Berserk of Gluttony (LN) - Volume 4 - Chapter 18

Chapter 18:

Bloodthirsty

WITH RAFALE’S TEETH still scraping along the blade of the black sword, I drove him back, straight through the outer wall of the research facility. Then I leaped back to check on Aaron.

“Aaron, are you hurt?”

“I’ll be fine, but I’ve lost a good amount of blood.”

Aaron’s wound was already closing, thanks in large part to his high stats. However, the blood he’d lost made a slick pool on the ground beneath us. A glance at his face told me that he was still weak. Still, he rose to his feet, his eyes zeroed in on Rafale’s direction.

From the wreckage of the outer wall, Rafale sent up a torrential wave of rubble and debris as he reappeared before us, completely healed. We’d burst his head open and impaled him through the heart, but that didn’t matter. We could destroy these vital organs as many times as we liked, and he would still keep moving. He was no longer human but a monster in human skin.

“Is this what Lina would have wanted for you, Rafale?” Aaron called.

“I will not hear it, old man.”

“If in fact she did wish for her own blood, her own son, to become what you have, then my heart aches for you both, Rafale.”

“I said shut it, or else I’ll—gah!”

Rafale suddenly fell to his knees, his breath growing heavy, twitching as though he was struggling to control something inside himself. I knew the feeling well. Rafale looked like I did when I fought Gluttony’s insatiable hunger for souls.

However, when I had fought and then devoured the chimera called Haniel in Galia, I had gained the help of Luna, the girl who had been trapped within that Galian weapon. Thanks to her assistance in controlling the urges of Gluttony, I no longer needed to devour as many souls to keep it satisfied. With her, I could maintain balance. But that was only true until I reached my half-starved state. If I unleashed the entirety of my Gluttony, I would regress back into the starved berserker I had become when I fought the Divine Dragon in Galia.

In the ashes of that fight, my soul had been saved because Lady Roxy had chosen to reach out and rescue me from the brink. I had decided never to rely on that power again. If I fell to the starving depths of true Gluttony a second time, the one I would hunger for the most would be none other than Lady Roxy herself.

Luna had called Lady Roxy my bastion. But that bastion existed only as a sacrifice to quell the urges of my Gluttony. The prospect alone terrified me.

In the shivering Rafale that stood before me, I sensed the same struggle. The same grappling for control.

“Damn it all to hell! Not now, not…again…” Rafale reached up and frantically scratched his forehead as if something fought to release itself from his skin. Then he reached down and grabbed two vials filled with red liquid from a small case strapped to his thigh. He drank them down in one gulp. “Is this not enough…?”

As Rafale grappled with whatever was roiling inside him, the nightwalker formations began to crumble. At the same time, an army of soldiers and holy knights arrived to push the monsters back. They had mobilized when they’d heard the sounds of battle. I spied two knights in striking white armor among the reinforcements: the king’s bodyguards.

I turned to Aaron, who nodded. “It seems the king’s orders have finally reached the cavalry,” he said. “They’ve arrived.”

“With the nightwalkers in disarray, they should be able to handle it, right?”

“I believe so, which means there’s one thing left to take care of.” Aaron turned his gaze back to Rafale. “Rafale! Whatever you’ve done to yourself—it’s beyond your ability to handle. You must understand that great power comes at great cost. When you accept such a power, you also accept its weight, but here you refuse to accept it.”

“Shut up! He craved power too… He was driven by hate! And he did what he did because of the pain! Isn’t that right, Fate? You hate me, don’t you?” Rafale glared at me, challenging me.

“I don’t know what link the two of you share, and perhaps what you say is true, Rafale. Or at least, perhaps it was true, once. The Fate I met in Hausen is not the Fate who stands with me now.” Aaron put his hand on my shoulder and nodded.

I looked Rafale in the eyes. “You’re pitiful, Rafale.”

“Shut up! Not you! Not from you! Remember when you killed Hado? Remember that hate?”

“I…I can’t deny how I felt when I faced your brother. But I can’t go on living like that.”

I pointed the blade of the black sword at Rafale and walked toward him. In the distance, one half of Hado’s body rebuilt itself, but it did so all too slowly. This alone was proof that Rafale’s power had weakened. Even if he was functionally immortal, in his current state, we could at least restrain him.

He also apparently couldn’t afford to use the black spear’s portal attacks, as when his weapon met mine, we clashed in a purely physical deadlock.

“Answer me this,” I said as our weapons pushed back and forth, “where did you get that power? That spear?”

“Do you really think I’d tell the likes of you?”

“Fine. Then I’ll make you talk.”

The black sword edged forward, pushing and pushing until it sliced into Rafale’s left shoulder. A streak of pain flashed across his face, and his crooked teeth clenched tight.

He’s immortal, but he still feels pain. That meant that when I’d broken his face, when Aaron impaled him, and when his chest was gouged open—he’d felt all of it. Rafale…is that how badly you want your victory?

Rafale glared at me, screaming. “Hado! You worthless piece of trash! I’m giving you an order! Move, damn it!”

The regenerating Hado lurched his grotesque half-formed body to its feet and flapped toward us on one wing. Aaron dodged in for the attack, slicing off Hado’s remaining wing and sending him tumbling. But Hado’s momentum sent him straight into me and Rafale. I leaped back to avoid the collision.

Rafale laughed. “You’re useful after all, brother!”

Using his brother as a momentary shield, Rafale fled through the hole in the outer wall and back into a research facility—the Vlerick research facility. Hado swung his broken holy sword in an effort to slow me down, but with his head still sliced in half, he couldn’t see well enough to focus.

“Get out of my way, Hado.” I sliced him once more into two pieces across the waist. Then I kicked the pieces across the floor, watching as he again struggled to repair himself.

“Leave Hado and the nightwalkers to me,” I heard Aaron call from behind. “Go after Rafale. Put an end to this.”

“Don’t push yourself too hard, Aaron.”

His wound might have healed, but he’d lost all that blood. Under better circumstances, he should have been resting. But Aaron wasn’t one to complain or falter in the heat of battle. I’d have to take the chance he’d given me to finish things myself.

I entered the facility through the hole in the wall and scanned the area. Where did you go, Rafale? Up…or down?

A familiar scream pierced the air, coming from the hole Hado had created when he first knocked me out of the facility. The rubble led to the basement. That scream likely belonged to whoever Rafale was attacking. There was also a good chance something down there was important to Rafale, because it was where all the nightwalker research had been done.

Then I realized why I recognized that voice. It belonged to Rafale’s younger sister, Memil. I’d dropped her when Hado first threw me. Rafale must have found her on his way down. But if he’d attacked his own sister… Dread lanced through me, and my grip tightened on the hilt of the black sword.

“Hang on a second,” said Greed, “don’t tell me you’ve come all this way and now you’re too scared to head back down there!!”

“I’m going. But tell me this first: Has Rafale become the bearer of a Skill of Mortal Sin?”

“As a bearer yourself, you should be able to tell better than anyone.”

“I don’t know quite how to put it… He’s similar, but there’s something different about him. It’s weird.”

“Ha! Looks like you’ve started putting the pieces together!”

“What does that mean?”

“All things in good time, Fate.”

I aimed for the experiment room as I leaped down. That room filled with glass cylinders of red liquid, all of which contained one of an array of different creatures. The room where I had first discovered Hado.