Chapter 211 Volume IV - Chapter 56: Chaos on the Ghost Ship
"Is an escape of a captive somethin' that needs this much fuss?"
"Are ya dumb, Bulgar? Of course, it's a bloody big deal."
I let out a deep sigh, leaned back, and raised my eyes to the ceiling. Then I waited briefly.
After the explosion that shook the entire ship half an hour ago, it was impossible to step inside or outside. Almost everyone working was after a single captive who had escaped from the dungeon, and it was hard to make sense of it, at least for me.
Shouldn't someone held captive in a dungeon be weak? I didn't understand how he could cause trouble even for those in authority.
Still, an order was an order, and as a soldier, I could not go against it.
And I was hungry...
"Anyways, come on, let's grab a bite-"
I stiffened as I saw the widened eyes of my friend, almost the only person I had ever met on this ship, the only person I had ever known.
"What th-"
My eyes widened as my gaze shifted to the red stain that appeared slowly and without reason on my friend's stomach.
I drew my gun, pointed it at my friend's back, and just then a force came down on my gun.
The barrel of the gun suddenly slid down, and then with another force, it flew out of my hand and across the room.
My friend's body fell to the floor, and in the shock of losing my gun, I involuntarily stepped back. I turned around, or rather I tried to turn around.
As the space in front of my eyes slowly twisted to reveal something there, I could finally make out what it was.
Still, when I was confronted with a glowing violet eye, instead of seeing the brightness and vibrancy of a living person's eyes, I realized that knowing who was in front of me was useless when I found a void in front of me.
"S- st-"
My knees gave way, I fell to the ground and my head bowed.
I was sweating, shivering as the purple energy emanating from the body of the person in front of me passed me by, caressing my skin.
I didn't dare to look in front of me, I couldn't. Yet when a hand gently reached for my chin and lifted my head up, I met that violet eye again. Then a voice that made my whole being tremble echoed quietly in my ears.
"Where is the garage?"
My eyes involuntarily shifted to my friend's body, and I swallowed, staring at his lifeless body as the blood oozing from his wound slowly spread across the floor.
Only a few seconds ago we were chatting...
What can I... what can I do?
I closed my eyes, I accepted death. There was no way out of here, I didn't even think I could speak out of fear.
The hand holding my chin withdrew, and for some reason, I felt a moment of relief. Yet when the same hand landed on my head, my eyes opened wide. When I met the same purple eye again, that purple-colored void where I couldn't even see my own reflection, this time a reality hit me.
I am going to die.
There is nothing I can do and I, an ordinary soldier, will die.
I don't want to...
I don't want to die...
I wanted to turn around and run away, but my muscles wouldn't respond to me.
It wasn't happening, I couldn't do it.
My lips curled upward for no reason as I felt the heat enveloping my head.
I can't...
I waited. There was nothing else I could do.
Yet it was not death that came, nor was it a sudden darkness.
I felt a headache as the purple energy surrounded my head, turning my vision purple like it. My expression involuntarily distorted as my thoughts left my mind one after the other.
I tried to think but to no avail. I tried to understand what had happened to me, I tried to remember, but everything in my mind was getting mixed up. My memories were becoming meaningless, the more I tried to understand what had happened, the more... I found myself in chaos.
"Where is the garage?"
I looked up and saw a single violet-colored eye looking back at me.
Who was that?
Who was... me?
The garage... where was that?
Where was I?
"Just give me one straight answer, where is the garage on the ship? After that, everything will be back to normal."
Back to normal...
As my headache was getting worse, I found myself wanting to give the other person an answer.
Garage...
The confusion in my mind seemed to dissolve for a moment, a single word surfaced out of the confusion and I involuntarily focused on it.
North...
"N- north..."
"Well done."
When the hand on my head withdrew, I looked up, feeling relieved.
Yet I was confused again when I realized that I couldn't think anything about what I was seeing. I tried to make sense of it, to grasp where I was and what had happened to me, but to no avail... No matter how hard I tried, all I got was intense ligament pain.
Was I not going to get better?
No... did he say that?
Wait a minute... Who said that?
Finally, as I looked around, the last thing I saw was a purple figure slowly disappearing into the nothingness.
*******
A warning notification.
That's what saved me from my momentary dozing off.
I sat up quickly, shook the burr out of my eyes, and focused on the notification on the screen. As I did so, my eyes widened, and then a smile appeared on my face.
"In the garage, Tenebra is in the garage. I want backup there now!"
Without waiting for an answer, I went into one of the cameras in the garage.
What I found was a one-eyed person standing in front of hundreds of guns.
His left eye was still lit by that purple glow, his face was calm. He was looking at the hundreds of guns pointed at him as if they were nothing. He had no fear, what he was doing even looked stupid from the outside.
And so, finally, for the first time in a long time, I heard his voice. His lips parted, then he turned his gaze away from the armed soldiers and straight into one of the cameras.
"General Kahdun."
My lips curled upward involuntarily, and Tenebra continued as if speaking directly to me.
"You have a magnificent ship, but... its security is a bit shaky."
As he finished, the ground shook. The soldiers suddenly panicked and reached for the triggers of their weapons, but none of them pulled it. At the same time, other warning notifications appeared on my screen.
Explosions had occurred on either side of me.
"Let's get on with the main event, shall we?"
I didn't know what he was blowing up the ship with, I didn't know how he had planted them without anyone noticing, but I didn't care. The explosions were not extremely damaging to the ship, they only caused damage where it was, which was a relatively small area. It wasn't something that took an inordinate amount of time to fix, nor was it a matter of urgency.
When the order to fire was given, hundreds of weapons aimed at Tenebra fired simultaneously.
Tenebra's body was riddled with bullets. The blood from his body watered his clothes and spread across the floor.
However, as I continued to watch, I realized something was wrong.
"Stop!"
The shots stopped. Tenebra's riddled body collapsed to the floor. A slight silence fell over the room, tension enveloped everyone's body. Meanwhile, a faint light enveloped Tenebra's body, and then his body slowly began to turn to dust.
I gritted my teeth, accidentally biting my tongue.
"At least three people on each vehicle in the garage! And send someone to check out those explosions!"
"G- General, we've located Tenebra's location!"
"Where?!"
The person I turned to had a blank expression on his face.
"East, west, and south, sir..."
For a moment I just remained where I was.
How could he be in three places at once?
Yet, remembering how his body had turned to dust, it wasn't hard for me to understand that he could manifest himself in more than one place at once.
I opened the map of the ship in front of me, then looked at my troops.
I distributed all the troops according to their squadrons, placing a certain number of soldiers at each of the important points. In the garage, I made sure that there were always soldiers, even those who were much stronger than the soldiers. Of course, I did not neglect the huge area where the passageways were located.
In this way, the inside of the ship became a locked box from which no normal person could escape in the slightest. Still, Tenebra was not a normal person, and I knew it, so I acted deliberately.
"The clone from the east's been taken care of!"
Soon I heard that the one in the south was also dealt with, so my focus shifted to Tenebra in the west.
He was fleeing and fighting at the same time. He was mowing down the soldiers in front of him with a black sword, dodging bullets as best he could. I could see that his body was bleeding, yet it was clear that this too was a clone. Tenebra couldn't expose himself in such an open place on his own. He would have been caught sooner or later.
Then where was he? What could he be doing?
What's his real purpose? Is it really a distraction? Or do those clones have a special purpose?
Read latest chapters at f(r)eewebnov𝒆l Only