“Bartha!” Elinor’s scream tore through the air as one of her many eyes caught a familiar face among the gruesome pile of bodies—Senior Special Agent Big B.

Big B was a logistical personnel, not a field agent. But because of Elinor’s mistake, she had been punished—demoted to being the C.I.B. local headquarters’ doorwoman alongside Elinor. And now, she was dead while she was alive.

Before Apex Ace could react, Elinor bolted past him, straight into the pile of corpses. Her hands stretched toward her senior’s cold, lifeless body, but just before she could reach her—

A figure lunged out from the blood-soaked ground. Fast. Ruthless. Aimed directly at her chin. But to his shock, Elinor dodged with effortless precision—without even slowing down. She barely seemed to register the attack, her focus locked solely on her fallen senior. Ignoring her attacker, she continued.

Reaching the heap, she pulled Big B’s lifeless body into her arms, her trembling hands frantically searching for any sign of life.

Alas, Nothing. Only cold, stiff silence.

Elinor clutched her tighter, her voice breaking as she whispered, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry… It’s all my fault…” But her apologies fell on dead ears.

The other four fanatics, who had been lounging atop the corpse pile just moments ago, sat on their asses. Their eyes sharpened, their postures tensing, having just watched Elinor effortlessly dodge their captain’s attack—even while shaken and distracted from the death of her friend.

“Youngest!” their captain barked, his voice laced with excitement. “She’s mine!”

Then, without warning, he dove into the ankle-deep pool of blood covering the entire ground floor and vanished without leaving behind any trace.

Apex Ace’s instincts screamed at him. The entire makeover of the ground floor was a trap set by these fanatics. They had willing walked into a damn trap, no wonder their opponents were so relaxed. But there was no turning back. If they wanted to reach the basement, they had to go through here.

“Elinor, snap out of it!” Apex Ace shouted, his voice sharp with urgency, hearing their opponent plan to target Elinor first, but he wasn’t about to let his guard down. It could just be a feint—a trick to throw him off.

He wanted to cover Elinor’s back, but stepping deeper into the pool of blood wasn’t an option. Everything about this scene screamed trap. The knee-high blood, the stacked corpses—this wasn’t just carnage; it was intentional.

He knew curse users’ bodies were consumed by their innate tools or cores after death. Yet, somehow, these enemies had managed to pile up the bodies of fallen C.I.B. agents and let their blood pool on the floor without flowing and spreading. That could only mean one thing—this was related to their abilities.

A grim possibility crossed his mind. What if the bodies and blood were only here because the victims weren’t completely dead? But no that wasn’t the case as MindBug’s innate curse tool and Doctor Druid, who shared his senses, had already scanned the corpses. There were no mental or emotional signals from the corpses. They were well and truly dead.

Apex Ace scanned his surroundings, searching for the fanatic who had disappeared into the blood. But neither MindBug’s innate curse tool nor Doctor Druid’s emotional sense could detect him. It was as if the man had vanished completely. Was he swimming through the blood? Or was it something worse—some kind of dimensional trick, allowing him to move unseen and emerge from anywhere in the pool?

Apex Ace couldn’t be sure. What he did know was that he wanted to get rid of this blood and the corpses before they could be used against him. A storage talisman would do the trick—suck everything up in an instant. But using it would expose his identity, and if that happened, this whole charade would be pointless.

“Mister, stand back—they’re all mine!” Elinor declared, her voice steady despite the storm raging inside her.

Then she leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss to Bartha’s forehead. “I’ll join you as someone you can be proud of,” she promised before slowly, she rose to her feet.

Read new chapters at NovelBin.Côm

The fanatics exchanged glances before bursting into laughter, both amused and mocking. Elinor was only a Knight-tier curse master, while even the weakest among them had the body of a Hero-tier curse master, and the strongest, their captain, had the body of a curse master close to breaking through to ocean-tier. To them, her rage-fueled confidence was nothing short of hilarious. She actually thought she could take on all five of them?

“Get down here while I’m asking nicely,” Elinor ordered, her voice sharp as she warned them, “If you make me come up there, I’ll make sure your death is the most painful thing you’ve ever experienced.”

She ignored the absence of their missing captain, her focus locked on the enemies before her. What she really wanted was to avoid stepping on the corpses of her fallen comrades to get to them. But if they forced her hand, she wouldn’t hesitate.

Her words only made them laugh harder. Loud, jeering, cruel laughter.

The idea that she could inflict pain worse than having one’s soul forcibly stripped from their living body and inserted in a Rust Worm egg—just to be reborn as a Rust Worms Curseling—was laughable. That kind of agony was beyond comprehension. They didn’t believe Elinor had the strength, much less the stomach, to do something worse than their rebirth. Her grief, her anger, her sadness—it only made their amusement sweeter.

Then, in an instant, a shadow emerged out of the pool of blood, right behind Elinor, striking with a fist aimed squarely at her back. But her reaction was faster.

With an eerie, almost unnatural grace, she sidestepped at the last second. Before her attacker could even register what had happened, she drove her own fist straight through their chest.

Her hand burst out of their back, gripping something plump, bloody, and pulsing—a grotesque thing only visible to Elinor and the fanatics. But it wasn’t a heart. It was a bloody orb.

The fanatics’ laughter died instantly, replaced by stunned horror. The girl they had mocked—the Knight-tier curse master they had so easily dismissed—had just taken down the strongest among them like it was nothing.

Even Apex Ace was taken aback. He hadn’t expected Elinor to be this strong. He should have known better than to underestimate a direct-line descendant of McSuile family, no matter how clumsy and airhead Elinor seemed.

As Elinor stood there, the corpse hanging by her wrist dissipated into nothing, leaving no trace, not even an innate curse tool. Just then, the blood-drenched orb in her grasp twisted and writhed before morphing into a Rust Worm.

Elinor didn’t crush it. Instead, one of the hundred eyeballs at the end of a braid of her box braids ruptured with a wet pop. The braid immediately went limp, lifeless.

A moment later, deep slits split open across the Rust Worm’s body. It let out an agonized squeal, writhing in pain. Then, all at once, the slits peeled wide like eyelids, revealing countless blood-red eyes with slit pupils. And those eyes… they began to weep.

Thick, crimson tears streamed down its grotesque form as its screams grew sharper, more desperate, filled with pure torment. The sheer agony in its wails snapped its comrades out of their terror-stricken daze.

“F-Fuck this—Youngest, finish her off!” one of the fanatics shouted, panic thick in his voice. Gone was their arrogance. They were no longer amused. They were afraid…afraid for their lives. Unfortunately for them, they were up against a true McSuile, and they had no idea who they were up against. Otherwise, instead of ganging up to attack, they would scatter to escape.

Without a second thought, Elinor casually tossed the wailing Rust Worm back into the blood pool, not even sparing it another glance. Its fate was already sealed. Once she had placed her curse on something, not even a Void-tier could save it from her whim.

While Elinor stood ready to take on the remaining four clowns alone, determined to avenge her fallen comrades, Apex Ace couldn’t help but track the Rust Worms she just threw, using MindBug’s innate curse tool with Doctor Druid’s assistance. He had no idea Elinor had only released it because she had already cursed it—but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t planning to steal her kills, just making sure the damn thing wouldn’t slip away in the chaos.

Though… he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t tempted to kill it and take its curse core. After all, when he fed the mutated Rust Worm curse core he’d obtained earlier to the Cursed Toybox, it had compiled a complete breakdown of that curseling and its abilities—far better than the half-baked explanation Delores had given him.

Seriously, how the hell did she leave out the fact that Rust Worms could morph into cursed items or tools they infested and devoured? Especially when she had no problem detailing how the Samsara branch of the Immortal Sect was founded or how the Immortal Sect came very close to overthrowing their government and ruling this country.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep