Player Who Became A Constellation [EN]: Chapter 206

206

“Huh, why…?”

The villager, a look of utter shock on his face, stared at Karen with trembling eyes, a crimson stain blooming on his chest.

Karen leaned in close, her face inches from the villager’s, their breaths mingling in the night air.

Sniffing delicately, Karen grinned wickedly, a predatory glint in her eyes.

“You stink.”

“…….”

“The smell of human blood. It’s overwhelmingly strong around your mouth.”

Karen tilted her head, her voice taking on a singsong quality.

“You’re not human, are you?”

“…….”

The villager’s face twitched, a subtle tic betraying his inner turmoil.

Soon, his features contorted into a hideous mask, and he opened his mouth in a silent snarl.

He lunged, trying to bite Karen with teeth that had elongated into sharpened fangs, but Karen reacted instantly, slamming the impaled man to the ground with brutal force.

The man rolled on the floor, his struggles weakening until he slumped, lifeless.

Karen dashed towards the other fleeing villagers, swinging her gauntlets with deadly precision.

“W-What are you doing!?”

Jeff shouted, his voice laced with confusion and alarm.

Loki also moved, his senses on high alert.

At the same time, he felt that strange presence in the village again.

The presences he had felt last night.

The presences of werewolves.

It was blanketing the entire village, a palpable wave of primal energy.

“I see.”

Now he understood why the Nord warriors had attacked this place with such ferocity.

“This place is a nest of monsters.”

Werewolves were known to increase their numbers by biting people, transforming them into their own kind, spreading their curse like a disease.

And this entire village had been turned into werewolves, a breeding ground for the beasts.

This place had become a nest, venturing out into the surrounding territory every night to kidnap people and swell their ranks.

“Then the Nord warriors here must have been dispatched to deal with the threat.”

The Nord warriors were busy subduing the remaining mercenaries and adventurers, their movements efficient and ruthless.

Some of them recognized Loki, and their eyes widened in surprise and awe.

“What? Why is this guy so defenseless…?”

“Idiot! Don’t you know who that is!?”

“What?”

Some recognized Loki and knelt, bowing their heads in reverence.

Following suit, the other Nord warriors also acknowledged him, sensing the shift in the atmosphere.

The battle was already over. The resistance had been crushed.

Many mercenaries and adventurers had been subdued or had fled into the darkness.

Knight Jeff was also groaning under the sword of a Nord warrior, his armor dented and bloodied.

Jeff gritted his teeth, glaring at Loki and the Nord warriors with a mixture of anger and betrayal.

“Damn it, traveler! You, were you in league with these Nord warriors all along!?”

Jeff, in his desperation, assumed Loki was in league with the “bandits.”

Loki ignored the accusations and moved forward, standing tall before the man wearing armor modeled after his own appearance.

“Ah-.”

The man on the horse dismounted, his movements stiff and awkward.

He seemed unsteady, struggling to maintain his balance.

He raised his head and looked at Loki, then knelt and bowed his head in a show of respect.

“Hans, is it?”

Soon, he removed his helmet.

“It’s been a while, Master.”

And revealed a middle-aged man with blond hair and piercing blue eyes.

Hans Stinger.

The hero of Lonia, and one of the most powerful figures in Asgard.

“Did you enjoy your little game?”

He had been impersonating Loki, sowing chaos and confusion.

***

Many mercenaries, adventurers, and Kelpel soldiers lay dead, their bodies scattered across the battlefield.

The survivors were either those who had fled early or those who were tied up and dragged towards the “bandit’s” base.

“What, what’s going on!?”

“…The guys who caught the werewolves were in league with the bandits.”

“Then what, did they know we were going to attack?”

The adventurers and mercenaries began to cast suspicious glances at Loki, their trust shattered.

Jeff, who was being dragged at the front, shouted, his voice hoarse with anger.

“You cowardly Ein!” [Ein is a derogatory term for someone considered weak or dishonorable.]

Hans looked at Loki, a playful glint in his eyes.

“Ein, you say?”

“It seems he sees me as an Ein.”

“Haha! It’s true that Loki isn’t human, but an Ein…”

Hans burst into hearty laughter, the sound echoing through the ranks.

“How is the situation in Asgard?”

Loki asked, his expression serious.

“It’s not good. There hasn’t been any noticeable division yet, but the people are definitely shaken. The person they trusted and followed has been missing for a year… But now that you’ve appeared like this, things will soon be restored to their original state.”

“How are the other countries?”

“The Kron Empire is still strong. Occasionally, apostles serving corrupted constellations and corrupted kings have launched invasions, but as befits an empire, they are defending well against their attacks. Of course, it seems they are now reaching their limits, stretched thin by constant warfare.”

“How is Lonia?”

“…There are signs of division.”

Loki looked at Hans, his gaze sharp and questioning.

At that moment, the barricade at the mountain peak came into view.

It was a temporary camp, hastily constructed but well-defended.

“This Kelpel territory is one of them.”

“One of them?”

“The lord is suspected of being corrupted.”

“…….”

The barricade gate opened, revealing the camp within.

The Nord warriors saluted, welcoming Loki and Hans with cheers and shouts of respect.

“Oh! The master of Asgard-!”

“H-He has finally returned!”

“To be able to fight alongside him in this battle…!”

The Nord warriors’ cheers echoed through the mountains, a testament to Loki’s reputation.

The mercenaries and adventurers couldn’t help but be puzzled, their fear slowly giving way to curiosity.

Who was he that the Nord warriors praised him so much?

“Suspicion?”

Hans nodded, his expression turning grim.

In front of him, a woman was standing before the camp’s barracks, her figure framed by the rough-hewn structures.

Wearing a luxurious dress, she looked out of place in this dusty, war-torn camp.

“This is Miss Clea, the daughter of the Lord of Kelpel.”

Miss Clea raised the hem of her skirt slightly, bowed gracefully, and greeted Loki and Hans with a polite smile.

“She is also the one who reported the corruption of the Lord of Kelpel to Asgard.”

“I heard she was kidnapped and taken to the outside world?”

“It seems the Lord of Kelpel spread that rumor to cover his tracks. He knew we were coming and was wary. It would be best to hear the rest of the explanation from this noble lady.”

The noble lady Clea approached, her eyes filled with a mixture of hope and apprehension.

“Miss Clea, please give a detailed explanation to this person…”

Hans gestured towards Loki.

“This person is…?”

Clea asked, her voice soft and hesitant.

“He is the King of the Nords.”

Clea covered her mouth with her hand, feigning surprise, though Loki suspected she already knew.

The captured mercenaries, adventurers, and Knight Jeff stared at Loki with shocked expressions, their mouths agape.

“I-It is an honor to meet you, Your Majesty.”

Clea knelt and bowed her head, her movements fluid and practiced.

“I heard that the Lord of Kelpel was corrupted. Can you tell me what happened?”

Loki asked, his voice calm and authoritative.

Clea nodded, her eyes glistening with unshed tears.

***

Clea’s mother, Catherine, was a peculiar person, consumed by vanity and the fear of aging.

Watching her mother’s daily life, Clea noticed she always wore a gloomy expression whenever she stood in front of the mirror.

‘I’m getting old,’ she would mutter, her voice filled with despair.

Clea felt sorry for her mother’s obsession. There were many portraits of her mother when she was young in her room, and as time went by, she looked at them more and more often, comparing her current appearance to her youthful beauty.

So Clea went around the market streets, searching for anything that might alleviate her mother’s suffering, buying all the things that were said to be good for skin care and giving them to her mother as gifts.

But even while applying such gifts, her mother remained unsatisfied, constantly searching for something with better effects, something that could truly restore her youth and make her more beautiful.

‘Isn’t there anything better?’

‘Buy something better.’

‘Something that makes me more beautiful!’

As the days went by, her mother’s obsession with youth grew stronger, consuming her every thought.

Whenever that happened, Clea kept visiting the market streets, desperately seeking a solution, and all sorts of rumors about her began to spread.

Before she knew it, her reputation was branded as a woman obsessed with beauty, willing to go to any lengths to maintain her youthful appearance.

But she didn’t care. She wasn’t someone who cared about other people’s opinions, especially when it came to her mother’s well-being.

She kept buying cosmetics and foods good for beauty for her mother, hoping to find something that would finally bring her peace.

One day, her mother suddenly blurted out a horrifying idea.

‘Bathing in the blood of young women… they say there’s nothing better for the skin.’

At that time, Clea felt goosebumps crawl across her skin, a wave of revulsion washing over her.

Supplying the blood of young women was an unthinkable act, a violation of everything she believed in. Clea refused to even consider it.

But her mother, who firmly believed that bathing in the blood of young women could make her beautiful, even bought the raw blood of maids for money, her desperation overriding her morality.

Clea was worried that her mother might be going crazy, consumed by her obsession, so she consulted her father, hoping he could intervene.

But her father only told her to watch over her mother and remained a bystander, unwilling to confront his wife’s growing madness.

And then her mother disappeared.

She was attacked by bandits while taking a walk in the forest, a seemingly random act of violence.

‘Bandits attacked this territory!?’

The Lord of Kelpel was furious at the report, his face flushed with anger. Clea watched the scene from the side, her heart filled with dread.

‘Ah, Father. Mother is….’

‘Don’t worry. I will form a subjugation party with my soldiers and bring her back safely,’ he declared, his voice filled with determination.

‘H-However, there are eyewitness accounts that they are not mere bandits. They look like… cultists. Like the Black Inquisitors [a fictional cult]. If they are correct, it will be difficult to deal with them unless it is the Asgardian regular army. It would be better to ask for help from the north….’

‘It will take months to get here from there. Besides, Asgard is too busy with the war these days to care about this small territory… I will go myself,’ he insisted, dismissing her concerns.

With that, the Lord of Kelpel left with his soldiers, determined to rescue his wife and punish the perpetrators.

And for two weeks, she didn’t hear any news about her father, the silence stretching on, fueling her anxiety.

Eventually, Clea sent a letter to the Lonia royal family asking for help, but the messenger she sent also disappeared shortly after, raising her suspicions.

As things took an unusual turn, Clea realized the seriousness of the situation, the pieces of the puzzle slowly falling into place.

‘I have to somehow inform the Lonia royal family about the situation in this territory before it’s too late,’ she thought, her mind racing.

Clea decided to go to the Lonia capital herself, risking everything to expose the truth, but then the Lord of Kelpel and his wife Catherine returned, their arrival shrouded in an unsettling aura.

The Lord of Kelpel was covered in blood, his armor stained crimson, his face grim.

‘I succeeded in the subjugation,’ he announced, his voice devoid of emotion.

Clea was delighted at the words, relief washing over her. She really thought her father had saved her mother and subjugated those evil cultists.

“But… it wasn’t.”

From that day on, residents began to disappear one by one from the villages near the territory, their absence unexplained and unsettling.

She requested an ‘investigation into the missing persons’ several times, but her father glossed over the incident, dismissing her concerns as unfounded.

As the scale of the missing persons gradually increased, even the territory’s people in the inner castle disappeared, their fates unknown.

Eventually, Clea tried to ask directly and headed to the office, determined to get answers.

‘Kuh-.’

A groan was heard from beyond the office door, a sound of pain and suffering.

Clea was curious and brought her eyes to the gap in the doorknob, and she could see a shocking sight that would forever haunt her nightmares.

Her mother was piercing and tearing at the maid’s neck, her movements savage and animalistic, and her father was staring at her with a blank face next to her, seemingly paralyzed by the scene.

‘……!’

“…At that time, my mother’s appearance was closer to a beast than a human. The fact that my father was watching it and staying still… my father must have been… complicit.”

Fortunately, if she had been in the complete form of a werewolf, she would have sensed Clea’s presence and smell, and she would not have been safe either.

Clea hurriedly sent a letter to Asgard, desperate for help.

She secretly delivered the letter through a general merchant, not a messenger, knowing that sending a messenger would be suspicious and likely intercepted.

And Asgard responded to it and dispatched troops for investigation, their arrival a beacon of hope in the darkness.

However, Kelpel refused the entry of foreign troops under the pretext of security, fearing exposure.

Eventually, the Asgardian subjugation party camped in a nearby forest, where they were ambushed by werewolves, a desperate attempt to silence them.

Of course, the opposite result came out. The werewolves were hunted, and following the fleeing ones led to villages, revealing the extent of the infestation.

The result was this. They attacked and burned that place, which was clearly a den of monsters, a necessary evil to contain the spread of the curse.

That was why they were rumored to be Nord bandits, their actions misunderstood and feared.

Clea bowed her head to Loki, her voice trembling with emotion.

“Please.”

“…….”

Clea shed tears, her heart heavy with grief and guilt.

“King of the Nords. Please purify my mother and punish my father for condoning it, for allowing this horror to consume our land.”

Her words were the exact opposite of what Catherine had said, a plea for justice and redemption.

***

The sun was slowly setting, casting long shadows across the land.

The streets of Kelpel, which had concealed people during the day, were now filled with only a sense of silence, an eerie calm before the storm.

Everyone goes home and locks the door, seeking refuge from the encroaching darkness.

They closed the windows, nailed boards, and firmly fixed the door, barricading themselves inside their homes.

“P-Please! Just for tonight-!”

“Shut up! Go somewhere else!” a gruff voice responded from behind a closed door.

Despite the pleas of the poor people who had no home, they were coldly rejected, left to fend for themselves against the horrors of the night.

As the door closed, the vagrants on the street turned their heads, their eyes filled with fear.

Darkness gradually approaches, swallowing the world in its inky embrace.

Terrified, they hurriedly move somewhere, seeking any semblance of shelter.

What they had to do now was to hide in the sewers or in the stinking garbage heaps, desperate to avoid the creatures that roamed the streets.

The world was swallowed up by darkness and disappeared, leaving only fear and despair.

The only moon that illuminated the world was high in the sky, its pale light offering little comfort, the moon’s blessing never reached the ground, unable to penetrate the darkness that had taken hold.

Thud… Thud….

On the streets where people had disappeared, other people walked out, their forms shifting and contorting in the shadows.

On the streets, and beyond the barriers of Kelpel Territory, people raised their heads, their eyes glowing with an unnatural light.

Looking at the moon in the sky, their appearance began to change, their humanity fading away.

The back is bent and swollen, bones cracking and reforming.

The skin is torn, and black hair grows thickly from within, covering their bodies in a coarse fur.

The face was that of a wolf, the snout elongated and the teeth sharpened into deadly fangs, and the body was a hairy, muscular, hideous figure, a grotesque parody of its former self.

They raise their heads, their throats constricting.

Awooooo-!

Receiving the energy of the moon, the beasts roared, announcing that it was their time, the time for the hunt to begin.

Night was the time for them to prey, to stalk the shadows and feast on the flesh of the living.

***

“Ugh! S-Save me! Is anyone there?! Please! Save me!” the innkeeper screamed, his voice hoarse with terror.

The innkeeper was tied to a wooden pillar in the middle of the square, his body trembling with fear.

He was the innkeeper who had been caught secretly kidnapping and selling those who had stayed at the inn until now, a cruel and opportunistic predator.

Accordingly, the Lord of Kelpel had hung him in the square as a public execution, a grim warning to others who might consider similar acts.

His whole body had just been doused with the blood of all kinds of animals, the stench thick and nauseating.

This is because werewolves, rather than kidnapping him and making him their own kind, would be excited by the smell of blood and tear him apart on the spot, a fitting end for his depravity.

The surrounding braziers made the sound of crackling firewood, casting flickering shadows across the square, but the innkeeper could not see the flames of those braziers, his vision blurred by fear.

“Ugh, please,” he whimpered, his voice barely audible.

It feels like all senses are being swallowed up by the darkness, his mind reeling with terror.

Even though his eyes were wide open, he couldn’t see anything as if he was closing them, the darkness pressing in on him from all sides.

As the light of the world disappeared, the darkness of the night was truly despair itself, a suffocating void that threatened to consume him.

Krrr-.

The innkeeper flinched, his body convulsing with fear.

He hurriedly turned his head to the left, his eyes darting around in a desperate search for salvation.

He felt a presence as if something had passed by, a fleeting glimpse of something monstrous in the shadows.

“W-Who is it!?” he stammered, his voice cracking with terror.

Hehehehehe-.

A chilling sound is heard from the right, a low, guttural chuckle that sent shivers down his spine.

“Who is it!?” he repeated, his voice barely a whisper.

He looks at the place where the sound came from, his heart pounding in his chest.

Darkness further stimulates the imagination and spreads fear, conjuring images of grotesque creatures lurking in the shadows.

Werewolves, reaching 2m in height, stood tall in front, behind, left, and right of him, their eyes glowing with predatory hunger, as if he was going crazy.

They bared their fangs and opened their mouths, their snarls echoing through the square.

“Who-!?”

The innkeeper was torn apart from all sides, his screams cut short as the beasts descended upon him, their hunger insatiable.