The Return of Lilietta - Chapter 125

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 125

Phissh, a quiet gunshot like air escaping rang out.

Even in this situation, her remaining instinctive reason processed a silent bullet. Because she knew what kind of monster that was.

A monster whose presence could barely be felt even though it was right in front of her.

Last Defense Line Command official monster classification grade, Named, identification name, Mimic.

It narrowly dodged the bullet that flew toward its eyeball.

It had tremendous reaction speed, but couldn’t completely avoid it. As the silent bullet lodged near its eye, the creature let out a soundless shriek and opened its mouth.

Blonde hair tumbled out from its gaping mouth. Rita froze in place.

Mimic, blonde hair, blood, patchouli scent.

Her breathing rose to her throat like grains of sand, scraping as it went. Her chest tightened as if being crushed, her heart pounding like an alarm bell. Her ears became muffled as if submerged in water, and her vision narrowed.

‘No.’

Sharp instinct and cool reason barely held back her nerves that were about to have an episode.

You can feel a presence, can’t you.

Still, still alive.

Look carefully, the head wasn’t cut off.

That head has a neck attached to it. A body is connected to it.

Not a severed head, but a severed, severed head?

Her friend’s severed head rolling around inside the monster’s mouth.

Mimic, blonde hair, blood, patchouli scent.

Pain crushing her entire body, a smiling monster, saliva dripping on her face, the sensation of broken ribs piercing her lungs, her friend’s head being chewed before her eyes, her friend’s eyeball falling between the monster’s gnashing teeth and rolling on her chest, the agony of limbs being crushed, the suffocating weight, the monster’s stinking throat.

As if her whole body would burst, as if her head would shatter, terribly horrific.

Pain, helplessness, despair, helplessness, fear, helplessness.

Because she was nothing but a weak child, she couldn’t protect them. She couldn’t protect them. She couldn’t win.

Unable to resist, absolutely unable to escape, just being crushed to death… a nightmare.

‘No! This isn’t that time!’

That’s not Max Pascal.

Brother is still alive.

He’s alive, I tell you!

Move, Rita Pascal!

She bit her tongue. The sharp pain and the taste of blood in her mouth forcibly brought her mind back to reality from being dragged into the nightmare.

The more she breathed, the more breathless she became. She stopped breathing altogether and moved her gun muzzle.

Silent bullets fired in succession hit the Mimic’s body with rapid thuds.

Hastily made bullets in an unstable state couldn’t inflict fatal wounds on a creature with fast reaction speed. But it was enough to cause pain and a sense of crisis.

The Mimic, which had been twisting its body to avoid the barrage of bullets while opening its mouth, finally leaped into the shadows at its feet. Its reptilian black skin sank deep, cutting through the shadows like water.

The Mimic disappeared. It had fled.

She could feel the gun barrel overheating from the frenzied shooting. She had no time to worry about that.

Rita dragged her trembling legs.

Ignoring the faint pain in her thigh, ignoring her muscles stiffened with fear, she somehow moved toward the blonde hair that had fallen on the ballroom floor.

As soon as she reached the blood-pooled floor, her legs gave out. She collapsed and checked Leonhardt’s condition.

Her brother lay sprawled with his eyes closed and pale face, his neck torn and bloody.

Fortunately or unfortunately, it seemed he was attacked without having time to use his aura. There were no signs of magical contamination.

Instead, what was visible were bite marks from the monster. If she had been just a little later, his neck would have been torn off completely.

She placed her trembling fingers near his nose.

Faint breathing touched her hand. She had known he was alive because she could sense his presence, but only when she felt his breath on her fingertips did she finally feel relieved.

“Huu…”

A thin breath rose like a sob, then was swallowed back down her throat.

Lillieta fumbled as she tore at the hem of her nightgown. She wrapped it around Leonhardt’s bleeding neck, attempting to stop the bleeding.

‘A potion, I should have brought a potion.’

The healing potion Olivia had given her was in her bedroom.

She carefully pressed her brother’s neck to avoid suffocation and supported his upper body, leaning him against the wall. The wound area needed to be higher than his heart to reduce bleeding somewhat.

‘I can’t scream. I can’t call others and wake them up either.’

Because the Mimic would be lurking around here.

That monster was called an imitator because it had the habit of disguising itself as a person and its disguise excellently reproduced the outer shell, but there was another reason as well.

‘…A beast-type mutant created when human shadows are contaminated by magic.’

Just as Kraken was originally an octopus and Crawler was originally an earthworm, the Mimic’s original form is a ‘human shadow.’

Monsters that weren’t originally living beings tend to be relatively smaller in size than those that were originally creatures, but they tend to have more troublesome characteristics.

Like the Doppelganger, whose original form is presumed to have been a mirror-like lake.

‘Mimic, Mimic… swims through shadows to move. It can dive and lurk, and rest and heal wounds inside them. All shadows connected to the shadow the Mimic entered become the Mimic’s territory. The Mimic can sense its entire territory simultaneously and can appear anywhere within its territory…’

She recited like a mantra the information humanity had collected while the Mimic produced countless victims.

All shadows connected to the shadow the Mimic entered become territory that it can sense and move through freely.

But it was the middle of the night, and the Creme Dome with its lights off was shrouded in darkness everywhere except where stars and moon peered in.

‘…I have to consider the entire manor as Mimic territory. The garden too, since shadows might extend outside the manor.’

The garden side with streetlights would be somewhat better, but she couldn’t let her guard down. Just because there’s light doesn’t mean shadows disappear.

‘And Mimic primarily targets living, moving people…’

It was born from human shadows and imitates humans. It wears human skin and moves like a human.

But that’s only imitation at best, so unlike Doppelganger, it can’t copy the inner contents. The imitator can barely mimic only the outer appearance.

‘Because it wants to imitate humans, it covets the most vibrant humans. When it wears their skin, it acts like a person for a while, but if it sees a more lively person, it quickly abandons its current skin and targets that one.’

This was the crucial difference from Doppelganger.

Doppelganger has intelligence and malice, infiltrating human groups, but Mimic just moves according to its instinct to imitate and isn’t very intelligent.

‘Thanks to that, it’s easy to predict its behavior patterns.’

People who are asleep or unconscious are safe from Mimic for the time being. Assuming there are other living, moving people around.

‘Mimic has no interest in humans who are dead or motionless like the dead.’

This was a fact she had experienced firsthand.

When life hangs by a thread and one approaches a state close to suspended animation, Mimic ignores that human and targets other humans who move well.

That was the reason why the powerless 14-year-old Rita Pascal survived alone before an irresistible monster.

The monster that had climbed on top of her and was chewing Max’s head lost interest when the girl’s entire body was crushed under its weight and her breathing became so weak it seemed about to stop, and turned its attention to more vibrant humans.

To other squad members who were screaming and running away or firing guns in panic.

When she regained consciousness after fainting, all squad members except her and nearby civilians had been annihilated.

She crawled among the incomplete corpses of friends, colleagues, and countless unknown people—some only in pieces, others with skin peeled off—repeatedly vomiting and coughing up blood before fainting again.

Afterward, she was rescued by another squad that had been dispatched after receiving reports of a Named-class monster appearance, and Rita Pascal became the sole survivor of Mimic’s debut stage.

The nightmare vividly comes back to life.

The stench of that moment and the pain of dragging her body with crushed bones and people’s screams like hallucinations and the lingering tinnitus and the taste of bloody vomit in her mouth and the hellish scene and the relief of surviving and the terrible guilt born from that relief.

The punishment from the Oaths that followed and the fear that she would never be able to fight monsters again and the swamp-like helplessness and the time that flowed colorlessly and odorlessly in the hospital bed and the gaze like looking at a broken machine, and the result of neglecting all those things and even neglecting herself.

The scene of her only comrade, who had tried somehow to protect her as she neglected herself, bleeding with one eye pierced.

The sensation of the trigger when she shot and killed adults whose faces she knew to protect that boy. The night when everyone tried to kill him and her. The explosive sound that tore her eardrums.

Explosive sound, explosive sounds can be heard.

The nightmare that crawled up gnaws at her mind. It tries to overflow into reality again.

Lillieta bit her lips until they were tattered. She swallowed the surging things inward and pressed them down with the reason she had struggled to gather.

‘Don’t sink. Think about what you need to do right now. Set a goal.’

She focuses on her thoughts, repeatedly reciting Mimic’s characteristics. She assesses the situation.

‘…The sleeping people are fine. I can leave them as they are. If there were no awake people at all, the sleeping ones would be in danger too, but if I stay alive and moving, Mimic will target me as a priority.’

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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