Hastur lashed out with a tendril, knocking the still-struggling Coran cold. He turned to Dustin. “All the guests evacuated?”
“—If the actors are just the ones Finnian photographed, then yes—all guests and performers got out. But…” Dustin sidled closer and zoomed in on a phone photo’s corner. “Take a look. That’s a kid’s costume.”
“No child that size was in Finnian’s shots—or among the actors I sent off.”
Hastur discerned nothing. The magnified patch showed only a spotless wooden chair back—courtesy of his Intelligence 3, no doubt.
But it proved Dustin wasn’t imagining things. There had been a child among the actors.
“Crack—”
Something in the deck beneath them snapped.
Before the ship could tilt past seventy degrees, Hastur scooped Coran into Dustin’s arms. “Get him out of here.” Dustin opened his mouth as if to protest; Hastur fixed him with a steely glare, each word deliberate. “I won’t break my word.”
Seawater surged into the cabin. Propelled by Hastur’s unyielding command and the worsening chaos, Dustin scrambled out the door.
Hastur smashed a porthole with a sharp “Crash!”, gripped the frame with uncanny dexterity, and slithered free.
“Splash…”
He plunged into the sea.
The water was frigid, laced with the stench of chemical effluent—a far cry from the Black Lake of his dreams.
The disorientation lasted a single second. Then he snapped his mental tentacles tight. Their churning wake rocketed him faster than any land sprint. Half a second later, he vaulted onto the deck, senses cranked to their limit.
“…Pathetic…”
“Ping! Ping!”
Gunfire and sneering voices drifted from a cabin nearby.
Hastur caught the acrid spike of Finnian’s rage hormones—overshadowed by triumph and mockery several times as potent.
Deeper lurked the musty calculus of advanced age: scrutiny and scheming. Fainter still, purer signals of curiosity and hurt.
The rawest emotions read clearest. He could almost hear that fragile hormonal whisper shape into a heartbeat:
‘Hurts… light, pretty!’
—The child.
With the ship a wreck, Hastur no longer held back. He unleashed a colossal invisible tentacle, pulverizing the deck and the three levels beneath in one cataclysmic sweep.
“Rumble…”
The collapsing bulkheads groaned low and deep.
Below, Hastur spied Finnian facing down a cadre of elderly humans, squared off against a pack of young thugs.
Panic rippled through them all at the overhead ruin’s plunge, sending most scrambling. Yet some held the line, shouting to steady the fray.
Out front of the right-wing rabble stood a thug with half his skull rebuilt as cybernetic implants.
He clutched a barely clad boy of about thirteen or fourteen.
The boy was strikingly handsome—thick lashes framing large gray-blue eyes, sharp features evoking a castle-bred princeling of mixed blood.
But no prince’s gaze hung so vacant; his was crossed, unfocused.
He didn’t even breathe through his nose. His mouth gaped in slack idiocy, drool spilling from a lopsided corner.
“He may have some degree of intellectual disability,” G8273 murmured. He had materialized silently behind Hastur, his whisper brushing the air by his ear.
Startled, Hastur whipped a tentacle backward to impale him.
G8273 parried effortlessly. “For the detective’s sake, you can’t kill this poor innocent gentleman.”
Ever the thick-skinned opportunist, G8273 used his borrowed body as a shield and nodded toward the battlefield.
“If the detective were here, he’d tell you: criminals don’t pick hostages who can’t maneuver.”
“But look at that kid. He can’t even stand on his own—walking’s out of the question.”
“Not just clumsy—he might blunder right out of the hostage play with some dim-witted stunt. So why would these thugs pick him as a human shield?”
—Because that child looked so much like Finnian.
Hastur instantly pieced together the logical chain and lowered his head to gaze at the crowd below.
The same deep brown hair, the same gray-blue eyes.
If this child wasn’t related to Finnian by blood, then someone had deliberately prepared this substitute out of hatred for him.
The child was suffering because of Finnian.
That explained why Finnian was burning with rage yet held back, restrained by the situation.
“Would you make a move for him?” G8273 asked softly again.
The ship was about to sink, yet these people, each driven by their own interests, continued to face off amid the downpour.
Thick smoke and raging flames climbed onto the deck. Hastur didn’t need to sniff to confirm that all of them had undergone heavy cybernetic body modifications.
So they weren’t afraid of explosions or sinking at all.
The propulsion components in their cybernetic bodies could turn them into underwater torpedoes, and their lungs, stored with backup oxygen, could sustain them back to shore.
In the struggles of the powerful, only the weak would be crushed by death.
But would any of the powerful ever turn back for the weak?
Would there be someone who possessed power strong enough to protect the weak, who had the soft heart to pay attention to them and shelter them—
Who also wielded the brutal strength to shatter any conspiracy, becoming an unstoppable blade and an indestructible shield?
From that group of decrepit humans teetering on the brink of death, Hastur caught the scent of hopes and desires like a flood. And so he halted his steps, holding back.
The next moment, a burst of blue-purple cannon fire bloomed from Finnian’s gun barrel. The thug clutching the boy collapsed without warning.
It all happened in the blink of an eye:
The enemies on the right roared and raised their gun stocks;
The flash shock grenade Finnian had tossed at their feet detonated abruptly.
In the blinding white light that filled the cabin and seared the eyes, the gun-wielding foes were swept away by the blast. Finnian, prepared for it, activated the thrusters in his legs and charged toward the center of the shockwave like an enraged brown lion.
A boy was flung into the air, caught steadily by Hastur’s mental tentacles.
The cabin below plunged fully into a baptism of gunfire and death.
【Mission: [The Dean with Employees in Mind’s Luck is Never Bad] (Completed!)】
【Mission Reward: 5 Freedom Points】
【Your employee [Finnian] used [Arm Strength Enhancement Component] to tear apart 1 enemy!】
【Your employee [Finnian] used [Corpse Limb Remnants] to smash 1 enemy’s skull!】
【Your employee [Finnian] successfully seized the enemy’s [Continuous Kinetic Cannon], killing 5 enemies!】
Bullet text and the ding-ding-dong-dong of upgrade notifications rang without end. Hastur stood at the edge of the collapse, then suddenly whipped his mental tentacles back to wrap around the limbs of the person behind him.
“?” G8273 didn’t resist, only looking puzzled. “Mind if I ask? What did I do to earn this treatment?”
Hastur didn’t turn his head. “You’re the only one who’s successfully hurt Finnian since he joined the institute.”
G8273 chuckled. “Sounds like I’m the ultimate villain who deserves to die here.”
“To me, yes.”
Hastur paused, then turned to face G8273. “I don’t like the way you look at me, G8273.”
“It’s like I’m some experimental subject, an observation target. I despise that gaze.”
The downpour seemed to have stopped, stars silently scattering across the black curtain of night.
G8273 once again found himself strangely, uncontrollably noticing how a droplet of rain still trailed over the eye socket of the pale mask drawing near him, sliding down the cheek, lingering on those colorless lips before dripping onto his jaw.
The raindrop was still hot, scorching like magma, evoking thoughts of annihilation.
“But I like the way you look at me when I get close to you.” Hastur slowly lowered his head, pressing the icy bone mask once more against G8273’s forehead.
It was a slightly condescending posture. From that angle, he watched as G8273’s light-pupiled eyes dilated slightly, then contracted sharply:
“Like gazing at the approach of annihilation, like beholding the one thing in the world truly worth watching.”
Their breaths tangled in the narrow space between them. G8273 was astonished that he could even sense the Outer God’s “breathing”—though it was probably just a fleeting illusion from the lingering mental pollution.
The Outer God’s mental tentacles brushed over the artery at G8273’s neck, like a dangerous, subtle hint—or perhaps simply a naked threat. “Where did you go when you left?”
G8273 stared into the void beneath the hood. After a moment, his gaze shifted to his right palm.
Hastur followed his line of sight and spotted a familiar golden liquor swaying in a small Belgian cup, exuding a intoxicating, madness-inducing aroma.
G8273 wiggled his fingers, shaking the cup of honey wine lightly. “You wouldn’t give me your phone number, so at least leave me a way to contact you.”
The green glow swiftly faded from the young gentleman’s eyes, along with that cup of golden honey wine.
Before vanishing completely, Hastur heard G8273’s voice, laced with polite laughter, carried away on the sea breeze:
“I’ve called a yacht for you… And, see you next time.”
In the distance came the roar of a speedboat’s engine. Finnian, lugging a new gun he’d seized from the fray, vaulted onto the deck. “…Oh no.”
He groaned at the white speck in the distance. “That’s Babylon Company’s Vivian Series… I sure as hell can’t afford her rental fee right now… Hope whoever called it prepaid the bill.”
~~~
Meanwhile, at the Phoenix District Sub-Police Station.
By the interrogation room door, Coran Domino smugly held up his hands, letting an officer unlock his cuffs while mocking Detective Dustin:
“Why the long face, Detective? You’re not a newborn babe in this world. Surely you know how it really works?”
Detective Dustin ground his teeth, glaring at Coran. Seconds later, he whipped his gaze away, fixing it fiercely on the branch deputy chief nearby:
“He’s the mastermind behind those missing persons cases! There are plenty of guests from the cruise ship who can testify, tons of rescued victims too—and you’re just going to let him walk tonight?!”
“He’ll run!”
“And start up again somewhere else!!”
“And who knows how many more people will become his merchandise for profit!!”
“Detective Dustin, watch your language and your tone with a superior.”
The deputy chief peered over his thick lenses. He wasn’t young anymore; even his speech carried the mumbled cadence of age.
“I find the chain of evidence you’ve provided insufficient. No physical proof. And witnesses? They can be bought off, can’t they?”
He sighed, his snow-white eyebrows drooping like he was truly disappointed:
“I’m starting to regret tipping you off early about the station’s promotion plans for you.”
“I think this accusation against Mr. Domino might stem from your eagerness to climb the ladder…”
Coran shook his now-empty wrist, sneering. “Too bad, thanks to this screw-up, it’ll be a long time before you get another shot at promot—”
Under the dim yellow lights of the interrogation room corridor, Coran suddenly clutched his neck as if choking, emitting a horrific wheezing gasp.
The nearby officer jumped in alarm, and even the deputy chief scrambled up from behind the interrogation desk—this old guy could still manage a leap, so his body must’ve been top-tier back in the day:
“Mr. Domino! What’s wrong? Asthma? Cybernetic malfunction?”
Dustin caught a familiar salty, fishy stench—like the synthesized, unpolluted seawater scent he’d smelled as a child in a museum.
His chest heaved twice. Realizing that even if something happened now, he couldn’t stop it, he clenched his fists and stepped back, biting down hard.
The next instant.
“Bang!”
Fetid swamp sludge burst through the skin, splattering everywhere.
Amid the horrified screams of the officer and deputy chief, Dustin stared stone-faced with rage at the floor.
The hypocrite’s human skin had torn away, revealing twitching bird and octopus embryos writhing in the muck.
Dustin drew a silent deep breath and raised his M500.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!”
The embryos in the sludge stopped moving. The deputy chief’s legs buckled; he slumped against the corridor wall, panting in shock. He glanced at the mess that was Coran Domino on the floor, then at Dustin, who had holstered his gun with an impassive face.
With the threat of death receding, his first thought wasn’t “What the hell is that monster?! How do we handle this?” but:
Coran Domino was dead.
His source of profit was gone. Now what?
Dustin could barely suppress his disgust as he watched the deputy chief straighten up, adjust his glasses, and flash him a friendly smile once more:
“How horrifying. This must be a sign from God, a warning that this man was a black sheep of evil!”
“Detective Dustin, I think I owe you an apology. It looks like you were right—we need to investigate this crime thoroughly right away…”
“Nice work! Dustin, I always knew you were the brightest star in our branch!”
Dustin’s teeth ground with a creak.
He stared at his superior, realizing more acutely than ever that humans could be even more repulsive than monsters.
They were like spiders and vultures, perched atop the precinct house, casting shame upon the badge on its roof—the emblem of integrity and glory.
~~~
Thousands of miles away.
Hastur had just confirmed with the speedboat’s pilot that the bill had already been prepaid when the System chimed.
【Character Task Triggered: [I Once Swore to the Medal]】
【The [Detective Dustin] under your protection has finally lost all faith in his superiors tonight.
He sees those greedy wretches as the festering rot encrusting the precinct, as cancerous cells leeching the life from Phoenix District.
He wants to carve away the rot, excise the diseased tumor. He wants to restore the luster to that badge of integrity and glory, for he once swore an oath to the medal.】
【Help Detective Dustin fulfill his career dream!】
Hastur fell silent for a few seconds, then tugged back the server who had inquired about additional services—only to be turned down.
The server was professionally trained, maintaining his beaming smile even as he was pulled back. “What can I get for you, sir?”
Hastur adapted to local customs, following human etiquette. “Uncork a bottle of champagne.”
