"Master Haruyama," Stas crouched in front of the bound man who was being held by a disguised Kenta Rinako.
At the moment, they were all dressed in simple, nondescript cloaks and dark masks.
Ordyntsev didn't want his distinctive armor to attract anyone's attention and for "news of certain Shiro's suspicious activities" to reach Io.
Having arrived at the coordinates specified by Minoru, namely, in the city of Gushto, Stas faced the inevitable question: where specifically should they look for the item they needed?
Kaede, who had been taught by her mentor to search for and sense chaos, proved to be very helpful at this point. Ordyntsev had already heard that yokai were far better than anyone else at detecting the presence of this energy, destructive to all living things.
Now, he could see it for himself in practice.
The girl seemed to be listening and simultaneously sniffing out a call or scent that only she could perceive.
When a puzzled Kenta asked a question and found out who Kaede really was, he muttered something like, "Why am I not surprised?" and fell silent for a long time. Stas didn't interfere.
It took three days for Kaede to pick up the trail.
Eventually, her instincts led them to a building near a mansion owned by one of the wealthy nobles.
Casual inquiries among the residents revealed curious information.
The owner, Master Haruyama, turned out to be an avid collector of various curiosities.
A more obvious target would have been hard to come up with.
The capture also went without any problems.
Although the noble's guards included samurai skilled in controlling prana, there were no blade masters or sensors among them. And since the incident happened at night and the guards had nothing to counter a combination of illusions and shadows, they all jointly went to sleep until morning.
A half-open window allowed them to get inside. Haruyama was then subdued and delivered to the main hall of his mansion, where Ordyntsev was waiting for him.
And the conversation immediately went off the rails.
"Masters, I'm just a modest noble. I've tried not to cross anyone's path. If you want something from me, say it, I'll do everything, just don't kill me," the noble's words surprised Stas. He expected a completely different behavior. Usually, local powerholders, even in a hopeless situation, continued to cling to their honor.
This one broke down too quickly. Suspiciously quickly. Nevertheless, such behavior was worth encouraging.
"Calm down, Master Haruyama," Stas nodded reassuringly at the frightened man around thirty years old, with thin, slicked-back mustaches and an absolutely smooth chin. "We only need one single thing from you. Being a collector, surely you grasp how certain individuals desire to own items that are not easily obtained. What are they prepared to do to acquire such things?"
"Naturally, you're not going to say who hired you, right?" the noble asked irritably. The news that another collector was behind the warmasters who had broken into his house did not please him.
"Then we'd have to kill you." Ordyntsev shrugged, speaking of it as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
"Alright, alright, I'll give everything. Just don't kill me, I beg you. Help me up. We need to go over there, yes," the collector nodded toward the side corridor.
Ordyntsev nodded to Kenta, who abruptly hoisted the noble to his feet, causing him to wince in pain.
A few more turns and corridors, and they reached an unremarkable dead-end with a table and a full set of samurai armor on it.
Behind the armor, on the wall, there was a wooden carved panel depicting something resembling a lion.
"You need to press its second fang," Haruyama gave another instruction. Kaede stepped forward, but Stas stopped her with a hand gesture.
Ordyntsev had seen movies and knew how such stories could end.
"Master Haruyama," Stas looked suggestively at the nervous noble. "You understand that we'll get what we want one way or another. And I really hope you haven't decided to do something foolish, like heroically sacrificing yourself?"
"N-no."
"Then press the button yourself."
One of the man's hands was untied, but he was still held firmly. Hesitating, Haruyama pressed hard on the fang, but not the one he initially pointed to, but the adjacent one.
The wall to the right shuddered and, sinking slightly inward, slid to the side, revealing stairs leading down.
"Glad we understand each other," commented Stas as several lanterns were pulled out, and the darkness was dispelled by the flickering light of fire.
The warmasters, along with the noble, began to slowly descend the wooden staircase, looking around carefully.
Soon, their path ended as they stood on a stone floor. A warmaster had clearly worked here; the surface was too even.
The noble pressed an inconspicuous button on the wall. At that exact moment, seals on the ceiling began to increase their glow slowly.
Kenta quickly bound the disgruntled Haruyama again.
Stas looked around.
A long corridor branched off into dozens of alcoves, which contained boxes or simply hung various items.
Most of the exhibits looked old and spoiled. Time had not spared them. For instance, there was an entire section of broken swords, spears, and axes. And judging by their appearance, they had clearly been dug up from somewhere.
Most likely from someone's grave. Not the most peaceful and safe business in this world.
"I like to collect different antiquities," Haruyama said, noticing the unimpressed looks of the surrounding warmasters and, for some reason, started to justify himself. "But you talked about some item. What exactly do you mean?"
Ordyntsev looked intently at the sweating collector.
"Some six months ago, an ancient artifact was delivered to you, which is several centuries old. A magical and very dangerous item. Worse, it's related to chaos." If Stas hadn't been expecting exactly this reaction, he wouldn't have noticed it.
For a moment, the noble's gaze flickered, betraying himself instantly.
"I'm sorry, but I don't... Ahem." The collar tightened by Kenta's hand didn't let him finish.
"Now, the truth," Ordyntsev advised.
"You're making a big mistake," Haruyama grumbled, glaring at the warmasters from under his brow.
"Lead the way."
As it turned out, at the end of the corridor, there were several locked doors. Haruyama approached one of them.
At that moment, Ordyntsev's nerves tensed to the limit, and from Levi came a sense of fear.
Even Kaede looked confusedly at what seemed to be an ordinary wooden door.
For a second, it seemed that the surrounding light dimmed a few tones when the noble turned a suspiciously pale face to the warmasters.
"Please step back. Beyond this point, there is nothing that you want."
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"Open it!" Stas barked. Kenta, holding the collector, tensed, ready for anything, but they still nearly missed the attack.
Haruyama exploded with pieces of flesh, skin, and rot, almost splattering Ordyntsev and the supreme.
The bounding him ropes were still falling to the ground along with the skin they had previously held, but the seemingly ordinary man, turning into a monstrous creature, had already leaped towards a hesitating Mari.
Kaede was gasping for air next to him, nauseated by the spreading chaos.
But Mari's father proved his rank. Suddenly appearing to the right of the flying collector, he slammed him into the stone wall with a forceful kick, forming a huge crater.
The building around them shook from the impact but held.
The bad news was that the creature that had crushed the wall with its body was also intact.
Ordyntsev managed to spot suspicious symbols tattooed on the inside of the skin lying in a bloodied heap of ropes. Now, it became clear how the servant of chaos managed to hide the emanations he radiated from the yokai.
It was better not to think about what kind of person would tattoo their skin on the inside with runes.
The monster, now looking like a skinless zombie oozing green ichor, tried to get out of the hole, but his arms and legs were quickly sucked into the walls, immediately stiffening.
The squinting Stas finished the technique. He could have used a live specimen of a chaos creature.
"Shiro!" Kaede's panicked cry made him turn around and swear.
From several previously locked doors, having broken the barriers, a wall of rotting, bloated bodies poured out, in which it was no longer possible to recognize people.
Many of them sported horrific mutations and additional, repulsive limbs. Inflammations and tumors of various kinds bounced in time with their disorderly steps.
Some, under the influence of chaos, had managed to fuse together, forming a writhing and moaning heap of bodies, shuffling with a dozen legs.
'The vague rumors of people disappearing, unfortunately, turned out to be true. Damn my luck! Why, of all earthlings, it was me who had to end up in such a mess?'
Ordyntsev's nerves were severely frayed by the sight of all this horror. He involuntarily remembered those scenes he had tried so hard to forget.
The rot that covered the Great Serpent bore a suspicious resemblance to the surrounding filth.
Only a dart released by Levi prevented the collector from closing his elongated fangs on the neck of the distracted Stas.
Realizing that the stone holding his hands and legs was indestructible, the chaos creature simply abandoned its limbs, growing several centipede-like appendages from its belly, with which it leaped at the earthling.
Having received a steel dart in the rear, it hissed furiously, but choked when a ray of pure ether hit it in the head. Its power was weaker than what was used against the renegades, but it was enough to blow up the monster's skull.
But the chaos spawn clearly refused to die. Its flesh rapidly changed, growing some sort of armor from bursting pustules, and fountains of hardening filth began to erupt from the holes where its limbs had been.
Stas, with a stone face, treated the mutating monstrosity in front of him to several ether strikes, then encased it in a stone sarcophagus. Only then did he check how his subordinates were doing.
And things were bad.
There were far more chaos-altered creatures than expected. The collector managed to deceive them, hiding the ambush even from Leviathan's gaze.
Worst of all, Kaede's illusions worked very poorly on the chaos spawn, and the shadows also slowed them down weakly because, in the confined corridor, there was nowhere to hide.
The most productive were Kenta, sowing death, and Leviathan, leaving entire clearings with her telekinetic strikes.
But it couldn't go on like this. Stas felt the sarcophagus being pressured from the inside, and something nasty was clearly happening with the chaos servants' corpses lying around.
"Get ready to break out of here!" Stas shouted, sending a stone explosion into the wall opposite the door they wanted to enter.
And he did it for a good reason.
Shrapnel from the stone debris tore to pieces the dozens of green tentacles reaching out from the room.
Looking inside, Stas barely suppressed the urge to vomit.
He couldn't be shocked by the sight of someone's innards or parts of someone's "inner world," but the pulsating horror around him clearly no longer belonged to something a person could look at without consequences for their psyche.
And in the center of all this trembling abomination was a piece of metal, glowing with mystical light, which, upon closer inspection, could be recognized as part of a huge shoulder pad.
Once a mere part of an archdemon's armor, it now seemingly tried to break free and escape - until Ordyntsev swept it into a pre-prepared runic container he had bought from Takehiro Satoshi.
The crafty old man didn't even ask Stas why he needed such a thing; he just slyly smiled, demanding his price in knowledge.
The piece of the shoulder pad indignantly clinked against the wall but still fit inside. The container lid clicked, and the chains of runes, in turn, lit up green, showing that the chaos protection was working.
At that exact moment, the surrounding monsters howled and, losing the will that controlled them, started to tear everything around them to pieces.
"Run outside!" the group, fatigued and tormented by the horrors they witnessed, burst out onto the surface like a cork from a bottle and rushed away.
Around, the awakened and confused servants and guards of the mansion ran. The underground tremors from the battle made them think of an earthquake, and the birds screaming in panic in the sky only fueled the disorder.
At that moment, Stas was extremely busy.
He hadn't forgotten about the filth into which Haruyama had turned. Right now, the demon brought into this world by the artifact was trying to destroy the stone prison encasing him to get to his offenders.
Too bad Stas wasn't going to give him a chance.
They stopped only when they had managed to put a somewhat significant distance between themselves and the mansion. From this vantage point, they had a splendid view of the buildings, between which people scurried about in fright.
Another minute and Ordyntsev completed his preparations.
Stas knew that, most likely, a large part of the servants and warriors were clean and not defiled by the influence of chaos, but the risk was too great. If this filth began to spread, there would be trouble for everyone.
This time, the ray of destruction formed as if it were a gentle dog, just waiting for its master's command.
The humming black laser rushed towards the mansion, pierced the wooden structures, penetrated the stone, and hit the chaos spawn that had emerged from the sarcophagus.
For about a second, the pile of rotting flesh resisted the seething ether, but then finally gave in to the quantitatively superior energy.
The mansion and all the nearby territories were engulfed in a deafening explosion and a black cloud of corrosive ether.
Even the warmasters standing at a distance were struck by the shock wave. Fortunately, Kaede, who stood in front of Stas, managed to shield him.
After a few minutes, the ether began to dissipate, revealing a black crater and debris scattered around.
And although Ordyntsev really didn't want to delve into this ash pit, there was no choice. They had to make sure that everything had perished.
Fortunately, that was indeed the case. The ray of destruction was more than sufficient for this small mansion and its much larger underground part.
Having finished, Ordyntsev and his subordinates quickly fled.
They had no desire to answer many uncomfortable questions from the local daimyo.
At the same time, the gray container, flashing green, ominously swayed on Ordyntsev's belt.
The evil locked inside it was already trying to undermine the protection of its new prison.
After all, chaos corrupts, and nothing can stop it.
*****
Stas looked doubtfully at the locked container, placed in a complex multi-tiered runic circle. The last one was drawn by Kaede, using onmyodo knowledge. She understood this topic much better than Stas. Ordyntsev was planning to rectify this matter, but there just wasn't the opportunity yet.
However, the girl warned Shiro that her knowledge was by no means a panacea. Yokai killed demons, they didn't study them. Therefore, the protection could not be considered solid.
This was bad news, but it changed nothing.
It had been a month and a half since the destruction of the mansion, and only now had Stas decided to deal with the chaotic artifact.
The reason for the delay was simple - it was not so easy to find a time when assignments kept pouring in.
Nevertheless, after another mission, Stas managed to snatch a week, which he intended to spend in hastily created underground rooms.
Ordyntsev immediately warned everyone about the danger of his upcoming research, so his subordinates were on alert.
Having already reached out to the container, Stas froze, hesitating.
The more he witnessed the capabilities of chaos, the less he desired any association with it.
But there was no choice.
If he wanted to resolve his issues with the Great Serpent, he had to learn to fight this damned energy.
However, there was no further possibility to delay.
Slowly and carefully, Ordyntsev hooked the lid and tossed it aside, then quickly withdrew his hand and listened to his sensations.
Silence.
Stas felt nothing.
Assured that the runic protection was working, he finally looked inside.
Now, the piece of the shoulder pad looked disappointing. No glow or other illumination. But this time, the intricate runes and the depicted skull of some toothed animal were much better visible.
If you roughly match the size of the piece to the whole shoulder pad, it turns out that the owner of this wardrobe element was at least twice the size of an ordinary human, minimum.
Stas shook his head in irritation.
Is this fair?
When a yokai is born, a lot of knowledge and skills are already embedded in their essence. They are immortal and capable of becoming immaterial.
Or take dragons, who are born with everything they need to become great.
Apparently, demons are also born giants.
And only humans in this chain lack everything possible.
That's why humanity has always sought ways to make up for its shortcomings.
Stas didn't know much about chaos, if only because Minoru also didn't have much information on this topic, but he remembered something.
The last invading archdemon came from the plane of rot. His followers were always known for their lack of fear of death, incredible vitality, and... immortality.
Of course, for its sake, these followers had to sacrifice something.
But such is life, isn't it? Isn't it impossible to achieve something without sacrificing time or effort for it?
Stas had already walked this path, losing part of his human appearance, so should he fear the gifts that chaos offers? After all, those same serpentine eyes were useful. So maybe chaos isn't that bad?
After all, he was the one who always sought immortality, and should he reject the path that leads precisely to eternal life merely because of some native superstitions and clueless spirits?
A powerful blow to the head sent the dazed Ordyntsev away from the container.
'Who dares?' flashed through his angry mind, but Stas couldn't get up in time because his arms and legs were seized, and he was sprawled on the ground.
"Shiro! Shiro! Come to your senses already, for Kami's sake!"
"W-what?" Stas blinked and looked in confusion at Kaede, Mari, and Kenta, who were leaning over him. Turning his head, he realized that he was being held not only by serpentine coils but also by Leviathan's telekinesis.
"He's awake! Levi, you can let go," Kaede said happily, but Mari stopped her.
"Wait. Master, are you back to your senses? Are you no longer compelled to speak in an unknown language? What do you want now?"
"To sleep," the earthling admitted honestly to his subordinates, who exchanged glances. "And to throw this vile artifact straight into the nearest volcano!"