Earth's SSS Pornstar to SSS Combat God in Another World-Chapter 29: Automaton Model Fourteen

Joji only peeped into the main chamber.

A chimera stood there, over three meters tall, shoulders hunched beneath the low stone.

Black veins crawled through its skin like ink spilled under flesh. The head was human.

Joji knew that face.

Mary Cathryn Lacrosse’s house had portraits, kept like prayers on the wall.

Beneath one name, written. Jaime Lacrosse.

Once a knight of Everhart. Her missing eldest son.

He was alive by dark magic, stitched back into motion.

Yet he was not docile. His jaw was clenched. His eyes were wet with rage.

His whole body shook as if it was trying to tear itself free from its own seams. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

"I’m not giving up," Jaime roared.

His voice grated wrong, demonic in the throat, but the will behind it was still steel.

A chuckle answered him from the shadows.

"Don’t be stubborn. Just be under my control. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of your mom. Ki. Ki. Ki."

Jaime’s posture buckled for a heartbeat, like the words had hands.

Joji’s blood turned cold.

"Alaric, shoot this bastard with all you got," he whispered.

Alaric stepped in, bow already drawn. He shoved the door wider with his shoulder and loosed.

The arrow flew straight and true.

It punched between the mage’s eyebrows and drove through.

For a breath, the old man simply stood there, blood leaking down his brow.

Then the skin began to melt away.

What looked old sloughed off like wax. Underneath was a sharp narrow face, too youthful, too pleased.

His grin widened into something ecstatic and unhinged, laughter bursting out like he had been waiting for the cue.

His robe tore as his body changed.

Metal. Dark mechanics. Ornate gold plating. A towering skeletal machine rose from the shed flesh, narrow waist, stilt like legs, and six arms unfolding, each armed with an estoc that gleamed in the mana light.

Two cores pulsed in his torso, one beating with a rank four mage heart. Another sat lower, an Elite Knight Core, alive and wrong inside him.

He looked at them and smiled, as if they were gifts.

"You two," Jaime’s called, voice hoarse. "Run."

"Who told you to speak?" the machine creature scowled.

Black smoke poured from the creature’s nose and mouth and rushed into Jaime’s.

It forced itself into every opening it could find. Jaime gagged and trembled, muscles spasming as the smoke settled inside him like a second spine.

"Joji," Alaric said, voice tight with urgency. "Once that ritual is complete, those two can slaughter the whole town. We need to stop him."

Joji’s mind split in two. One side screamed to live. The other saw fifty missing and ten thousand waiting to be next. He gritted his teeth until it hurt.

He glanced at Kobto, Kobluk, and Lilina.

"Get out. Find Mary Cathryn. Alaric, lend them your Everhart coat of arms."

Alaric tore his Everhart badge free and threw it. Kobto caught it clean.

"Go," Joji snapped.

Kobto and Kobluk ran like mad. Kobto scooped Lilina up and let her mount his back as the kobolds dropped to all fours and sprinted.

The machine watched them flee and laughed, head turning with a smooth mechanical grace.

"Oh. So brave. Young knights. Ki. Ki. Ki," said the machine with grating voice.

Joji flooded his limbs with Lightness of the Wind Art. Alaric did the same.

They vanished in a blur and reappeared, Joji at the front, Alaric at the back, trying to split the machine’s attention.

Four estocs moved at once.

Steel met steel. Sparks spat into the air. Joji hammered fast punches, trying to break timing, trying to find a joint, a seam, any failure.

The estocs parried with perfect economy. Alaric drove in with his dagger, focusing on one point again and again, trying to create a weak point in the estoc.

"Feisty," the machine said, amused. "I haven’t even introduced myself."

Its voice stayed calm even as it fought. "Let me introduce myself, Everhart knights. My name is Fourteen."

Jaime snapped out of his stupor, eyes flaring as his will found a gap. Energy surged out of him, dragging himself out of the ritual.

Dark aura bled off his limbs, imperfect and filthy, but his fist still came down hard enough to dent stone.

He charged into the fray and matched Joji and Alaric’s pace, his strikes landing in the same rhythm as theirs.

Fourteen fought all three of them and kept smiling.

"Fun. Fun. Fun. Ki. Ki. Ki," Fourteen laughed jovially.

Then it opened its mouth and spat a condensed ball of darkness.

Joji threw Emerald Blade Wind Art up to meet it.

Boom! The collision exploded.

The hall shook. All of them were thrown apart like toys.

Joji hit the floor, rolled, and came up tasting blood. He snorted it out.

His body already began to repair the damage, the regeneration in him refusing to let injury become a limit.

Then he saw it. Fourteen was behind Alaric. Joji’s eyes widened.

"Alaric! Move!" Joji roared.

It moved with a mimicry of Lightness of the Wind Art, too smooth for something that should have been bound by metal.

Alaric felt it too and dashed, barely in time. Another burst of dark magic detonated where he had been.

The shockwave slapped Joji’s face and rattled his teeth.

Joji charged anyway, trying to pin Fourteen down, trying to force a trade.

Fourteen saw through it and slipped away, laughing.

"Come. Chase me, silly little knights."

Alaric, Joji, and Fourteen exchanged blows while they slid along the wall as if it were flat ground.

Jaime held the doorway behind them, blocking it, not letting the monster out of the dungeon.

"Here. Catch." Joji threw a dozen bone javelins from his back.

Kobto and Kobluk were already at the choke point, the larger chamber where the dead chimeras lay, with Lilina at their side.

Then a chimera stepped into their path. Two meters tall, a goblin head sewn onto a lizardman body, stance wide and taunting, aura flaring to look bigger than it was.

Kobluk drew two blades from his back, shoulders lowering into readiness.

Kobto twisted his flute and it lengthened, the wood shifting into a blowgun with a soft creak.

Lilina’s fingers hovered over the bottles at her belt, itching to be used.

They could not fight what Joji and Alaric were fighting.

But they could handle this one. And they meant to.