The teddy bear, reeking of rotten meat, charged forward. Its massive arm swung down at Sassel's head like a standing elephant toppling over—and behind it followed more grotesquely-shaped dolls.
With a dull thump, the barrier shattered. Compared to the crude shield the black sorcerer had just made, the teddy bear's strength was overwhelming. It smashed through the grayish-white magic barrier like a dragon stomping a brick wall to pieces. Its arm paused for only a fraction of a second against the spell obstructing its path before the barrier exploded in its grasp, just like the wall had. In the blink of an eye, its fist grazed past Sassel's head. The feeling was like a concrete pillar flying at his face; the mere passage of it made his innermost protective ward cry out with a series of cracks, nearly collapsing completely. If he hadn't dodged in time to avoid a direct hit, he would absolutely be a Headless Knight right now—the non-moving kind.
Seeing the black sorcerer crouched on the floor—and who knows how those two rubies functioned as eyes—it remained just as sluggish, simply lifting its leg to kick at him again, like swinging another concrete pillar. The piercing whistle made the very air tremble. The furry, cylindrical limb, twice as thick as its arm, was anything but cute.
Sassel rolled across the floor in a pathetic, sorry state, his shield scraping and cracking against the litter of rubble and broken glass. In the next moment, Jeanne had already thrust her sword out, plunging it deep into the teddy bear's waist. Instantly—a black smoke, countless times thicker than that of the transparent people, boiled out of the wound. A mixture of rotten flesh and blood like sludge gushed out, pooling on the floor. The bizarrely scented burning souls swirled through the room like malevolent ghosts.
An instant later, its waist seemed to lose connection with its brain. Its upper body crashed to the floor with a heavy thud, its two arms flailing as if having a seizure, while its two legs began to run aimlessly, dragging the broken torso behind them.
"Inquisitor! This damned thing is stuffed with a pile of souls and random corpses!" Sassel yelled. "Burn the souls in any part of its body, and that part will lose control!"
As he spoke, there was another loud crash. The pink rabbit-person also smashed through the wall and squeezed in. The window was crushed to pieces, bricks clattered to the floor, and dust flew everywhere. The shattered glass even tore the dress on the doll.
This bipedal rabbit doll was another malformed thing—its head was as long as its body, and its straight, upright ears were as long as its head. It wore a pale green dress stained with spots of blood. Its short limbs had no fingers, just a pair of large, gleaming shears embedded in them. Its eyes stared like a corpse's, and its mouth, full of yellowed and blackened canine teeth, spewed a vomit-inducing stench.
Just as it raised its shears—which were taller than a person—and charged at Jeanne, who had just pulled her sword free, a pale gray magic ray shot from Sassel's fingertip. The ray crossed the several-meter distance and drilled into the rabbit doll's chest with a sickening, corrosive hiss. The magic ray spread out in the doll's chest like ink dropped into clear water. A dozen or so ignited, twisted souls erupted out like a violent plague cloud. Streaks of black smoke howled and swirled, spreading throughout the entire room, their screams sharp and piercing.
Then—the rabbit doll's entire upper body went limp and drooped down. Only its two legs continued to charge forward aimlessly, running past Jeanne and smashing into the tide of dolls surging from the other side, toppling a pile of filthy monsters.
"Dammit!" Jeanne cleaved a three-head-tall werewolf toy in two, a thick cloud of black smoke blasting her in the face. She yelled out, her tone rough, "Are you sure you want to go that way!?"
"That path doesn't have the fewest dolls, but at least I know there isn't any other random shit over there."
More blank-faced dolls came running with heavy, thudding footsteps—from the corridors on every side, like a fishing net closing in. The two of them were the carp in the pond.
"I'll open a path with magic. You stick close to me. Once we break through to a quiet corridor, we switch to the concealment spell and hide."
As she watched the black smoke dissipate along the sides of the room, Jeanne noticed that the black sorcerer was clutching the black cat.
"By the way, why are you still carrying that cat? As emergency rations?"
Sassel took a deep breath, feeling it condense and compress in his chest. He opened the door within his body that connected to the Labyrinth of N'kai—the demesne of the Sleeper, Tsathoggua—and carefully pushed it open a slightly larger sliver. A darkness that devoured light began to spread from his soul and surge into his body. The labyrinths of these Outer Gods were dangerous, and pushing the door open wider than one's capacity was even more dangerous—but he was deeply experienced in this.
The black sorcerer began to gather the spell, casually answering her question as he did. "It can lead us through this goddamned maze. And as a bonus, it can lead us to the master of this house."
"Are you sure?"
"At least according to it, the master of this house has never left its room, right?"
"Fine."
As another rabbit-shaped doll crossed the completely shattered wall and charged to within a meter of them, the black sorcerer responded. He opened his mouth, and a black magic ray, even grimmer and darker than the room itself, shot through the entire corridor.
Jeanne only saw the silent, formless ray shoot from the black sorcerer's mouth. An instant later, it had crossed the entire visible space, piercing through the tightly packed column of giant dolls like a hot coal through snow, extending dozens of meters away, to a point that was hard to see clearly. The lifeless walls and curtains were undamaged; the dolls' bodies showed no signs of rupture. But Jeanne could feel it—along the path the magic ray had traveled, the frenzied souls within the dolls were devoured, plunging completely into another world, as if an invisible tongue had licked up candies from a bag.
The ray vanished. Along the direction they had come from, the dolls' intact bodies collapsed to the floor like puppets with their strings cut, devoid of all life. They piled up haphazardly, like stacks of wheat freshly harvested by a farmer.
The master of the Labyrinth N'kai, the Sleeper, the Toad-God Tsathoggua. Offensive spells developed based on this labyrinth had many advantages: low cost, effective against specific beings, silent, and not particularly dangerous to the caster. However, black sorcerers usually didn't use this type of spell—because it was far too wasteful. All souls killed using the power of the Labyrinth of N'kai were, without exception, eaten by its master, leaving not a single scrap for the sorcerers.
This was a necessary understanding. All who tried to break the rule would incur the hatred of its servants.
Of course, directly summoning a Formless Spawn—a servant of the Toad-God—to devour life force was another matter entirely.
But then again, even this "less dangerous" spell was only so in relation to black sorcerers whose bodies were highly mutated. For the newly reincarnated Sassel, this was still a considerable burden.
For an instant, Sassel felt as if he had lost connection with everything around him. A part of his soul seemed to have been pulled from his body, sinking and dissipating into some amorphous, dark abyss. In a daze, he saw masses of black mycelium spread throughout a vast, lightless black cavern, slowly writhing, coiling, flowing like water, and extending countless slender tentacles like the shriveled limbs of infants.
The grotesque vision was enough to make one vomit.
"Hey! Black sorcerer! Wake up!"
Prying his eyelids open with great effort, he found himself being dragged head-first by the inquisitor. She was pulling him by his two legs, running down the corridor. The black cat was perched on her shoulder, and the curtain bundle of food was tied to her waist. From the looks of it, dragging a grown man was no more difficult for her than dragging a feather.
The protective shield on the back of his head knocked against the dolls' messy limbs, their teeth, and their bizarre sharp and blunt instruments, creating a series of clanging echoes.
"Keep dragging me for a bit. I need to recover," Sassel said to Jeanne, his whole body limp. "I reincarnated less than a day ago. I still opened the door too wide that time. My consciousness almost fell into the Sleeper's labyrinth and didn't make it back."