An Arcanist in Karakura Town 26: Research is Great! (Patreon)

An Arcanist in Karakura Town
Chapter 26: Research is Great!

-VB-

“Hey, let us go!”

I ignored the demands of the Hollows I’ve caught. Instead, I focused on the table in front of me and the devices on top of them. There were a total of four of them, one for each Hollow of similarly stronger than average durability.

Device #1 “Boom” was a bomb. It produced an explosion of spiritual particle to particle “bond.” It, unfortunately, did not limit its explosive power to only spirits but also regular matter, which was why I had a watermelon right next to the cage of one of the Hollows to simulate a human-ish body. Oh, it also had a rat I caught inside of it, happily chewing away at its cage’s delicious content.

I grabbed it, pulled the pin, turned to the first Hollow subject, and smiled.

The serpentine Hollow screamed in horror as I under-tossed the cylindrical bomb.

The bomb landed just outside its cage, and shattered.

Visually, there was nothing but the bomb just shattering on the ground like glass.

Spiritually, everyone in the room felt a sudden expansion of pressure. Limited in size, though this only increased the lethality as this act compressed the energy into only that sphere, the “spiritual” explosion chunked the front half of the serpentine Hollow. The watermelon exploded with both rat’s gore and the watermelon bits splattering everywhere.

Both events led to a sudden burst of wind overtaking the warded and quarantine corner of the warehouse, which was a containment Bounded Field within a “lab” Bounded Field within Hide’s Great Wall noble phantasm which was in turn within a larger “stealth” Bounded Field. On top of this, the cage that held the poor subject and the concrete that had once been under the watermelon also disappeared in a perfect sphere centering on the bomb and the watermelon, respectively with larger and smaller radii.

I hummed as I noted the details of the detonation effect. The way that the Hollow died told me that only a certain amount of penetration was there, even with the limited and focused power of the Boom. The rat, on the other hand, had exploded and did so with such a force that also caused the watermelon to explode.

Interesting, very interesting. Was it because just like with chemical reactions, the shattering of bonds between spiritual particles led to an outburst of energy, maybe in the form of reiatsu, but built up within a mortal body like a physical force? Reiatsu did kill people and chunk environments if the pressure was high enough. Was I mimicking that by literally converting all reiatsu in -?

“Holy shit, he killed Kenny!”

“You bastard!”

I glared at the other Hollows. “Shut up before I make you die a slow death.”

“You can’t make me, bitch!” the abnormally obese Hollow with five lips on one head taunted effectively.

I felt my cheeks twitch a little.

“Alright,” I said as I turned back to the table, and instead of Device #2, I picked up Device #3, “Gluttony.”

It was a rubber ball with a lot of runes in place written using my blood. Turning back to the obese Hollow, I tossed it like a baseball.

The Hollow laughed when the fist-sized ball landed harmlessly on his stomach.

And then began screaming when the ball morphed into a centipede-like parasite.

Everyone alive in the room watched as the centipede tore into the stomach, digging into the Hollow. It screamed bloody murder, weeping and begging, as the Curse of Gluttony devoured it from the inside out.

Finally, nine centipedes, each as long as my forearm and as thick as three fingers put together, burst out of the Hollow’s untouched backside. The Hollow keeled forward and died, not even ashes left behind. The carnivorous Curse didn’t even look at the Hollow in the cage next over, which had been intentionally put close together for exactly this experiment. The multiplied curse just wasn’t interested.

As I expected, this “bomb” was not going to work well against anything more than one target.

“I took an inspiration from nature,” I spoke casually as the avatars of the curse slithered towards me. I knelt down and put my hand to the floor, bottom up. The centipedes climbed up and coiled themselves around my forearms, four on the left and five on the right. And then they flashed a dim black light. When the light went away, it showed coiling yet simplistic tattoos of centipedes criss-crossing each other. “If life can be parasitic and carnivorous, then could magic and spirits imitate that?”

“Y-You’re a monster…!” a short squat and many horned and clawed mole-like Hollow stuttered. “You’re a monster!”

“I am a researcher, thank you very much,” I snapped back at him testily with narrowed eyes. “With all of the mess the world intends to keep dunking me into, I can’t focus on what I really want to do. Just be grateful that your existence will further both magical and spiritual arts… in warfare.”

“I don’t want to die…” the last Hollow, one that had fashioned itself into a monkey’s appearance with a lot of fur and a cow’s head, whimpered from its cage.

“Too bad,” I shrugged as I grabbed … Device #2, “Basilisk.” I tossed it lightly at the whimpering cow-monkey Hollow, and watched in glee when the glass-bomb shattered on the sanskrit-reinforced bars of the cage.

The Hollow screamed as its hands, closest to the side of the cage where the glass-bomb exploded, began to turn to stone.

This bomb’s effect was simple: it fused spiritual particles together when exposed to its area of effect and then the effect would climb up and over whichever spiritual essence was connected to the petrified part beyond the range of the bomb itself.

The Hollow wept as its arms began to petrify. “Nononononono-!”

The petrification climbed up its shoulders and spread across its chest.

“Hel….p m….!”

Ah, though they do not breathe, constriction of the chest via petrification made talking harder, huh?

“H-...!”

The effect quickly ascended its throat and then … it was over.

The last evidence of life of the Hollow was the twitching of its toes before it too became stone.

I turned to look at another rat I’ve caught.

Healthy, alive, and unaffected.

This was a good candidate for landmines.

The last Hollow banged on its cage. “LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!”

I stared at it blankly before grasping the last bomb from the table, Device #4, “Pariah.”

It froze upon seeing me.

“W-Wait, we can work something out! You don’t have to kill me like you did Kenny, Eric, and Stan! I’m super smart!”

“So are a lot of people,” I shrugged. “Intelligence isn’t exactly a commodity on short supply in this day and age.”

“Oh, fuck you-!”

I tossed the bomb, which got the Hollow to scream in fear mid-outburst.

The bomb hit the iron bar and then bounced off, doing nothing.

“...Huh?”

“Huh.”

The rat next to this cage squeaked.

“Ha, it did nothing!”

I squinted at the Hollow before grinning. “No, it’s working.”

“... No, it’s not!”

“Yes, it is,” I said as I gestured to the Hollow’s hands. “Look.”

It looked.

And screamed as it began to lose cohesion.

“W-What’s happening to me?!”

“Nothing seriously. All souls are, at the end of the day, spiritual particles that form an ego. What I did was remove your ego. Think of it as a disease. It latches onto you… and slowly starts converting you to itself.”

It stared horrified at its hands before looking up. “... You’re a fucked up monster. Killing us in horrible ways wasn’t enough. You decided to erase us?”

“I see it as nothing different from death. All things must end. Why not even the memories and identities? Imagine, granting death to identities.” I shivered in delight. “It’s wonderful!”

It glared at me as its body began to turn into that of a Blank, an ego-less soul. “You’re a monster. I hope you burn in Hell.”

I snorted. “I’ll erase Hell if it ever comes after me and mine.”

It blinked. “... Why did I have to get caught by a sociopath? I couldn’t be eaten like all other Hollows or purified? Purification sounds nice now,” it muttered resignedly as the conversion reached its neck. “Good bye, cruel world.”

And then it was a Blank.

I looked at the rat.

Blank eyed, still, and laying down on the ground. It was breathing but when I nudged its cage, it didn’t respond.

Dead.

I hummed. “I suppose the question of which bomb I can design will be used has been answered.”

Basilisk was a good name for a landmine.

Just like how mythological basilisks will turn an unsuspecting victim into stone, all unsuspecting enemies of mine will die without causing harm to anyone else.

Wonderful.