"Whoa, this is something else! But didn't you say we're going to a hospital? Why'd you bring me to your house? Planning to silence me or what?"
Matou Zouken stood with hands behind his back, his face twisted into a filthy, distorted smile, exuding a rancid, decaying stench.
"Settle privately, huh? Easy enough… This house? It's mine now. And this little girl? She's a Samuel too. Old worm, get lost!"
Samuel's flippant grin carried an air of supreme arrogance.
"Hmph, hmph, hmph… Bold kid. I knew you were after Sakura, but stepping into my magecraft workshop? That's too cocky. Witness the weight of centuries!"
Zouken's body dissolved into a mass of rotting flesh, from which swarms of worms crawled, spreading across the ground.
A gray mist unfurled, heavy with an unclean, putrid sensation, like foul breath.
Samuel pointed at Kariya, whose face paled, and Sakura, already terrified by Zouken. "Hey, this guy's your son, right? And Sakura's here too? You're practically handing me hostages!"
"Do as you please! With your body, I don't need this son. As for Sakura? Dead, her research value drops significantly!"
Unlike Toaru's magicians, who were akin to espers, Nasuverse's magi were barely human. True magi were monsters devoid of conscience, sacrificing countless lives for a goal, a scrap of intel, or an experiment's outcome.
Zouken was one such monster.
To survive, he'd turned himself into this grotesque, inhuman thing, his flesh a manifestation of malevolence.
Sakura's rare "Imaginary Numbers" attribute made her a prized treasure to magi. But dead? Her value would plummet.
No magus would let their treasure depreciate.
Zouken assumed Samuel was a magus coveting Sakura's potential.
He was wrong. Samuel's primary goal was to kill him. Sakura was secondary—worth studying, but not the main objective.
The gray mist thickened, the door vanishing. The lush forest around them took on a deathly hue under the fog.
"Kid, don't try to escape. This is now a 'temple.' You're bold to intrude alone, but against the Matou family's centuries of legacy, you'll fall."
As Zouken spoke, the forest came alive, worms chirping and writhing.
"W-Wah…"
Sakura sobbed, overwhelmed by the crawling, swarming worms, enough to spark entomophobia or trypophobia in anyone.
Especially in a child not yet eight.
"There, there, Sakura, it's okay. Big Bro's here."
Samuel scooped her up, shielding her eyes with his body.
"Die, fool! Jie jie jie!"
Zouken's sinister laugh echoed, resonating eerily with the forest's worms chorus.
"Dead worm, you made my little sister cry. Next life, don't come back as something so gross."
"…"
Kariya stood silently, doubting Samuel's chances but committing the boy's image to memory.
"Kid! Still so arrogant on death's door? Let your screams entertain me!"
With Zouken's words, wings buzzed. Swarms of flying worms surged from all directions, while crawling worms flooded the ground like a tide. Samuel was engulfed in a sea of worms.
"Tch… Testing if I'm worthy to work with you? Don't you trust me, when you sought me out?"
Justeaze had vanished. Samuel shook his head, facing the worm onslaught.
The air reeked of decay, like rotting corpses.
"Disgusting!"
With Samuel's calm words, a light pierced the "darkness."
Crimson radiance shone like the sun, incinerating worms to ash wherever it touched.
Using immense computational power, Samuel manipulated electrons to form a bowl-shaped transparent wall, precisely targeting and annihilating individual worms with millions of calculations.
In an instant, the courtyard's worms were reduced to atoms.
"What is that? What is that?"
Zouken's voice dripped with madness. A stream of worms poured from the house, reforming his body. His eyes locked onto the towering figure behind Samuel.
As if entranced, he staggered toward him.
"Our ideal… my ideal…"
One step, and he was crushed again.
"An… angel?"
Sakura's cute, slightly dazed voice murmured, gazing at the "manifestation" behind Samuel.
"Go to hell, vermin!"
Light flooded Fuyuki, Samuel's vast calculations washing over the area like water rinsing a plate. Believe it or not, every worm was pulverized to dust.
And Zouken's decayed soul… was intercepted.
***
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