Chapter 112: "Pain Packer" and "Rising Sun"
The Clock Tower's terrain was the stuff of nightmares — for ordinary people and button-mashing players, anyway. For Feitan, it was just a moderately interesting hostile playground.
Of course, once his emotions settled back to something approaching normal, especially with a heavy string of money bags slung across his shoulder, his read on the whole situation became noticeably more grounded.
There were genuine treasures inside this so-called Castlevania. Nothing compared to the golden armor that had vanished in front of his eyes, but these coins — stamped with the unmistakable marks of some unknown ancient civilization — were clearly worth real money. Old Drac's private stash probably ran to good money.
And compared to the Grand Cemetery, which hadn't even qualified as a warmup, the high-difficulty terrain here matched much better with the quality of what it dropped.
Whether or not he was doing some frantic mental repair work for the earlier humiliation, Feitan had more or less reasoned himself into a perfectly logical explanation for why money bags would appear in the Clock Tower specifically.
With his emotions having swung so hard in both directions, a fair measure of compensatory psychology quietly doing its work, Feitan was now pressing upward almost by momentum — looking for more things his gut told him were worth having.
Since Ross had only planted the money bags inside the patrol armor units, Feitan had no reason to suspect deliberate Creator Authority manipulation. As far as he was concerned, this was just standard patrol armor loot. His rightful reward for the effort.
Which, honestly, was very much in line with how people work. Put a chest full of treasure in a completely trap-free room and most people would be suspicious and hesitant to touch it. But make them earn it first by clearing some difficulty, then hand them the goods, and they'll see it as fair payment and barely think twice.
There were exceptions, of course. A certain suspiciously ageless white-haired twin-tail elf mage — catching her just requires placing a mimic chest anywhere convenient.
Having cleared the spike traps, stepped across platforms that could have crushed a person flat, and swung through the steady arc of the giant pendulums, Feitan made it to the Clock Tower area's topmost room.
Six large black columns supporting the interior. Six typical castle windows. Solid rock on every side.
Drawing on experience from the Grand Cemetery, Feitan could read it at a glance: a room with no visible exits was the trigger zone for some kind of BOSS fight.
Yes. At this point Feitan had picked up on it too. The rules of this area felt very much like those of some kind of genuinely dangerous game.
In the original story, he had taken a strong interest in the world's most expensive and most dangerous game — Greed Island — and had voluntarily stepped inside after seizing a console.
Expensive and dangerous: meet either criterion and it was squarely in Feitan's wheelhouse. In a certain sense, his tastes were pretty simple and direct.
But at this moment, his left brain and right brain started arguing.
Left brain: the BOSS here is probably the same situation as the Grand Cemetery skeleton. Not worth the trouble. Turn back.
Right brain: I already got all these valuable coins on the way up. The rules here might just be that there's genuine loot to be had. The BOSS in this room might drop something serious.
In the end, a bandit's greed won the argument. They were a thoroughly bandit organization that went after whatever they wanted without hesitation — path dependency and habitual thinking had been baked in for years. Resisting the pull of potentially existing treasure was genuinely hard.
Besides, just these coins on his shoulder weren't enough to shut people up. Bring back an actual piece of serious loot, though, and some of the lost face could actually be recovered.
With that settled, Feitan stepped voluntarily into the room.
As expected: invisible walls closed the moment he entered. He extended his Nen to probe the space and got back exactly what he anticipated — the entrance, the windows, every path that looked like it led outside, all sealed.
Already prepared for that, Feitan set the string of money bags down against the wall. Then, from a considerably larger bag, he pulled out the throwing knives and throwing axes he had collected off monsters on the way up.
"Come on. Show me what you've got."
He raised the throwing axe in open provocation. His voice carried through the empty room — and then:
A section of something resembling a miniature great rock serpent's tail rose silently from the stone floor behind him. The rough but sharply pointed tip aimed at Feitan's unguarded back, and launched.
Sensing the air displacement from behind, Feitan jumped on instinct — effortlessly clearing almost to the ceiling. The tail scraped past him.
But at that same moment, a massive, rough-edged rock construct erupted from the ceiling. Its skull — all hard angular protrusions, like a Lego figure come to life — threw its entire bulk directly down at the airborne Feitan.
No double jump. No way to change direction mid-air. Feitan took the full force of what had to be several tons of body-slam impact.
Right. The Four Saint Beasts' Genbu. That was the BOSS Ross had configured for this room, in place of what should have been Grant DaNasty.
Looked at through the lens of the original story, Genbu — seemingly the weakest of the four on the surface — was actually the most mechanically demanding BOSS of the entire group. His only killable point was the core hidden deep inside his body. As long as that core stayed intact, he simply did not die.
And the most terrifying part: the one controlling Genbu right now was a flesh-and-blood player with intimate knowledge of both sides' strengths and weaknesses.
Having completed Genbu's setup well in advance, Ross had controlled it to submerge into the BOSS room's stone floor and run the combat scenario through his head beforehand.
Ross's read on Feitan when facing the ambush of 『Rock Dive Tail Strike』: he would definitely dodge rather than block with a weapon, since he needed to preserve his weapon's integrity for the regular fight to follow.
And dodging split two ways: sidestep or high jump. Ross bet on the jump. A sidestep opened the possibility of a secondary evasion in another direction, but airborne with no directional control was easier to land on. So he had pre-positioned Genbu's main body at the ceiling with the tail extended through the floor below, angled and ready.
Ross's read was right. Or rather: Feitan in his currently overconfident state was just very easy to read.
Genbu's body slammed hard into Feitan. First contact, first successful ambush — and not the minor nuisances from earlier. This was a full-force body slam, loaded with demon energy.
More precisely: all demon energy concentrated into the striking surface, with all four foundational Nen skills and the advanced technique — Ten, Zetsu, Ren, Hatsu, Gyo — all deployed together in combination:
Ko.
Defending with Ten alone was never going to stop it.
The result: Genbu's charge absorbed almost entirely by Feitan's body. Internal organs damaged on impact.
But while taking the full hit, Feitan also inevitably entered the forced backward-jump and one-second phase movement state.
The buff meant to protect players from chained damage had turned against him completely.
With Feitan's agility, even after eating a hit, he could normally use mid-air leverage to kick off Genbu, redirect himself, and clear whatever came next. But the one-second phase state caused his near-instinctive kick at Genbu's surface to find nothing. His foot phased straight through. Without any purchase to redirect himself, Feitan remained in backward airborne momentum with nowhere to go.
Meanwhile, the first tail strike that had missed had already re-angled. It tracked Feitan's spine as he dropped — out of phase movement now, fully hittable.
Clean contact. A solid launching tail strike.
A spray of blood, uncontrolled, out of Feitan's throat, out of his damaged back.
This two-hit combination from Ross directly exceeded the total damage Feitan had taken in the past three years combined.
Muscles, organs, bones. All damaged.
"Bastard, you..."
"Far too you've pushed it!!!"
But at that moment, Feitan — barely having righted himself in mid-air and found the ground — spat out a mouthful of clotted blood, and began speaking in strange inverted words.
At the same time, his Nen reserve, which should have been bleeding down, began showing a nearly eerie explosive surge upward.
Then a suit resembling a variant of a straitjacket materialized from nowhere and covered Feitan from head to foot:
Pain Packer: The Unforgivable
Through the viewing slit in the armored headpiece, Feitan looked at Genbu's somewhat dull, remotely-controlled face with the gaze of someone staring at the thing they hate most in the world.
Feitan decided: destroy the whole room, stone creature and all.
"Back to you, your pain return I will."
A mass of Nen resembling some kind of high-energy aggregate materialized in front of him and shot rapidly upward.
When it reached the highest point of the room, it detonated mid-air — expanding into an enormous fireball like a miniature sun. The temperature of the entire room began climbing at speed:
Rising Sun.
At the same time, Machi, Franklin, and Nobunaga, on Castlevania's outer perimeter, all looked up in almost the same instant toward the far side of the castle's main structure — the top of the Clock Tower — and their expressions went still.
They knew. The light and heat blazing from that room like a lighthouse could only be Feitan's terrifying ultimate technique. The one that could easily engulf everyone in the surrounding area and reduce them to charred remains.
Which left exactly one question.
Who on earth had pushed Feitan that far?
***
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