Apotheosis of a Demon - A Monster Evolution Story

67 - FOLLOWER OF THE DARK LADY

I walked through the town of night, fiddling with the ID card I appropriated from the men in the subway.

I connected the card to my smartphone and used [Cyber-Manipulation] to read the info. The man was working in the material storage department. Hmmm... not quite what I was looking for. He looked muscular so I had thought he was one of the guards. If he was just a warehouse worker, there weren't going to be many places I could get in with his card.

And that wasn't my only problem. Once he noticed his ID card was gone and sent in a report, the card's going to lose all of its functions.

But I didn't think it was going to be that much of a problem. Further investigations revealed that reissuing cards would cost quite a pretty penny, and the card owner would need to go directly to the issuing office to get their card. Most people would probably go search for them first and only request card lockage once they were certain it was lost forever, right?

He just needed his mobile device to buy things, so I was thinking I'd probably have about half a day before I needed to worry about it... anyway, if things went wrong, I'd just make something up as I went along.

Besides, I could probably manage something about the card's privileges too.

"...the 12th research center."

It was inside a fifteen-story building in a semi-industrial district some distance away from the subway station. Or to be more precise, apparently the whole building was the 12th research center.

The 12th's purpose within the corporation was to hold the developer department of the game World of Yggdrasia. At the very least, they seemed much more likely to be aware Yggdrasia was a real world compared to the other departments, so there was no need for me to hesitate. Not like I intended to, anyway.

"[Cyber-Manipulation]"

I checked for any patrolling watcher drones nearby. I used my Skill to look through the cameras, then weaved through their blind spots to dash into the underground parking lot. I got in.

I might be able to handle the city's cameras, but I had no confidence I could use my Skill to completely fool the cameras of a place that took security as serious as this, so I just focused on moving through their blind spots. I went around behind the guard standing alone in front of the door, who obviously looked like he'd had experience in the army. I cut his throat with a quick swipe of my knife.

Had he been a mercenary before? He was unconsciously standing in a location where he wouldn't show up on the cameras.

I moved the body to a dark spot, freezing the spilled blood and vaporizing it into dust. I couldn't use my more obvious abilities here on Earth. I didn't want to stand out, true, but mainly I just didn't want to use those abilities too much.

It wasn't like Earth had no mana at all, but compared to Yggdrasia, there was way too little of it. Back there, my [Absorption] allowed me to recover thirty percent of my magic each hour. Here, I could only recover a single percent after three days.

I'd already spent close to thirty thousand magic points just to come here. While I still had fifty thousand left, if I froze and demolished the entire building and then it turned out it wasn't my target, no amount of mana could last me the entire trip.

Still, if I directly absorbed people's lifeforce with my hands instead of using my cold mist, then while people here didn't have magic, their souls would still refill a tiny bit of my own magic pool.

Honestly, while I had no personal grudges with these guys, my impression of the corporation wasn't so good that I'd bother picking and choosing who to spare in a pack of beasts that had bore their fangs against me. If anything, I hadn't even a single positive emotion to associate with them. They'd understand if I didn't bother to discriminate.