standing beside him moments ago. Turning to the left, he saw both of them lying on the ground with their mouths wide open as though they had died in unimaginable agony.

"W-What exactly did you do?" the man asked with a trembling voice, continuously backing away. His thoughts were in disarray as he left the revolver hanging from his belt.

Zavi ordered his clone to raise the revolver, then calmly pulled the trigger through his control.

Bang... Bang... Bang...

The deputy leader of the bandits, who had been spouting nonsense earlier, died with gunshot wounds to his chest and mouth.

"Fuh... what a nuisance."

Zavi stepped closer to the deputy leader's corpse, recognizing him by the ring and the golden skull necklace around his neck.

'These people are such a pain...'

Zavi took the golden skull necklace and the blazing red ring as proof that he had truly killed the bandit leader.

As he walked out through the iron gate and along the cracked, moss-covered concrete fence surrounding the building, something with glowing red eyes deep within the darkness behind him, among trees that were nearly destroyed, watched from afar from the moment Zavi had arrived until the massacre of the bandits inside the building came to an end.