Earth's SSS Pornstar to SSS Combat God in Another World-Chapter 35: The Father Worries While the Son Scurries

Glass glittered across the marbled floor like winter hail, and the wine that had been meant for a toast ran between the shards in a dark red stain.

Jonas Cutler stood over it as if the mess had happened inside his chest. His fingers shook.

He did not remember throwing the goblet. He only remembered the word that had come to him like a hammer.

Dead.

The doors to the receiving hall opened hard enough to make the hinges complain.

The head guard stumbled in with two men behind him, all three still wearing road dust.

The head guard’s eyes had the dull shine of glass.

A handprint bloomed on his right cheek, red and swollen, the mark of someone striking him with an open palm.

Jonas turned on him.

"How can you be so careless?" Jonas roared.

"You said the other guards were traitors. You swore you had rooted them out. Why did you not know about this earlier?"

"We fed you. We paid you well. We put your sons and daughters in school. And you come back to me with this."

The head guard did not flinch. He did not lower his gaze. He barely breathed.

Jonas felt the room tilt. For a heartbeat he thought he might fall.

At his side, Martin did not move. The head butler looked like a servant only in the cut of his clothes.

His stillness belonged to a man who had once lived by the blade. He watched the guard’s face the way a hawk watched a mousehole.

"You brought proof?" Jonas said, swallowing. "You said you brought proof."

The head guard raised a bundle of cloth with both hands. It was stiff and dark with dried blood.

The smell reached Jonas an instant later, copper and sweat, and something faint that reminded him of Walter’s riding gloves after a long day.

His knees wanted to give. He locked them.

Martin’s hand lifted between Jonas and the cloth. Jonas looked at him, half angry at the interruption, half desperate.

Martin spoke softly, as if the words might startle something in the room.

"Master," Martin said. "I think what this guard claims, that young Master Walter is dead, might be nothing but a picture planted in a mind."

Jonas stared at him like a man clinging to a rope over a ravine.

"Speak," Jonas said. "Speak clearly, Martin."

"I am saying this," Martin replied. "He brought a bloodied cloth. It smells like the young master, yes. But I could name a hundred ways to fake that smell."

"A cloak kept in his room. A scarf stolen from his laundry. A glove pressed against the cloth and left to rot in a jar. There are easier tricks than murder, if a man’s goal is panic."

Jonas blinked, trying to breathe around the tightness in his throat.

"What’s more..." Martin added, and his voice changed. It did not rise. It sharpened.

Jonas saw it then. Not the words. The moment in Martin’s eyes when suspicion became certainty.

Martin moved. He crossed the space in a step that seemed too short to cover the distance.

His palm drove forward with a flat, brutal certainty, not a punch, not a slap. Jonas heard a wet crack.

The head guard’s mouth opened in surprise that had no time to become pain.

Martin’s hand drove through the man’s forehead and burst out the back of his skull.

"Why?" Jonas rasped. "Martin. Oh, Martin. Why did you kill him? My son. How? Why? What now?"

"Master," Martin said. "Look."

He pulled his hand free. Something pale white and slick came with it, writhing in the air like a strip of wet ribbon.

It hit the floor and did not die. It bucked and curled, a white caterpillar thick as a thumb, nearly six inches long, its skin shining with mucus.

Its mouth was a tiny ring that opened and closed as if tasting the air.

"Master," Martin said again, slower now. "This worm can control a man. It crawls into a skull through the ears or eyes."

"After a month, the host dies, after it has eaten enough of the brain."

Jonas’s breath came in thin pulls. His eyes jumped from the worm on the marble to the dead guard, to the swollen slap mark on the man’s cheek.

Then Martin’s hand snapped up and two steel slim blades hissed through the air.

They hit with a wet squelch. Napes split. Eyes ruptured. The men behind the head guard jerked as if yanked by strings and collapsed in the same beat, their faces still wearing confusion.

Two worms were pinned hard to the wall. They twitched and curled, smearing mucus and a thin dark streak down the stone.

Martin did not look surprised. Jonas did.

"There is such a thing," Jonas whispered. He tasted bile. "What ditch would my body be lying in without you, Martin?"

Martin did not smile. He watched the worm until it stilled, and only then did he look back to Jonas.

Jonas’s hands hovered uselessly over the red stain on the marble, as if he could wipe it away and make the day rewind.

"How about my Wally?" Jonas said. The name came out small, not the name of an heir or a young master, but the name of a boy in a courtyard with scraped knees. "Do you think he is all right out there?"

Martin’s face did something Jonas had learned to read over years.

The butler was measuring the world, laying out possibilities like knives on a table.

He did not answer at once. That was the part that hurt most.

Then Martin spoke, careful as a man stepping onto thin ice.

"I will not lie to lift your spirits," Martin said. "But I think someone helped him. Young Master Walter has a way of lowering his head when he must, even when he has every right to hold it high. That is a survival trait. A rare one."

Jonas let out a breath he did not know he had been holding. It did not fix anything. It did not bring his son back into the estate. But it loosened the knot around his heart by a notch.

He had trusted Martin once as they ran caravans through the Kingdom of Vicario, when steel and greed decided who lived and who did not.

Jonas looked at the broken glass again, at the wine bleeding into the grout like a wound that would not clot.

’If they can put a worm in a man’s head,’ he thought, and the thought made his skin crawl, ’what other vermin have they already put into my house?’

Back in Lost Boy’s Marsh, Joji and his cohort went slow, boots testing each patch of ground before trusting it.

The air smelled of wet rot and old leaves, and every step made the bog answer with a quiet suck.

No one spoke. Their faces were tight, eyes wide, watching for one thing.

It was not a woman in white. They almost wished it was.

A boar king stood ahead of them, snorting at a fallen log as if the wood had offended it.

It was a behemoth, taller than a cottage, long as a cart team, six meters of brute height and more than twelve from snout to tail.

Its hide was a moving wall of bristles and mud. Its breath came out in hot gusts that stirred gnats into little storms.

Joji did not boast. Even with a body the system swore was worth nine men, he pictured himself pinned under that hog and felt his mouth go dry.

Then he remembered the clumsiest of the bunch. Walter.

He nearly slapped his own forehead, but when he looked, his eyes almost popped.

Walter was leaning on a giant rotten trunk like a tired man at a tavern door, face slack, almost peaceful, staring at the monster as if it were a shrine.

Joji told himself it was fine. His body disagreed and moved without thinking, dashing toward the man in silent steps.

Too late. The trunk gave a wet groan and toppled with Walter still on it, sinking into the bog with a slow, hungry gulp.

Every head turned. Every throat tightened. The boar stopped snorting. Its small eyes slid toward them.

Then its gaze met theirs. Walter’s smile twisted into something like a cry.

"Oops?" he said.

"Run," Joji snarled.

He hauled Walter onto his back and broke into a sprint. Lilina climbed onto Alaric like she had practiced it, arms locked around his neck, legs tight at his waist.

Kobto lifted his flute with shaking hands and tried to pour calm into the air. A thin note cut through the swamp stink.

"It’s useless," Kobluk growled, already moving, already reading the beast. "It sees us as meat."

Joji risked a look back and for a heartbeat he felt foolish hope. The boar had not moved. It only watched them.

"It’s not moving. Look," Joji yelled, breath burning, Walter’s weight dragging at his shoulders.

Then his smile died.

Something in him flared, a cold pressure behind his ribs that screamed louder than logic.

Run. Trust it. With this new body, with this new sense, he had learned the hard way that ignoring it got men killed.

Behind him, the boar king moved.

It rolled, as if its bones had forgotten their proper shape, tucking into itself until it became a bristling ball.

Then it launched forward and began bulldozing through the marsh, trees snapping like kindling, mud blasting up in thick sheets.

It did not sink. It bounced, unstoppable, turning the swamp into a battering road.

Joji’s face soured.

"Split up," he barked. "Everyone split up."

He drove straight ahead. Alaric cut left. Kobto and Kobluk dropped to all fours and ran right.

The boar made its choice with a simple mind. Joji and Walter were the biggest cuts of meat.

"Oh, come on," Joji spat.

He darted, searching, brain racing faster than his legs. Rock rose ahead on his left, a rare hard spine in the sucking world.

Beyond it, the ground fell away into a wide, old sinkhole, its edges slick, its mouth dark and waiting.

Joji saw the drop and knew they could not stop. Not with this speed. Not with the bog stealing their footing.

If he tried to brake now, they would skid and tumble and vanish into that pit.

His eyes climbed instead. Vines. Thick ones. Coiled around trees like ropes left by giants.

An idea struck him so hard it almost made him laugh.

’Just like fucking Tarzan now,’ he thought.

He rubbed his palms together, spat into them, then shouted from the bottom of his lungs and jumped.

His fingers caught the vine. It was slick with swamp wet, saggy with age, and for a heartbeat he felt it slide.

Then it held. The vine took their weight and swung two grown men out over the sinkhole’s edge.

Walter clung to Joji’s back like a sack of grain and screamed, not like Tarzan, but like a pig squealing for dear life.