The fiend had never left. Like a starving wolf on the hunt, it lingered in the dark, watching everyone.
The world blurred past in a rush. In this moment, the demon hunter's inhuman physique revealed itself in full. A drop of several meters meant nothing to Lloyd; when he hit the ground, he didn't even pause before moving again. Joey had intended to follow, but after climbing out the window and giving it a second thought, he decided to take the stairs like a normal human being.
Everyone at the scene sprang into motion. Only a handful remained behind to secure the area; the rest boarded carriages and hurried after Lloyd.
It was a familiar scent—the trace of a fiend. In Lloyd's eyes, the entire world seemed to drain into black and white. Only the demon's trail burned in a deep, blood-red hue, carving a vivid path through the colorless world and guiding him forward.
The secret blood within him stirred, rising. The hunter's speed surged, swift as a cheetah in full chase.
"A new anomaly reading!"
Blue Jade's startled cry rang through the communication channel just as Joey was mounting his warhorse.
"I'm guessing that new anomaly is Mr. Holmes here. You wouldn't believe how fast he was running just now!"
Spurring his horse forward, Joey galloped down the street, chasing the distant figure of Lloyd at the edge of his vision.
Inside the central monitoring station, two red dots streaked across the map before Blue Jade, dragging crimson trails behind them as alarms wailed.
This was the true marvel of a demon hunter. He needed no assistance from the Watcher System—he himself was the perfect predator, tracking the path of the fiend.
"I've found you!"
After crossing street upon street, Lloyd came to an abrupt halt. The sense of the fiend was close—very close. Yet this was the middle of a public road. People stared at him in nervous confusion. Everything looked perfectly normal. No monster in sight.
Something was wrong. It had to be here.
Lloyd scanned his surroundings. He couldn't pinpoint the exact location, but after a brief pause, he caught the faint scent of blood in the air.
Joey arrived at last, urging his horse forward, just in time to see Lloyd charge straight into an apartment building. As he ran, Lloyd shouted, "Suaran Hall investigation!"—though the Winchester in his hands did little to reassure anyone.
"Damn it! That lunatic!"
Joey yanked the rifle from his saddle holster and rushed in after him.
The Purge Agency operated under one supreme directive: minimize the spread of demonic contamination at all costs. This was Old Dunling, a vast city of millions. If a fiend's corruption spread unchecked, it would be like the Black Death of old—within days, the city would become a graveyard.
Inside the Agency were numerous contingency plans for urban collapse and national fragmentation. The Pillar of the Furnace regularly released massive doses of neutralizing agents, attempting to counterbalance and regulate the pollution left behind by fiends.
Like a bloated machine on the verge of breakdown, patched together with mismatched parts to maintain a fragile illusion of stability.
Doors were smashed open one after another. The screams of terrified residents mingled with the crash of splintering wood, forming the grim symphony of the chase. Then a surge of thick, metallic blood scent flooded Lloyd's nose—it was right ahead.
He raised the Winchester and fired straight at the wall.
In the next instant, the demon hunter's strength exploded forth. He slammed into the bullet-riddled wall and burst through it.
Wood splinters filled the air. A corpse lay still in a pool of blood. This time, the fiend had not had time to conceal its trail. A streak of blood led from the window out into the open.
"New victim. Tell them to lock this place down."
Joey arrived moments later through the hole Lloyd had made, still trying to piece together what had happened. Lloyd left only that single sentence before vanishing again.
The chase continued. The fiend's trail grew clearer. Wind roared past Lloyd's ears, yet he barely felt the heat of his blood beginning to boil.
A hunting hound that had rested too long had finally caught the scent again. Even chasing nothing more than an instinct, he felt vividly, fiercely alive.
"This is your true nature. You've never changed. Detective, investigator—those are just labels you use to hide. You've always been this."
Watson's voice echoed strangely by his ear, then faded like wind, impossible to grasp.
Lloyd seemed not to hear—or perhaps he simply no longer cared. At the next corner, he finally saw it: a black shape, sharp hooked claws hammered into the wall as it scaled the building.
A fiend.
The Winchester roared. Shattering pellets blasted the wall, dust spraying as blood burst from the beast's shadowed form. It wasn't enough to stop it. The creature kept climbing—but another shot thundered, loosening the already damaged masonry. Its claws slipped. It fell, powerless, while the hunter closed in from below.
But this was the city—narrow alleys cluttered with trash bins and jutting laundry poles. The fiend crashed into the chaos. Lloyd lost sight of it and could only continue the pursuit.
Blood smeared across puddled, dust-choked ground. As he ran, Lloyd's mind raced. Why was this fiend so abnormal?
From a hunter's experience, lesser fiends had no true minds—only beasts driven by instinct, incapable of revenge or planning. A low-level fiend would never seek "vengeance." It would have devoured that woman completely.
This one was clearly like Sabo—a fiend that retained fragments of reason under corruption. But that clarity was temporary. Their ultimate fate was always the same: annihilation in despair.
There were exceptions.
The demon hunters themselves.
Leaping over obstacles, Lloyd fired as he advanced. Bullets ricocheted wildly between narrow walls, sparks bursting in the dimness.
Gunshots echoed through the district, throwing nearby streets into chaos. Mounted police formed a perimeter at the alley's edge. Iron whistles shrilled constantly, passing warnings and signals—like a flock of mournful birds circling overhead, crying out in grief.
The whistles and gunfire blended into a single, urgent rhythm, like Death itself pounding on doors and windows. Debris flew up ahead as the fiend fled in panic. At its core, it was still a beast—afraid of thunder, afraid of fire. This sudden upheaval unsettled it.
Lloyd couldn't help but let out a cold laugh.
A creature that spread fear… now tasting fear itself. How absurd.
The power of the secret blood surged. Lloyd planted a foot onto the iron lid of a trash bin, leaving behind a deep, warped footprint.
Not just strength.
Weight.
Lloyd bore within his body the Silverbind Spike, a failsafe implanted by the Demon-Hunting Order. It was meant to restrain hunters who lost control—but the steel grafted into his bones meant that, in truth, every hunter carried a suit of sacred silver war-armor beneath their flesh at all times. Thanks to that hidden framework, Lloyd—though gaunt to the eye—was far heavier than any man had a right to be.
They were close now—so close to catching that grotesque fiend. But the alley had run out.
With the aid of the Seer System, Blue Jade mapped several projected escape routes. Outside the alley mouth, mounted police had already formed a line, standard rifles braced. Muzzle flashes burst outward, spears of flame several feet long.
The Purge Bureau's efficiency showed itself in moments like this—swift coordination, a localized operation rising in seconds like a steel trap snapping shut.
A storm of bullets swept forward.
The creature still held a warped imitation of human shape, draped in blood-soaked rags, its face hidden behind a cracked, filthy mask. Its clothing was so stained and ruined that no clear feature could be made out.
"Stop it!"
Joey shouted from behind Lloyd, raising his rifle. He was only human—no hunter's strength, no Grand Knight's iron will to command relic armor from the Old Century. But among ordinary men, he stood near the peak.
His gaze aligned past the iron sights and settled on the monster's silhouette.
He fired.
In that brief instant, blossoms of red burst across the fiend's body.
Then came the chaos—gunfire overlapping in a roaring wave, bullets shrieking through the street, steel clashing, blood spraying.
Lloyd couldn't tell how many rounds had struck it. All he saw was a widening rain of blood.
Yet the creature did not falter.
Its terrible vitality drove it forward. With one savage swipe, its claws plunged into a warhorse's body. The talons were like blades—swords grown from bone. As it reached the interception line, another curtain of blood rose into the air.
Two horses had their throats opened in the first instant of contact. Their screams tore the street before they collapsed. Some officers tried to fight back. Others met the creature's gaze—and in that instant, the surging contamination eroded their minds. They stood frozen, devoured by a force called terror.
"I'll handle it!"
A shotgun roared again—this time striking the fiend's flank. Its charge staggered for half a heartbeat, just long enough for a dazed officer to be dragged clear. One more blow and he would have spent the rest of his life in a chair.
"Where are the reinforcements? That damn thing's slipperier than we thought!"
Joey shouted into the comms. The Purge Bureau rarely faced fiends with this level of cunning. Usually the Seer System provided ample response time, and when hunters fought, it wasn't ordinary men on the line—it was a tide of steel clad in Old Century divine armor.
"Reinforcements? The strongest hunter in all of Old Dunling is right there with you!"
It wasn't an exaggeration. From the moment Blue Jade saw Lloyd cleave open a carriage, leaving the street outside awash in blood, she had marked him as the upper limit of human combat potential.
"That's not the problem! We can't catch it! If this keeps up, the panic will spread—we need it finished fast!"
Joey had witnessed the chase firsthand. Lloyd was advancing like an unstoppable force, yet still couldn't quite close the distance.
Blue Jade glanced at the mechanical map. On the far side, a blue route was racing toward the red target marker.
"Drive it toward the city's edge! The rapid response unit is aboard the Iron Serpent—they're closing in!"
Across Old Dunling and even into Inglvig, the vast transit system known as the Serpent of the Atrium roared to life. Steam tram lines shifted. Mechanical gears meshed with grinding force, tracks switching under bursts of steam power.
Some lights turned red, others green. Within minutes, a clear corridor was carved through the tangled city. A fully armed squad sped toward the target, and from the end of the rails came a deep, thunderous rumble.
Lloyd and the fiend ran ahead, gunshots cracking now and then behind them. Trails of blood marked the route—but the monster ran as if uninjured.
Farther back, Joey was losing ground. Even with his exceptional stamina, he was too slow. He could only watch the two figures shrink into the distance.
For a moment, he found himself envying Lancelot.
The mysterious Grand Knight possessed a will like tempered steel. Even clad in first-generation Old Century armor, he could move freely under demonic corrosion. That was why he commanded the Bureau's rapid response force—and alone held authority to deploy Old Century armor at will.
Galahad and the other Grand Knights required Arthur's approval and an assessment of corrosion levels from the Perpetual Pump before donning such relics. The armor was too dangerous—one misstep, and it would birth a greater fiend.
But Lancelot was different.
His mastery over Old Century armor had earned the unanimous trust of both Arthur and the Perpetual Pump.
"How is it still this fast?!"
Even Lloyd was growing frustrated. The fiend refused to engage, never granting him the chance for close combat. Police whistles echoed in the distance; after that first clash, no mounted officer dared approach again, only herding it from afar.
"Wait… that's the industrial district ahead!"
Massive structures loomed at the horizon. Gloomy smoke swallowed the sky, and the air carried the bitter taste of ash.
Then a cold voice cut across every channel:
"Rapid response unit has arrived. All units, clear the area."
Lloyd didn't carry a Bureau communicator—he heard none of it. But his senses told him another presence was rushing in fast.
Then came the sound—
Wind-rending speed.
The Iron Serpent thundered along the industrial rails from the far edge of sight, vast plumes of steam bursting from its mechanical seams. And still it was not finished—armor plates along its body snapped open one by one, and thin daylight gleamed off the jagged divine armor beneath.
Lancelot raised the fire-lance in his hands. Its long barrel resembled a knight's lance from centuries past—and the racing Iron Serpent was his warhorse.
As they closed, the fiend's form swelled in his vision.
Like a joust between knights, he struck at the instant their paths would cross.
He pulled the trigger.
Flame erupted.
A burning path like a dragon's breath tore forward, engulfing the fiend's line of advance.