A blue prompt light flashed at the interface, and he successfully logged into the network.
For a few seconds, Nolly just sat there in place, breathing in great gulps, as if he had just escaped from the set of some horror flick.
But as he smoothly took control of the company networks for the major media outlets, his nerves finally relaxed—
No “hackers lurking in the shadows watching him” launched any attacks. Perhaps the hacker behind the shipwreck hadn’t even uncovered who was orchestrating the disappearance case. They were probably just bluffing.
As for the King in Yellow?
Ha! How could He possibly exist?
He had lived for forty-four years without ever hearing tales of eldritch gods manifesting—aside from the ones he himself had spread. This was a world governed by science.
Relaxed, he manipulated his familiar programs, voraciously sucking up information from the net in a vengeful burst of compensatory indulgence. When he passed the backdoor to a strip club’s surveillance feed, he paused with keen interest.
The sight of all that pale flesh made him swallow dryly, his throat parched. He held out for a few seconds before he couldn’t resist breaching the cameras—
Zzt.
His vision plunged into sudden darkness. He was kicked out of the network.
“？？” Nolly reflexively reached to yank the chip from the port at the back of his neck, assuming a fault in his brain core. But just as his hand touched the interface, the villa’s lights snuffed out.
In the darkness, the incandescent filaments still glowed faintly with their scorching red heat.
The next second.
Clang… snap!
Every door and window in the villa locked tight.
Nolly jolted upright, yelling as he sprang from the sofa and bolted toward the nearest sliding glass door.
He hammered at it with his fists in a frenzy, even though he knew that “glass door” was made of triple-layered tempered glass sandwiching nanotech porous material. Not only could no human strength shatter it, but cries for help wouldn’t carry outside either:
“Security!! Security!!!”
Terror truly stripped away rational thought. Unable to smash through the doors or windows, he scrambled on hands and knees toward the foyer alarm. He pounded the switch over and over, but the alarm that should have blared stayed utterly silent.
Zzt… light… evil…
The video playing on the coffee table warped into whispers like those of malevolent ghosts.
He caught the briny, fishy tang of seawater that should have been sealed outside the doors. Refracted light from ocean waves danced across the living room ceiling on the first floor.
Nolly spun around, his sweat-slicked back pressed hard against the wall. His chest heaved wildly as he stared at the coffee table.
The video stuttered on in fits and starts:
“…fear… light… use… holy water, crucifix…”
“…brother… thrust the light into its insidious hood!!”
His eyes fell on the crucifix and LMS50 Tactical Flashlight he had set out on the coffee table earlier. A few seconds later, driven by the spur of death and dread, he lunged toward them!
Crash… thud!
Decorative items scattered across the floor.
He hit the ground clutching the crucifix and flashlight in one hand while fumbling a star-shaped stone into the other: “Begone!! Begone!!!”
Upstairs in the villa.
Under the concealment provided by Hastur and G8273, Finnian slipped effortlessly through a top-floor window. Crouching behind the second-floor railing, he watched Nolly execute that silky little chain of actions:
“? What’s he yelling while waving that starfish around?”
Hastur had no idea what the starfish ritual was supposed to be, so he simply translated: “He’s shouting ‘Begone! Begone!'”
“Hold on, I think I remember this,” Dustin said tensely, stepping in front of Hastur to shield him. “Pentagram, flames… that’s the ‘Old Seal’! I saw it in the intel on the Cradle Cult. That ‘Old Seal’ can drive off—or even kill—all Cthulhu Deities!!”
In that instant, different people reacted in different ways:
Hastur stared straight-faced like an old man on the subway checking his phone: “‘Cthulhu’ system?”
Finnian hissed in a low voice: “Careful!”
G8273 sounded as if he’d heard the punchline of a joke: “Can ‘kill’?”
The three voices overlapped. Even if Nolly had been stone deaf, he would have heard the disturbance on the second floor.
He roared as he yanked a railgun out from under the sofa. He didn’t care what was hiding up there or if the shot would catch him in the blast—he just hauled back on the trigger.
Thud.
A dull sound echoed through the villa, like a bowling ball dropping onto a wooden floor from several stories up.
It was so muffled that it called to mind those nights on the top floor when you heard marbles rolling across the roof.
In the vast, empty living room of the villa, the noise produced not the slightest echo. It was as if the second half of the sound had been swallowed whole, like he’d fired the slug straight into the void of a black hole.
Nolly’s eyes bulged wide in horror as he gaped at the yellow-robed figure hovering amid the rippling waves on the ceiling. It had taken a direct railgun hit without a single hair out of place. Even with a devastating weapon in his hands, Nolly still felt utterly defenseless.
A violent shiver ran through him. Trembling, he hurled aside the useless physical weapon and thrust aloft the crucifix anointed with holy water and the Old Seal. He shone the LMS50 straight into the unknowable darkness and chaos beneath that yellow hood:
“Go to hell!! Monster!!!”
Hastur, abruptly blinded by the flashlight beam: “…”
“…” Silence fell over humans and non-humans alike on the second-floor platform.
Dustin tried to make sense of the absurdity before them:
“According to… the information gathered by the Police Station, there are indeed legends in the Cradle Cult that describe their worshipped deities as fearing light. They claim the Old Seal can disperse or even destroy Them. Oh! Crashing a ship into Them can break Them apart too.”
“You serious?” Finnian pointed downstairs. “Does Hastur look like he’s in any trouble? His robe hem is drooping! He’s clearly speechless. Besides, the Dean spent ages lounging around Lake Hali, dozing off day or night.”
Finnian glanced again at the downright comical scene unfolding below. He could totally empathize with what Hastur must have felt when Dustin claimed the failed ambush attempt on him had been by “your great-uncle”:
“And this is it? The best the Pontiff could come up with to fight eldritch gods is waving a crucifix and a starfish while shining a flashlight right in Their face?”
It was just… too ridiculous!!
G8273 shot Finnian a glance. From the neutral standpoint of a bystander, he issued a fair reminder:
“You find it comical only because Hastur right now stands on your side.”
“Imagine if he were your enemy. You’d be up against an unknown entity immune to material attacks, one that can’t be repelled by any occult rite. You’d have no recourse whatsoever, while he could snuff out your lives with a single thought.”
“From the perspective of your race, you ought to share the same despair and terror as Nolly Qianning.”
Finnian shrugged nonchalantly: “But he saved us.”
“A being like Hastur—if he truly meant us harm—would never have let me shoo him off to hang sheets on the line or sheltered a police detective. So if he suddenly turns unfriendly one day, there has to be a damn good reason.”
Finnian fixed G8273 with a look: “Like being manipulated by an enemy. In that case, we’d go after whoever’s pulling his strings, not gun down our savior.”
He stretched out the words: “Just in case you didn’t catch that, the ‘enemy’ I’m referring to—is you.”
G8273 met his gaze steadily: “Inferring the choices of non-humans through the lens of human emotions is a grave error.”
“Then we’ll talk when you’re proven wrong.” Finnian racked the machine gun in his hands and planted one foot on the second-floor railing. “I’m not the cool, rational sort. More often than not, my emotions override reason—a month ago, I might have tried to change that.”
“But Hastur and Ithaqua saved me that night.”
He muttered under his breath: “If God really exists, maybe that was His voice telling me not to let my hot blood cool.”
Downstairs, Hastur unconsciously perked up his ears to listen to his employee’s defense of him when the system chimed.
【Unlocked Character Story: Lamp God Parable No.4】
Hastur had no interest in checking it out—he just wanted to hear more of Finnian’s flattery—but this particular unlock didn’t appear as text. Instead, it manifested as a long panoramic silhouette poster.
The poster stretched five meters high, nearly brushing the ceiling of the double-height living room.
Hastur, who had just descended to the floor, saw a profusion of black-and-white corpse silhouettes.
Broken ones, ones hacked into chunks… vivid red blood was the sole splash of color amid the monochrome.
Hastur slowly tilted his head back. The corpses were piled into a mountain: mangled and incomplete at the base, growing progressively more intact toward the peak—like a deranged killer who gradually learned to cloak himself in the guise of calm composure.
Yet those corpses, that towering five-meter heap of them, showed ever more tortured body language the higher they climbed.
Hands belonging to men, to women, to children and elders… all stretched desperately upward, as if straining to claw their way out of hell.
Or perhaps… to drag the murderer perched atop them straight down into the abyss.
Hastur could scarcely make out Finnian’s silhouette—if not for the fact that his back rested against his prized motorcycle, fashioned into a throne.
Even in silhouette, Hastur could discern the grotesque mismatch of Finnian’s left side: bulky to the point of disproportion, etched with cold mechanical lines, half his head reduced to something inhuman. The man had undergone extreme cybernetic body modifications.
An eye-searing red—as lurid as the blood—glowed from the position of Finnian’s eyes, transforming the “human” enthroned on the corpse mound into a killing machine. He stared out beyond the frame through those crimson mechanical lenses.
The top of the poster bore a short passage of text:
【The Fourth Millennium.
The world has finally extinguished the lamp wick’s last trace of warmth.
The one who forces the Lamp God to fall shall themselves be forced to witness the Lamp God seated upon their own corpse as it falls.】
Any other player who saw this would probably clutch their chest in agony, cursing the game designers for another gut punch.
But Hastur’s first reaction was:
Oh, so this is the fate that awaited Finnian without me.
Yeah, when you put it that way, doesn’t that make the player a bona fide angel—aka God—aka savior?
Angel Hastur smugly scanned the poster once more, as if it weren’t a knife to the heart but a chronicle of his own triumphs.
In his satisfaction, he noticed two lines of vertical text along the poster’s edge, nearly blending into the decorative border:
【？？？】
【Second-Generation Leader of the Dismer Gang】
Hastur: “?”
What was this Dismer Gang? Judging by the poster, it looked like Finnian had suffered quite a bit to claim the role of “second-generation leader.”
Hastur made a mental note of this new intel, closed the poster, and tuned back in to the employees’ praise.
~~~
Unfortunately, while he’d been lost in thought, Finnian had already wrapped up his little pep talk. Now the man was yanking Nolly by the collar, roughly prying the Pontiff off Detective Dustin.
“Detective! Detective, save me!” Nolly’s face was flushed red from the chokehold, but his bloodshot eyes were still locked desperately on Detective Dustin as he stretched out his hands toward him. “You took an oath, right? Before joining the police station, you swore to protect the citizens—”
“My oath was to protect innocent citizens.”
Detective Dustin wasn’t one to go soft every time. He warily checked the interface at the back of Nolly’s neck, placed a signal jammer, then dragged over a chair and sat down in front of him.
“Answer my questions. I’ll make sure you end up at the Nuri District Police Station in half an hour, instead of having Hastur drain your brain marrow dry.”
The fox-borrowing-tiger’s-might Hastur: “…?”
His diet didn’t include brains… Would that even taste good? The Egg Yolk Jellyfish, which only ate company cafeteria food and never touched organ meats, rippled with a sudden wave of disgust.
Nolly seemed not to hear a word, probably too traumatized to process anything. He was in a full daze: “This isn’t real… It can’t be… Impossible!”
He started thrashing again under Finnian’s grip, this time fixing his stare on Hastur.
“You—you’re not—real! True Outer Gods fear the light!! They fear the Old Seal!! I created you! How could I not know?!”
