"Most creatures can’t handle Oragon because it’s too pure an energy, and what’s more, too heavy. Their souls would collapse trying to contain it."
She said this, a notion Ryuk really couldn’t completely understand, but now he could at least imagine what it felt like to possess Oragon.
"Happy now?" she asked with a hmph, rolling from her seat to stay beside Iris, who had already quickly fallen asleep.
"Hey, you haven’t shown me your unique skills yet," he added, but all he got was a scoff.
"I already explained to you most of the important skills. You also didn’t show me your Hurricane skills, did you?" she said, something he couldn’t really argue with, and in the end, he could only drop it.
Suddenly, he felt a thrumming from the side of his head, and a moment later, his Amma comms opened up.
He found a message bolded, his heart quickening in high hopes, but when he opened it, it wasn’t quite what he was expecting.
He couldn’t identify a name on the message, just a couple of weird symbols that showed whoever owned it hadn’t deleted the initial auto-generated name and put in theirs, but the message read:
[<<Need some blood>>]
His eyes furrowed in thought.
Only a single person could have sent him that.
His hand reached out and he typed:
{<<Are you genuinely reaching out to me, asking me to come all the way to your place for some blood? How tyrannical>>}
He sent it back, waiting a couple of seconds before a reply came.
[<< I really need it. Got myself into a little trouble >>]
’Odette in trouble? Yeah right, like hell I’m believing that.’
He thought, unimpressed, but then his eyebrows furrowed when he saw the green light on the comms disappear, meaning the Amma comms signal was off.
The only way for the Amma comms signal to be off was when one falls asleep, in other words, unconscious.
’This is weird.’
He didn’t waste any more time sitting as he rose to his feet and moved to the elevator.
Zaffre heard the sound of his footsteps, but she didn’t attempt to ask him where he was going.
She only watched him leave.
When she felt his presence completely disappear, she sat up on the sofa, turned over to look at Iris to confirm she was asleep, then moved to the TV and switched it on.
Quickly browsing through, she clicked on a save option, and there, she found a video she had previously discovered but couldn’t watch due to Iris and Ryuk’s presence.
She could only quickly save it, and now, she could watch it.
In the video, a chaotic fight was captured by the satellite.
Her eyebrows furrowed as she gazed at the being, completely covered in thick, purple veins, with a terrifying, explosive brute power that crushed everything in his path.
The purple runes on him were familiar, but even more so, the timing of the fight completely matched when Ryuk said he needed to be somewhere.
’Is this him? No, I’m sure it’s him.’
’To think...’
______
It was early in the night, just around 8:23, when Ryuk arrived before Odette’s mansion gate.
It was as gigantic as ever, the walks around continuing with nothing amiss.
He entered and pushed open the mansion door.
He was expecting some purple woman in a crown sitting on the sofa with a mischievous grin that couldn’t conceal her pride, but he was proven wrong.
She wasn’t sitting on the golden sofa, and the entire living room space was empty and unnervingly quiet.
His comms appeared, and he tried to check on her connectivity.
It was still down, meaning she was still unconscious.
He switched off the comms and continued up the stairs.
’Perhaps, she’s in one of the rooms.’
And true enough, it didn’t take long before his ears picked up on a heartbeat.
He navigated his way through the ginormous mansion and came upon a door.
He knocked twice but didn’t get a reply, so he grabbed the knob and pushed the door open.
Before him was a cozy room of purple, dim purple lighting diffusing from the lamp on the bedside desk.
It faintly illuminated a figure half hidden within the sheets.
"Hey Odette, you okay?" he asked, stepping closer to her.
There was no reply, but when he arrived by her side, he finally knew why, and the scene made a faint gasp escape his lips.
The woman on the bed was the same Odette he knew, but right now, there was something different.
On her neck, there was a dark patch of shadowy veins that thrummed as if alive, and in their center, a gash of darkness roughly carved across the side of her neck and down to her shoulders.
One look and he could tell she had been slashed by something and, from the squirming dark veins, also poisoned by it.
’How is this possible? Odette is stronger than I am. Just who was she fighting with?’
[She’s 100% out.]
The system notification blinked as he looked down at it.
[Epic Quest: Defeat a Nihil is still ongoing.]
The flashing panel made an idea appear in his mind, only to be pushed away just as quickly as it came, and he asked:
’Do you really consider stabbing an unconscious person to death as a defeat?’ he asked the system, and it replied.
[So far, the stab leads to her death, then it’s still a defeat.]
’Deactivate system,’ he ordered, and the panel disappeared.
While he saw something alarming:
Someone like Odette being knocked out cold by something, or someone, was a signal that if he had fought that thing, he would have most likely met his end.
All the system saw was an opportunity for Ryuk to finally complete the epic quest by killing her while she was fully knocked out.
It was the one imperfect thing about the system: it was too logical.
WHEEEEZZE
A faint wheezing from Odette pulled him out of his thoughts, and he climbed onto the bed to get a closer look at the gash.
It was clearly the reason for her unconsciousness, and Ryuk only needed 30 seconds of studying before he figured out what was really happening and how to cure it.