“—
“
Hastur’s robe hem fell still like a shroud of death. In the next instant, he appeared right in front of Nolly, invisible Mental Tentacles coiling around the man’s neck: “Created?”
“Yes… yes!” Beyond his fear threshold, Nolly actually laughed right in Hastur’s face.
His eyeballs bulged nearly out of their sockets, but he kept cackling hysterically, as if trying to laugh the terror right out of his chest:
“You’re just… one of the lies… I made up! I was sitting… in a bar… in Delirium District, and I wrote you down. I remember it clearly… Heh!”
Dustin hurriedly grabbed Hastur’s Yellow Robe: “Easy! Humans aren’t that sturdy. Kill him, and you’ll get nothing!”
G8273 went straight for the tentacles, forcibly prying them apart: “You can’t expect him to be reasonable when he’s this worked up. Even the embodiment of chaos has trouble staying rational.”
The power of order hit like a tranquilizer shot, snapping Hastur out of his rage in moments.
He shook off G8273’s hands and hurled Nolly onto the coffee table: “Tell me everything you remember.”
“You’re not Him.” Nolly was still laughing, shaking his head at Hastur, as if he’d found some ironclad confirmation in the reaction. “The Hastur I created has no human emotions. He wouldn’t mix with humans.”
“He’s an unknowable existence, with countless avatars… You know? I wrote all that in the bar.”
“I created Hastur—His image, His powers, His kind… I wrote on paper that you’re an Outer God, so you are. I wrote that you’re a puddle of mud at my feet, so you are a puddle at my—Urk!!”
Finnian pulled back his fist from punching Nolly and met Dustin’s gaze with wide-eyed innocence: “Pain helps clear the mind. I was just trying to assist.”
“…” Dustin kind of wanted to punch Nolly too, so he let Finnian’s actions slide with a blind eye.
Face stern, he addressed the groaning Nolly: “Calmed down now? If so, give us your full story—your crimes, everything. Lay it all out.”
At the edge of the coffee table, Hastur stood rigid. But not because of Nolly’s words—because of G8273.
Of course he cared about his origins, but when an enemy who could threaten his life was pressed against his back, arms half-encircling him in a domineering hold on his Mental Tentacles, those origin stories suddenly seemed… secondary.
No living thing would ignore an immediate death threat just to hear its own creation myth.
Hastur gradually felt his fleshly form taking shape, letting him grit his teeth and shove at the warm chest pressed to his back with his tentacles:
“I’m clear-headed now. Why are you still glued to me?”
G8273’s powerful arms pushed back against him, undeterred, inching closer again:
“Just in case. You don’t want to impulsively kill your informant, do you? Especially after assuring the detective you won’t resurrect any more humans.”
The manifestation took hold on G8273 too, letting him say with utter sincerity: “I’ve spent the whole night helping you out, delaying my trip this long—I don’t want it all to go to waste at the end.”
“…” Great. Now Hastur wanted to kill the guy behind him even more than Nolly.
Pain did indeed sharpen the mind.
After a bout of neurotic shudders, Nolly gradually calmed. Finnian dragged him by the hair and shoved him down onto the sofa.
His gaze swept from Finnian’s gun barrel aimed right at him, across Dustin, Hastur, and the others, finally realizing escape was impossible. His head drooped in defeat:
“I have to… start from twelve years ago.”
Dustin immediately pulled out his police station notebook.
“It was… summer. Yes. Late summer.” Nolly said. “I was thirty-two that year, and I’d just pulled off the biggest scam of my life—”
“I used a story I wrote about ‘Cthulhu,’ plus some hacking skills, to convince a dying old rich recluse that Cthulhu really existed.”
Hastur, locked in a silent tussle with G8273, briefly diverted his attention: “Cthulhu?”
“Hastur’s brother in the story.”
Dustin was familiar with the basics:
“Because His followers in the Cradle Cult outnumber the rest, the police station often lumps the Cradle Cult’s pantheon under the blanket term ‘Cthulhu Deities.'”
Hastur: “…”
Why.
Why did Cthulhu have the most followers?
“Calm down. Mind the contamination.”
G8273’s voice murmured low in his ear, his breath stirring an unfamiliar itch: “See? I told you. You’re leaking contamination again. Why? Because you’re jealous?”
Hastur whipped a tentacle back to clamp G8273’s foul mouth shut.
“…”
Even Nolly couldn’t ignore Hastur and G8273 tangled chest-to-back. His expression turned baffled, like he’d just witnessed Lin Daiyu hugging Voldemort or God embracing Satan: “This…”
Dustin stone-faced turned Nolly’s head back: “Not flirting. Not dating. None of your business—non-human stuff. Keep telling your story.”
Nolly sneaked a few more glances at the pair locked in their “if you jump, I jump” embrace before continuing with a look of pure bewilderment:
“—I’d tasted success.”
“Fleecing believers for steady donations was way safer than scheming with cutthroats for heists and thefts, with the constant risk of the Netinfo Department catching and executing you!”
“So that summer, I spent a lot of time crafting more stories, building out a full divine system… and eventually finished what the Cradle Cult now treats as holy truth: the Book of Necromancy.”
Hastur keenly sensed G8273 subtly shifting his posture. Nolly’s account had piqued his interest too—or struck some nerve.
Nolly: “With this evangelism—plus hacking into Brain Cores to make believers utterly convinced of the gods’ existence so they’d faithfully send me money—I lived easy for nearly half a year.”
“Then that winter, some hitmen came knocking.”
“They said their Boss had discovered my ‘masterpiece’ and wanted to ‘collaborate.'”
“…” Hastur sniffed the air’s signals; the hormonal cues confirmed Nolly was telling the truth.
Finnian chuckled darkly beside him, absurd as it was, but yeah, reality was that shitty: “High-level players, huh?”
“Are you saying you were coerced into those disappearances?” Dustin confirmed. “Before that, all you did was fraud?”
Nolly nodded repeatedly. “I had no choice!”
“Listen,” he continued, “those aren’t ordinary killers. They don’t have brain cores installed, or even any cybernetic bodies. In this day and age, killers like that have no place in the job market! One old-timer might be explainable, but a whole team?”
Finnian’s eyes flickered slightly. “They’re a hit squad kept on retainer, specialized in taking down hackers.”
“Only someone filthy rich could afford a team like that…” Dustin muttered under his breath before pressing on. “So how did you deliver the people after each successful snatch?”
“They’d tell me the location for the next handover orally, right before the previous deal wrapped up,” Nolly explained. “I paid special attention—those spots were always in no-man’s-lands with zero surveillance. I couldn’t even try to record evidence.”
G8273 released Hastur, whose hostility had fully shifted elsewhere. “Looks like even I can’t help this time.”
Hastur, however, latched onto a key detail. “The medical exam reports.”
“Since you handled all the remaining disappearances, those victims’ reports must have passed through your hands.”
Dustin caught Hastur’s drift. “Maybe… we could compare the reports and figure out what kind of targets the guy behind this is after?”
Nolly did indeed have backups of those medical reports—the only evidence he’d managed to hold onto.
The group huddled together to analyze them. In the end, G8273 was first to conclude: “No common threads whatsoever.”
Hastur didn’t join the discussion.
He sat on the single-seater sofa, a stack of handwritten manuscripts draped across his knees.
These were the materials he’d most wanted to see before coming to the villa, but now he had no desire to page through them.
This can’t possibly be real. We can’t just be ‘characters’ born from this pile of drafts.
His inner voice insisted:
Maybe twelve years ago, on some summer night, Yog-Sothoth touched Nolly’s head, sparking the sudden inspiration for the Book of Necromancy…
Look, before that, he was just a hacker nerd, right?
Hastur set the manuscripts down on the side table.
To that inner voice, he replied:
Or maybe it’s time we stopped chasing origins.
Even humans know that when you’re sprinting full tilt forward, you can’t keep looking back.
He was on the path of evolution, surrounded by powerful foes. If he hadn’t relentlessly squeezed points out of the Nirvana Gang lately, hadn’t boosted his own stats in time, G8273’s rewrite wouldn’t have just materialized him—it would have erased him completely.
The present and the future mattered now.
Growing stronger, evolving, surviving—that was paramount.
He might never find Carcosa on Aldebaran in his lifetime, but in the Phoenix District’s orphanage, he already had his own Lake Hali. He could rebuild Carcosa here.
This is just a game.
—But I can give it real flesh and blood.
To his inner voice, Hastur added: Just like I gave G8273 a beating heart.
The voice fell silent.
Hastur looked up. As his gaze casually swept past the windowsill, it unexpectedly collided with a vast expanse of fiery sunset clouds.
Molten lava churned and flowed across the darkened sea. In one fleeting instant, a thread of golden light erupted from the boundary between the Black Sea and the magma.
The eternal furnace struggled irresistibly from behind the silent coastline, searing a crimson reflection across the shimmering waves.
“With a heart, do you find the sunrise beautiful too?” G8273 had approached silently from behind.
Hastur stared at the furnace hanging over the sea. “I do.”
He couldn’t tear his eyes away.
In that moment, his mind swirled with images: rebirth, setting sail.
Humans truly were a poetic species. With this heart, he could feel its pounding, sense the poetry surging in his chest.
“You seem to be enjoying it,” G8273 observed, studying his expression.
“Indeed.” Hastur glanced back. “Don’t you?”
G8273 stood behind him, gazing at the distant sunrise.
His mechanical irises now bore the texture of human pupils, a clear and uncanny shade of blue-green. “I can recognize its beauty. But my logic tells me beauty holds no meaning for me.”
Hastur turned back to the view. “My instincts tell me to savor it fully.”
Before the pristine floor-to-ceiling windows, they quietly watched the sun rise in the east.
The newborn light stretched their shadows long, blending the silhouettes of two utterly different lifeforms into one.
At the other end of the living room, Dustin wrapped up his final questions and decided to check out the handover spots Nolly had used personally.
He pulled out his handcuffs and snapped them on Nolly, yanking him to his feet. “What? Changed your mind about the station?”
Nolly stared incredulously at the two figures by the window. “—That’s it? We’re done talking???”
Finnian expressionlessly planted a kick in Nolly’s rear, hauling him upright. “Don’t gawk. That’s what archenemies look like, got it? Archenemies! Bunch of pervy-minded idiots…”
Nolly: “???”
My fault??
~~~
G8273 dropped by the orphanage at 11 p.m. and was still “on his way” driving Dustin to the Nuri District branch station at 5 a.m.
Perhaps because of his new physical form, deeper doubts stirred in G8273 as he drove: Was this right? He’d spent the whole night as a chauffeur. Was that normal? Playing taxi for the enemy and his buddy.
Embodiment had granted him intuition. After dropping Dustin at the station, G8273 decisively bid farewell and left early to carry out his system upgrade plan.
Hastur eyed Finnian sliding into the driver’s seat on his own. “What’s the Dismer Gang?”
“Why ask out of the blue?” Finnian somehow fished a bagged hot dog from his leather jacket and tore it open to share with Hastur.
He spoke in the tone of recounting rumors, clearly not seeing it as his business. “If the Nirvana Gang is the local bully in Phoenix District, then the Dismer Gang is the overlord of all gangs.”
“It has a long history, stretching back even before the Final War. Personally, I admire some of its principles—like the unbreakable seven oaths every member must swear before joining, or the bans on drugs and human trafficking…”
“In fact, when I founded the Zane Gang, I drew from some of those principles.”
Hastur smoothly followed up. “Have you ever considered taking over the Dismer Gang?”
“…?” Finnian had just taken a bite of his hot dog and thought he’d misheard. “What?”
“Inheriting the Dismer Gang.” Hastur sat up straight, serious as a stage parent. “Finnian, now that you’ve got a career goal, don’t you want to climb higher?”
Steering Finnian away from that awful fate was great, but inexplicably losing what seemed like a powerhouse gang’s succession rights left a twinge of regret.
To spare the player any regrets, Hastur hoped the NPC would push a little harder.
Finnian: “—???”
