Chapter 239 — Kamel
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
"Are you real?"
The humanoid creature, seemingly formed of coalesced arcane energy, let out a startled cry, and that cry alone brought Gao Yang and everyone else to a halt.
This creature could speak! This creature could communicate!
Gao Yang forcibly checked the "Steel Storm" that was about to be released, keeping his longsword angled defensively before him while he stared at the mana creature. Behind him, Tir spread both hands wide, and a hazy veil of water mist enveloped the creature. Though it was impossible to tell what the mist actually did, it was clearly a powerful magical effect, for the lightning crackling all over the mana creature's body dimmed by more than half in an instant.
"You can talk?!" Gao Yang demanded in a low voice. "Who are you? Why are you here?"
But the mana creature seemed not to hear the others at all. He merely looked down at the dented slash mark on the armor plate over his chest, then glanced at the Cecil soldiers poised on full alert around him, and kept muttering to himself: "Real? Fake? Real? Fake? Real..."
"Hey, what real and fake!" Tir could not help shouting. "If you don't explain yourself right now, I'll let you taste a sea crab's pincers!"
"I... I..." The mana creature finally seemed to register the shift in the atmosphere around him. But he had likely gone far too long without communicating with anyone; even if he retained the capacity for speech, he was severely lacking in logic. He merely swayed in place, at a loss, not knowing how to answer the others' questions or how to express his own thoughts. After a period of violent inner conflict, he suddenly let out a shrill shriek and began shouting, "I need to check the barrier! I need to check the barrier! I need to check the barrier!"
Amid these seemingly deranged cries, the figure of the humanoid creature formed of arcane energy gradually grew unstable, and then, before everyone's eyes, he abruptly transformed into a bolt of lightning, leaping and flickering with a crackle before vanishing from sight.
Leaving Gao Yang and the others staring at one another. Tir was still standing there with both hands raised in a great-wing-spread (fish-fin) pose, but clearly her mist barrier had failed to bind that bizarre mana creature.
"What just happened..." Miss Siren wagged the tip of her tail in confusion. "Where'd the lightning guy go?"
"I don't know, but I suspect he'll be back," Gao Yang said, not sheathing his longsword but keeping a wary eye on every stir in the hall. "If I'm not mistaken, he should be..."
Before Gao Yang could finish, a series of strange noises suddenly came from deep within the facility.
The sounds were chaotic and confused, impossible to tell whether they were boulders rolling or steel grinding, as though a mass of disordered machinery had started up deep inside the building. And with this chaotic noise, lightning flickered once more through the semicircular hall, and after a series of crackling sounds, the humanoid creature brimming with lightning appeared before everyone again.
Tir immediately struck another great-wing-spread (fish-fin) pose...
But before the mist barrier could form, the humanoid creature suddenly raised both hands—or rather, the two leaping arcs of lightning that resembled arms—and a shout tinged with an eerie tremor came from between his armor plates: "Wait! We are not enemies!"
"You attacked us first," Heddy said, leveling her staff at him. "What exactly are you... a person?"
"As expected... as expected... a hallucination wouldn't have this many variables... a hallucination wouldn't be this logical..." Yet the humanoid creature only kept muttering to himself, lucid one moment and mad the next, until Gao Yang repeated Heddy's question, and only then did the creature suddenly react. "Ah... ah... right, self-introduction, self-introduction, I am... I am..."