Under that hair-raising fourth demand, the group of arrogant Blue Cloak nobles before him stumbled back half a pace in a pathetic, synchronized scramble.
No one responded. Only a suffocating dead silence crept through the corridor.
The hands Lynus had resting on Erika's waist and the back of his neck suddenly stopped their serpent-like caress.
"I see."
Lynus let out an incredibly faint sneer. There was no anger in that laugh, only a condescending, predatory contempt. He released his grip on Erika, as if having lost the last shred of patience for these cowardly colleagues.
"Since you are all so fiercely protective of your 'defective products,' I'll have to do it myself."
He turned, his boots clicking sharply on the ash-black metal floor, walking straight toward the row of metal wheelchairs lined against the right wall.
Erika stood frozen in place. His hollow gaze followed Lynus's retreating back. The space of this corridor now presented a grotesquely distorted sense of fragmentation: to the left, the massive French window occupying the entire wall, beyond which lay a pitch-black abyss that could swallow light itself; to the right, these restraint chairs gleaming with an icy, clinical light.
Lynus walked slowly, like an extremely fastidious buyer inspecting cuts of meat hanging in a slaughterhouse. The pale light fell on his dark blue robe, and the impossibly clean glass of the window perfectly reflected his ruthless silhouette.
"Let me see…"
Lynus stopped before the first wheelchair. On it was restrained an extremely burly man, thick leather straps already biting deeply into his misshapen, bulging muscles. The man's head hung limply, meaningless gurgling sounds escaping his throat.
Lynus extended the hand that had just viciously slapped his own face, and with two fingers pinched the man's chin disdainfully, forcibly lifting his head.
A face with milky eyes and drool at the corner of the mouth was exposed under the light.
"Excessive muscle fiber proliferation, but pupillary light reflex is already non-existent," Lynus evaluated coldly, as if reading a decommission report for a piece of scrap machinery. He released his fingers, letting the heavy head fall back onto the chest with a heavy thud. "Waste."
He walked on. Second. Third.
The Blue Cloaks standing at the corridor's end had faces of ashen grey, yet none dared step forward even half a pace to stop Lynus's blatantly transgressive act of rifling through their "private property."
Finally, Lynus's steps halted dead before one wheelchair.
The restraints on this chair were tighter than any other.
Tight to an appalling degree. The edges of the wide, thick leather straps were completely embedded into the subject's flesh, leaving rings of purplish-black lividity around the wrists. The color of the bruising was so dark it was almost black, carrying the morbid sheen of flesh on the verge of necrosis from prolonged blood deprivation. It exuded an extremely ominous aura of death under the pale light.
Even more bizarre—this restrained body did not occasionally convulse, twitch, or emit unconscious moans like the others.
Those were signs of life still struggling, proof that the nervous system was still futilely sending signals. But this subject had none.
It presented an extremely taut, absolute dead silence—like a bowstring pulled to its absolute limit.
Motionless. Not even the slightest muscle tremor. That stillness wasn't due to unconsciousness or limpness, but a dormant, coiled tension forcibly suppressed by some terrifying willpower, ready to explode at any moment. Like a beast with its throat tightly strangled by an iron chain, quietly waiting in the darkness for the moment the chain snaps.
The corner of Lynus's mouth slowly curled into a hair-raising arc.
That curve was extremely shallow, but Erika, standing behind him, vividly felt that emotion—not satisfaction, not surprise, but the thrilling confirmation of a hunter finally uncovering a venomous snake hidden within rotten wood.
Lynus turned his head.
Across a dozen paces, his gaze cut through the pale light and the shadows of the wheelchairs, directly locking onto the utterly placid Black Robe administrator at the corridor's end.
"Remove the restraints."
Lynus's voice drifted over. Simultaneously, his long, pale fingers lightly tapped twice on the wheelchair's metal backrest. Tap. Tap. Light as a catalyst of death.
"That one is mine."
A voice suddenly drifted from the group of Blue Cloaks behind Erika.
Very deep. Very slow. Like chewing on bloody bones between the molars.
Erika didn't look back. He didn't dare. But his completely formatted mind instantly matched this voice print—it was the one who had said "hard to say" amidst the laughing crowd. He was also the only one among these Blue Cloaks whose mere presence triggered Erika's biological instincts to sense extreme danger.
Heavy footsteps approached from behind.
Those boots stepped on the ash-black metal floor, each step planted solidly, as steady as a moving iceberg.
Erika kept his head down, only seeing a dark blue robe hem forcefully cut into his peripheral vision. That tall figure passed him, walking straight toward Lynus, toward that wheelchair shrouded in purplish-black lividity and dead silence.
No nonsense.
The Blue Cloak called Cassius walked to the wheelchair and stopped. He raised one hand and waved incredibly casually toward Lynus and Erika's direction—a gesture as contemptuous as shooing away two bothersome flies, signaling them to get lost.
Lynus didn't get angry.
He stood there, the morbid curve of his mouth instead deepening. Those pale blue eyes narrowed slightly, scrutinizing Cassius from head to toe with a gaze that made one's spine run cold.
"Cassius." Lynus's tone became extremely strange, hovering somewhere between admiration and a serpentine stickiness. "At least you didn't completely disappoint me."
He stepped aside.
It wasn't a panicked retreat, but a haughty concession of 'I permit you to perform.' Lynus shifted half a step sideways, completely yielding the position directly in front of the wheelchair.
Erika also stepped back.
He needed no command. Instinct drove him to drag his ruined frame backward, hiding himself deeply within the corridor's shadows. But he didn't dare lower his head. His gaze was magnetically drawn, riveted to that wheelchair.
Because Lynus had blocked his view earlier, he hadn't seen the full picture. Only now did he realize—
The subject's head was firmly encased in a black metal device.
That thing wasn't really a helmet; it looked more like a cruel, fully enclosed torture device. Heavy, light-absorbing black metal completely locked the entire head inside, with no eye slits, no mouth opening—only two pinprick-sized holes at the corresponding position for the nose, allowing for mere survival. It was like a severed head, individually sealed in an iron can.
Cassius walked behind the wheelchair.
His gloved hand reached toward the back of that black metal head, groping along the smooth surface. The movement was gentle and practiced, like caressing a rare treasure.
Click.
An extremely crisp mechanical engagement sound.
In the dead silent corridor, this sound pierced Erika's eardrums like a bullet.
That black metal cage—split open right down the middle.
SSSSSS—!!!
The sharp screech of high-pressure gas leakage erupted abruptly. A thick cloud of white vapor frantically burst from the crack, carrying the intensely pungent smell of chemical coolant and some cloying preservative, instantly flooding the surrounding air. The gas was like a malevolent spirit imprisoned for centuries, finally finding an escape, desperately fleeing outward.
Erika instinctively held his breath.
His eyes stared rigidly at that dissipating white vapor, at those two heavy pieces of metal about to fall away.
When the white gas finally cleared.
Erika's breathing thoroughly stopped.
He wasn't holding his breath from fear. It was a genuine, system-wide halt where even his heart involuntarily skipped a beat. Deep within that completely washed-out mind, left with only commands and void, it seemed a long-severed nerve had been violently plucked.
It was hair.
A cascade of loose, red hair.
That red was too piercing. In this cold world built of ash-black metal, dark bloodstains, and pale light, that head of red hair was like a spontaneously combusting flame of karma, pouring down from the head that had just shed its metal shell.
Some strands were plastered tightly to her cheeks by sweat; some fell on shoulders twisted by restraint. It wasn't a dull, lifeless red, but an extremely vibrant, pure red, as if just pulled from molten lava, still faintly pulsing with high-temperature flames.
That face was revealed.
Pale. Paler than any corpse Erika had ever seen. It was the kind of near-transparent, ghastly white that comes from years without sunlight, with blood forcibly blocked beneath the skin by some extreme force. Through that thin layer of skin, you could clearly see the blue veins beneath.
The girl's eyes were tightly shut.
Long lashes cast two fragile shadows on that deathly pale face. Her cracked, bloodless lips were firmly pressed together.
She didn't move.
But Erika now finally understood the source of that "bowstring pulled to its limit" dead silence. Her stillness wasn't from being tortured to a breakdown, but from her using every last shred of remaining strength in her body to suppress something terrifying, on the verge of bursting forth.
Erika stood petrified in the shadows.
Staring at that face, pale as paper.
Staring at that hair burning like blood.
He didn't know how long he stood there, nor why that shade of red caused such an alien cramp in his stomach.
He only knew that from this moment on, this corridor watched over by the abyss contained one more thing.
A flame.
Quietly, and most dangerously, burning in this desolate, ash-black wasteland.