“Devil? Is that you, devil?”

“No, dad, I already told you. He’s not here. He will be back though, I’m sure of it.”

The chief mumbled incomprehensible things in response as he slowly shuffled to another room, and Jori sighed as she resumed staring out of the window of her hut.

“I hope they’re alright.”

“I’m sure they will be.”

“Eek!”

The sudden voice caught her off guard, and she let out an unusually high-pitched yelp, before turning to see Liroi standing right behind her.

“I… I didn’t realize you were here,” she muttered, slightly taken aback by her over-the-top reaction.

“My apologies, Lady Jori. I didn’t wish to disturb you, but I believe you were the one who called me here to discuss something.”

“Yes… yes, that’s right,” she regained her composure and continued, “have you accounted for the weapons that the hunters lost yesterday?”

“Indeed. Two swords, an axe and a Beast Rifle are gone, although I believe Charlie, the hunter that has not returned, has the rifle, so Lady Anten and the devil man might retrieve it and bring it back.”

“I see.”

Jori sighed again as she rubbed her temples in slight frustration.

“This is not good, Lady Jori. Even if we ignore the loss of our swords and axes, the Beast Rifle was one of our best weapons, and if they can’t get it back… I don’t know.”

“…alright.”

“?”

“Our chances of survival are getting lower with each failed hunt. My dad might not be able to move as freely as he can soon. And I can’t manage an entire village if our strongest forces keep dwindling.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Maybe it’s time… that we consider the Paradise option.”

Paradise.

Liroi gulped as soon as he heard it. The one word that was supposed to bring peace and happiness, yet at the same time sounded dubious and dangerous.

“Are you sure?”

She didn’t reply. Instead, she walked to her table at the corner of her room and sitting down on the chair behind it.

“I don’t know. I really don’t want to take that option, but we’re running out of other options.”

“Hold on, what about Anten and the devil man? Maybe they can help us keep the village safe.”

“Not an option. I don’t believe those two will be staying with us for very long. They have other things to do.”

“Huh? Like what?”

Before she could answer, a soft but still prominent rumbling sound cut through the hut, causing both of them to instinctively turn towards the window.

In the distance, a dark cloud was emerging, growing bigger and bigger as it slowly crept towards the village, occasional flashes of light illuminating its body.

“Seems like a storm is coming. We better tell everyone to take shelter.”

“…”

For some reason, she was continuing to stare out the window without saying a single word. It was almost as if she didn’t know what to do about the situation.

“Lady Jori? Come on, we’ve faced this type of storm before. All we need to do is be prepared when it comes—”

“No.”

“What?”

All of a sudden, she stood up from her chair and began walking towards the hut entrance.

“Lady Jori?”

She turned and faced him, and it was then that he noticed the serious, pained look on her face.

“What’s going on?”

“Liroi. I need you to get all the able hunters and usable weapons and prepare.”

“Isn’t it just a storm?”

“No.”

She paused for a moment before finishing her sentence.

“It’s something else.”

“…”

Another rumbling sound, this time much louder than the last one, echoed through the hut.

**********************

“…”

As the first drops of rain hit him, and he flinched from their sudden impact and coldness, he was confused.

Huh? Didn’t I die? Why am I feeling this?

Despite what he expected, he hadn’t felt anything else since he closed his eyes. He didn’t feel any pain. He didn’t feel any squeeze. He felt nothing but the rain and the sand beneath him.

He opened his eyes slowly.

“Scr….eeech….”

The crab beast that was in front of him had stopped again. Much like what had happened earlier when he shot it with the Beast Rifle, it was shaking and swaying.

Did the shot actually work? Was the effect just delayed?

A quick glance revealed something different.

Sticking out of its underside, the thing that had most likely caused it to stop its attack was something he hadn’t seen before. As for what it was exactly, he wasn’t entirely sure. He could only describe it as looking like a long spear, or maybe even an arrow. It was pure-white in colour and almost translucent, almost like it was made out of light. By appearance alone, it shouldn’t have pierced the crab beast so cleanly, and yet it did.

A weapon that looked and acted unnatural.

“…”

Sure enough, the person who had fired it was the one who was floating slightly above him with her wings.

“W-wow…”

She was just as dumbfounded as him, first staring at the arrow, then focusing on the bow that had appeared in her hands in an instant. Much like the arrow, it looked like it was made out of light, and it was slightly shimmering and flowing with the wind.

“…well! would you look at that,” she declared triumphantly as she filled herself with pride at her accomplishment.

“…”

He didn’t say anything in response, but unbeknownst to her, he had cracked a slight smile.

“BOOM!”

At that moment, a crack of lightning, followed by a boom of thunder, interrupted their little celebration.

“Scr… SCREECH!!!!!!!”

The bolt of lightning had struck dangerously close to them and more importantly had hit something unexpected: the crab beast’s shell. And despite its multiple gaping wounds, it reacted violently to the strike and began to pound the ground with its claws, spraying him with sand and blinding him temporarily.

“Ah, fucking hell!”

Even though he had no weapons on hand, he still raised his fists and braced himself for any possible last-ditch attack.

“Come on…”

As for the angel floating above him, considering that her first shot was by pure accident, she was at a loss fumbled around with the new bow in her hands, trying to figure out how to create a new light arrow to fire at it again.

“Man, you just don’t give up, do you?”

But the person who reacted first was the devil who had just returned to the scene.

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With his fire sword already ready in his hand, he pushed the blinded hunter out of the way before standing in front of the enraged crab beast.

“Then, I’ll end it.”

“Screech!!!”

Overwhelmed by the pain, the lightning strike, and the familiar threat in front of it, it thrust out its claw at him.

“Hahhhhhhh!!!!!”

In response, he charged forward with the sword pointed directly at its underside.

“BOOM!”

“….sc…sc…”

As the next lightning bolt struck, the beast finally fell.

The fight was over.

**********************

“Hey, you awake?”

“Ugh…huh?”

He woke up to drops of rain hitting him on the face. Apparently, he had passed out on the ground, and Anten was looking down over him with a worried but slightly amused expression.

“That was… brave, though I wouldn’t call it incredibly smart.”

“What do you mean?”

To answer his question, she tossed something down at him, and he immediately reacted by putting his hands out to catch the mysterious thing.

“Ow! Huh?”

As he did so, he realized something was off, marked by a sudden burst of pain coming from his right hand.

Or, upon second glance, the right hand that was supposed to be there, instead of a bloody stump.

He paused, and the object fell with a splat onto his body, and as soon as he saw it, he could finally connect the pieces together.

“Huh, I guess it got me in the end after all.”

One last strike from the hard-to-kill beast.

“I think you should be able to reconnect them easily.”

“Thanks, I guess,” he replied as he sat up. Grabbing his detached limb with his remaining hand, he joined it back up with his stump, and in just a few seconds, it looked good as new, with no scarring at all.

“Where’s Charlie?” he questioned as he shook his freshly reattached hand, flexing the fingers and gripping them to confirm that it had returned back to normal.

“He’s over by the beast carcass. I don’t know what he’s doing though.”

He glanced over. Indeed, he was beside the crab beast, seemingly digging around its remains, pulling random chunks of meat out and making a lot of disturbing squelching noises, clearly unaffected by the pouring rain or the weirdness of his actions.

“Hey Charlie! You ok over there?” he called out.

“!!!!!”

His voice was muffled and hard to make out, probably because his head was planted inside a carcass, so he stood up and walked over before repeating his question.

“You alright?”

“Yeah, just trying to find something, give me a minute,” he pulled his head out and replied before stuffing it back in and continuing to dig around.

As the squelching noises continued, he scratched his head as he watched, unsure of how to respond. Even Anten, who had silently slid next to him when he wasn’t looking, was also silently staring with a mildly disgusted and confused expression.

“Ah! Found it!”

At last, he seemed to be done, as his hand grabbed onto something deep inside and pulled it out.

“There she is!”

“…oh.”

It wasn’t anything they had expected. It wasn’t a weapon like a sword, a spear, or an axe. It wasn’t the skeletal or half-digested remains of a body. Instead, it was…

“A ball?”

“Not just any ball,” he remarked as he pulled it out with considerable difficulty, indicating that it was quite heavy.

With some help from the rain, he rubbed away the blood on it, revealing a shiny, lustrous metallic surface similar to the crab beast’s shell, “it’s a Lake Pearl, made from a rare metal. You can sell it for a high price if you know where to look, but its real quality lies in the tools one can make from it. If you want to know how good it is, just think back to how hard the crab beast shell was.”

“So… this Pearl was what you were after this whole time?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Huh,” came the reply from Anten, “I thought you were only focused on the fight. All that talk about not stopping until you killed it, that was just a lie?”

He smirked as he hoisted the Pearl up to his shoulders.

“Don’t get me wrong, miss. I would have still killed that fucking thing as long as I still breathed. However, don’t think I’m doing this just for myself. I still answer to Jori after all, and I do want to protect the village to the very end, no matter what.”

“…”

“Hold on a minute, are you… crying?”

“W-what? No! It’s just the rain!”

“I swear I saw a tear there.”

“You are not wrong.”

“Hey! Don’t butt in!”

As the distant booms of thunder and the pattering of rain continued, Charlie laughed, Anten tried to argue, and he smiled.

After a short while, all of them had calmed down, and with the Pearl still on his shoulders, Charlie began to walk back towards the direction of the village.

“Come on. We should get a move on, and get some help from the other villagers to carry the crab beast meat.”

At that, the angel and devil looked at each other and chuckled again.

“Nah, you don’t need to do that. We can carry it back.”

“Are you sure about that? I think it’s pretty heavy, especially with the shell—”

“Please,” Anten bragged as she puffed out her chest, “both of us are strong. Just watch us!”

**********************

“…”

In the end, they could only manage to hold one of the claws from the crab beast together, even with their combined strength. Any attempts to carry the whole thing back, by land or by air, proved incredibly challenging and all of them ended in failure, which caused a great deal of embarrassment and disappointment to Anten.

“Well,” he tried to reassure her, all while struggling under the weight of the ‘reward’, “I guess this was bound to happen eventually. It’s the end after all, there are probably a lot of things that contradict one another now. Light becomes dark, crabs become heavy, all that stuff.”

She shot him with a critical look in return, and he wisely stopped talking.

“I wonder what the others will think about this.”

Meanwhile, Charlie, unaffected by the whole thing, was whistling and smiling, carrying around the Pearl in his best attempt to show it off once they returned back to the village.

As a result of the time they had wasted, the journey back that was only supposed to take a mere few minutes for the angel and devil had turned into a few hours. The storm had already passed, and the heat had returned, resulting in a humid mess that was only going to get worse as the sun began to set and the temperature began to plummet.

By the time they reached the cliff separating them from the village, the sky was dark, and the strong winds threatened to blow them off balance.

“Do you think we’ll get a hero’s welcome?” Anten casually remarked out of the blue.

“Oh, definitely!”

“How about you, devil?”

“Huh? Probably, I guess? I don’t really need that sort of thing though.”

“Come on, I think we deserve it after all.”

“That’s strange,” Charlie interrupted.

“Hm? What is?”

All of them were standing right at the cliff edge, and he seemed like he was in the process of climbing down, but he had suddenly stopped and was staring in the direction of the village.

“Something’s wrong. Look.”

The two of them followed his gaze.

He was right. Something definitely looked wrong about what they were seeing.

“Shouldn’t there be… lights?”

“You’re right. Maybe everyone’s asleep?”

“Not possible, the guards should still be awake. We should be seeing their light.”

“What do you think, Anten?”

“…”

Anten was silent. She was looking in the same direction as them, but she wasn’t responding at all. Suddenly, she let go of the claw, and without the needed support from her, it dropped to the ground with a loud crunch.

“Anten?”

“…you feel it too, right?”

“Feel what?”

She turned to look at them with a distressed expression.

“I’m talking to you, devil. You feel it too, right? That strange feeling?”

As soon as she mentioned it, he felt it as well. It was hard to describe, but it felt suffocating, as though a strong force was weighing down on him, pulsating and aching, specifically near the center of his body. It didn’t feel like his heart was getting affected by the sensation, so the only other option he could think of was his actual essence, his soul itself.

He clutched his chest and staggered a little. It wasn’t strong enough to fully incapacitate him. It felt like more of a minor inconvenience, but nevertheless, it was there, and it was something he had never felt before.

“Yes, I can feel it,” he replied with slight difficulty as the pressure squeezed his throat.

“This is not good,” Anten continued, her face slightly contorted in pain and worry, “if you can feel it too, that can only mean one thing.”

“What?”

“We have to go down to the village now.”

**********************

There was no laughing.

There was no crying.

There was no shouting.

There was no talking.

As the three of them ran towards the village and called out for people, no one came out of the huts despite the loud noises they were making. The pathways were completely deserted. The huts were empty.

It almost looked as though the village had been abandoned. However, they instinctively knew it wasn’t the case.

“It’s not possible,” Charlie confirmed as they ran through the alleyways, “there are too many problems outside the village, and as far as I know, Jori never had a concrete plan for any forced evacuations.”

“There’s no plan for any emergencies?”

“Well, there is a big shelter near the south side of the town, so maybe they could be hiding there.”

“Alright,” Anten came to a sudden stop and pointed at him in response, “Charlie, you check out the shelter. Devil and I will go to the chief’s hut and try and find Miss Jori. We meet at the center of the village. Got it?”

“Yup.”

Charlie nodded, and the three of them split up.

“Please… please… I can’t… it can’t…”

As they ran towards the hut, the panic was only worsening for her, and she began to mumble and hyperventilate.

“Ten, you need to calm down,” he assured her, “we don’t know what happened yet, so we can’t jump to conclusions.”

“I know, I know, I’m sure Miss Jori is fine, I hope.”

“I hope so too.”

However, when they entered the chief’s hut, all hope was quickly thrown out.

Slumped up right against the wall opposite the hut entrance were several bodies, limp and lifeless. In the center of the painful scene were Jori and the chief leaning against each other.

As they slowly walked in to get a closer look at them, they could see a small hole in the wall resembling that of a gunshot, but strangely they could not see any other holes similar to it on any of the dead bodies. In fact, they were strangely bloodless and clean, and it seemed like there were no signs of a struggle or fighting in the hut itself.

“Maybe they’re just asleep? Or knocked out?”

He tried to come up with a reasonable explanation as they inspected the bodies.

“No,” she gravely shook her head in response, and using her hand, she opened one of Jori’s shut eyelids, revealing a fully black eye instead of a normal one.

“I can sense if a person is alive when I touch them, but… I can’t feel anything.”

She closed Jori’s eye and stood up, her head down and turned away from him.

“So, they’re… dead?”

“…most likely,” she concluded after some hesitation.

As the truth settled in, the atmosphere in the hut became incredibly pressurizing, and the two of them could not speak or react.

They could only keep staring at the lifeless bodies.

**********************

As they met back up in the center of the village, Charlie’s face was dark.

It wasn’t hard to guess what he had found.

“All the villagers?”

He didn’t reply, but he bit his lip and nodded.

“Damn it!” she yelled and punched a nearby hut wall, easily breaking a hole through it with her strength and emotion.

The three of them fell silent for a few minutes before Charlie spoke.

“Fuck, this isn’t normal. People can’t just… lose their life like that. Something must have happened to them.”

“Just to confirm,” she asked, “you have no idea what could have happened, right?”

“No beast I know could have done this, not cleanly anyway. And if they got attacked, I would have seen wounds or injuries,” Charlie replied.

“There was a bullet hole in the chief’s hut,” he chimed in with his arms crossed, “but there were no gunshot wounds at all.”

“So, something must have provoked a gunshot, but then they all died without getting shot? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s almost as if it were…”

“…something unnatural, and not of this world.”

She finished the sentence for him as she came to an epiphany.

“An unnatural thing, with mysterious effects… it has to be.”

“What?”

“Devil. Remember what I told you about the Particles. This has to be the work of one of them!”

“But we haven’t seen one yet, how can we even know whether this is it?”

“I’m not sure, but I can feel it. Not like a gut instinct either, somehow I could… sense it when I touched them. This was caused by one of the Particles. Someone must have tried to negotiate with Miss Jori, and when she refused, they threatened her with it, and it did this to all of the villagers, that’s what I believe!”

However, despite coming to the conclusion, there were still a few problems left.

“That’s all well and good, but that’s not the issue here. Say your theory is correct. How do we fix this, and how do we find whoever did this?”

Her determination from figuring out the answer faltered as Charlie posed the question to her, and she slumped down again.

“I don’t know. They must be long gone at this point, and without them, we most likely cannot figure out how to undo this.”

Just then, he spoke up.

“…no.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t believe they’ve gone very far,” he explained, “they must have come here for a reason, and if they went so far as to target every villager here, they must not have fulfilled it. That means that not only did they waste more time than they needed here, but they might also be coming back here, so they definitely didn’t go too far away.”

“So…”

“You said you could sense the Particle, right? Do you think you can maybe refine that sense to pinpoint where it is?”

“W-what? Umm, I guess I can try?”

“Good.”

He clenched his hand into a fist and declared.

“Then we’re going after them.”