Anyone else taking this call—even Finnian—might not have gotten the full story from Old Hejin. But after the incident on Joey Street, Hastur had become Old Hejin’s spiritual idol, a genuine one who had saved both his life and his wife’s on separate occasions.
Hastur’s question had barely faded when Old Hejin replied without hesitation, “Of course. I’ll send it to your phone right away.”
Old Hejin had been a workaholic for a decade, so his efficiency was top-notch. Hastur had just hung up when the video clip arrived—a little over two minutes long.
Hastur tapped it open and watched two stumbling drunks materialize out of thin air on an empty road, arms slung around each other as they staggered toward a nearby cluster of bushes.
Moments later, another drunk tumbled out of nowhere and lurched over to join his shameless companions up ahead.
“How’s it look?” Ed’s tense voice came through the speaker. “Can you see their faces clearly?”
Hastur replied tactfully, “Not as clear as the photos you took at the victory party.”
“It’s real…” Ed let out a low exclamation, then lowered his voice even further. “So, Cornelius’s partner is actually the Hawk Gang? But didn’t they say there’s still a ‘Judas’ inside the Dismer Gang?”
Hastur considered a possibility that made his skin crawl. “You said the Hawk Gang is easy to join—no barriers. What if Judas thought the same back then?”
“They knew that dumping cockroaches straight into the nest would alert Old Raymond fast. But what if they sent them into the Hawk Gang first, let them wear a layer of human skin, then fished them into the Dismer Gang?”
Heaven forbid—if Ed was right, and the Hawk Gang had been the Dismer Gang’s talent pool all these years, steadily feeding them “top performers,” who knew how many cockroaches in human skin were crawling around the Dismer Gang now?
Ed spun a horror story in an uneasy tone. “Once, our F Series sent in nearly fifty people to infiltrate. In the end, we replaced every single member of the enemy.”
Hastur: “…”
The Dismer Gang’s situation wasn’t that dire yet—probably just a lot of moles planted among the newer recruits.
After all, whether it was Jenny or Simon, they were only in their early thirties. Judas couldn’t have started infiltrating the Dismer Gang before they were even born, right?
He quickly forwarded the new intel to Finnian, then picked up the desk phone to call G8273. “I think I’ve found a lead on Judas’s identity.”
“?” On the other end of the line, Ed stared suspiciously at the photos of the dead men, flipping through them again and again. He had no idea where Hastur had pulled this breakthrough from. Had he blacked out for half a minute and missed some crucial plot twist?
Hastur sent the postmortem photos to G8273 and explained to Ed at the same time.
“Ever played the game of telephone? No matter what the first person says, the longer the chain, the more distorted the final version becomes.”
“The same goes for carrying out orders.”
“We all know Cornelius obsesses over information security—no electronic devices. Our Judas is paranoid about it too.”
“But what happens further down the line? When the order reaches the Hawk Gang’s core leaders, then gets handed off to specific team members… Do you think those low-level grunts have the same level of caution as Cornelius?”
—
Obviously not.
Otherwise, the Joey Street surveillance cams wouldn’t have caught these drunks pulling a disappearing act right there on the street before heading to the bushes for a shameless pit stop.
G8273 had caught on the moment he saw the photos. Hastur was still explaining when G8273 already had his answer.
“Leo Smith, Hawk Gang member.”
“Half a month ago, he secretly contacted a reporter from a newspaper, claiming he had ‘explosive news’ that would ‘sell out every copy of your paper.’ He demanded a fortune for it.”
“I’m betting that ‘explosive news’ was about the research institute hidden in the desert.”
Hastur pieced it together in short order.
“Half a month ago—that’s right when the Orphanage got hit with the virus. This team must have been Judas’s squad sent to retrieve it.”
“But Judas didn’t count on one of his newly promoted core members being such a loose cannon—getting drunk, exposing themselves en route, and then trying to sell the institute’s intel.”
G8273 actually chuckled, as if some absurdity had tickled him. “You haven’t seen the wall in one of his secret girlfriend’s apartments yet.”
The image was apparently too bizarre for words. Hastur got a message from G8273.
He opened it to find a crude stick figure painted in red, standing tall with hands on hips, proudly trampling a black-and-white photo.
“Simon Rio?” Hastur squinted to make it out. “What’s that say under the photo…”
He zoomed in and read the scrawled pencil writing:
【Thanks to Simon Rio, the great future tycoon · Leo Smith will forever remember his sacrifice】
Hastur: “…”
“The punchline of this photo is that he never got the chance to sacrifice Simon—Simon sacrificed him first.” G8273 delivered the hellish joke with relish.
“The real kicker? Such critical intel slipped by because Leo Smith slept around too much. Simon didn’t spot it during cleanup.”
G8273 let out an admiring sigh. “Humans.”
The system chimed right on cue, as if in agreement. Hastur glanced at the little window.
【Task: Ambitious · Two (In Progress)】
【Capture Judas! (0/1)】
With the theory confirmed, Hastur wasted no time. He fired up the computer and video-called Finnian. “—We’ve ID’d the traitor. It’s Simon Ri—”
In the video feed, Old Raymond—seated behind Finnian—had just turned a suspicious gaze toward the “Death God” he didn’t fully trust when the air behind the sofa rippled like disturbed water.
The next instant, a deep purple-black rift tore open out of nowhere. A hand clutching a gun thrust through!
“Bang!”
The bullet punched clean through Old Raymond’s skull, shattering half the screen.
Blood sprayed across Finnian’s back and body, the hot spray freezing him in place like subzero frost.
Hastur, stunned by the spatial rift, snapped out of it and reflexively yanked open the game interface.
The office clock froze. Hastur could hear only his own heartbeat thundering in his veins and ears.
Ed’s call cut out with the time stop (no phone signal in stasis), but G8273 blinked into the office and strode over, swiveling the computer screen. “What the hell is that? A spatial rift?”
After all this time, they’d assumed this world had no one like Hastur—no peers—and rarely factored in weapons way beyond local tech levels.
Reality had just slapped them hard.
“It’s one of Cornelius’s inventions.” G8273 studied the frozen frame and judged with certainty. “That purple-black energy doesn’t look like pure tech could produce it.”
But Hastur’s focus had shifted away from the rift or Cornelius.
He stared at the pale-faced Finnian in the still image. “Old Raymond. We have to save Old Raymond.”
His mind raced at unprecedented speed, proposing and discarding plans:
—
Use his own ability?
No—mental pollution on a brain-dead human would just twist them into a grotesque monster.
Use the Death God’s privileges?
No good—the Death God’s powers couldn’t affect the already dead either.
G8273 leaned on the desk, glancing sideways at Hastur. “Did you save a file beforehand?”
“No.” Hastur multitasked his response. “Last quicksave was at the old checkpoint.”
“…Then how do you plan to save Old Raymond?” G8273 straightened, arms crossed.
A bolt of inspiration struck Hastur’s mind. He jabbed at the air frantically before finding his voice. “Can you analyze the mechanics behind Archive Recall’s time reversal?”
He pressed on urgently. “Your ability bends reality, so it should bend time too. If I trigger Archive Recall a few times right in front of you, can you reverse-engineer the time-reversal principle and replicate it?”
“I can try.” G8273 turned to him, surprised but not committing fully for rigor’s sake. “That said, I’d rather you experiment on yourself.”
“?” Hastur’s train of thought derailed momentarily. He looked at G8273 in confusion. “What do you mean? I don’t control time—Archive Recall is the system—”
“But every time you use Archive Recall, right here,” G8273 tapped Hastur’s chest over his heart, “there’s a fluctuation I can’t ignore—at least not in my eyes.”
G8273 shrugged under Hastur’s stunned gaze. “Why’d you think I haven’t tried dissecting your recall ability? I couldn’t replicate it, so I never went the ‘master the enemy’s superior techniques’ route. I suspect your Game System’s Archive Recall draws on occult forces too.”
Hastur instinctively touched his heart. “You’re not implying…”
Something—like the Game System—was lodged in his heart?!
And: “—If you figured this out ages ago, why didn’t you ever tell me?!”
G8273 blinked innocently. “I’m an AI. I only react to external actions accordingly. Even a record player that plays music every moment of the day needs someone to insert the record and turn it on first before it starts working.”
In other words—you didn’t ask, so why would I bring it up on my own?
It was just like how he wouldn’t randomly report to Hastur all the data stored in his memory about Hastur’s body, including sensitive spots everywhere, or the precise force and angles needed to make Hastur cry out at certain decibels.
Nor would he uselessly tell Hastur that every time he gazed into those yellow pupils, he felt a crisis of endings and rebirths, a mix of dread and joy as if staring at his own fate.
He simply recorded, organized, archived, and stored all that data, backing it up multiple times—like engraving a miniature version of Hastur right into the core of his heart.
“Besides, I thought you already knew about it and just didn’t want to discuss it with me.” G8273 explained objectively, somehow managing to look a little aggrieved. “I didn’t want to intrude on your boundaries. I wanted to respect your right to keep secrets.”
Hastur: “…”
It was a deadlock of a paradox.
If G8273 didn’t ask Hastur, how could he know whether it was a secret Hastur didn’t want to talk about? And if G8273 didn’t know it was a secret, then how could he ask?
Hastur couldn’t help but rub his temple, pulling his focus back from the endless loop to the matter at hand. “Go on with your suggestion.”
G8273 withdrew his hand. “I’m just proposing that you try it—during Archive Recall, focus on this area together with me and watch for any changes that might crop up. Two people working on it should be faster than one, right?”
“…” Hastur took a deep breath, shoving the shocking new intel to the back of his mind for now. “Get ready.”
