Chapter 210 Volume IV - Chapter 55: A Purple That Reflects Fear
My eyes twitched as I stared blankly at the screen. I blinked a few times but what I saw in front of me didn't change, the blue dots were no longer visible on the screen. Only the red dot remained.
"What? What happened?!"
I knew the answer, yet I didn't want to accept the truth.
"G- General Kahdun, the first unit that encountered the escaped captive... we lost contact."
I slammed my fist on the table, yet I took a deep breath in and out, knowing I had to keep my composure. I closed and opened my eyes, then entered the camera of the warehouse before it was quickly destroyed.
The entrance to the huge warehouse appeared in front of me.
Immediately after the entrance, which was open for several meters, the warehouse was divided into aisles by several intermediate shelves. Each of the shelves was long, each was wide and contained countless cabinets and drawers. Some were locked, others were easily accessible.
Following the structure of the warehouse, I first noticed the dwarves trembling with fear inside. They were standing just in front of the partition divided into aisles with intermediate shelves. The employees, who had little combat training, were all gathered in one spot, with a total of four guards in front of them. They were looking at the door of the warehouse with electric batons in their hands.
There was an unmistakable tremor in their eyes.
Soon the door opened and brightly colored purple energy quickly seeped into the room. Then Aiden Tenebra; with one eye and purple vein-like structures covering his whole body; entered. As the guards stood trembling and staring at him, he completely ignored them and turned his head upward, directly toward the camera. Then, just like the previous ones, this camera's signal went dead.
The other cameras in the room had also gone down, all of them at the same time.
I clicked my tongue.
"When will the main force get there?"
"I- In no more than a minute, general."
"He went into the warehouse, Marnul, who knows how many artifacts are in that warehouse and he has them all right now... Send everyone on the ship there, everyone, do you understand? Not a single person will be interested in anything but him"
The attendant nodded and quickly turned to the screen in front of him.
"Give me an image from the closest person there."
In just a few seconds a window opened on the screen in front of me. It was an image moving along a corridor, he could not be seen because he was strapped to the soldier's chest, but I was sure of what I would see if he turned around, because the countless footsteps echoing along the corridor were transmitted to me through the image.
Soon the soldier reached the front of the warehouse. What he saw caused everyone to freeze for a moment.
The door had melted, as if fused to the wall in a million degrees of heat. It was impossible for the mechanism to work.
"What are you waiting for? Break the door, open it somehow!"
There is no other entrance to the warehouse, the only entrance is the sealed door in front of the soldiers. So they have no choice but to open this door.
Still, we're not too hopeless. Because on the bright side, Tenebra can't get out of that room either. I'd say we've got him cornered.
"We'll be needin' a few minutes for the door to be open, sir..."
It was hard not to slam my fist on the table.
A few minutes was enough time for Tenebra to find something useful from the artifacts inside.
I watched as the second contingent arrived at the front of the warehouse, pushed through the crowd, approached the door and one of them pulled out a strange-looking rifle-like weapon.
The soldier placed the weapon against the edge of the door and then pulled the trigger. With that, a red glow appeared at the end of the gun's barrel. Then the soldier slowly pulled the gun upward.
The points where the red light touched melted, separating the wall and the door. Still, the soldier was slow. I wanted him to be fast, but he couldn't help it. It was difficult for the laser to melt the material used to make the ship.
So the seconds passed one after the other. One after another, the troops formed an orderly line in the corridor in front of the warehouse door. And it didn't stop there. Other holes were being drilled above, below, and through the walls on the other side of the warehouse.
Tenebra was completely surrounded, and in a short time, a full complement of soldiers would burst into the warehouse.
As the seconds turned into minutes, I started biting my lip. I was nervous, there was a little bit of doubt in me. As the holes continued to be drilled, I was thinking.
If Tenebra could do this in the first place, why had he been willing to be tortured so much?
If he had such power, why hadn't he tried to escape before?
For another thing, 'that' man seemed to know a little bit about him. Did he not know that? Or did he know but deliberately ignored it...
"Sir, the door is open."
I put my thoughts aside, then returned to the footage. The soldier who opened the door with the laser finished his work at this very moment. When the last connection between the door and the wall was broken, he leaned back slightly and then fell to the floor with a loud thud. At the same time, other sounds echoed through the warehouse, other holes had been opened.
Ignoring them, I focused inside, trying to see what had happened.
Most of the shelves of the warehouse had collapsed on the floor, obviously rummaged through. There were weapons, artifacts, armor, swords, and many other things on the floor.
There was definitely something missing, Tenebra must have taken a lot of stuff with him if the warehouse had been rummaged through like this. Apart from that, the lights on the ceiling flickered on and off, giving the warehouse an overall eerie atmosphere.
And the bodies I saw before the room's camera was broken... They were all on the floor. Some parts of their bodies had been crushed, as if they had been hit by something hard, and much of their skin was burned; it looked like it had been abraded. They had met a painful death.
"Split int' groups 'n search every single spot in the room! He must be here somewhere!"
At the orders of the person in charge, they approached the shelves. As the warehouse was really big, there were tons of places that no one could see in its current state, and the shelves had been shuffled and overturned, which was an extra challenge.
So as the countless dwarves began to walk, covering the holes that had been made all over the room and moving deeper into the warehouse, suddenly a sound echoed through the room.
It was a sound that was hard to make out, yet not impossible to hear in the tense atmosphere. It was someone moaning.
The man who had provided the footage quickly turned around, and the next thing he saw was the puzzled expression on the face of the person checking the bodies lying on the floor.
The moaning sound had come from there, from the body on the ground.
When the other troops realized this and turned back in front of them, I quickly shifted the view to the dwarf controlling the moaner. First, they separated him from the group and led him outside. Then they gave him support and made him drink a potion. The dwarf coughed a few times after drinking the potion and then opened his eyes slightly.
He was a blue-eyed dwarf, and from the way he was dressed, he was not a security guard but an employee in charge of sorting things.
"Straighten up brother, be wary. Tell us quiet 'n slow what's happened."
The dwarf coughed again, this time coughing blood out of his mouth. Still, he forced himself, and then his lips parted.
Suddenly he paused, for a moment he seemed to stare into space. His meaningless gaze seemed as if he was trying to grasp something by looking at the wall. But it didn't last long. Because the dwarf put his hand to his head and blocked his vision. He stood like that again for a while, as if he had a headache.
"Are ye all right? Can ye hear me?"
As those around him tried to help him, I scanned the images of the other soldiers. They had scanned almost every inch of the warehouse and were still scanning.
There was no one inside. Tenebra was nowhere to be seen, as if his presence had been erased from the world. That purple energy, not even a glow was in the room.
I closed my eyes and thought.
Where could he have escaped to? There is no other hole in the room... Even if I thought he could melt the walls, there is no such 'melted' hole in the room. How did he get out of the room? Could one of the artifacts he found in that short time have given him teleportation?
How unlikely is it that among all those artifacts he found something that could do that? It's impossible for him to find something like that in just a few minutes, but... what if he did?
What if... What if he found an artifact other than teleportation? Invisibility, maybe.
Disguise, illusion, all sorts of things.
I hesitated for a moment, then my eyes widened.
Disguise. Oh...
"Hey."
As soon as I spoke out loud, the employee behind me turned to me.
"That employee... the one who survived."
"Yes, sir?"
"Surround him without letting him know."
The employee's eyes widened.
I'm not sure... It's just a delusion, maybe I'm thinking in vain right now, but... It's worth a try.
The employee stood still for a while, but nodded quickly, then started giving orders to the soldiers.
Just as I had told him, many of the soldiers moved slightly toward him, without making a sound and never making eye contact with the dwarf. They surrounded him, and the dwarf's eyes continued to stare blankly at the ground, as if he had gone mad.
The paramedics tried to communicate with him, but in vain. The dwarf seemed cut off from the world.
After a while, one of the soldiers approached him out of nowhere, put his shoulder to the medic's hand, and whispered something to him. The medic stood up nervously with a pale face and stepped back.
After the medic had moved away, the soldier approached the dwarf, who was barely conscious. He drew a gun from his waist, then put it to the dwarf's forehead.
"Stop pretendin'."
The dwarf shifted his eyes from the wall to the gun on his forehead and then to the man's eyes. Yet his expression had not changed, he was still staring blankly, as if he had a mental disability. It was as if he was trying to make sense of something, to grasp something, but he was failing.
"I'll be pullin' the trigger."
The soldier put his finger on the trigger, then pulled back slightly. On the other side, the dwarf's eyes were still the same.
After a moment he paused. A deep silence fell over the entire warehouse, and then the dwarf's eyes widened.
The soldier with the gun to his head stepped back, if only momentarily, in response to the dwarf's reaction.
A white light filled the entire image. The image was cut off in an instant. Immediately afterward, the ground, or rather almost the entire ship, trembled as if a violent earthquake had struck.
"What happened?!"
I knew the answer, yet I quickly turned around and one of the staff shakily answered my question.
"G- general, something exploded inside the warehouse..."
I clenched my fist, slammed it involuntarily on the table. This time I didn't hold back, my hand hurt, but I didn't care.
"All entrances and exits to the ship will remain closed... All personnel will be double-checked right now. Report for damage, injuries, and deaths, I don't want a single person on the ship to slip through the cracks. Every single point of the entire ship will be checked, no matter if it happens more than once. Do you understand?!"
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