Chapter 128: Meeting again
"Viral?" Hide muttered into the communicator. His face was contorted into a profound scowl of pure, unadulterated irritation. "What kind of blind, morons run these public media streams? I’m wearing a blue jacket. My hair is literally silver-white. Where the hell are they getting ’Black’ from?"
From the other end, Evelyn let out a long, dry sigh. "The news feeds didn’t broadcast a clear image of your face due to the distortion, but everyone saw that wall of that pitch-black mist and your dumb show of your summon... The name is stuck. Deal with it."
"Vermin remains vermin, regardless of what the media prints," Commander Maddox’s voice suddenly interrupted the channel, "Let the media play their games, Hide. The main thing is that you remember what you got to do."
Maddox paused, a sharp paper shuffle audible over the frequency. "I expect you to be at the coordinate layout I transmitted to your device by exactly 06:00 tomorrow morning. Do not be a single minute late, boy. I am very strict about that."
The link clicked dead with a sharp tone. Hide slowly lowered the communicator, sliding it back into his pocket as he adjusted the collar of his jacket.
He stepped away from the high ledge, and cast a final glance at the muffled glow of the overcast sky. The city was quiet, but the three-month deadline Ren Sihue had branded into his calendar was already ticking.
Navigating the shadowy perimeter, and went down through the stairs. Though he didn’t come from them... he was not going to jump down from this high. He waled inside the long-abandoned machinery factory. The structure was a decaying hollow of rusted rebar and corrugated iron panels, a tomb of old manufacturing units completely sealed off from the civilian registry.
As he stepped through a buckled cargo door, his True Sight mapped the interior instantly. Rows of dead assembly tracks rose like skeletal remains through the dark, cold air.
He had barely taken three steps across the cracked concrete floor.
BOOM!
An explosive, invisible force struck Hide squarely between his shoulder blades. The velocity was so blindingly powerful that his Abyssal Scale Carapace didn’t even have the spatial microsecond required to expand across his ribs. He was propelled through the air like a discarded ragdoll, his body flying twenty meters across the manufacturing hall until he slammed violently into a massive, reinforced structural metal wall.
CRASH.
The impact was catastrophic. The thick steel plate shrieking as it deformed under his weight, leaving a deep, human-shaped indentation trailing across the metal beam.
Hide dropped heavily to his knees, concrete dust and loose iron flakes raining down over his silver hair.
But despite the bone-jarring trauma, Hide did not panic.
Slowly, methodically, Hide pushed himself back upright, leaning his shoulders against the dented metal wall. Standing right at the center of the dark assembly floor, his arms folded loosely over his tailored suit coat, was a familiar theatrical nightmare. The pristine white mask with its painted diamond eyes and wide, blood-red porcelain smile caught the glint of the distant skyscraper lights filtering through the shattered roof panels.
The Joker.
Hide spit a speck of blood onto the concrete, his cold blue eyes locking onto the masked figure with a look of pure, unbothered contempt.
"Finally showed up again, huh?" Hide said, his voice entirely deadpan, carrying the raspy chill of a predator who was thoroughly annoyed. "Is the itch in your asshole so high that you can’t live without spying on me for a single goddamned day?"
The vulgar provocation didn’t invite an aggressive rage reaction. The Joker merely tilted his head to the side, his painted smile remaining entirely unbothered as a high-pitched, theatrical giggle echoed from behind the white porcelain.
"My, my, such hostility from our champion," the Joker purred playfully, his tone carefully calibrated to act as a precision ragebait. "I map out a beautiful upper-tier corporate stage for you, I let you show off your lovely dark little toys to the entire network board, and this is how you greet your director? How deeply tragic, dear."
Hide didn’t fall for the trick. His expression remained an unreadable mask of absolute ice. He didn’t offer a single micro-flicker of emotional vulnerability.
After all he knew that the bastard was lying.
The Joker’s playful posture shifted slightly, his gloved fingers tapping against his chin with genuine interest. "But truly... I must commend you, Hide. To look at where you were standing just a few short weeks ago, compared to how cleanly you processed that A-Rank vanguard today... Your evolution speed is good. You really are growing up remarkably fast."
Suddenly, the Joker’s painted diamond eyes widened under the mask’s slit frames.
Without a word of explanation, his theater routine collapsed into a frantic, survivalistic reflex. The Joker violently kicked off the floorboards, lunging backward across the hall in a blur of desperate motion while simultaneously slamming both of his gloved palms firmly over the sides of his ears.
But his layout calculation was weeks out of date. His entire body violently stiffened mid-air.
The Joker had realized his error a millisecond too late. The reinforced metal wall he had forcefully slammed Hide into wasn’t a solid structural block—it was an old primary ventilation array lined with dozens of porous, recessed structural drainage holes directly behind Hide’s posture.
The moment his back had made contact with the steel, Hide hadn’t just taken the damage; he had started pouring thick columns of corrupted pitch-black mana directly through the hidden ventilation holes so that the Joker wouldn’t know.
Concealed within that darkness, his third autonomous manifest materialized into the structural void.
Petra
The massive flying-type phantom expanded its obsidian feathers within the rear layout, its hollow eye-sockets locking directly onto the Joker’s coordinates as it unleashed its second skill. Paralyzing Screech.
The screech was not heard by anyone or anything. But its use alone had done the work it needed to do.
BOOM!
Hide exploded off the dented metal plate using Petra’s first ability Sonic Flight as his body transformed into a terrifying, sound-speed missile.
He pulled his right arm back, his knuckles hardening as dark-steel scales punched out through his skin, driving a devastating straight punch directly at the center of the Joker’s porcelain mask. He was going to shatter that painted smile into dust.
WHOOSH.
At the last possible millisecond, the trickster... defied all conventional laws of human anatomy, the Joker’s neck tilted at an impossible, ungodly ninety-degree angle. Hide’s scaled fist missed the porcelain cheek by a fraction of an inch.
Bypassing the missed trajectory, Hide’s calculation re-synchronized instantly. Snapping his fingers shut mid-blur, he reached out and caught a handful of the Joker’s dark, neatly styled hair.
Gripping the locks with his talon-tipped armor plates, Hide forcefully rotated his entire torso, intending to use the man’s mass to slam him clean through a nearby concrete pillar.
But the moment his swing finalized, he realized something. The mass clutched firmly within his scaled grip was weightless—impossibly light, carrying absolutely zero biological weight of the skeleton.
Hide skidded to a violent halt, his boots carving tracks into the concrete as he opened his fist.
He wasn’t holding a human head. Resting inside his scaled black talons was a synthetic, torn piece of a commercial dark hair wig.
He snapped his gaze back towards where the joker was.
But the guy was not there anymore! he was trying to jump off the nearby window.
Hide ran to the window, but by then the Joker had already jumped and as hide looked below... the mysterious person was gone. There was no one out the window falling down or flying.
His heart was hammering against his ribs, not from the physical toll of the brief deathmatch, but from a profound, paralyzing wave of unmitigated shock.
In that final, fraction of a second before the Joker jumped out. Hide saw his real hair.
The actual hair of the Joker were, pristine, shocking, and unmistakable shade of brilliant silver-white—matching Hide’s own unique biological features down to the very last strand.
