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A face appeared in Maiza’s mind. It belonged to the man they’d called “the demon,” the one who’d given them immortality—a companion who should have been in distant New York now. However, even as he thought it couldn’t possibly be him, he’d asked the village headman just to make sure.

“Nothing. Never mind, just hurry and get out of this village…no, out of this forest.”

“What did you mean, ‘demon’?”

Clicking his tongue irritably at Maiza’s curiosity, the man grudgingly added, “…There’s a monster here.”

An isolated region in the middle of the forest. A monster that menaced the village.

The occult story—or rather, a sort of folk tale or legend—had come up abruptly. However, Maiza didn’t snort at it. Instead, he listened quietly to Dez.

“You could never know how we suffer at his hands. And even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“What kind of monster is it?”

“I’ve got nothing more to say to you! Get out!” the man named Dez spat with fogged breath. His face was flushed.

After a short silence, Maiza murmured, as if confirming something:

“Elmer…Elmer C. Albatross.”

Rustle.

The air writhed.

The moment the name left Maiza’s lips, the attitude of the people around him changed dramatically. The hostility, which had nearly faded, rebounded as if by magic. The men bewitched by Sylvie turned back to Maiza so quickly that they might have been spring-loaded dolls.

Even the village head, whose face had rarely even twitched, opened both eyes wide and looked Maiza and the others over again.

“Why, you…”

“We’re looking for that man. If he isn’t in this village, we’ll leave immedia—”

“Get them!”

The headman’s roar echoed over the village’s main road, cutting Maiza’s words short.

The villagers, faces and bodies tense, burst into action. They moved with the force of wild animals mobbing their prey, but it seemed as though there was another emotion mixed with the hostility in their eyes.

Fear?

Maiza realized the true shape of the feeling that lurked behind their expressions, but the men’s arms closed in on him before he had time to confirm it.

However, he was as calm as if he’d expected all this. Repeatedly sidestepping without shifting his gaze, Maiza kept evading the men’s arms at the last second.

“Wait, please, we aren’t really—”

When he looked at the village headman, the young man beside him was pointing a long gun his way.

“I take it there’s no use in arguing?”

A gunshot echoed through the quiet village, and Maiza’s body rocked with the impact.

“Maiza!”

In spite of herself, Sylvie screamed at the sight. Unlike Maiza, she didn’t seem to really understand what was happening; she had her back to the car and hadn’t moved a step. Czes had gotten a handle on the situation a bit more quickly and slipped under the car early on.

The bullet grazed Maiza, gouging his thigh. His thick trousers ripped, and a spray of blood misted the air.

Sensing an opportunity, the villagers surrounded him. Only the village headman was looking at something else: the drops of blood from Maiza’s leg.

Dez stared at the red spots that had spread across the stone flags, a fierce uneasiness filling his heart.

His anxiety was right on the mark.

The blood that should have stuck to the pavement suddenly began to slide over the ground.

As if they had a will of their own, the red spots gathered, making for Maiza’s feet.

Like dancing shadows, they collided with one another, mingled…and finally climbed up Maiza’s leg to disappear through the rip in his trousers, into the wound.

The villagers who’d been attempting to immobilize Maiza registered the abnormal sight while it was happening. First they stopped dead, and then, turning pale, they gradually retreated.

“The same…”

“Demon.”

“He’s like that guy…!”

“He’ll kill us.”

“Defile us.”

“Don’t meet his eyes…”

The villagers muttered in low voices to one another.

“Hmm?”

Seeing this, Maiza felt a slight uncertainty.

He’d regenerated in front of people who didn’t know the circumstances before. Quite naturally, those who saw it were terrified, and most of them distanced themselves from him immediately. One of the few exceptions was an individual who ran a small crime syndicate in New York: his one and only boss.

However, the villagers’ response had been a little different from what he’d seen before. Ordinarily, when Maiza’s body healed, people feared him as something unknowable… But this group seemed to be frightened because they recognized this distressing phenomenon. This wasn’t fear of the unknown. They already held a concept of beings that regenerated, and that concept held some sort of terror for them.

I see. For the most part, I understand.

Nodding to himself, Maiza took another look at the situation around him.

When he did, he saw that several of the people who’d distanced themselves from him were edging toward Sylvie. From the way they kept stealing glances at him as they closed in on her, they were probably planning to use her as a hostage.

“Hey, don’t you dare!”

With her back against the car door, Sylvie tried to slap away the hand of the first man who reached for her.

However, the villager moved just a little bit faster, and he trapped Sylvie’s slim wrist easily.

Maiza turned, preparing to go rescue her, but then he saw something and stopped in his tracks. Behind Sylvie, with the faint hum of a motor, the window in the car’s rear door had begun to roll down.

The villager who had hold of Sylvie’s arm was desperate to subdue her, and he didn’t seem to have noticed.

Through the window, a brown palm reached for him—

Clamp.

The hand at the end of the long arm stretching from the window wrapped around the villager’s wrist as he tried to immobilize Sylvie.

“Yeek?!”

The young villager screamed, involuntarily distancing himself from his prey.

As if in response, the arm hanging from the window zipped back into the car.

The villager’s trapped wrist was hauled along with it by force.

“Waaaaaaaaaugh!”

Before he had time to struggle, the villager’s arm was halfway into the car, and the motor noise echoed again. Someone inside was shutting the window, with the man’s arm in it.

“Aaaaaaaaaah!”

Pressure assailed the young man’s arm. It wasn’t severed, of course—the glass stopped closing once his arm was firmly pinched—and yet the window didn’t open either. It compressed the man’s flesh and bone with an unsettling creaking noise.

At this sudden, unfathomable development, the villagers near Sylvie froze. Meanwhile, Sylvie peeked into the car through the window—only to hastily leap away from the door.

Just as Sylvie made it to the front of the vehicle, there was a click. The car’s rear door was kicked open, hard—with the poor villager’s arm still stuck in the window.

“Waaaugh!”

The force lifted the villager’s body into the air and very nearly sent him flying, but his trapped arm wouldn’t allow it. Something gave an even bigger creak, but the people nearby weren’t able to tell whether the noise had come from the window or the bone.

What emerged from the door, which had been flung open as the man screamed, was…

“A mon…ster?”

Unlike their reaction to Maiza a few moments ago, the villagers’ voices held a fear of something they didn’t understand. The figure of the man exiting the car was just that peculiar.

He was clothed in white fabric from head to toe, and the sleeves that ended halfway down his arms revealed brown skin. His outfit certainly wasn’t lightweight, but considering the surrounding temperature, the lack of cloth was enough to make people feel cold just by looking at it.

If that had been all, it wouldn’t have qualified as “peculiar.” The problem was what was above his neck.

The first thing to catch the eye was the strange mask fixed to his face. It was the sort worn at festivals in Southeast Asia or Hong Kong, with a complicated shape and a light background decorated with garish primary colors.

In addition, all that was visible under that mask was not skin but the pure white of bandages. In other words, this man had bandaged his head and face, and was wearing a mask on top of that. Through the holes where the mask’s eyes should have been, they could see glowering eyes that gleamed sharply.

At the incredibly incongruous appearance of this man, the villagers glanced at one another, and a small murmur rippled through them.

Paying no particular attention to them, the masked man spoke dispassionately, watching Maiza.

“Your driving is too rough. I’ll say it again. In fact, allow me to say it one more time: Do you intend to kill me?”

The man’s expression was invisible behind the mask, but from his tone, it was clear that he was considerably annoyed.

“Ordinarily, I would either punch or kick you, but considering the situation, I will overlook it. I venture to overlook it.”

“That’s terribly generous of you, Nile.”

Maiza responded to the grandiose speech with a light shrug. Then he turned and addressed the wide-eyed villagers.

“Ah, this man was less a passenger than he was being transported in the backseat, so I didn’t make him get out earlier… In any case, we had no intention of hiding him, so please don’t get the wrong idea.”

However, the village headman and the others weren’t listening. They were looking at the man who’d appeared before them with the expression of a person trapped in a nightmare.

Possibly because he’d noticed the gazes, Nile, the masked man, folded his arms and said to Maiza, “I do not fully understand the situation, but for the moment, things seem to have calmed down. However, permit me to ask: What should I do, Maiza?”

“Erm, I’d like to settle this as peaceably as possible, so no violence, please.”

When Maiza told him this, surveying the villagers as if he was concerned for their safety, Nile nodded with a grunt, then circled around behind the car.

Setting a foot on the spare tire fixed to the back of the car, the masked man began climbing up to the roof with admirable agility. When he’d reached his destination, he folded his arms and looked down on the villagers imposingly.

As the locals stared at him, wondering what on earth was about to happen, Nile slowly opened his mouth:

“Very well. First, you kneel. Then we talk.”