Chapter 191: Chapter 195 Disappearance
With a clang, Dante Wayne’s silver fork dropped onto the plate.
The sound of the falling fork was a bit shrill in the somewhat cavernous dining room, startling the maid who was standing by. She quickly came forward to ask, “Mr. Dante?”
Dante didn’t respond to the maid’s inquiry. The City-State Governor remained sitting there, stunned, as if his soul had temporarily left his body. After a good while, he suddenly blinked, his consciousness seemingly snapping back to the surface from the brink of drowning – the sounds of the real world boomed in his ears—he took a sharp breath, hearing the maid’s voice again, “Mr. Dante, are you alright?”
Dante Wayne stared blankly at the fork that had fallen onto the plate, slowly reached out to pick up the fork, and noticed his hand was shaking violently. Countless intertwining, chaotic memories shuttled and overlapped in his head; he felt a burning pain near his eye sockets, as if his Ruby prosthetic eye was burning hot.
Suddenly, he turned his head and, before the maid could speak for the third time, he broke the silence with a somber tone, “Has Fenna sent someone with any messages?”
The maid paused, looking at the respected Governor with some confusion, “… Who is Fenna?”
The next second, the maid was startled by the Governor’s sudden ashen face and ominous aura.
Dante Wayne’s face changed dramatically, as if even the air pressure around him dropped. He was silent for several seconds, but eventually, he managed to maintain a calm demeanor and waved the maid off, speaking as evenly as possible, “Please leave for now, and don’t come in.”
Confused and a bit tense, the maid left, and the dining room fell completely silent. Dante Wayne sat quietly at the end of the dining table, alone.
As if for the past eleven years, he had been sitting at the table like this, living alone in this expansive mansion.
Layer upon layer of tumultuous, disordered memories continued shuttling through his brain; “realities” from different dimensions seemed to overwrite his memory, but Dante just sat there quietly, letting his memory be constantly rewritten, murmuring as if in a dream, “Fenna is still alive… Fenna is still alive…”
He suddenly looked up.
At the other end of the dining table, a figure had appeared at some unknown time.
It was himself—at least, it appeared to be another version of himself.
It was a gray and white figure, dressed just like Dante Wayne, with the same face and hairstyle, even the wrinkles on the back of the hands were identical, but the features of the figure were slightly blurred, and its eyes were just two hollow and sunken caverns filled with endless void and eeriness.
Dante quietly watched the gray and white “self” across the table. The figure also lifted its head to quietly observe him. After a long time, the gray figure suddenly grinned, revealing a silent smile, its sunken eye sockets reflecting a tumult of disordered light.
The thing spoke, its skin shifting and cracking with the movement of its lips, “Ah, your heart has finally developed a hole, ‘Mr. Myself’.”
Dante Wayne stopped his continuous murmuring and stared hard at the figure sitting across from him, his own “reflection”: “What have you done?”
“To be honest, I don’t know either; it just happened, the surprise came too quickly, a hole annihilated itself,” the thing across the table shook its head, “But don’t you want to see this? You no longer need to bear the pressure of the truth, nor need to worry about any responsibility or future… Everything is returning to the right track, and eternal relief and peace await everyone, just like the promise you received many years ago—everyone’s wish will be fulfilled…”
Saying this, the thing slowly stood up from across the table, its face twisted into a broken smile, “I understand your heart very well, just as I understand my own…”
Dante Wayne also slowly stood up. There were no weapons in the dining room, but he always carried a short dagger with him, and now he gripped that sole weapon tightly, staring down the gray figure, “Nothing but a void, a hollow shadow… Do you presume to understand the human heart?”
“I am your Spiritual Body reflected in the Subspace…” the gray figure spread its arms, seemingly unconcerned by Dante’s hostility and provocation, “Subspace understands everything, including that shallow, laughable human heart… Come, kill me, then see me once again, we haven’t played this game for a long time…”
The gray shadow’s words stopped abruptly.
Dante Wayne looked across the dining table in bafflement. He saw a clump of green flame that had spread from nowhere, pouncing on the phantom like a predator smelling its prey. The phantom tried to dodge it, but the flames seemed to defy the laws of space and burned fiercely upon it.
Piercing howls and strange cries came simultaneously, the sharp sound waves instantly shattering all the glass in the dining room. However, these sounds were trapped within the space and could not escape—so, layers of sound waves echoed in the dining room, becoming more bizarre and chill-inducing.
Dante Wayne watched blankly as his Subspace projection twisted into a strange, writhing “grease” in the flames and from it continued to emerge hisses and howls. He could barely make out a few words amidst the venomous curses, and only one word had some meaning: “Homeloss!”
This word was almost bellowed out by the “grease” as it exhausted its voice.
Then the grease too was consumed by fire, leaving only pale ashes in the flames. Dante Wayne stared blankly at this all, and the next second, a searing, intense pain suddenly filled his entire body.
The burning of the subspace projection now had a reverse effect on the physical body.
The dagger fell to the ground, and the Governor’s robust body immediately dropped, Dante curling up in agony, feeling as if he, too, was being consumed by fierce flames. This belated fiery ordeal was tearing and destroying his spiritual body and mind. In the hallucinatory flames that rose into the air, he saw the spreading green flames slowly circling around him, but they showed no real intention of coming up to “hunt.”
The spiritual fire took one last turn in front of the Governor, flickered twice, and then rapidly spread elsewhere.
Dante even felt that the fire “spat” at him, as if to express disdain for food that did not meet its taste.
He felt he might already be delirious from the pain of being burned by the flames.
The next second, all the pain disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived, and Dante’s consciousness felt like a spring stretched to its limit, suddenly released with a snap. This sudden release was the final blow that destroyed his consciousness, an intense dizziness came over him, his vision went black, and the perception of the whole world began to rapidly fade away.
And just before he completely lost consciousness, he heard the sound of the door opening, the maid’s cries of alarm, and the confused footsteps of others who had been disturbed.
…
Fenna calmly surveyed the empty archive room, attempting to find the trace of the middle-aged priest.
In the first two minutes, she didn’t move from her spot, didn’t rashly try to leave, nor did she touch any of the objects within sight.
This was to prevent triggering a contamination source after falling into some kind of hallucination, which would allow her sanity to be invaded.
Not until she confirmed that all the items in her sight were physical entities, and after she had taken protective measures for her own mind, did she go behind the arch-shaped desk of the administrator and decisively pressed a button underneath the desk.
That was the alarm bell.
As the bell rang out, it echoed continuously in the empty archive room.
Fenna then lowered her head to look at the lantern in her hand.
The middle-aged priest had disappeared, but the lantern he had lent her was still in her hand. The lantern continued to give off a soft, warm glow. Despite the fact that the archive room was not dark, the flame of the oil, which bore Holiness, seemed to dispel something, forming a hazy halo within a few meters’ radius around her.
Fenna did another round in the administrator’s resting area but still couldn’t find any trace of the priest.
The alarm was still going, sharp, piercing, anxiety-inducing.
Fenna returned to the front of the arch-shaped desk, her gaze falling on the pile of scattered parts and the symbols written in blood.
As the bell tolled emptily, no one entered the place.
The young Judge suddenly realized—
It wasn’t the middle-aged priest who had disappeared.
It was her.
The very moment this thought rose from the depths of her mind, Fenna felt the “atmosphere” around her change, as if a veil was suddenly lifted to reveal another dimension overlapping reality, and she suddenly widened her eyes to see boundless flames igniting everywhere in the archive room!
And in that roaring sea of fire, a silhouette holding a black umbrella stood not far in front of her, unnoticed until then.
The figure was tall and thin, exuding an otherworldly aura. He raised an arm toward Fenna within the flames, and a low, hoarse voice came from within him, “You…”
Fenna only heard one syllable before she took down the greatsword that normally required two hands to hold, then with one hand gripping the lantern and the other lifting the greatsword, she launched a leaping slash from three meters away.
“Heresy!”