The surroundings had fallen silent at some point, leaving only gunsmoke and flames dancing quietly across the battlefield.
Hastur locked eyes with that pair of eyes through the Jeep’s tea-colored glass. A few seconds later, the car window slid down on its own, without anyone touching it.
The owner of those eyes—or rather, the entity manipulating that shell of a body—bent down in a languid posture, draping one arm over the window sill. “I thought we wouldn’t run into each other this soon.”
It was worth emphasizing that no matter how human the two sides appeared, or how flirtatiously suggestive the scene might seem, at their core, both were inhuman entities without the capacity for emotions.
Strip away the anthropomorphic shells, and this was nothing more than one side brazenly trespassing into the territory of the other without permission.
The intruder wasn’t just bending at the waist; the muscles in his waist, abdomen, and shoulders were taut, coiled like a spring, ready to unleash an attack at any moment. His gaze scanned the territory’s master without a shred of courtesy, looking down from on high.
His forearm and forehead poked an inch into the window, like a beast probing its claws and snout into a lair before striking.
No wonder, then, that Hastur launched a direct attack.
Boom!
The Jeep, which had been barely holding together, was finally engulfed in a blaze of explosive fire.
Hastur heard the system’s grim alert chime, with crimson text flashing repeatedly before his eyes: “HP depleted. You are dead!”
But in reality, he continued weaving through the sea of flames and smoke. The crackling tongues of fire licked at his yellow robe, seeming deadly but ultimately as feeble as the hands of a terminally ill patient. In the blink of an eye, the unscathed yellow robe left them far behind.
How could mere mortal flames kill an ancient deity?
Invisible mental tentacles coiled across the ground, hoisting Hastur high into the air.
His yellow robe transformed into a dense weave of fungal threads, surging wildly toward the swift, enemy-controlled body charging at him.
“I—fuck!” Detective Dustin, hunkered rigidly behind a black sedan, couldn’t hold back a curse.
The chaos unfolding before him was beyond his comprehension. “Who’s fighting who right now?”
Honestly speaking, just minutes ago, everything had been crystal clear.
Finnian had stormed the outpost alone to settle a score with the Zane Gang. Old Neil and his men had hung back, watching from the sidelines to stay out of trouble.
But in the blink of an eye, the situation flipped.
The suited goons Old Neil had brought suddenly turned on him, dragging him away from the abandoned power station.
Amid his desperate struggle, Finnian switched targets to the black-suited bodyguards, trying to keep Old Neil from escaping.
As for the Zane Gang, who had been closing in on Finnian?
The thugs didn’t know what had gotten into them. The moment Finnian turned his fire on the bodyguards, they all stopped dead, then pivoted in unison, unleashing a hail of bullets toward something in the sky above the hydroelectric station.
It was a mess like a botched play, yet amid the chaos lurked an undeniable order.
On the battlefield, everyone except Finnian had rigid expressions, their eyes glowing with an eerie green light.
The members of different factions had their assigned roles. Watching any single group with a unified goal, their movements were eerily synchronized, far too precise for individual coordination—like puppets under a single controlling force.
Detective Dustin couldn’t fathom how a simple visit had dragged him into this madness, or why the abandoned hydroelectric station was drawing such a motley crew tonight.
But he hadn’t forgotten his objective: interview Old Neil.
So when Finnian pinned down the black-suited bodyguards with suppressing fire, drawing their attention back to him, Dustin seized the moment. He darted forward and grabbed the still-heaving Old Neil. “Come with me!”
“—?!” Old Neil was still struggling to catch his breath. His eyes widened, staring into Dustin’s blue ones.
After being hauled dozens of meters away, the old man finally managed a wheezing question. “How come you aren’t controlled?!”
Dustin blinked. “Huh?” The way Old Neil phrased it made it sound like he knew something.
Still dragging Old Neil toward safety away from the battlefield, Detective Dustin couldn’t resist asking, “Do you know what’s going on here?”
Old Neil hesitated.
It was clear the old man had zero desire to chat with a cop.
But with all his own men having turned traitor, Dustin was his only lifeline right now. He had no choice.
“I’ve seen something like this once before, twenty-three years ago. You must’ve learned about it in the police academy—AF48, the Ghost War? Ring a bell?”
Detective Dustin nodded.
“Yeah, it was some underground lab’s AI going rogue. It sparked independent will in AIs across the board, triggering a wave of explosive attacks on human society.”
“That led to the Netinfo Department getting completely overhauled and restructured into what it is now… this quasi-independent agency that oversees hackers and AI tech, barely answerable to the government.”
Dustin could tell Old Neil had no love for the Netinfo Department’s autonomy.
The old man cracked a brief, wry smile. No matter the times, hearing the police and Netinfo Department trash-talk each other always brought a chuckle.
“Spot on. I lived through that whole mess back then. The people controlled by AI had the same green-eyed glow as the ones behind us.”
“So after the chaos, I had surgery to remove my brain core implant. Haven’t let them put one back in since.”
That was why he’d stayed clear-headed, and why he was stunned to see Detective Dustin moving freely.
“All recruits get a standard brain core implant when they join the force. You don’t have one?”
“I…” Detective Dustin faltered, murmuring in confusion, “I do have one… I don’t know why I’m not controlled.”
Their exchange was just a minor sideshow at the battlefield’s edge.
At the center, Hastur seethed with unprecedented fury.
【Ahh█▄ymg’ l’ ah ▂▁█■▃！】
When Hastur stopped forcing his voice into human speech, some fragments defied notation in any mortal tongue.
Here on this battlefield, probably only the voice in his own mind understood his rage.
How dare you get distracted by other matters when I’m attacking you?!
Having the Zane Gang’s members attack him wouldn’t enrage Hastur; it was just one way for an enemy to strike.
But trying to use the black-suited bodyguards to abduct Old Neil?
That arrogance and disdain ignited Hastur completely, boiling away his last shreds of reason like searing magma.
His kind were meant to unleash their full power only in utter chaos.
Thump…
Reality softened, turning into a quivering drumhead.
A muffled drumbeat echoed as mental tentacles lashed at the fabric of the world.
G8273, leveraging his cybernetic body’s implants, leaped onto the station’s roof. Before he could steady himself, the tiles beneath his feet turned mushy, like a sagging, elastic-less sheet of human skin.
Snapping out of a brief system lag akin to bewilderment, he immediately detonated his leg thrusters for a boost out of the depression.
As the explosion hurled him into the air, a deep drum thrummed in his ears.
Thump…
Impossible.
G8273 had already maxed out his processing power, juggling two objectives. Somehow, he carved out a third logic thread.
Cthulhu-system eldritch gods attacked via mental pollution. As a code-based lifeform, he had no “mind” to corrupt—how could he hear the drum only those with warped spirits perceived?
Priorities shifted in an instant.
All compute power devoted to “extract Old Neil” was yanked and redirected without reserve to a new goal.
Kill the eldritch god.
Reality shuddered.
Such tremors had once been imperceptible to human eyes, whether from mental pollution or raw computation.
But as both escalated to an insurmountable peak, humanity’s latent sixth sense screamed in warning.
Behind the convoy.
One moment, Detective Dustin was exclaiming in shock, “What the hell? The black-suited bodyguards and Zane Gang just all dropped!”; the next, his gaze shifted skyward.
“Fuck… Am I hacked via brain core, or hallucinating? Why do I see a mess of tentacles—or roots?—writhing up there, with green digits floating all around?!”
He wasn’t the only one seeing it.
As the no-holds-barred duel hit its fever pitch, primal urges for survival and evolution gripped the two combatants like invisible hands, shoving them past their bottlenecks into a new phase.
Hastur’s mental pollution forcibly infiltrated the cold, lifeless code. Mental tentacles coiled around characters that shouldn’t have physical form.
G8273’s code shattered its hardware limits, seizing control and rewriting reality itself.
Masses of green characters floated in the air, forming anchor-like chains that bound the otherwise intangible mental tentacles and forcibly rewrote them.
Both combatants sensed the enemy exerting strange influences upon them.
For example, G8273 had originally been nestled in the brain core of some Zane Gang thug, lacking any physical form. Yet in this moment, he felt the bizarre sensation of flesh warping grotesquely.
Hastur, composed of formless, unanalyzable non-matter, suddenly gained a physical entity visible and comprehensible to the human eye under the rewriting code.
Behind the convoy, Old Neil stared up at the scene in the sky, his mind shaken to its core, his expression one of near-worshipful daze. “Yellow Robe…”
The entity towering over the night sky was draped in a muddy yellow robe that surged like ocean waves.
Beneath the yellow robe, deep brown tentacles resembling the roots of ancient trees sprouted profusely, lashing out like the arms of deep-sea creatures.
Those “arms” moved at no great speed—slow, even.
Yet the air of reality churned like seawater in their wake, stirred into swirling vortices that engulfed the greenish chains binding them.
“It’s real… Hastur… the King in Yellow…”
Old Neil murmured in intoxication, his eyes locked on the night sky brimming with an excitement and fervor that bordered on mania, a worshipful faith that was anything but normal. “Hastur really exists! Everything Satha-Hegla preached is true!!”
Dustin, nearly scared out of his wits by the monster looming overhead, shot Old Neil a shocked sideways glance. It took him a few seconds to snap back to reality.
Oh, he couldn’t exactly call Old Neil abnormal. The man had been a Cradle Cult initiate from the start, a true believer. Seeing his god descend in the flesh? Of course he’d be thrilled. This reaction just proved Old Neil wasn’t all talk.
These snarky thoughts raced through Dustin’s mind as he firmly pressed down on Old Neil’s head, which the man had craned back too far. “Watch for stray bullets!”
Bang-bang-bang-bang!
Kinetic rounds punched through the car door, leaving a dotted line of whistling holes.
