Chapter 10

This night was destined to be anything but peaceful.

If anyone had set up a bank of cameras high above Phoenix District at that moment, they would have seen streams of vehicles pouring in from every direction, all converging on the abandoned hydroelectric station in the northern sector.

Unfortunately, no one was doing anything of the sort.

The only one watching was Hastur, who sat in the jeep that Finnian had “borrowed.” He had been peppering the man with endless questions—”Are you a genie?” “Do you have any djinn blood?” “Is it possible you do, but you just don’t know it?”—until a thoroughly exasperated Finnian finally snapped, “Can you shut up already?”

With no choice but to find another way to kill time, Hastur decided to experiment and see exactly what his thirty points in Mental differed from before.

He fiddled around fruitlessly for quite a while. Then, without warning, his vision blurred and shot upward at high speed.

Phoenix District shrank and expanded in his view before finally stabilizing. When it did, Hastur realized he was now “watching” Detective Dustin speeding along in his car.

It was a bizarre new experience.

Hastur knew full well that his body was still seated inside the jeep, yet his field of vision was completely detached from it.

He swiveled his perspective, feeling as if he were riding shotgun right next to Detective Dustin. He could clearly make out the detective’s clenched jaw and hunched shoulders, his whole body straining along with the accelerator.

Beep—

The blaring horn of a massive truck slammed toward them like a solid wall. Two black sedans closed in on Detective Dustin from either side, trying to force him to a stop.

“Damn it!” Detective Dustin’s palm smashed against the steering wheel. With a brutal yank, he swung the car around, smashing through the guardrail on one side of the road and barreling past the two vehicles boxing him in. “I just want to ‘talk’ to your boss!”

His roar drifted out through the open window, followed by a merciless hail of bullets.

Hastur: “—??”

Was investigative work always this intense?

“…Leader, Dean!” Finnian’s irritated voice cut into his ears. “What the hell are you doing? Your yellow robe’s about to rip the trunk apart!”

Hastur could hardly explain that he was “immersed in a holographic game, playing VR from the sidelines.”

Detective Dustin was driving like a pendulum on a carnival ride, and the disconnect between his vision and body made Hastur feel like he was about to get flung right out of the car. Instinctively, the yellow robe spread out into fungal threads that rooted into the seat behind him, anchoring him in place.

“I’m checking in on the detective’s situation,” Hastur explained, picking his words carefully. “Looks like he’s going solo to interview them—forcing a whole convoy to stop on his own.”

Finnian fell silent for a moment. “…Is that detective always this reckless?”

More importantly: “Shouldn’t we go help him out?”

Amid the disorientation, Hastur pulled his vision back. With that kind of reckless drive, Detective Dustin would succeed at anything.

“No need. He can’t die without my permission. But we can pick up the pace—if we wrap up early, we can swing by and lend a hand.”

“?” Finnian shot a quick glance at Hastur through the rearview mirror, clearly latching onto that “he can’t die without my permission” line. But he soon looked away. “We’re here—the Zane Gang’s first outpost.”

Finnian slammed on the brakes. The tires screeched sharply against the pavement.

Lights flared to life inside the outpost like startled birds taking flight. The optical components of cybernetic bodies and external weapons glowed faintly in the darkness, like the eyes of beasts lurking in the night.

Whoosh—

The first bullet whistled out from the outpost, grazing past Finnian’s face as he tilted his head just slightly, vanishing into the shadows.

In the next instant, Finnian pushed his reinforced cybernetic body to its limits. He surged into the outpost at a speed too fast for the naked eye to track!

Hastur quickly retracted the yellow robe’s fungal threads from the trunk. He pushed open the door to jump in and help when he noticed subtitles popping up nonstop in the lower left corner of his vision:

【Your employee [Finnian] used [Dagger] to kill 3 enemies!】

【Your employee [Finnian] killed 1 enemy barehanded!】

【Your employee [Finnian] seized the enemy’s [Heavy Electromagnetic Railgun] and killed 5 enemies!】

【Congratulations! You have leveled up! Gained 1 Freedom Point.】

【Your…】

“…” Hastur gradually slowed his approach to the battlefield.

A flurry of thoughts raced through his mind: “Finnian doesn’t seem to need any help,” “When my employee kills enemies, I level up too?” and “Praise Finnian!”

A godsend for generating Freedom Points!

He promptly invested that 1 Freedom Point into Mental and instinctively switched to “leeching mode”—letting his minion grind mobs while he spectated from afar. He watched as Finnian turned into a human meat grinder, conquering the battlefield with raw violence and hand-to-hand combat skills.

Subtitles continued to trickle in, awarding stray Freedom Points.

By the time Finnian returned from the now-silent battlefield, dragging a heavy machine gun in one hand and covered head to toe in blood, Hastur had racked up a total of 3 Freedom Points—three times his current Strength score.

What a concept!

The way Hastur now looked at Finnian was like a human eyeing an automatic money printer: “I’m never gonna bother learning to cook properly.”

“?” Finnian tossed a few leather wallets to Hastur, convinced he’d misheard. “You’re definitely gonna learn to cook properly? You spent half the fight just spectating, and that’s what you came up with?”

Finnian shook his head in disbelief at the alien logic of non-humans and climbed back into the driver’s seat, dumping the heavy machine gun onto the passenger side.

“Get in. Next stop, their main base. We’ll leave the bodies here until cleanup’s done, then load ’em into a truck and haul them to the police station for the bounty.”

You generate the points, so you call the shots. Without objection, Hastur floated back into the car and began counting the cash out of boredom.

Five wallets: a total of 40,000 in cash and three bank cards.

He probably couldn’t touch the money in the cards, but the cash reward was nothing to sneeze at. And best of all, he hadn’t even lifted a finger!

Hastur glanced at his growing construction funds, his heart swelling with a sudden benevolence toward the entire world.

A voice echoed in his mind: We should gather more followers, Hastur.

Once again, it framed the game mechanics through a mystical lens: Followers will sustain us. More followers, more sustenance.

For once, Hastur found himself swayed. He even pulled up the Hidden Character Profile on impulse.

No idea if it was low production values or what, but the whole profile only showed four shadowy silhouettes. One was Finnian; the other three were vaguely familiar outlines.

The login screen from when you created your New Game, Hastur, the inner voice reminded him. Those four characters with special intros—remember who they were?

As if Hastur remembered. He’d just been mashing skip back then. Who knew he’d one day care about the romanceable roster?

Even worse: Ever since he’d poked around that empty house on Vanilla Street, the game’s login PV had swapped out for a shot of the house’s furnishings. No way to rewatch it now, even if he wanted.

“…” Hastur and his inner voice lapsed into mutual silence.

Humans would pay the price for their arrogance and impatience. Non-humans were no different.

Hastur reflected deeply on his own behavior. The moment he thought, “I need to make more point-generating… er, companions,” his vision blurred once more.

It yanked him back to Detective Dustin’s side.

The car chase seemed to have wrapped up. Detective Dustin leaped out of his patrol car and charged toward the black convoy ahead. “Wait! Hold on a second, Mr. Neil.”

Pushing past the towering bodyguards in suits blocking his path, Hastur spotted a cluster of men in suits surrounding an elderly man as he stepped down from a vintage Bentley at the convoy’s center.

The old man sported a neatly trimmed mustache and leaned on a cane. His white hair was slicked back with pomade into a stiff, conservative style—a dead giveaway for an old-school hardliner.

With support from his subordinates, he steadied himself. His eagle-like gaze sliced toward Detective Dustin. “Do you have a death wish, Detective?”

Detective Dustin didn’t flinch. “Of course not. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have dodged all those bullets while flooring it in a patrol car.”

“You do have impressive driving skills,” the old man conceded objectively, before his expression hardened. “But that’s no excuse for buzzing around my convoy like a fly that won’t quit.”

“There’s nothing a cop like you has to say that I’d want to hear. Consider yourself lucky you ran into the current me—the one working on restraint and self-cultivation. Ten years ago, you’d already be a charred corpse courtesy of a bomb.”

“But I’m not charred right now. Thank the goddess of luck for that.”

Detective Dustin started worming his way through the bodyguards’ blockade, utterly unintimidated.

Or perhaps he’d steeled himself for death the moment he kicked off that insane chase, letting him pursue the truth single-mindedly, without a care in the world.

“I’m not here for a business seminar. I just want to ask about the Cradle Cult. From what I hear, you’re a member of the Satha-Hegla Cult?”

The old man paused for a beat but held his ground with rigid defiance. He stopped talking to Detective Dustin altogether, merely nodding slightly to the bodyguards beside him—signaling them to deal with the persistent pest.

—It was right then that a jeep roared into Hastur’s view, screeching to a halt beside Detective Dustin.

Hastur: “……?”

This jeep looked familiar. The people inside it…

Hastur suddenly caught sight of himself once again clutching the back seat with muddy yellow mycelium.

His vision snapped back like a taut rubber band suddenly released.

Hastur was surprised by the unexpected coincidence. “How did you end up at the Zane Gang’s outpost, Detective?”

Finnian felt a steady calm, the kind that came from having been through too much for anything to surprise him anymore. He pushed open the door and stepped out of the jeep.

“That’s Old Neil, one of the elders of the Nirvana Gang. He’s probably here to talk cooperation with the Zane Gang. The detective must want to interview him, so he followed us all the way here.”

This surprise wasn’t half bad. No matter what, it was better for their own people to stick together than to scatter and fend for themselves.

Everyone present turned their heads at the sudden intrusion of the jeep.

Dustin hadn’t seen Finnian before, so his reaction remained fairly calm. Old Neil and the Zane Gang members who had come out from the outpost to greet them all wore stunned expressions almost in unison.

The yellow-haired man with freckles who had come out to meet them even let out a scream like he’d seen a ghost. “Finnian!? You’re not dead!?”

Finnian hefted the heavy electromagnetic railgun he’d looted, flashing a lazy smile at the yellow-hair. With the half-dried blood staining his body, he looked just like a vengeful ghost come calling in the dead of night.

“No, I’m dead. You killed the Finnian who belonged to the Zane Gang with your own hands and dumped his body in the Desert Wasteland. Forgot already, Gavin?”

“…” Old Neil stood there propped on his cane, his breathing seeming to freeze solid.

In the next moment, he stepped back with the practiced savvy of a veteran who knew the rules. He retreated all the way to the rear of the convoy, leaving this battlefield of Zane Gang infighting for them to sort out themselves.

And in the instant he withdrew, cannon fire roared from Finnian’s barrel!

The bottom left corner began spamming messages:

【Your employee [Finnian] used [Heavy Electromagnetic Railgun] to kill 5 enemies!】

【Your employee [Finnian] used [Dagger] to kill 2 enemies!】

【Your employee [Finnian] successfully looted the enemy’s [Linked Kinetic Machine Gun], killing 5 enemies!】

【Congratulations on successfully leveling up…】

Hastur stayed comfortably in the jeep, savoring the joys of having a proxy player, and gave thanks to his past self from a few days ago for not ignoring Mr. Invisible Clue.

He pulled up the status panel and clicked freedom points like a dolphin waiting for its trainer to toss treats—one point arrived, he clicked; another came, he clicked…

【[Gavin] dealt 20 damage to your employee [Finnian]!】

【Your employee [Finnian]’s cybernetic body is damaged. Left arm cybernetic body in failure state.】

【[Gebir] dealt 15 damage to your employee [Finnian]!】

【Your employee [Finnian]’s cybernetic body is damaged. Right leg cybernetic body in failure state.】

“?!” Hastur slammed the status panel shut. His mental tentacles surged out without a second’s hesitation.

His point production… no, his employee!

It happened almost in an instant.

Everyone on site—including Detective Dustin, who was trying to use the chaos to sidle up to Old Neil, and Old Neil himself, who had grown impatient with his bodyguard’s scolding and taken matters into his own hands—felt an invisible tide of viscous, salty, fishy water surging toward them. In the blink of an eye, it engulfed them all.

They were like bits of plankton plunged into the ocean depths, pinned motionless by irresistible pressure and turned into specimens. The seawater squeezed them mercilessly.

With a swing of his massive mental tentacles, Hastur cleared the enemies around Finnian. The tentacles wrapped around one of them with flexible brutality, tightening with crushing force.

“Pa!”

The implanted metal cybernetic body was wrenched free by the man’s twisted flesh. Precisely meshing components and copper wires snapped, sparking a chain of small explosions.

Hastur released the enemy, now missing everything below the chest, and swung his tentacle toward the next target.

—A pair of icy mechanical palms suddenly clamped down on his mental tentacle.

The enemy, who should have been stone dead, jerked spasmodically. It lifted its head bit by bit, revealing eyes glowing with mechanical green light. Hands still embedded with metal parts gripped Hastur’s supposedly intangible mental tentacle tight.

“…” Still seated in the car, Hastur jerked his head up. At the same moment, a polite knock sounded on the door beside him.

He whipped around and locked eyes with a second pair—glowing the same eerie green, rotating with circular vector icons like HUD displays. Eyes that belonged to no human.