Chapter 48 : Labyrinth (48)

Of course, Hans had no intention of committing suicide.

With a whip in one hand and a witchgrass torch in the other, he had a plan.

However, there was an unforeseen variable he hadn’t expected.

The moment Hans threw aside his whip and instead wielded the witchgrass torch with both hands, swinging it to release the poisonous smoke toward the monsters.

At that exact moment, Alje recklessly threw herself into the path of the incoming barrage of snakes!

“Alje! Wait!”

“Eh…? Cough! Cough, cough!”

As a result, the situation turned into something akin to a pincer attack.

Some of the Ogaksa, surrounded by the witchgrass smoke as Hans had intended, suddenly lost their buoyancy and plummeted to the ground like falling stones.

But not all of them.

Some still retained their strength, and since there was no guarantee of absolute safety, Hans had considered this not even a second-best option.

However, he had planned to evade them from the start, so he hadn’t expected the worst-case scenario.

Crunch.

Alje, on the other hand, had anticipated the worst.

Through the girl’s eyes, the sight of dozens of Ogaksa flying toward them all at once seemed completely unavoidable.

If that many of them bit down on a human at the same time, injecting their venom simultaneously, it was obvious that no fragile human body could survive—even with an antidote.

No, before she could even think rationally—instinctively, as her heart dictated, Alje threw herself forward.

Despite being a large monster in her true form, she was currently disguised as a human.

Her delicate skin was pierced mercilessly by venomous fangs.

“Ugh…!”

Her small body trembled as if she had been electrocuted.

If the attack had been directed at her from the start, she could have avoided all of them without getting bitten.

But Alje had chosen to block instead of dodge.

She lowered her head, crossed her arms to protect her vital areas, and let the bites land elsewhere.

Despite this, fangs still sank into her forearms, thighs, and shoulders.

Unlike Hans, she wore no proper armor—simply because she found it annoying and uncomfortable.

As a result, there was nothing to deflect or lessen the force of the bites.

“Why the hell did you do something so stupid…?!”

Despite his anger, Hans immediately sprang into action.

His whip cracked sharply through the air once more.

But the Ogaksa, having already sunk their teeth deep into their prey, no longer reacted to the sound.

Without hesitation, Hans swung the whip again and again.

Some strikes accidentally lashed against Alje’s body, but more often, the whip’s strands tore through the comparatively weak bodies of the snakes or hooked onto them with the knotted loops at the end.

However, the snake heads, even when the bodies beneath them were severed, refused to let go.

Instead, they clung on tightly.

Hans quickly grabbed the staggering Alje and dragged her toward more stable ground.

With enough distance between them and the Ogaksa nest, the creatures no longer pursued them.

Some had been paralyzed by inhaling the witchgrass smoke directly, stiffened in place.

Others, having missed their mark, slithered back toward their pit.

This would have been the perfect opportunity to hunt them—but right now, Hans had only one concern.

The girl, now too weak to stand, her body riddled with snake bites.

“Alje, lie down. Relax your body. That’s it.”

Her small frame lay against the solid ground, covered in snakes—both the living and the dead.

The living ones clung tightly, injecting their venom, while the dead ones had locked their jaws in place before stiffening in death.

These were not things that could simply be pulled off by hand.

“Dizzy…”

“Don’t talk.”

It wasn’t just the venom.

The places where the snakes had struck were already blooming with deep bruises.

If she were an ordinary human, she would have died long before the poison even had a chance to spread.

But Alje wasn’t an ordinary human.

Perhaps that was why she had been so reckless.

“…..”

At the very least, Hans realized one thing.

Even if a shapeshifting monster could mimic a human, its disguised body was still fragile.

Of course, it was much stronger than that of an ordinary person—but it was nowhere near as tough as a true monster’s thick hide or hard exoskeleton.

If the fangs of an Ogaksa could pierce her skin, then so could a sword.

Would cutting a shapeshifter’s human form actually kill them?

Hans didn’t know.

Laying Alje flat against the firm ground, he pulled out his dagger with his teeth.

Then, he drove the blade into her bruised flesh.

“Ugh.”

“Bear with it.”

He hadn’t restrained her, nor had he given her any anesthetics.

Yet, despite everything, Alje endured the pain surprisingly well.

With precise cuts, Hans carved into her flesh to remove the snake heads, which were embedded too deeply to be pulled out by hand.

He had to stop the venom from continuing to spread.

Fortunately, Ogaksa venom caused blood to clot, so excessive bleeding wasn’t a concern.

But there were other concerns.

The Ogaksa were monsters that carried poison within their very being.

How potent could their venom be?

If a normal human had been struck by that many of them at once, their organs would have burst from the sheer impact alone.

And once the venom took effect, their body would decay at an alarming rate.

But Alje was still alive.

And not just barely—she was surprisingly vigorous.

Just as if a hole in her heart wouldn’t be enough to kill her, no wound seemed capable of bringing her to true death.

“Ah, mister… It hurts…”

“Then why the hell did you do that?!”

“.….”

This was already the second time that Alje had caused trouble.

Hans’s hands moved swiftly to administer first aid, but the words coming from his mouth were far from gentle.

He might have excused the first time as unavoidable, but.

No, there was no such thing as “unavoidable” in a labyrinth.

Still, in the end, Hans couldn’t bring himself to scold her harshly.

Because through her fever-flushed face, she smiled faintly and said-“I told you… I’d protect you.”

The man fell silent, focusing solely on treating her wounds.

After severing all the snake heads still latched onto her body, he flicked his fingers to pop the cork off a glass bottle.

An antidote, prepared in advance precisely for such a scenario.

He pried open Alje’s mouth and poured the entire bottle in, then opened another for himself and drank half of it.

And then, Hans began to remove Alje’s clothes.

“A-Ah, mister?”

“Stay still.”

If she had truly resisted, Hans wouldn’t have been able to stop her.

But instead, Alje, whose face was already red from the venom, only turned an even deeper shade of crimson and remained quiet.

Of course, it wasn’t as if Hans had suddenly been overcome with desire in the middle of a swamp.

He stopped halfway through undressing her, then lowered his head and pressed his lips to her exposed, pale skin.

“…Ah.”

A primitive method—sucking the venom out by mouth.

He rolled his tongue over the puncture wounds, which looked more like they had been made by large arrows than by snake fangs.

He swallowed the coagulated blood like jelly before turning his head to spit it out.

A sharp tingling sensation spread across his tongue.

Since the bite marks covered much of her body, extracting the venom took a considerable amount of time.

In truth, he wasn’t even sure if venom worked on a monster’s body.

This might all be meaningless.

But at the very least, when Alje was in human form, Hans treated her as human.

Whether that was pretense or sincerity, he himself wasn’t sure.

She looked like a person—so he treated her as one.

“Mm… Haa…”

After sucking out the last of the venom, he finished the antidote that he had left half-drunk.

Even so, his head felt light, as if floating.

As a proper labyrinth dweller, he had some resistance to toxins, but that didn’t mean he was completely immune.

Hans braced himself against the damp ground and slowly pushed himself up.

The sensation of the cool, sticky mud brought back some of his clarity, making him painfully aware of the situation they were in.

The ground, hidden beneath dense undergrowth.

The severed, horned snake heads scattered around them.

But the sight of the disheveled girl seemed to make everything else meaningless.

Her skin, exposed as her clothes had ridden up, was still dazzling despite being dirt-streaked.

Her chest, at least, remained covered, preserving a certain innocence.

If anything, the slight swell of her figure only emphasized that she was not truly human.

Their proximity was too close.

Even with the venom drained, her flushed cheeks still held an alluring warmth.

The pounding of his own heart, trembling as if confused, quickly transformed from shock into something more intense.

Pressed half against the ground, half against each other, their bodies were acutely aware of one another.

He could push her away at any moment.

 ‘And yet—’

Alje relaxed completely and whispered in a voice laced with moisture.

“I’m… okay with this.”

Their eyes met.