Chapter Ninety-One: Carve a tally mark for me.

"What happened!"

From another direction, one no one had noticed before, Li Chou clutched his face and stared at the scene before him in utter terror.

At that moment, as everyone's gaze converged on him, he hurriedly tried to defend himself.

"Boss, I swear I'm the real one. I would never lie to you..."

"Relax. I believe you."

"Then, then why are you raising the axe, boss..."

Squelch.

"I'm really not a fake..."

Squelch.

"Boss, you know me. If I were an impostor..."

Squelch.

...

...

"I'll be honest. I'm done pretending. I'm the fake one. Heh heh heh..."

"Hm?"

Colin blinked, almost thrown off by the sudden confession.

But at that moment, the clone lunged straight at him in a suicidal charge, as if making one last desperate struggle.

Before Colin could even bring the axe down, a flash of white light struck as a bible with iron corners smashed into the other man's skull.

The "Li Chou" before him exploded at once, turning into a scatter of ash.

Shana had made her move.

Colin gave her a nod, said nothing, and let his gaze continue roaming through the group.

He remembered having chopped off ten heads in total; with the one Shana had just smashed, that made eleven.

All the uncanny feeling vanished.

Everyone present also felt a lightness lift from their shoulders...

Finally, Colin's eyes came to rest on the last Li Chou in the group...

"B-Boss..."

A weak voice drifted out, sounding as though he had just woken up, drained of all strength.

Li Chou was slumped on the ground, blank-faced, drenched in sweat as if he had just been jolted awake from a nightmare.

Colin instinctively raised his hand, but he did not bring it down.

This one was the real one.

"Do you know what happened to you?" Colin asked in a low voice.

"I don't know. I was conscious the whole way here, but now I feel like I'm dreaming..." Li Chou said weakly.

Colin nodded and said no more, instead sweeping his gaze across the crowd.

You started out with twenty-one people. No one has been lost along the way; the group still has twenty-one.

At last you understand that the trouble comes from something curse-like, something that has set its sights on one of you.

After some contact, you have come to know a little more about it...

Every hour it creates a duplicate of itself. Only when the number reaches half of your group will it truly make its move.

The more people it occupies, the greater the danger each time one of its bodies is destroyed.

A curse...

Colin instinctively looked at Li Chou.

The prompt never said who had been cursed, but now that so many "Li Chou"s had been cut down, it was obvious who it was.

No one interrupted him. Even Li Chou himself sat properly in place, letting Colin's gaze rake over him.

Everyone knew that, in the private slang of those survivors the lord referred to as fools, the lord was now "renewing his cheat."

Once the cheat was turned on, everything would be solved...

Colin had no idea what these people were thinking. He was rapidly extracting more information about the curse.

With the means currently at your disposal, you judge that you cannot eradicate this curse. You can only clear away the duplicates at regular hourly intervals to ensure safety...

At most, through some occult methods, you can draw out the curse and isolate it for a time, but the method has little value.

You realize that if you are distracted, you are very likely to forget this information...

"So the gist is: even if I kill Li Chou now, the curse won't disappear. As for occult methods, all that's left is the Knight's Notarized Shield, and that isn't much use either..."

Colin rubbed his forehead, feeling that this was pure misfortune, suffering for no reason at all.

When the last cursed body self-destructed, Colin knew the duplicates were at least somewhat intelligent.

Without the prompt, it would have been very hard to tell which clone was real and which one was fake.

Where had it come from?

You cannot comprehend the manner of this thing's existence...

"...So that means its origin cannot be traced? Or rather, I simply can't understand it?"

Colin felt a throb of pain in his skull. It was bad enough that the system kept tempting survivors to their deaths; now even the prompt, which was supposed to be his golden finger, could not stop playing riddles from time to time...

Neither of them was reliable in any real sense.

No...

Colin pinched the soft flesh at his waist and realized he had somehow drifted off, almost forgetting the real matter at hand.

This was the hunter's state, and he had nearly been affected by it...

Colin glanced at the others. Their eyes were somewhat vacant, as though they were on the verge of forgetting what had just happened.

At the sight, a chill crept over him...

He drew a deep breath. Li Chou, seeing Colin's expression and thinking the matter was more or less resolved, was just about to ask what was going on when he suddenly saw Colin lift the axe and bring it down in a single stroke...

Decisive, fierce, without the slightest hesitation...

It was over!

Li Chou could not possibly block such an attack, but very soon, a shrill scream rang out from the side. He realized he had not died...

And beside him, there was now a pile of ash...

Only then did everyone suddenly come to their senses. As they pieced together the memory from before, they realized there had been a traitor in the group.

"The matter is more or less settled for now."

Colin said coldly, briefly explaining to the others what had happened.

"I... I was cursed?"

Li Chou looked utterly in disbelief, but the facts were right before him, leaving no room for doubt.

"Yes. Though I still don't know exactly how it happened, you were probably marked the moment we came in... This underground area is far more dangerous than we imagined..."

Colin said slowly. He suspected that this duplicate was connected to the ritual at Water Manor.

Its style was simply too unlike the rest.

Compared with those bloody and brutal aberrations, it seemed to have come from an entirely different world, far stranger and more mysterious.

But that was not the key issue.

The key was that Colin could not keep Hunter's Hour active forever. He needed a way to remain constantly aware whenever something was happening within the group.

Otherwise, what had just happened would repeat itself, again and again.

Until they were all dead.

After a brief thought, Colin came up with a plan and rolled up his sleeves.

"Shana, help me and use a knife to carve some words onto my arm..."

Pain was the best warning.

The main danger of this curse lay in its ability to infinitely diminish its own presence, until the moment it erupted...

If one could remain aware of its existence, then it was not actually that dangerous. But if one could not...

That was another matter entirely.

"You..." Shana hesitated, then said, "...carve words on your own arm?"

Carve the character for uprightness, Colin muttered to himself.

Realizing what he intended, Shana extended her pale arm and said gently,

"If you need pain to remind yourself, then I am actually more suitable..."

Colin waved her off. Under the influence of Hunter's Hour, he said without much emotion,

"It's fine. You're not getting out of it either. We'll all be carved."

"Uh..."

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