Chapter 645 : The Concealed Hunter

Inside the underground Forbidden Archive of the Hymn Cathedral, the massive Dread Devourer Direwolf let out a furious roar after the shameless ambush. All four eyes atop his two gigantic wolf heads glared in the same direction—staring at the black-cloaked figure who had suddenly appeared. The three other members of the Afterbirth Cult were equally stunned, turning their gaze toward the intruder.

“Who is that…? When did he appear?”

“Why didn’t we smell his presence at all earlier?”

Blond and the others stared at the ragged figure standing amid the rubble in his grimy, old trench coat, eyes filled with shock. As werewolves, they possessed extremely keen and powerful olfactory senses—there should be no living creature whose scent could escape their noses.

Yet this mysterious man had successfully ambushed Duval and snatched away the already-secured Crimson Holy Mother. Duval, as a Dread Devourer Direwolf, should have had olfaction far beyond that of ordinary werewolves—reaching an extraordinary, even illogical level. And even so, he had been successfully ambushed.

From the perspective of the werewolves present, it wasn’t that the man had no scent—it was that his scent had only appeared the moment the ambush began. Before that, they had not sensed his existence at all.

“Die, you little thief!”

To have the item stolen from his very grasp and his artery slashed—that humiliation enraged Duval beyond belief. He didn’t care who this figure was or what technique he had used to achieve his ambush. The wolf head on Duval’s right roared in fury and took a step forward, swinging its massive claw down toward the tiny figure with blinding speed. In another instant, the blow would have flattened the man into pulp.

But the mysterious figure standing amid the debris showed no fear. Calmly, he sidestepped with a backward leap, avoiding the blow with uncanny precision. As the rubble where he had stood moments ago exploded in a thunderous crash, the man landed. Duval, seeing his attack had missed, immediately followed up with a wide, sweeping claw. The man responded with a forward roll, lowering his body to narrowly evade the sweeping strike that could’ve leveled everything in its path.

Duval's strike demolished several archive shelves, sending wreckage flying. But seeing that the target had still evaded him only intensified his rage. He raised a massive foot and stomped down, intending to crush the man like a rat. Yet once again, at the moment the clawed foot came down, the mysterious man spun aside with perfect timing and avoided it.

The impact shook the entire underground archive, sending tremors through the ground. Blond and the others stumbled and struggled to remain standing, but the mysterious man maintained perfect balance. Standing atop the fractured floor, he raised his butcher’s cleaver and swung it hard into the nearby wolf foot—ripping a deep gash into the heel, sending blood gushing out.

With his tendon severed, Duval let out a howl of pain and dropped to one knee, claws slamming down before the mysterious man. The man didn’t hesitate—he leapt again and delivered another slash, severing a large mass of tendons and muscle that supported Duval’s body. The limb went limp, and the beast's massive body sagged forward. Both wolf heads came crashing toward the attacker. The man evaded the snapping maws and drew a long, slender blade from his waist, thrusting it straight into the right wolf head’s eye, piercing its pupil.

“ROAR!!!”

Blood sprayed from the ruined eye. The sheer pain, almost mocking in its precision, drove the beast into a wild frenzy. Duval surged with spirituality, rapidly healing his wounds. Then, like a creature driven mad, he began destroying everything around him. He no longer tracked the enemy—he simply attacked indiscriminately.

Stone pillars were smashed, bookshelves toppled, claw marks tore deep gashes into the walls. The tremors shook the chamber violently. Though the archive was structurally reinforced like a military bunker—capable of withstanding artillery bombardment—even it now seemed on the verge of collapse. Blond and the others were shaken with fear and scrambled to dodge the destruction.

“Calm down! You can’t kill him like this!”

At that moment, Duval’s left head snapped angrily. It seemed his rebuke managed to rein in the rampage. Slowly, the maddened direwolf came back under control and ceased his pointless devastation. Both heads began scanning the surroundings, trying to locate the mysterious intruder amidst the ruins.

“Where did that bastard go?!”

Duval's heads searched frantically, but saw nothing. The entire archive—save for the beam of sunlight shining through the hole in the ceiling—was steeped in gloom. Duval attempted to use his prized sense of smell to track the intruder again, but the scent had vanished once more. No matter how he sniffed, he couldn’t pick it up—just as it had been before the ambush.

“What’s going on… I can’t smell him… Where did he go?!”

“A scent shouldn’t disappear that fast—what kind of technique is this?!”

Duval strained his nose, searching desperately. He scanned every dark corner with his eyes, listened with sharpened ears—but still, nothing.

Suddenly, a black blur shot out from one shadowed corner of the archive, launching a surprise attack from Duval’s blind spot. A deep gash split open across his back, blood spraying once again. Roaring in fury, Duval spun and lunged at the scent’s source, smashing into more shadows with frenzied strikes. The floor cracked into craters, the ceiling collapsed in chunks—but the enemy had vanished once more.

And so it continued: the mysterious figure would dart from one patch of darkness, strike Duval, and disappear again before retaliation could reach him. No matter how hard Duval chased, he could never truly catch the phantom. Once hidden in the shadows, the attacker became completely undetectable.

Duval could only flail in futile rage, counterattacking blindly while accumulating fresh injuries and growing ever more furious.

Meanwhile, Dorothy still sat calmly in a carriage on the outskirts of the cathedral district, watching the scene unfold through mystical observation. Watching the rampaging direwolf being toyed with, she smiled faintly and commented.

“Performing even better than expected... A legend of the big city, huh? Far better than the ones from small places like Glamorne…”

Gently adjusting the small hat atop her head, Dorothy murmured softly.

Indeed, the mysterious figure currently entangling with Duval—the Crimson-rank Dread Devourer Direwolf—within the underground archive was no mere entity. It was an Anecdotal Construct created by Dorothy herself, one whose core concept came from a Tivian urban legend: the Night Demon.

𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

The Night Demon, Tivian’s nocturnal killer, was arguably the most well-known urban legend in recent years. Since two years ago, a string of brutal serial murders had plagued the noble district of Tivian, all tied to a single murderer. As the media and gossipmongers spread word of the gruesome killings, the figure was gradually given the name “Night Demon.”

Among Tivian’s citizens, the legend of the Night Demon had become extremely widespread, riddled with so many fantastical elements that it was practically invoked to scare children into behaving at night. Of course, despite the legend’s dramatic elements, Dorothy knew the truth: the Night Demon was actually an extraordinary assassin developed by the Eight-Spired Nest using some unknown method. The killer’s targets—Tivian’s nobles—were part of the Eight-Spired Nest’s infiltration campaign into Pritt, much like their use of the Night Demon in the assassination of Duke Barrett.

But the truth didn’t matter. What mattered was that the legend existed, and Dorothy could use it to fabricate an Anecdotal Construct.

In fact, Dorothy had begun working on creating the Night Demon construct as early as her return to Tivian. But in doing so, she encountered a problem.

The legend of the Night Demon had spread too far and wide in Tivian. Too many people knew about it, and the stories varied by region, with the figure’s appearance being vague and inconsistent. This lack of coherence and blurred identity made it difficult for Dorothy to consolidate the legend into a concrete form and summon power from it.

So, during her stay, she deployed her corpse marionettes to taverns and gambling dens across the city to propagate a more defined version of the legend. She used the Bewitching Dreams Path’s Charisma aura to disseminate a refined narrative of the Night Demon to thousands of citizens—detailing its appearance and setting.

Thanks to this effort, while Dorothy’s version of the Night Demon wasn’t the dominant story in all of Tivian, it was far more coherent than the others and substantial enough to serve as the core archetype to manifest an Anecdotal Construct. During the process, she even added in a few elements of extradimensional knowledge.

That knowledge had come from an unexpected windfall during her major medical knowledge exchange in the Royal Crown Library. Due to the advanced nature of this world’s medical systems, Dorothy had received some rather fascinating returns. Among them was a rough overview of a technique called Blood Ministration, and anatomical diagrams of bizarre beast-mutant creatures.

What stood out was that these anatomical diagrams weren’t strictly for medical study—they were instructional guides for how to hunt and kill such creatures, complete with a few practical hunting techniques.

Dorothy took these elements—originating from “Yharnam”—and embedded them into the Night Demon construct, giving it not only the traits of a “serial killer” but also a degree of Hunter attributes.

Because the Night Demon was a legend born in Tivian, a metropolis with a population of several million, and because Dorothy summoned the construct within Tivian itself, its power level was extremely high. It possessed agility and speed equivalent to a Crimson-rank Shadow Beyonder. It had elite combat reflexes, sharp hunting techniques, and its bladed weapons carried equivalent Shadow enchantments—slicing through bone and flesh like fruit.

Beyond that, it had a unique ability: Sightless Concealment.

This power stemmed from the public’s general impression of the Night Demon: elusive, impossible to track, and capable of erasing all traces of their crimes. No matter how hard the police tried, they could never catch the killer—a disgrace to Tivian’s law enforcement.

The manifestation of that impression was this Anecdotal Construct’s ability: in a dark environment, the moment it left its pursuer’s line of sight, it would enter a concealed state—becoming completely invisible. Its scent vanished, its sounds silenced, and even its footprints disappeared. No sense could detect it.

In this concealed state, the Night Demon left no trace whatsoever. Only those with powerful Lantern abilities could detect it. Any other method—even those of Crimson-rank Beyonders—would fail. As for beings above Crimson rank, Dorothy herself wasn’t sure.

This power stemmed from the real Night Demon’s lack of evidence at crime scenes—but Dorothy knew the truth: it wasn’t because the assassin was so clean, but because the Eight-Spired Nest used its deep infiltration in Pritt to cover up all traces. The press didn’t know that and instead glorified the Night Demon’s legendary ability to erase evidence.

That was fine by Dorothy. Whether or not the erasure ability was real didn’t matter. If enough people believed it, then it became real in her hands.

In a way, the Anecdotal Construct Dorothy had created might now be even stronger than the “original” Night Demon of the Eight-Spired Nest…

Relying on its tremendous speed and concealment, Dorothy guided her Anecdotal Night Demon to rapidly dart through the underground archive, inflicting wound after wound upon the monstrous direwolf. Duval could do nothing but flail and miss, his fury rising with each failed attempt.

Once again, the shadow-black blur shot out from a shelf’s upper shadows, landing atop the direwolf’s massive form. The black-clad butcher stood upon its nape and carved several deep gashes into it with rapid strokes, blood spraying high.

Duval’s right claw immediately swung up, aiming to squash the intruder like a fly.

“Die, you damn insect!”

But the Night Demon, moving with extreme finesse, leapt away before the blow could connect. Landing swiftly, he retreated several steps into a shadowed patch without direct sunlight—disappearing once again.

Duval’s claw, missing its mark, slammed brutally into his own flesh. The sheer force tore apart a massive portion of his right neck—severing one of his heads. The right wolf head tumbled off, but was caught mid-air by the left claw and quickly pressed back into place. The severed joint immediately began healing.

Ironically, Duval had injured himself far worse than all the damage inflicted by the Night Demon so far.

“Calm down… Don’t let him toy with you!”

The left wolf head bellowed, and with the newly reattached right head falling momentarily silent, the giant direwolf finally seemed to regain his composure. Emerging from his haze of rage, Duval began to think seriously about how to deal with his elusive foe.

As he scanned the surroundings, his gaze fell upon someone: Sander, who was crawling from a pile of rubble, disheveled and ash-covered.

Duval’s eyes lit up. He lunged forward and snatched Sander with one massive claw, lifting him close, then wrapped his other arm protectively around the captive—shielding him from the Night Demon’s ambush.

Seeing the sudden change, Sander panicked.

“Wh-what are you doing, Elder?!”

“Doing…? I need you to make a little contribution—for the unity of our three faiths…”

The left wolf head spoke slowly. Sander suddenly realized what was happening and began to thrash and shout in desperation.

“Contribution—no! I’m a servant of the Plague Lord! I’m not one of you Wolfblood scum! You can’t do this! This will—”

“Don’t worry. I’ll send a White Ash to your side afterward… as a formal apology.”

With that, Duval’s wolf mouth opened wide and swallowed Sander whole. He began chewing mercilessly. Within seconds, Sander’s anguished screams ceased.

As Duval’s throat contracted with the swallowing motion, the eye of his left head began to change, its color shifting from red to a bright, virulent green. When his bloodstained maw opened again, he murmured.

“Devour… mutate…”