I Possessed The Worst Character In The Hellish Game
Chapter 37: Frozen in the Red and Blue Moonlight [3]

Chapter 37: Frozen in the Red and Blue Moonlight [3]

Ding—!

A soft, mechanical chime echoed directly inside Mikael’s head, and a grey translucent window flickered into existence before him.

— ◈ [ Emergency Quest ] ◈ —

Objective: Save Alice Von Valerion from getting killed.

Reward: Exp 30%

Duration: 3 Minutes

Failure: ???

— ◈ [ Emergency Quest ] ◈ —

Mikael stared at the quest window as his ghostly grey eyes widened.

’Emergency Quest?’

’What the hell...?’

He’d never come across anything like an Emergency Quest in the Eclipsed Realm.

That kind of thing didn’t exist in the game—or at least, it never had before.

And he was sure this kind of thing wasn’t introduced in the DLC.

Now, suddenly, there was a quest to save Alice from some mortal danger who wasn’t even a part of the base game.

How was Princess Alice even in danger? Wasn’t she supposed to be with her parents in the ballroom with the King and Queen, under high security?

Before he could chase his questions and thoughts any further, a woman’s scream filled with raw agony and a mix of ecstasy tore through the air from somewhere nearby where he was standing.

But beneath the notes of human scream, there was something, a distortion in her voice that no normal human could produce.

Mikael looked in the direction of the scream, and a chill ran down his spine.

’Don’t tell me Alice is there?’

His every instinct in his body was telling him to turn around and run in the opposite direction from that scream.

He was barely scraping the bottom of Tier 1; his essence pool was barely 0.86, even though he was Tier 1.6.

He could only cast a handful of spells before exhausting his reserve, and on top of that, his Curse--Soul Drought made it harder for him to circulate the essence in his body, making it harder to cast even the most basic spells.

With all this charging towards that inhuman scream seemed practically nothing but a suicide.

But.

His ghostly eyes paused on the Reward of the quest.

[Reward: EXP 30%]

The amount of experience the system provided was nothing short of monumental for a single quest, and that too on Mikael’s route.

He remembered his first prologue quest to get admitted into the Astralspire Academy was only 7% Experience.

Given his current rank, which was likely to be the lowest among Astralspire Academy entrants, every single drop of EXP mattered to him.

Still, he wasn’t naive.

A reward this generous meant the quest’s difficulty would be brutal.

That was the unspoken rule.... and yet, the offer was too alluring for him to brush it aside.

A full 30% of EXP was equivalent to months of essence cultivation training, and maybe more for someone like him.

If he really wanted to rank up, he couldn’t keep turning his back on chances like this.

Making up his mind, he broke into a run as he headed straight for the source of the scream.

[Duration: 2:33]

[Duration: 2:32]

[Duration: 2:31]

.

.

But even as his feet pounded the dirt, the failure condition nagged at the back of his mind.

The quest details had shown nothing but question marks where the penalty should’ve been, and those blank unknowns gave him a sinking feeling far worse than any clearly stated threat.

He already knew how dangerous this world was--

But the danger you couldn’t see, the danger that didn’t even have a name yet.

It had a way of crawling under your skin deeper than anything you could prepare for.

{Mikael.}

Liren’s voice echoed in his mind from his essence core.

This time, her voice was serious and no longer sulky, playful.

{Are you sure this is worth the risk....? The source of that sound.... whatever made it, it’s dangerous. And given my condition right now, I won’t be able to provide any kind of help.}

She said the last sentence in a small, sad voice.

He understood her concern.

Even with the Essentia Cistern he had just retrieved, even if he managed to charge it somehow fully, he doubted the combined reserves would be enough to summon her.

In fact, he was fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to summon her anytime soon—not until he ranked up at least once or twice.

The contract allowed it in theory, but the essence cost scaled with her power, and his reserves were still laughably small.

"We don’t have a choice. We need to take risks sometimes if we want to get stronger. But you don’t need to worry, I’ll back out if things get too dangerous."

Then after a short pause, she said...

{...Okay. Please just be careful.}

"I will."

Besides... that girl was also....

***

[Duration: 0:25]

Mikael rounded a final hedge and skidded to a stop.

The clearing before him was a scene torn from a nightmare itself, which made his blood run cold.

The same blonde woman with a lavender gown who had just bumped into him earlier in the ballroom, the one who had been muttering to herself with sweat on her pale face, was no longer human.

Her belly had stretched outwards, and she looked more than nine months pregnant; her spine had elongated to nearly twice its normal length.

But it was what was happening below her waist that made Mikael’s stomach lurch.

The remnants of her lavender silk gown hung in tattered shreds around her hips, and from her nether region, something was forcing its way out as dark tentacles burst from her.

They unfurled into the night air like the petals of some hellish flower, lashing blindly in every direction with such force that they gouged small craters into the gravel wherever they struck.

Mikael’s eyes widened seeing the monstrosity in front of him.

’What in the actual hent—’

This was nothing like the aberrations he had encountered in the game.

The transformed humans after losing control in Eclipsed Realms were grotesque, yes, but they followed certain design principles—rules of anatomy, however twisted.

This thing in front of him looked like something that had crawled out of a different genre entirely.

Then his gaze fell on Alice, who lay a few meters from the aberrant, her small body frozen in place, her golden eyes wide and unblinking.

’Alice!’

How did she even get in this situation?

Where were her guards?

How had a twelve-year-old princess managed to wander alone into the gardens during a royal banquet without a single person noticing?

This made no sense.

He also saw Elara sprinting towards Alice, her gown torn below her knees, to run quicker.

He couldn’t see any guards behind her.

’Is she an idiot? Why didn’t she call the guards to search for Alice?’

[Duration: 0:11]

[Duration: 0:10]

His eyes widened watching the duration time.

He turned towards Alice and saw that one of the tentacles was about to head straight at her.

Elara was too far to reach her, leaving him no choice but to step into the battle himself.

He opened his mouth, and a small grey magic circle materialized in front of his throat.

The circle had many delicate layers of interlocking runes that spun and clicked into place as it began to rotate in slow motion.

「Siste!」

The word rang out through the garden, carrying a resonance that seemed to vibrate in the air itself.

The tentacle stopped a few inches before Alice’s face.

It was the spell he had created himself by combining both of his Talents: Spellcasting and Melodic Supremacy.

It wasn’t something that had ever existed in the game.

And he doubted any mage would be able to cast such unless they had a divine-grade Spellcasting Talent like his---unless, they were someone like Archbishop Sophia or Seraphina Ishtar, and even they would need a Musical Talent like his to succeed.

The mechanics were simple in theory but devastatingly difficult in practice.

Under normal circumstances, Melodic Supremacy meant that whenever he sang or even spoke with intent, people couldn’t help but be drawn in.

His voice carried an almost magnetic allure, something that slipped past reason and made others want to listen, to linger on every note.

It was a charm, a kind of enchantment woven straight into the sound.

But this spell twisted that charm into something far more forceful.

He had designed it back when he was trapped inside Liren’s memories, with nothing to do and no essence core to cast anything, and nothing to do but think.

He had spent those empty hours turning over ideas for spells he couldn’t yet perform as he hunted for a way to make up for what his curse had taken from him.

His essence circulation was painfully slow—slower than anyone else’s—which meant he would always need more time to cast than his opponents.

So he had built a spell specifically to buy himself that time.

The principle was simple, even if the execution was anything but.

When he spoke the command word, his Melodic Supremacy Talent took hold of the sound and shaped it into a carrier wave.

Normally, that wave would just make someone receptive, willing to hear him out-- maybe even dazed by the beauty of it.

But this time, the wave bypassed the ears entirely and resonated directly with the target’s brain.

The spell wasn’t anything as grand as freezing time or stopping the world around him—it was far more limited than that.

It simply flooded the target’s neural pathways with a cascade of conflicting signals, jamming the connection between thought and movement.

For a brief moment, voluntary muscles locked in place.

The brain still screamed commands, but the body couldn’t hear them anymore.

It was like cutting every string between the brain and the body.

But it also came with its own limitations.

It required intense concentration to maintain, which meant he couldn’t move very fast while the spell was active.

And it also didn’t work on people with high Willpower—their mental defenses were too strong for the carrier wave to penetrate.

And currently, he couldn’t isolate it to a single target; anyone within earshot who lacked sufficient Willpower would be affected.

Aberrants, however, were a different story.

Their Willpower was already eroded by the Madness that had consumed them. The spell found easy purchase in their fractured minds.

He had maybe three seconds.

Maybe four.

But it was more than enough for him.

His stride was slower than he wanted, not wanting to break the spell as he crossed the distance to Alice in three deliberate steps.

He crouched down as he scooped her small form into his arms, straightened up, and started moving away from the aberrant.

"Are you hurt?"

Alice, who was also frozen, stared up at him as her golden eyes were wet with tears she desperately tried to hold back, and her face was as pale as fresh snow.

She opened her mouth, closed it, tried again.

"No." She barely managed a whisper.

Then she buried her face against his shoulder, hiding her tears from view.

He hugged her gently, rubbing the back of her head to comfort her as he continued to move back.

"Sorry, I wasn’t quick enough, and you had witnessed all that."

After 3 seconds.

The glow in Mikael’s eyes flared once, then faded, and the spell broke apart as he jumped back, his boot skidding across the gravel.

The tentacle completed its interrupted strike and slammed into the ground where Alice had been, piercing the stone with a sickening crunch.

The aberrant let out an ear-splitting scream in fury as the tentacles whipped in frenzy, lashing out in all directions with renewed ferocity.

One came at him from the left at extreme speed, but Mikael sidestepped, dodging the tentacle as he felt the wind of its passage brush against his cheek.

But the aberrant didn’t give him any time; the second tentacle arched toward him from the right, straight at Alice’s head.

He twisted and adjusted himself to save Alice, but in the process, the edge of the tentacle caught his shoulder, ripping through the fabric of his formal coat.

Pain flared across his skin as he felt blood prickle down his arms.

A third tentacle followed up, preparing to strike.

Mikael opened his mouth to use 「Siste」 again.

But before he could, a volley of shards struck the tentacle precisely as frost spread rapidly from the points of impact, crawling across the appendage in spiraling patterns.

Within seconds, the entire tentacle was encased in a shell of ice.

It twitched once, then ice broke apart.

But it gave Mikael enough time to leap backward, putting more distance between himself and the Aberrant.

A wave of cold mist rolled past him as Elara skidded to a halt at his side, her hands still extended from the spell she’d just cast.

Her golden eyes were blazing with fury and fear.

She looked at Alice, still clutched against Mikael’s chest, and something in her expression cracked with relief before hardening back into focus.

"You took your sweet time, princess."

*****