I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood

Chapter 187: Gazer Mite

A fraction of a second slower, and those daggers would have found a heart. The Scalpel would have pressed the advantage and ended him.

“Echo Quarry’s Ritual… it’s almost as good as ours,” Aldrich’s voice cut through the rain, calm and analytical. No panic. No fear. Just… appraisal.

The moment he spoke, the corner of The Scalpel’s eye caught a blur of motion. A tiny, impossibly fast, crimson shadow.

The shadow, he didn’t know when, had been crouched at the edge of the battlefield, hidden in the shadows of a broad-leafed plant.

Now, on some unseen command, the scarlet shadow coiled and launched itself at The Scalpel in a deadly, concealed charge.

It was a palm-sized spider, its entire body a lurid, brilliant red. Eight long, hairy legs moved with impossible speed, almost leaving a red afterimage.

The Scalpel and Aldrich were old rivals. They knew each other’s tricks.

And The Scalpel knew exactly how dangerous that unassuming-looking Scarlet Widow was.

Its carapace could deflect knives. Its speed was a blur. It was an ambush predator.

But the real killer was the toxin inside. A single scratch, and a superhuman’s body would rot from the inside out, dissolving into a stinking pool of filth.

Without hesitation,

The Scalpel broke off his attack on Aldrich.

With a flick of his wrist, the pale, perforated dagger sliced through the air in a cold, precise arc.

Hiss—!

The blade struck true, cutting the charging Scarlet Widow clean in half.

The hard carapace split open with a grating screech.

Thick, scarlet fluid sprayed from its severed torso!

The two halves of the spider twitched as they fell to the ground.

And The Scalpel, using the momentum of his strike and a swift shift in his footing, leaped backward.

His quick reflexes saved him from the deadly, sweet-smelling poison that splashed from the corpse.

But in doing so,

he had completely blown his chance to gravely wound, maybe even kill, Aldrich.

..................

The fight between the three of them raged on.

In a shaded corner of the greenhouse, away from the main battle, a Gazer Mite watched everything. It looked like a common mite, but many times larger, with a single, disproportionately large eye on its back.

It clung to the stalk of a thick-leafed fern, its eight stout, pointed claws dug in.

Its shell was a complex camouflage of green, brown, and gray, blending it perfectly into the verdant backdrop. Without a close look, it was invisible.

Its creator was hundreds of meters away, in a room on a mid-level floor of a derelict high-rise. A broken window gave a commanding view of the Garden.

One of Nicole’s observation posts.

But this time, she wasn’t using a simple scope.

What she was using was far more precious: a Gazer Mite, a creature that took rare materials to cultivate, and its dedicated observation device.

The device was, in reality, two Palmfiends Nicole had “stitched” together with dark arts and forbidden surgery. The two Palmfiends, long abandoned by their original owners, had lost their messaging functions after her modifications.

Now, they had only one purpose:

to receive and display everything the Gazer Mite saw. The images were transmitted in real-time, perfectly synchronized, to this room hundreds of meters away through some unknown link.

The brutal fight between the three Third-Ranks was now clearly and continuously displayed on the gently glowing, special skin of the modified Palmfiends, from multiple hidden angles.

Nicole wore a simple pair of “observation goggles,” which looked like diving goggles, formed by the two stitched Palmfiends.

She tilted her head slightly, tweaking the receiving frequency.

“From the looks of it…” she murmured, her voice sounding hollow in the empty room. “Aldrich’s group and The Scalpel, backed by the Quarry’s Ritual, are evenly matched. This won’t be over quickly.”

She took off the strange-looking goggles and turned to Ember, who wore an identical pair.

Ember also removed her goggles. She nodded, agreeing with Nicole’s assessment.

But for her, the outcome of the fight wasn’t the main point. Last time, her goal wasn’t just to help the Quarry take the Garden. This time, even if it changed hands again, it wouldn’t affect her much.

The critical question for her now, based on what she’d seen—the main fight in the greenhouse, the skirmishes in other areas—was her earlier suspicion.

The “counter-attack” plan… seemed real.

Aldrich was taking this seriously. The forces he’d committed, the sheer grit in his assault, his targeted methods against The Scalpel and the Ritual all pointed to it.

He was acting like he couldn’t care less if the Scarred Woman showed up to ruin his day again.