Touhou: Dragged Into A Death Game, I Summoned Kaguya! — Chapter 202

Chapter 202: Catch Him and Beat Him to Death

Haruto and Kaguya stood frozen in sheer disbelief. A few paces away, a blurry figure was frantically clutching their precious box of loot, sprinting into the distance. It took a full second for the sheer audacity of the act to register. Someone was actually trying to rob them? In a horror survival instance? The shock quickly melted into dark, menacing scowls. Without a word, the Boundary Youkai and the immortal princess readied their respective weapons—a pair of very ordinary, very lethal bricks—and bolted after the thief.

Meanwhile, a short distance away, the thief’s optical camouflage began to violently flicker. The invisibility effect had finally reached its time limit, peeling away to reveal a scrawny young man with narrow, rat-like eyes.

He sprinted like a madman, his lungs burning, but his gaze remained glued to the heavy box in his arms. It was brimming with high-tier ghost artifacts. A greedy, uncontrollable grin split his face.

“A bunch of absolute idiots!” he wheezed, his voice trembling with euphoria. “This is all mine now! With this much gear, let alone surviving this instance, I’ll be practically invincible afterward—argh! Pfft…”

His villainous monologue was rudely interrupted. His leading foot caught on absolutely nothing—a perfectly placed, invisible Gap—sending him pitching forward. He face-planted into the hard dirt with a sickening crunch. The wooden box slipped from his grasp, tumbling through the air before violently spilling its glowing, cursed contents across the ground with a loud, chaotic clatter.

Footsteps crunched against the dirt, slow and agonizingly deliberate. Haruto and Kaguya strolled up to the fallen thief with the casual air of predators cornering a wounded rat. Thick veins bulged against the back of Haruto’s hand as his grip tightened around his brick. Both of them wore identical, terrifyingly sweet smiles that absolutely did not reach their cold, dead eyes.

“Running?” Haruto tilted his head, his tone dripping with mock concern. “Why did you stop running?”

“Daring to steal from us,” Kaguya chimed in, gently tossing her brick up and catching it. “Are you in a rush to reincarnate?”

The sharp-eyed thief curled into a pathetic ball. Blood oozed down his chin, pooling around two freshly dislodged front teeth resting in the dirt. Hearing the rhythmic thud of their approaching footsteps, he scrambled backward in sheer terror. His voice whistled pathetically through the new gap in his teeth.

“Mis… misunderstanding!” he stammered, raising his hands in a desperate plea. “It’s all a huge misunderstanding!”

He forced a wretched, trembling smile that looked infinitely worse than him sobbing. Then, in a sudden burst of desperate adrenaline, he lunged for the scattered box, screaming at the top of his lungs. His physical form violently blurred, rapidly shifting back into a state of semi-transparency as he pivoted to flee.

Whoosh!

The sharp, whistling sound of a heavy projectile cutting through the air echoed out.

Thwack!

The brick found its mark with pinpoint, bone-rattling accuracy.

The camouflage shattered instantly. The scrawny man crashed back into reality, clutching the back of his bleeding head and thrashing on the ground in blinding agony. The wooden box slammed into the dirt a second time, spilling the remaining ghost artifacts with a series of metallic clinks.

“Hiding?” Haruto chuckled, closing the distance with slow, measured steps. “Go on. Try hiding one more time for me. Let’s see if your skull is harder than this masonry.”

The thief hissed through the pain, his vision swimming. Despite his pathetic state, he gritted his teeth and spat out a venomous threat. “You… you two just wait… I’m a member of the God Weaver faction!”

Haruto paused, blinking in genuine confusion. “God Weaver? What the hell is that?”

The thief froze. He clearly hadn’t expected these two lunatics to be completely ignorant of his prestigious organization. A fleeting hint of arrogant smugness crept onto his bloody face as he tried to push himself up.

Before he could even open his mouth to brag, Haruto’s boot slammed directly into his chest, stomping him brutally back into the dirt.

“Did I say you could get up?” Haruto asked, his voice chillingly flat.

“You’re dead!” the man shrieked, coughing violently. “When I get back… the God Weaver will hunt you down! You definitely won’t survive your next instance!”

“I see.” Haruto calmly retracted his foot, brushing a speck of dust off his trousers.

The sharp-eyed thief mistook the calm withdrawal for fear. His chest puffed out with renewed arrogance. But his smugness shattered when Haruto suddenly clutched his face, adopting a highly exaggerated, theatrical expression of sheer panic.

Haruto spun around to look at the girl in the elegant princess dress. “Oh no, Kaguya, whatever shall we do? How can we possibly avoid their terrifying retaliation? Are we completely finished?”

“Obviously, we have to pull up the weeds by the roots and silence him,” Kaguya replied, matching his dramatic flair with a perfectly straight, deadpan face. “There’s no one else around anyway. As long as he’s dead, the evidence vanishes with him. Who would ever know it was us?”

“Wait… wait a minute!” The thief’s arrogance evaporated, replaced by cold, suffocating dread. These two weren’t joking. They were actually going to murder him right here. He scrambled frantically backward on his hands and knees, kicking up clouds of dust. “Every member of our faction has… has a bound Soul Stele! The second I die, the organization will know immediately!”

“Hmm? Is that so?” Haruto scratched the back of his head, looking mildly inconvenienced. “Well, that is a bit of a problem.”

The thief nodded so violently his neck threatened to snap. “Yes, yes! I swear it’s true!”

“It’s fine, Haruto,” Kaguya kindly reassured him, bending down to retrieve her discarded brick. She dusted it off with aristocratic grace. “Their organization will only know that he died. They won’t know who did it. If you keep your mouth shut, and I keep my mouth shut, only heaven and earth will know. Who exactly are they going to seek revenge against?”

“No, no, no!” The sharp-eyed man shook his head like a broken rattle, desperate to find a lifeline. “Our Soul Steles also have… they have an image transmission function! Yes! It will automatically broadcast the footage from the final hour before my death straight back to headquarters!”

His frantic explanation died in his throat.

He watched in absolute, paralyzing horror as the young man casually reached into his inventory and pulled out three pitch-black balaclavas. Haruto handed one to the grinning princess, tossed the second to the quiet girl standing silently in the background, and smoothly pulled the third over his own head.

Was he actually going to die here? Over a box of loot? The thief wanted to weep, but his tear ducts were completely dry. A crushing wave of regret washed over him. Why in the world did he have to provoke these absolute psychopaths?

He had assumed that even if his stealth failed, dropping the name of his massive organization would be enough to intimidate any regular player into backing off. He never imagined he would stumble across a pair of reckless, overpowered lunatics who feared absolutely nothing.

“Fine, I’ll give you a chance to delay your execution,” Haruto’s muffled voice echoed from behind the black mask. “As long as you answer my questions to my absolute satisfaction, I won’t cave your skull in right now.”

“Ask! Please, just ask! I’ll tell you everything!” Hearing a sliver of hope, the thief nodded frantically, bobbing his head like a chicken pecking at grain.

“This God Weaver faction of yours—are they actually strong?” Haruto demanded, crossing his arms. “What’s the exact situation? How many members do you have? How is the hierarchy distributed?”

“They’re incredibly strong!” the man blurted out without hesitation. “I don’t know the exact headcount. I’m just a lowly outer member who joined recently. But there are definitely a lot of us. The organization is strictly divided into the Outer and Inner Circles. At the very top of the Inner Circle sit the Eight Divine Scions. I’ve heard rumors… all eight of them are Destined Players.”

“Eight Destined Players?” Haruto mused, though he didn’t sound particularly shocked.

He remembered Ye Tian mentioning that top-tier factions often hoarded more than one or two Destined Players. Still, having eight of them concentrated in a single ruling council was slightly beyond his initial expectations.

“What else?” Haruto pressed. “Does this little club of yours have a supreme leader?”

The sharp-eyed man shook his head. Seeing Haruto’s eyes dangerously narrow through the eyeholes of the balaclava as he reached for his brick, the thief threw his hands up in a panic.

“I swear! An outer member like me wouldn’t have access to that kind of classified intel!” he shrieked. “An Inner Circle senior only let that slip to me by pure chance! All I know is that the Eight Divine Scions meet regularly inside a specific, locked instance to discuss organizational business… Really! I’m not lying to you!”

Haruto remained silent, studying the trembling man. He could easily tell the thief wasn’t lying; the sheer terror radiating off him was far too genuine. After a brief, suffocating pause, Haruto asked his next question.

“Then how does Ye Tian’s Ascending God faction compare to your God Weaver?”

Realizing that the immediate threat of a brick to the face had passed, the thief let out a shaky sigh of relief. His trembling voice steadied just a fraction.

“There’s simply no comparison. Ascending God is considered a powerhouse among regular organizations, sure. But compared to the God Weaver… they are entirely vulnerable.”

A faint, unconscious hint of factional pride and smugness crept back onto his bruised face.

Thud!

Haruto immediately kicked him in the ribs.

“Wipe that disgusting smile off your face,” Haruto warned coldly. “What about Ye Tian himself? Could any of your Eight Divine Scions actually beat him in a one-on-one duel?”

The thief clutched his aching side, violently shaking his head. “No… they can’t. If all eight of them attacked him simultaneously, maybe. But in a strict one-on-one duel? None of them are a match for Ye Tian.”

Hearing that, Haruto instantly formed a mental gauge of the God Weaver’s true combat capacity.

Ye Tian certainly wasn’t weak, and the chuunibyou player had improved significantly in recent instances. However, Ye Tian was still miles away from reaching the terrifying threshold of a true Pseudo-God.

Initially, hearing grandiose titles like God Weaver and Eight Divine Scions had sounded incredibly mystical. Haruto had almost believed he was dealing with a genuinely terrifying superpower. He had half-expected the Eight Divine Scions to be eight actual Pseudo-Gods—monsters on par with the horrors from the Old Castle instance—and that their mysterious leader might be a true deity, or perhaps something even more beyond understanding.

If that had been the case, he would have been forced to stop playing around and immediately pull out the heavy artillery: the Talisman Cards of Mother Yukari, Reimu, or even Shinki.

But after all that dramatic buildup?

They were just like Ye Tian. A massive gathering of pure, unfiltered chuunibyous playing dress-up.

Sensing the evident wave of sheer disdain radiating from the masked youth, the sharp-eyed thief suddenly grew agitated. A bizarre surge of indignant loyalty overcame his fear.

“You don’t understand at all!” he shouted, his voice cracking. “You don’t understand the grand ideal of the God Weaver!”

“Ideal?” Haruto scoffed, rolling his eyes beneath the balaclava. “Isn’t it just trying to create a god? Even a 9 like Cirno could figure that out from the name alone, okay?”

“Wrong!” The lingering terror on the scrawny man’s face abruptly melted away. It was replaced by a deeply unsettling, fanatical expression—a toxic cocktail of sheer madness and absolute piety.

“Our ultimate goal… is no ordinary god!” he declared, his eyes wide and unblinking. “We will sacrifice everything, exhaust every resource, to construct a true Lord Yama! A supreme deity who governs life and death, and holds absolute dominion over the reincarnation of all things!”