Chapter 196.
Chapter 196: Disappearance
“With a crash, the silver fork in Dante Wayne’s hand fell onto his plate.
The sound of the fork falling appeared a bit sharp in the slightly empty dining room, and the maid who was waiting at the side was startled, and quickly went forward to inquire about the situation, “Mr. Dante?”
Dante did not respond to the maid’s inquiry, the city-state consul was still sitting there blankly, as if his soul had temporarily left this body, and it was only after a long while that he suddenly blinked his eyes, as if his consciousness had suddenly returned to the surface of the water from the edge of drowning, and the voices from the real world were booming in his ears – he sucked in a sharp breath and heard the maid’s voice again, “Mr. Dent, are you all right?”
Dante Wayne stared blankly at the dinner fork that had fallen onto his plate, and slowly reached out to pick it up, realizing that his hands were shaking extraordinarily hard, while a myriad of intertwined and confusing memories were weaving and iterating in and out of his mind, and he felt a searing pain coming from the vicinity of his eye socket, and that ruby prosthetic eye became hot as if it were about to burn.
He suddenly turned his head and broke the silence in a hushed voice before the maid spoke for the third time, “Has Vanna entrusted anyone with any news?”
The maid was stunned for a moment, somewhat puzzled as she looked at the respected Mr. Consul in front of her, “…… Who is Vanna?”
In the next second, this maid was startled by Mr. Consul’s suddenly iron-clad face and gloomy aura.
Dante Wayne’s face suddenly changed, as if even the air pressure around him had followed him down, he was silent for several seconds with an iron face, but in the end, he tried to maintain a calm attitude and waved his hand at the maid, saying as calmly as he could, “Go out first, don’t come in for the time being.”
Confused and slightly nervous, the maid departed, and complete silence fell over the dining room as Dante Wayne sat quietly at the end of the table, the only person at the large table.
It was as if he had been like this for the past eleven years, sitting alone at the table, alone, living and living in this large empty mansion.
Layers and layers of chaotic memories in the mind shuttle iterative, from different dimensions of “reality” as if to overwrite his memory, but Dante just sat there quietly, let the memory is constantly overwritten, his mouth as if talking in a dream-like softly repeating: “Vanna is still alive! …… Vanna is alive ……”
He suddenly raised his head.
At the other end of the dining table, a figure appeared at an unknown time.
It was himself – or at least it looked as if it was another self.
It was an entity of grayish hue, wearing the same clothes as Dante Wayne, with the same features and hairstyle, and even every wrinkle on the back of his hand was undifferentiated, but the figure’s features were slightly blurred, and its eyes were only two hollow, sunken holes, with endless emptiness and strangeness inside.
Dante quietly gazed at the gray “himself” across the table, the other also raised his head and quietly gazed at him, after a long time, the gray figure suddenly grinned, revealing a silent smile, the pair of sunken hollow eyes reflecting the chaotic flow of light and shadow.
The thing spoke, the skin on its face cracking and closing again as its lips wriggled and kept cracking, “Ah, a hole in your heart at last, Mr. ‘Myself’.”
Dante Wayne stopped his repetitive muttering and stared at the figure sitting across from him, the “reflection” of himself, “What have you done?”
“Honestly, I don’t know, it just happened, the surprise came so fast that a loophole took it upon itself to eliminate itself,” the thing across the table shook its head, “But don’t you want to see it happen? You don’t have to take on the stress of the truth anymore, or worry about any responsibilities or future …… Everything is getting back on track, and eternal relief and peace awaits all, just like the promise you were given many years ago – that all people’s wishes would be fulfilled ……”
The thing said, slowly standing up from across the table with a twisted and broken smile on its face, “I know your heart as well as I know myself ……”
Dante Wayne slowly stood up as well, there were no weapons in the dining room but he always carried a short dagger with him, now he gripped the only blade and stared the gray figure dead in the face, “Nothing more than a void, a shadow of nothingness …… You deserve to know the heart? ”
“I am your soul reflected in subspace ……,” the gray figure opened his hands as if unconcerned with Dante’s hostility and provocation, “Subspace knows everything, including that shallow and ridiculous human heart …… Come on, kill me and then see me again, it seems like a long time since we did this tour ……”
The gray shadow’s words ended abruptly.
Dante Wayne looked at the opposite side of the dining table with some dismay, and he saw a cluster of green flames spreading from nowhere, like a predator that sniffed its prey and lunged at the phantom, which tried to dodge, yet the flames seemed to ignore the laws of space and burned directly on the ta.
A mournful howl and a strange whistling sound came at the same time, the sharp sound waves instantly shattered all the glass in the restaurant, yet the sound was confined within this space and could not be transmitted outwards – so layers and layers of sound waves continued to reverberate in the restaurant, becoming more and more strange and creepy.
Dante Wayne watched blankly as his subspace projection distorted into a strange, writhing puddle of “grease” in the flames, and still hissing and whistling came from the grease, from which he could only barely distinguish a few words and phrases, and apart from the vicious curses, there was only one word that made any sense at all: “The Lost Country!”
The word was almost shouted by the puddle of “grease” at the top of its voice.
Then the grease was burned out, and only pale ash remained in the flames, and Dante Wayne stared at it, and the next moment a searing pain suddenly filled his body.
The incineration of the subspace projection was now reversed on the main body. The dagger fell to the ground, and the consul’s still-fit body fell to the ground immediately afterward. Dante crumpled in pain, feeling as if he were also being burned by the flames, this belated burning of his body was tearing away at his soul and mind, and in the illusion of the flames rising up in the air, he saw that the spreading green flames were only slowly balking at his surroundings, but were not really coming up! They didn’t really come up to “hunt and eat”.
Those spiritual fire finally circled around, in front of the consul swayed twice, quickly spread to other places.
Dante even felt that the flame “yuck” a mouthful, as if to express contempt for food that does not meet the taste.
He thought he might have been delirious from the pain of the flames.
In the next second, all the pain was gone as suddenly as it came, Dante felt his sanity jolted as if a spring stretched to its limit suddenly relaxed, this sudden relaxation became the final blow to destroy his consciousness, a strong sense of dizziness came, his vision went black, and the whole world’s senses began to fly far away.
And before his consciousness was completely lost, he heard the sound of the door opening, and the maid’s exclamation of surprise, as well as the chaotic sound of footsteps after the others were startled.
……
Vanna calmly looked around the empty archive, trying to find any sign of the middle-aged priest.
For the first two minutes, she didn’t move places, didn’t make any rash attempts to get out of the place, and didn’t touch any of the objects in her field of vision.
This was to prevent accidentally touching the source of contamination after falling deep into some kind of illusion, leading to the invasion of her sanity.
It was only after confirming that the items in her vision were all normal entities, and after completing the encore to her mind, that she came behind the administrator’s curved table, and decisively reached out and pressed a button underneath the tabletop.
It was the electric bell that pulled the alarm.
The bell rang, echoing over and over in the empty archive.
Vanna lowered her head again and looked at the carrying lamp in her hand.
That middle-aged priest had disappeared, but the lamp he had lent himself was still in his hand, and it was emitting a soft, warm glow, and even though it wasn’t dark in this archive, the flames of the oil burning with a holy nature still seemed to dispel something, creating a hazy halo of light within a few meters of the surrounding area.
Vanna looked around the administrator’s lounge again, still no sign of the priest.
The alarm bell still continued, shrill, piercing, and haunting.
Vanna returned to the curved table, her eyes falling on the scattered pile of parts and the marks written in blood.
The bell echoed hollowly; no one had entered the place.
It suddenly dawned on the young Inquisitor-
It was not the middle-aged priest who had disappeared.
It was herself.
The moment this thought emerged from her heart, Vanna felt the “atmosphere” around her change, as if a layer of curtains had been suddenly lifted, and another dimension overlapping under reality revealed itself to her, and she suddenly opened her eyes wide to see boundless flames igniting everywhere in the Archives!
And in that burning sea of fire, a figure holding a black umbrella stood not far in front of herself at an unknown time.
The figure was tall and thin, exuding an eerie aura, and he raised an arm toward Vanna in the flames, a low, hoarse voice coming out from within him, “You ……”
Vanna only heard one syllable, the next second has taken down from the back of that unusual people have to two hands can barely hold up the big sword, and then one hand carrying a lamp one hand raised the big sword, three meters away will start a jumping slash.
“Heretic!”
(End of chapter)