Chapter 706: Weak... so weak

"I..." Karen didn't know how she should respond.

She then suddenly felt a headache, as if something icy-cold was pouring through the mask into her brain. She then heard ear-piercing sounds, felt dizzy, her vision became obscured, she smelled a sticky stench of blood, and her consciousness went hazy...

She felt the injected coldness beginning to violently clash against the power that dwelled within her body already. This was an incredibly uncomfortable and painful sensation for her.

Karen instinctively tried to resist. However, her remaining lucidity made her accept the demon's power instead.

'This is my demon power, it belongs to me... No matter how difficult and painful it is, I must accept it, I have to endure, I must withstand it!

'For my younger sister, Kaho...'

Karen did her best to maintain her mental spirit and sense of self. She refused to give up!

Even when faced against a furiously cold torrential downpour, she didn't lower her head at all as she adamantly persisted, moving forward and facing everything head on!

After the mask's power violently clashed with the demon's power for a while, the two powers under Karen's acceptance began to combine, whirl around, and mix with each other... finally forming one.

After the torrential onslaught ended, the pain and discomfort diminished, and everything returned to normal.

When her consciousness was restored again, Karen felt an indescribably mystical sensation.

She now had extraordinary powers!

No... she had such powers to begin with. It was just that she had finally learned how to use them.

It was as if she possessed a warehouse that had been tightly locked, and now she finally found the key and could open it up and use what was inside!

"Erk..." A muffled sound came from beside her.

The sound was from Three-Eyed Cat.

He was clutching his head and seemed to be in pain.

"Three-Eyed Cat-san..."

"Did you also obtain it?"

"Eh?"

"A type of power just entered my mind just now... Did you not feel anything?" Three-Eyed Cat looked at Butterfly.

"I... did."

"So you also obtained a power, right?"

"Yeah..." Karen nodded.

Rather than obtaining a power, it was more like she had Awakened. But she supposed that it counted as obtaining a power.

"That hurt so much... Shouldn't the game developers at least give a notification before adding a new update? Damned developers..." Three-Eyed Cat rubbed his forehead. "Still, this new update seems quite nice. I'm even more motivated to kill others now."

"Three-Eyed Cat-san..."

"You still didn't answer my earlier question. Just who are you and your younger sister?"

Karen fell silent.

"If you don't want to say, forget it. I don't care who you are, I only want you to help me," Three-Eyed Cat stated calmly. "Feel free to leave if you don't want to, but we'll become enemies from that moment onwards. I'll unhesitatingly kill you."

"Three-Eyed Cat-san... Do you like playing this type of game?"

"Are you trying to ask if I enjoy killing people?"

Karen tacitly admitted this.

"I don't like killing people, but I don't hate it, either," Three-Eyed Cat replied. "This is a slaughtering game. The people here are equivalent to monsters in video games. Killing people here gives me the same feeling as killing monsters in other games. Basically, even if my enemies in this dream game were non-human, I'd accept it in the same way without any particular satisfaction or disappointment. This dream is really abnormal, but as a game, it's actually pretty fun. That's because there's no such realistic game in real life. And, the crow-masked person even said that the final victor will be able to obtain 100,000 sakuras of real cash in real life. Since it's a game, then I should try my hardest to win. Plus, I really want that cash prize, so I'm going to go all out."

Karen didn't know what to say to this.

She felt like something was off about Three-Eyed Cat, but she didn't know what.

"What about you? Do you want to win?"

"...I don't want to win. I only want to meet my younger sister."

"You said that your younger sister brought you here... How's your relationship with her?"

Karen fell silent once again.

Three-Eyed Cat guessed that it was probably a bad relationship, and didn't pry any further.

'Weak... so weak.'

Kaho felt empty inside after slaughtering a large number of players in unison.

At first, the battles here were rather difficult and stimulating for her.

But as her demon powers and techniques improved, Kaho soon leveled up to the point where she could easily suppress the normal players. She didn't feel any excitement anymore.

She then intentionally lured many players to attack her in unison in order to increase the difficulty. Yet, she didn't even need to become serious and use her real power to kill all those players. She felt that it was as easy as if she was cutting through grass.

It was boring that the enemies were so weak.

Although it was slightly fun to kill so many players all at once, Kaho still felt mostly bored and that it wasn't interesting enough.

"Is that all there is to this game?"

She suddenly felt like torturing other players to death for fun. But then, she felt like even that would be boring as well.

"So boring... I might as well just quit this game after I kill my older sister—if she managed to remain alive."

If that idiot older sister of hers still hadn't managed to use her demon power, then she would definitely have been killed enough times to be kicked out of the game already.

Only if Karen used her demon power would she be able to survive.

In that case, Kaho would do exactly as Karen wished: have a fight against her.

Kaho was absolutely confident that she would win. Her idiotic older sister had zero chance of winning.

Kaho decided to bring out her full power and completely suppress and kill Karen—over and over again—until she was kicked out of the game so that she would shut up and stop bothering her in real life!

Of course, the prerequisite was that Karen had managed to survive until now. If she wasn't even able to survive, then she wouldn't even have the right to become Kaho's opponent.

"I feel ashamed as the host to hear that a player thinks my game is boring."

A voice suddenly spoke up behind her.

Astonished, Kaho suddenly turned around, only to see a silver-haired figure wearing a crow mask and a black yukata.

Although she couldn't see his face, she recognized from the voice and the clothing that this was the boy who had given her the game card to enter this dream world.

He called himself Itsuki Kamitani. On that day, he had suddenly appeared before her, saying that he identified her as possessing demonic power and that he could help teach her to control her demon power.

Naturally, Kaho was suspicious of such a person who magically appeared out of nowhere. But right after Kamitani appeared, he showed off his own demon power, allowing Kaho to sense that he was just like her!

Kamitani gave her a strange blood-red card that he called a game card. He told her that injecting her demon energy into it would allow her to enter a game in a dream.

"You'll be able to use your demon power to the fullest in this game, which will help you to speedily learn how to use it properly. Think of it as training. I'm helping you because I'd like to be friends with you as we're fellow companions that possess demon power. Please take good care of me in the future. It'll also be beneficial to me if you enter this game and play it. Since I'm also gaining something, there's no need to feel that you owe me a favor."

The silver-haired boy then turned around and left after telling her all this.

Kaho mulled it over for quite a while before she decided to try using the game card. And so, she successfully entered the dream game, and truly was able to use her demon power. She began enjoying this feeling.

When Karen requested to fight against her, Kaho thought of this game and wondered if she would be capable of bringing Karen along her inside. She then tried it out, and to her surprise, it worked.

"Kamitani-san... I apologize, I didn't know that you were..."

"No worries, I should be the one apologizing. I feel truly bad that you were so bored." Kamitani chuckled. "I've already added a new element to this game; that should interest you a little more."

Right after he said that, dense black mist suddenly appeared.