The Reincarnated Assassin Is a Genius Swordsman

Chapter 1495 "Bear Fire Demon!" The Silent Serpent Swordsman bit his lip as he watched the light blooming from the wooden dragon connect with the Bear Fire Demon's blood. "What have you just done!" It was just as he tried to brush aside the light reddening as it mixed with blood and approach the Bear Fire Demon. "Natsu." As the Bear Fire Demon clasped his two hands together, a cluster of red magic flowed out from his fingertips. "I will find you." With those words, the wooden dragon's eyes flickered with blue light, and a massive light fell around the Silent Serpent Swordsman and the Effigy Ghost he was guarding. "Kuaaaaargh!" The Silent Serpent Swordsman screamed and dropped to his knees under the crushing pressure of the light bearing down on his entire body. Feeling the once-brilliant light subside, he struggled to lift his eyelids. "Bear Fire Demon…." The Silent Serpent Swordsman ground his teeth and pushed himself up. "I'll kill y— Huh?" Muttering that he would kill the Bear Fire Demon completely, he lifted his head—and froze on the spot. "Wh-What is this." The Silent Serpent Swordsman swallowed hard and turned his head. "Where the hell is this now!" He realized that the place he now stood in wasn't the Holy Sword Alliance's Holy Ground at all, but a completely different location, and he screamed in fury. "Hoo…." The Silent Serpent Swordsman bit his lip and looked around again. 'Judging by the forest and terrain, this looks like the central region….' Below a gentle hill bordering the forest stood a mansion with an air of considerable wealth. The tall, meticulously packed stone wall and the neatly stacked stone exterior clearly showed how well-off this family was. Around the arched front gate, climbing roses in a blend of red and pink bloomed in profusion, breathing life and brightness into the stone wall. 'Should I smash it?' The Silent Serpent Swordsman gathered Fighting Spirit into his fist and aimed at the stone wall, then lowered it. 'No, it might actually be dangerous.' It was clear he had fallen victim to some magic or formation the Bear Fire Demon had prepared. If he carelessly touched anything inside, the formation might shift and become dangerous. 'Every moment counts, and yet this is so irritating….' It was just as the Silent Serpent Swordsman sighed and shook his head. "Run!" "Run faster!" "Let's goooo!" From inside the stone wall came the clear, ringing voices of children and their bright peals of laughter. 'A child's voice?' The Silent Serpent Swordsman narrowed his eyes and climbed up onto the stone wall. 'Four children who look exactly alike?' Four boys were moving around, sweating, with wooden horse toys tucked between their legs, in an old-fashioned courtyard paved with pebbles. 'So these are the ones.' The children, their clothes covered in dust, looked and sounded so alike they could have been one person. They were clearly twins who had each received a divided portion of the Hydra's soul. "Push through!" "Never lose!" "Today we win!" "Yaaaah!" Watching the children swing wooden swords at each other while riding their toy horses, it seemed they were playing at war. Most people would have smiled at such a noisy yet peaceful scene, but not the Silent Serpent Swordsman. 'This feels disgusting….' The Silent Serpent Swordsman ground his teeth as he listened to the children's laughter. 'I don't know why, but it feels like my heart is being scraped with sandpaper.' Normally, he had no interest in humans whatsoever. Setting aside good or bad feelings, he should have been as indifferent as if watching ants, yet seeing this family filled him with irritation and rage. 'Now that I think of it….' The Silent Serpent Swordsman frowned, recalling the face of the Bear Fire Demon as he'd vomited blood and, flesh crushed, kept crawling closer. 'Why didn't I kill him?' As he was now, he could sever the Bear Fire Demon's neck with a single finger. Even if the Light Wind Palace interfered, killing him wouldn't be difficult if he used his full strength. But strangely, when it came to actually killing the Bear Fire Demon, his hand wouldn't move readily. In the end he had attacked, but every strike had avoided the vital points. 'Don't tell me….' The Silent Serpent Swordsman placed a hand on his own chest and bit his lip. 'Is that human really still left inside me?' The human child the Bear Fire Demon had called Natsu. It occurred to him that the child—whose soul he thought he had devoured whole—might still remain and have been getting in his way. 'No, absolutely not.' He was one of the heads of Hydra, the strongest and most vile monster of all. Even if it had been in spirit form, it made no sense for him to have let a human child slip away. 'And yet….' Since strange things kept happening one after another, a nagging suspicion began to smolder in the back of his mind. 'But why are there four?' The Silent Serpent Swordsman looked around the courtyard, his brow furrowing slightly. As far as he knew, the Bear Fire Demon had six sons. He couldn't understand why only four were in sight. "Dear." As the Silent Serpent Swordsman tilted his head, a familiar man's voice came from the right side of the courtyard. Turning to look, he saw a sharp-featured middle-aged man dressed in a neat leather tunic setting down his teacup and gazing at the woman seated across from him. "Where is Natsu?" The middle-aged man spoke the very name the Bear Fire Demon had called himself, looking toward the garden where the quadruplets were playing. This seemed to be the Bear Fire Demon's true face. "It seems he's been waiting, since it's been so long since you came." A beautiful middle-aged woman, holding a child younger than the twins, smiled and pointed to the mansion behind her. The child in her arms, with striking black eyes, seemed to be the very last piece of the Hydra. "Ha…." The Bear Fire Demon scratched the back of his head and sighed. "Hide-and-seek again, huh." He shook his head as if utterly exasperated. "You know it, don't you. What Natsu loves most is…." "I know. Hide-and-seek. It's just that finding him these days is no easy task." The Bear Fire Demon lowered his brows, as if finding Natsu had become quite a burden now. "Sometimes I wish he'd play like them instead." He glanced back at his other four sons playing war games and let out a short chuckle. "Still, I suppose I should go. That child always has a gift prepared." The Bear Fire Demon, seemingly looking forward to the gift Natsu—the youngest of the twins—had prepared, licked his lips and walked toward the mansion. 'That's it!' The Silent Serpent Swordsman let out a gasp of realization as he watched the scene. 'I need to find that child before the Bear Fire Demon does!' He had to admit it now. Given that the Bear Fire Demon had gone to such lengths to prepare all this, it seemed the soul of the child called Natsu hadn't completely vanished after all. 'And the fact that I couldn't kill the Bear Fire Demon fits, too.' Given that his hand had trembled every time he tried to kill the Bear Fire Demon he felt nothing for, that guess was likely correct. 'If I find that child first and kill him….' The Silent Serpent Swordsman twisted his mouth into a smirk as he followed the Bear Fire Demon into the mansion. 'The remnant of that child's soul left inside me will disappear completely.' If the Bear Fire Demon found the child first, the child's soul buried within his own would grow stronger again; but if he himself found the child first, he could completely extinguish that soul. 'Naturally, it'll be the latter.' He was the fifth head of the Hydra. Unlike the human Bear Fire Demon, finding a mere human child was as easy as breathing. 'Now I understand exactly what magic the Bear Fire Demon used on me.' The Silent Serpent Swordsman nodded slowly. 'A soul connection.' The Bear Fire Demon had linked his own soul to the Silent Serpent Swordsman's and placed the faint remnant of the child Natsu's soul inside that mansion for protection. Since it was a formation that bound their souls together, he naturally couldn't escape at once, and it was clear the Bear Fire Demon intended to rescue the child through this game of hide-and-seek. Teudeudeuk! As if confirming his own guess, the Bear Fire Demon, who had been acting composed, threw his eyes wide open the moment he entered the mansion and began to run. "This doesn't seem to be it, but…." Even though he thought it wasn't the right place, the Silent Serpent Swordsman opened the brown door right by the entrance without the slightest hesitation. But what leapt out from inside wasn't a child—it was a blazing red sword. A crimson blade, much like Raon Zieghart's sword, came rushing straight for his chest. Jjeoeoeoeong! The Silent Serpent Swordsman casually knocked aside the sword aimed at his chest and snorted. 'Not a bad surprise attack, but….' It won't work on me. His ability was Crisis Detection. To keep from having to hand over all his power to the last head of the Hydra, his sense for avoiding death was sharper than anyone's, which made an ambush like this no different from a child's swordplay. 'So it's find-the-child while breaking through traps.' The Silent Serpent Swordsman stepped aside, smacking his lips. 'The formation isn't bad, but the method is foolish.' The Silent Serpent Swordsman scoffed as he shut the door of the room the ambush had come from. 'In his desperation to save his son, he's completely forgotten what I actually did.' He himself had devoured the soul of the child Natsu and taken over his body. Even if he hadn't consumed it entirely, he had already absorbed the soul, so sensing where the remaining fragment of the child's soul was wouldn't be difficult at all. 'Where….' The Silent Serpent Swordsman closed his eyes and spread out his Aura Perception, formed from Fighting Spirit. Rather than simply moving his Fighting Spirit, he wove into it his own soul—the one that had devoured Natsu's soul—and released it. Through his Aura Perception, he sensed the Bear Fire Demon moving about frantically. Gasping for breath and drenched in cold sweat, he never once stopped moving, sweeping through the entire mansion. Tuuk! The Silent Serpent Swordsman sneered at the Bear Fire Demon and spread his Aura Perception even wider. As his Fighting Spirit wrapped around the entire mansion, his senses caught an extremely faint tremor. 'There it is!' The Silent Serpent Swordsman sensed the child's soul in a small space at the top floor of the mansion and slowly climbed the stairs. The Bear Fire Demon, seemingly unaware that he had found it, was still busily searching elsewhere. 'He said he'd show his father's strength, didn't he?' The Silent Serpent Swordsman stood before the door where he sensed the child's soul, his mouth twisting. 'A power you can't even see means nothing at all.' He sneered, mocking not just the Bear Fire Demon but Raon as well, and opened the door. Kiiiiik! The moment the door opened, a strong scent of wood filled the air. It seemed to be a workshop for woodworking—split and cut pieces of wood were scattered all over the room—but the child was nowhere to be seen. "Hmph." The Silent Serpent Swordsman, not flustered in the slightest, snorted and stepped up to the workbench. "There you are!" As if he already knew exactly where the child was, he bent down at once and drew a sinister smile at the child hiding beneath the workbench. "I never imagined you'd really still be alive." The Silent Serpent Swordsman shook his head, saying he hadn't known Natsu's soul had been hiding within his own. "Aaaaagh!" A boy who looked exactly like the children playing war games in the mansion's courtyard let out a scream. As if he were the only one here who could see the Silent Serpent Swordsman, he cried out and stumbled backward. "Don't run. I'm not a bad person." The Silent Serpent Swordsman waved his hand at Natsu. "Just a monster, that's all." He said he wasn't a person but a monster, crawling across the floor toward Natsu. "Ah…." Natsu clutched the faded wooden dragon tightly to his chest and backed away. But before he knew it, his back had already touched the wall. "It won't hurt." The Silent Serpent Swordsman drew a gentle smile. "It'll be over faster than last time." It was just as he said it wouldn't take long and reached out a pitch-black, burning hand toward Natsu. Kugugugugugu! Blue light bloomed from the eyes of the old wooden carving Natsu was holding, and it transformed into a massive dragon, blocking the Silent Serpent Swordsman's path. "That damn wooden carving again— Guhk!" Overwhelmed by the presence of the massive dragon blocking his path, the Silent Serpent Swordsman's jaw trembled as he took a step back—then he screamed. "Guh…." His jaw trembled as he saw a needle, as massive as a sword, driven straight into his own chest. "Y-You…." The Silent Serpent Swordsman grabbed the needle protruding from his chest and forced his head to turn. "Bear Fire Demon!" He ground his teeth as he saw the Bear Fire Demon, mask now on, standing there having pierced his chest. "I misspoke. For Natsu, it's hide-and-seek, but for us…." The Bear Fire Demon twisted the needle lodged in the Silent Serpent Swordsman's chest, his mouth curling upward. "It's catch-the-thief!" As he pulled the needle out, a clear fragment of soul, like spring water, sprang from within the Silent Serpent Swordsman's chest.