Assassin from Abyss

Chapter 29: Glowing Bead

Kei drew the talon out of Saana’s chest.

It came free leaving a bloody dent, blood trickling from it down her skin, and again the comforting chill ran up his spine.

He rose and set the talon back into its socket in the hidden-weapon gloves, drawn from his weapon bead, and put them on. Then from his apparel bead he took a fresh set — arm-gloves, a full-sleeved teal tunic-jacket, black leg-wear — and dressed himself in them.

He looked at Saana’s naked body on the bedroll, laid there as though sleeping.

He felt nothing. She had been a tool, and tools are used and discarded when their use is spent.

He rolled the beads along his bracelet until his hand rested on an oval purple one seated in its indent. A necro bead — a large dimensional space, kept freezing cold inside, for storing cadavers and carcasses without decay.

He put Saana’s corpse into it.

Then he went out of the bedroom into the hall. The hearth-fire had burned low, close to going out. It was well past midnight; an hour or two remained until the dawn.

He crossed to the severed head of Madam Butterfly and put it into the necro bead. Then he went to Kervyn’s corpse, lying in its small puddle of blood with the clumps of pus and grey matter scattered around it, and searched it, and found three diamond-shaped beads in the pocket.

With the owner dead, the beads were open to a new claim. Kei bonded them with his blood and checked the contents.

A currency bead — eight thousand droqdo and a few ditoso. An apparel bead — fifty or so expensive garments. And an alchemy bead — twenty Tier-4 healing pills, and fifteen others he did not recognize.

He shifted it all into his own oval storage beads, and slid Kervyn’s beads in with them. Dimensional beads of a kind could nest inside one another — a pocket within a pocket.

Then he put Kervyn’s corpse into the necro bead, and moved to the headless body of Madam Butterfly.

It had dried out entirely with the blood loss, and stiffened. He tore the clothes from it and stored them, and found on its wrist a bracelet like his own, worn tight as a bangle. He tried to pull it free, and it would not come — the hand had clenched hard as the blood drained.

Kei brought his beast paw down on the wrist at full force and crushed the bones of it. Then he twisted the reversible wrist a full half-turn, and the bracelet slid off easily.

It was pentagon-shaped, five different-colored oval beads set in its indents — a weapon bead, an apparel bead, an alchemy bead, a scroll bead, and last, a deep-green bone bead. That green he did not know; he had seen no bead of the color in any merchant-guild shop.

He set his blood to the bracelet, and it bonded to him at once.

He was about to go through its beads when he caught a red glow coming from beneath the blood-soaked bedroll by the hearth. The fire had died, and the hall was dark again, and the glow stood out sharp to his eyes.

He put the pentagon bracelet into his lower pocket and went, curious, to the light.

He hauled the bedroll up and threw it aside. Something small was glowing on the blood-soaked floor. He picked it up and turned it in his fingers — the prism-shaped white bone bead, the one he had found in the locker of this house and given to Saana on a whim, to sell her his lies.

He had forgotten it, and was glad to have it back. freewebnovel.cσ๓

Soaked in the floor’s blood, the white bead had gone red, and it was glowing in a pattern.

*On. Off. On. Off.*

He had tried to blood-bind it before, and nothing had come of it, so he did not try again. He held it in the fingertips of his right hand and studied it closely, and nothing happened.

After a while, disappointed, he made to put it back in his pocket.

And as he closed his palm and turned his hand toward the pocket, the glowing bead came against a thin cut on the inside of his palm — one of the cuts he had made to draw blood for the bracelets. A small residue of blood still sat in it. fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓

The bead touched the blood.

The hall filled at once with a blinding white light, and a sharp electric jolt went through the inside of Kei’s head, and he dropped, unconscious, to the floor.