353 Chapter 353: Poisoned Chalice

After notifying my teammates that it would be unlikely for me to join them, at least until the fourth match (which was in four days, so I still had three days to find Anastasia). Even if I ended up missing it, there were ten members in our team. Bu Fan or Dong Fang Yue Chu could take my place. Actually, why not have Lily or Sheila take my place? Other than Pearl, who was our healer and not as proficient in combat as the rest of us, there was no reason why the girls couldn't fight in the place of the guys. Or perhaps Harrison planned on holding them in reserve, to spring them on our opponents later in the tournament. After all, Bu Fan used that reason to abstain from fighting in the qualifiers. Surprising our opponents with the girls – whose skills and techniques were rarely seen in tournament matches – would be a good tactic.

Whatever the case, that was Harrison's problem, not mine. He was the captain, not me. What, you think this is Battle Frenzy or something, where the main character has to be the great genius leader who brings everyone to victory with his awesome strategies or something? Sorry to disappoint you, but I wasn't some perfect Mary Sue who was the strongest fighter, yet at the same time possessed tactical genius on the level of Ursarkar E. Creed.

For now, I focused on searching for Anastasia.

"Where was the last time you saw her?" I asked Redfield, even as we proceeded toward the hotel that the Silver Wolves booked for their accommodation. He shook his head.

"Here. The hotel. We just conversed last night, in the lobby. The captain ordered Ana and all the other mercenaries who returned with you to rest, so they were heading to their rooms. But…"

He hesitated for a little, and I prodded him impatiently.

"But what?"

"Even as early as last night, Ana was already showing signs…signs of uh, instability."

I didn't spare the ornate interior of the grand hotel a glance, and so focused was I on the conversation that I almost stumbled over a velvet couch. Throwing myself to the side to avoid falling into a luxurious lamp stand that served more as decoration than illumination, I turned back to stare at Redfield in bewilderment.

"Instability? What do you mean by instability?"

Redfield hesitated a little before plopping down on the velvet couch. I took the cushioned chair opposite him, leaning over the small coffee table between us to fix a glare on him. The guy was not going to squirm his way out of this one.

"Why didn't you bring her to a doctor then? Or a…psychiatrist?"

"Not that kind of instability," Redfield hastily corrected, waving his hands. "Not mental instability. I'm referring to magic instability. We gave her a sedative, but it didn't seem to be very effective. Ana was complaining about it, I remember that."

"…magic instability?" What the fuck was that? I was getting even more confused by the second. I had never heard of "magic instability" before.

"You know how Ana practices poison magic, right?" Redfield scratched his head. "Especially since she was formerly a Veneneum Assassin. Even after she was recruited by us and left the Assassins, she continued to practice the Veneneum Sect techniques, which involve a lot of poison spells and other methods."

More like after the Silver Wolves abducted her, interrogated her and forcibly conscripted her. That said, Anastasia seemed like she enjoyed her time more in the Silver Wolves, who treated her much better than those monstrous assassin masters of hers.

"Is she getting poisoned by her own magic?" I hazarded a guess, unsure of where the conversation was going. That was the only scenario I could envision when Redfield told me that Ana was suffering from magic instability.

"Sort of, but it's a lot more complicated than that." Redfield sighed and sank back into the couch. "Have you heard of the Woeful Poison Body before?"

"Are we ripping off Battle Through The Heavens now?" I asked, exasperated.

"Figures that you would have read that one. Well, it's similar to that one there, I guess. It's a physical constitution that turns the user herself into a very poisonous existence – her body becomes so toxic that just being in her presence alone is fatal. For people who have attainted that sort of constitution, they have no choice but to consume poison in order to survive. However, the more poison the practitioner consumes, the greater the toxicity of the poison that accumulates in her body."

"That can't be good. But this came out of nowhere. When did Ana start consuming poisons? I don't remember…"

Redfield gave me a look. "Why the fuck would she consume poisons in front of you? Or anyone, for that matter?"

"Then how do you know about it?"

"She told me that she had it, and after she disappeared, the captain and I did some research on it."

"Research? Yeah, right. All you did was go read Battle Through The Heavens."

Redfield didn't deny that, which meant that I was right. But seriously? Were we just going to assume that whatever happened in Tian Can Tu Dou's story was applicable here in reality, and that the Woeful Poison Body was pretty much exactly the same?

Sighing, I shook my head and chewed my lip.

"Let me guess…so the amount of poison in Ana's body has reached critical levels and she's in danger of blowing up from all the toxins gathered inside her."

"Exactly." Redfield was nodding grimly. Fuck. And here I thought I was being sarcastic by regurgitating whatever happened in Battle Through The Heavens. Can't the writer be more original instead of ripping off other books? However, Redfield continued to plunge ahead without waiting for me to roll my eyes. "When the poisons in Ana's body erupt, every living organism within a kilometer radius will die. Horribly."

Except me, because I had immunity to poison, but that wasn't something Redfield needed to know. So I just nodded for now, and plastered on what I hoped was an appropriately horrified expression. Gulping – well, just hearing about the kind of damage the poison could cause was pretty shocking, to be honest – I pondered for a moment.

"Wait, Ana knows about this, right?"

"Yeah. She was the one who told me that she was practicing such a terrifying technique." Redfield's complexion was ghastly even as he recounted everything to me. He rubbed the back of his neck and exhaled. "And judging from her condition last night, it seems that she doesn't have much longer before the…eruption."

Pushing my glasses up, I took a deep breath and steeled my nerves.

"We have to find her."

"That's right. That's why I approached you. I was hoping you might know where Ana went. You're the one closest to her."

Come on, dude, you didn't need me to guess where Anastasia would go. If Ana knew that she was on the verge of blowing up from her poison and in danger of killing every single living thing in a kilometer wide radius, then the answer to where she could have gone was blatantly obvious. If I were her, I would have done the same thing.

"Ana left the city. She's no longer in the city. She's worried about dragging people into the…uh, explosion, so obviously she would have gone to a place where there's nobody around. And if I'm not mistaken, she would probably head to the closest monster habitat – might as well take out as many monsters as she can before she dies, right?"

"Aurora Forest!" Redfield's eyes widened when he remembered the vast expanse of wilderness that lay between Aurora City – where we currently resided in – and Olympus City, the one we had just left two days ago. "You might be right!"

"Yeah, and we had best hurry. We should go search for her now." I was rising to my feet. Redfield jumped up as well, glowing excitedly.

"You're right! Let's go immediately."

"Wait."

The both of us froze when we heard the familiar, authoritative voice. Turning around, we saw not Captain Brent but the leader of the Silver Wolves himself, Colonel Feng Hai. Why not General, I don't know, I was just ripping off the mercenaries from BattleTech, where Jaime Wolf – the leader of Wolf's Dragoons – was a Colonel. So I was going to assume that the highest-ranked officer of a mercenary guild was a Colonel and not a General. Mercenaries usually were composed of only one regiment, after all.

The dark-haired mercenary leader glared at the both of us sternly, his hands clasped behind his back. He was dressed in his usual Silver Wolves military uniform, just like Redfield, a blend of black and Arctic gray. Currently he was giving off an imposing air that belied his young age – it was hard to remember that he was still only in his twenties.

"Sir?" Redfield ventured uncertainly. Feng Hai sighed.

"I don't mean to stop you guys from finding Ana, but you're not thinking things through. What are you going to do when you find her? As much as I hate to say it, Ana is a ticking time bomb right now. If you go find her, you'll just end up getting killed when she blows. Is that what she wants?"

"Even so…we can't just leave her alone!" Redfield argued hotly. Feng Hai shook his head and sighed again.

"That's not what I mean. I'm not telling you to leave her alone. I'm telling you to think. What are you going to do when you find her? Die with her? Do you have any way of saving her?"

"That's…" Redfield trailed off, realizing that his leader was right.

"First, we need to find a way to stop the poison within her body from erupting. Then we find her and administer the…cure. Or implement the method of cure. Blindly running after her right now is not going to help anyone, least of all Ana herself."

"I understand." Redfield took a deep breath. "But how? Is there a way to cure Ana of the poison inside her body?"

"We're looking for one right now." At that moment, Brent chose to appear. He waved his smartphone, which was currently projecting a holographic screen into the air and displaying an automatically scrolling list of…items. "But our prospects look pretty dim. I wouldn't be surprised if the Veneneum Sect is the only one who knows how to control it…and in fact makes use of this technique to keep their Assassins in line by forcing them to rely upon them for continued survival and…well, defusing the poison bomb inside their bodies, for a lack of a better word."

"Uh…what about the Poison Pill Method?" I asked, raising a hand. All three older men stared at me blankly. "She needs to learn how to control her technique – by gathering all the poison accumulated within her body and transforming it into a Poison Pill. To refine the Poison Pill, she probably needs three essential ingredients – three kinds of Heavenly Flames, the monster core of a Sky Poison Dragon Scorpion Beast, and the Bodhisattva Body Transformation Saliva."

"…you okay, bro?" Redfield asked dumbly.

"I'm serious!"

"Kid, you've been reading way too much Battle Through The Heavens," Feng Hai told me in a tone that brooked no argument. "Since when does such a convenient method exist? This isn't a receptartier or alchemist story, we don't have such pill methods or whatever nonsense. And there are no such thing as monster cores. What the fuck is a monster core? The accumulation of their qi in their dantian or some shit like that? Don't be ridiculous. There's no such thing."

"There's no such thing as a Sky Poison Dragon Scorpion Beast or a Bodhisattva Body Transformatio Saliva," Brent added, scratching his head as he ran a search on Google on his smartphone. "Whatever results I find are all entirely fictional. And those are quite the cumbersome, chuunii names."

"I wasn't the one who named them," I muttered under my breath.

"Speaking of pills, we did try to find some medicine for Ana, but we couldn't find anything effective for her constitution." Brent pinched the bridge of his nose and scowled. "Modern medicine just doesn't have the tools to deal with this kind of thing."

"And the Veneneum Sect will not save a 'traitor'," Feng Hai growled furiously. "They are more than contented to let her die, sayig that she deserves it for betraying them. Not that I would trust them to save her even if they accepted my request. I would go hunt down and destroy them if I could, but we can't afford to waste time on waging war right now. We need to solve Ana's problem."

"Is there any antidote, any miracle medicine…?" Redfield asked, but Brent shook his head.

"Do you think an antidote conveniently exists out there somewhere? This is a technique exclusive to the Veneneum Sect, and you know how secretive Assassins are. Our intelligence network is working around the clock to dig out whatever information they can find, but we don't have the time to wait for them to bring anything back concrete."

"Time…" that word stuck in my head for a moment. "If only we can stop time…"

At that moment, I blinked. All my experience of reading and watching science fiction novels and films came into play that moment (as well as playing sci-fi horror games such as Aliens versus Predator), especially the Aliens universe in particular.

Grinning, I raised my hand again, confident this time despite not having to rip off Battle Through The Heavens.

"Gentlemen…I think I might just have a way."