Absolute Loser Becomes The Pleasure King Using Satan System

Chapter 22: 22.The white legless lady-1

The forest breathed wrong.

Not with wind, there was no wind blowing here, only the low, wet churn of something ancient shifting in its sleep somewhere beneath the soil.

Every so often a shriek would cut through the trees, distant, inhuman, and then silence would fold back over everything like nothing had happened at all.

A man shrowded in black walked through it without concern, dragging the chain behind him with the same idle rhythm a man might use tapping his foot to a song only he could hear.

The girl at the end of the chain stumbled through the mud, wrists raw where the metal had worn through skin that no longer bled the way skin should.

She didn’t cry out. She’d learned better than that a long time ago.

’’Come now, little one, keep up,’’ the man said, not bothering to look back.

’’We’re so close to home. Wouldn’t want you dying out here in the mud before I’ve had proper use of you.’’

His voice was smooth, cultured, the voice of a man who had once given lectures to rooms full of people who admired him.

There was still an echo of that man somewhere in there, buried under everything he had built on top of it since.

He hummed to himself as he walked, some tune with no real melody, just the pleasure of making noise in a world that so rarely gave him anything interesting to listen to.

Then he stopped.

His head tilted, one ear angling toward the sound bleeding through the trees ahead.

Shrieking. Snarling. A very particular kind of chaos he knew intimately well.

’’Oh?’’ he murmured, lips curling. ’’Vexfang. Sounds like quite a lot of them, too.’’

He redirected without hesitation, the chain yanking the girl sideways as he changed course, cutting through the undergrowth toward the noise with the easy confidence of a man walking through his own garden.

What he found made him stop entirely.

A figure, small, human-shaped, wrestling against a Vexfang in the mud like some kind of animal. No grace. No technique. Just raw, desperate, flailing survival.

’’Now what,’’ the man said softly, ’’is this?’’

He watched, fascinated despite himself, as the thing tore the Vexfang open with its bare hands, some strange pink shimmer flashing across the creature’s body a half-second before it happened, and then the thing collapsed, poisoned, surrounded, doomed.

Doomed, except.

The man’s breath caught somewhere in his throat.

He’d seen countless denizens die in this forest. Countless things that walked and screamed and bled like this one did.

But none of them smelled like that.

None of them had that particular, unmistakable warmth clinging to their skin, that scent he hadn’t encountered in so many decades he’d almost convinced himself he’d imagined it entirely.

’’No,’’ he whispered. ’’No, that’s not possible...!’’

He stepped closer, ignoring the swarm of Vexfang closing in around the collapsed figure, his mind racing through explanation after explanation and discarding every single one.

A denizen wearing human shape. A trick of his own deteriorating senses.

A very elaborate, very cruel joke from something higher up the chain than him.

But no.

He knew that smell.

Living. Actually, impossibly, living.

A laugh broke out of him, high and delighted and slightly unhinged, echoing strangely through the dead trees.

’’A human,’’ he said, and the words tasted like something he hadn’t allowed himself to taste in years.

’’An actual, breathing human. In Narak.’’

His hands were already shaking with something that wasn’t fear.

’’Oh, I am not letting this go to waste.’’

He surged forward, tearing through the remaining Vexfang with contemptuous ease, barely sparing them a glance as he reached the collapsed body and closed a cold hand around its throat.

’’Sleep now, little specimen,’’ he murmured, almost tender. ’’We have so very much to discuss.’’

.

.

.

.

Mylo’s first sensation was pressure.

Not pain, not yet, just a dull, heavy weight pressing down on every limb like the air itself had thickened around him.

His second sensation was the smell. Stone, damp, something faintly metallic underneath it all.

He tried to move his arm. It twitched, barely, some kind of restraint biting into his wrist the moment he tested it.

Okay, so I’m bound. That’s, that’s useful information at least.

He forced his eyes open, vision swimming for a long moment before the world resolved into something recognizable.

A cave. Rough stone walls, uneven ceiling, a faint reddish glow coming from somewhere he couldn’t immediately identify.

Alright. Think. What happened last.

Poison. The Vexfang. The swarm. Something grabbing me.

And I’m still alive. That means whatever grabbed me wanted me alive. That’s either really good or really, really bad.

He tested the restraint again, subtle this time, cataloging the material without drawing attention to himself. Rope, maybe, or something rope-like. Not metal, at least not on his wrists.

If I can find a weak point, maybe.

Slow, unhurried, deliberate footsteps, the kind that belonged to someone who had nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there anyway.

Mylo went still.

A figure stepped into view, robed in dark, tattered cloth, hood pushed back now to reveal a gaunt, sharp-featured face, eyes a pale, unsettling shade that didn’t match anything else about him.

He looked almost human.

’’Ah, good, you’re awake,’’ the man said, crouching down with the casual ease of someone examining a particularly interesting insect.

’’I was starting to worry the poison had done more damage than I’d hoped.’’

Mylo said nothing, mind racing.

Don’t react too fast. Don’t give anything away yet. Figure out what he wants first.

’’Oh, don’t look so suspicious,’’ the man continued, almost wounded. ’’I’ve already dealt with the poison in your system, you know. Wouldn’t want my new specimen expiring before we’ve even had a proper conversation.’’

Specimen...?

Mylo’s stomach turned cold at the word, though he kept his face carefully blank.

’’Who are you,’’ Mylo said finally, voice rough. ’’And how did I end up here?’’

’’You don’t need to know my name yet,’’ the man said, inclining his head with theatrical politeness.

’’And as for how you ended up here, that’s precisely the question I’d like answered myself. Why don’t you tell me. Who are you, little one, and what exactly are you doing in my forest?’’

Careful, don’t say anything that gives him more than he already has.

’’I don’t know,’’ Mylo said slowly. ’’I don’t really remember much. I woke up in the lake, and everything before that is just, blank.’’

The man studied him for a long moment, head tilting slightly, that same unhinged amusement flickering behind his pale eyes.

’’Mm. Memory loss. How convenient.’’

He leaned in closer, voice dropping into something almost gentle, almost kind, which somehow made it worse.

’’Let me save us both some time. I am, without exaggeration, one of the most learned scholars this realm has ever produced. I have studied the anatomy, the essence, the very fundamental nature of nearly every denizen that crawls through this forest.’’

His smile widened.

’’So no matter how carefully you choose your lies, no matter how convincing you think they are, you will not be able to hide the truth from me. Not for long. I promise you that.’’

Mylo’s blood ran cold.

He knows. Or he’s close enough to knowing that lying is pointless. So what do I even do with that..

The man straightened, apparently satisfied with whatever silent calculation he’d just run behind his own eyes, and gestured to someone unseen.

’’In any case. Let’s get you settled somewhere more permanent, shall we?’’

The chains around Mylo’s wrists dragged against stone as he was hauled deeper into the cave, past another iron cage with a girl inside, before being deposited alone in another iron cage in a narrow chamber lit by the same faint red glow that seemed to seep out of the walls themselves.

Mylo forced himself upright, ignoring the ache in every limb, and made himself look around properly this time.

That’s when he saw her.

Across the chamber, suspended by chains bolted into the rock, hung a woman.

Or something that had once been a woman, though the word didn’t seem to fully apply anymore.

Her legs ended abruptly below the ankle, the wounds long since healed over into smooth, scarred stumps, as though whatever had taken them had done so with clinical precision rather than violence.

Her hair was white. Stark, impossible white in a world that offered nothing but red and black.

Her dress, torn in places, still held together in ways that suggested it had once been beautiful, an elegance completely out of place down here.

Her eyes opened.

Pale, sharp, entirely lucid, fixing on him with an intensity that made him forget, for a moment, the ache in his own body.

Her lips parted, cracked and faintly charred at the edges, and yet somehow still beautiful in a way that unsettled him more than comforted him.

’’You.’’

Her voice was precise. Each word placed with deliberate, careful weight, nothing wasted, nothing rushed.

’’Would you be willing,’’

A pause, her pale eyes never leaving his.

’’To team up with me. And kill that bastard.’’

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