Chapter 255: Lie

The flickering emergency lights cast long, erratic shadows across the ruined amphitheater.

The air smelled burnt wires and coolant, mixed with the tang of fresh blood leaking from the corridor. But towering in the center of the hall, glowing with an emerald radiance, the massive incubation vat hummed steadily, keeping Risa's motionless, unblemished corpse suspended.

Hide did not take his eyes off the man leaning against the severed console.

The man was draped in dark red garments—a thick, bulky trench coat and fur-lined shoulders that made him look like the ruthless chieftain of a crime syndicate. His cropped hair was stiff with sweat and grime, and his skin carried that same sickly, translucent pallor Hide remembered from Ufrifa, webbed with bulging violet veins that pulsed beneath his cheekbones.

And down the left side of his face was the horrific souvenir of his past hunts: an unhealed trench of scar tissue that ran from his forehead, tore through his blind-out left eye socket, and dragged across his jawline. His single functioning amber eye locked onto Hide, gleaming with manic.

Back then, this man had stood upon the skull of Drogon with a jagged broadsword buried to the hilt, Hide had looked up at him as a dangerous enemy back then.

They had been roughly the same height then. Now, the balance had shifted.

Hide's physical frame had stretched taller and broader. Clad from head to toe in the overlapping black draconic scales, with the writhing obsidian crown of the Dark Liege resting atop his silver hair, Hide physically looked down upon the man.

"Where is this place?" Hide asked, his voice a low, raspy growl.

The scarred man pushed himself off the console, his boots crunching over circuit boards. He tilted his head back, a wide, arrogant sneer pulling at his disfigured lips.

"What do you care?" the man mocked, crossing his arms over his bulky red coat. "And why in the hell do you think I'd tell you? Huh?"

Beneath his dark-scaled visor, Hide's jaw tightened. The proximity of Risa's floating body behind him, the memory of her dying in his arms, and the humiliating reality of having been chained in the dark as a laboratory rat pushed his sanity to the edge.

"Your fucking commander murdered my friend," Hide stated, pointing a clawed, dark-metal finger straight at the man's chest. "Walter Bigiva dragged me here, locked me in a cage, and you bastards are using her corpse as a bloody science experiment."

The man's brown eye flared, not with guilt, but with sudden contempt.

"Stop spewing your self-righteous bullshit, you lying bastard!" the man barked, taking an aggressive step forward. "You've completely lost your mind! Your disgusting, corrupted power finally ate away at whatever brain you had left, and you turned into the exact monsters we are at war with!"

Hide's brow furrowed beneath his crown. "What are you talking about?"

"You think we don't know what happened in the Dead Zone?!" the scarred man roared, his voice echoing off. "Ten elite operatives from our agency were dispatched to pull you and your squad out of those collapsing tunnels! And what did you do?! You butchered them like animals! You turned on your own people, slaughtered your comrades, and murdered that poor girl just to satisfy your bloodlust! And now you stand there, blaming Commander Bigiva for your own psychotic slaughter?!"

The man's sneer deepened into venom as he raised his right hand.

"And who are you going to blame Julian's death on, huh? You killed him with deceit, you slaughtered innocent Exterminators, and now you have the gall to play the victim?!"

SHING!

A flash of dense, silver mana erupted beside the man's hip. Materializing directly into his palm was the colossal, five-foot-long broadsword. A weapon forged from heavy, dark-grey meteoric alloy, its blade ridged with serrated teeth.

The man leveled the massive tip of the blade straight at Hide's throat.

"I, Arius, one of the esteemed Peerless Knights, will fulfill my duty to humanity," the warrior declared, his voice carrying the fanatical conviction of a righteous executioner. "I will keep an evil like you locked away from the world. And if necessary... I will slay you right here like the feral beast you are!"

The accusations crashed against Hide's mind like concussive waves.

'He thinks... I killed them?'

The truth seeped in his chest with clarity. Walter Bigiva had not merely orchestrated a secret ambush; the fucker had spun an immaculate web of lies to turn it all on Hide. To Arius, to the International Corporation, and likely to the entire outside world, Hide Volter was not a victim. He was a rogue Exterminator who had fallen to the corruption, murdered his own agency recruits, slaughtered the rescue squad sent to save him, and killed Risa in a deranged frenzy.

Walter had turned him into public enemy while keeping him chained in the dark to harvest his core.

And Peerless Knights? He had never heard that word ever.

Before Hide could untangle the web of deception, reality shattered.

SWOOSH!

Arius vanished.

There was no sound of boots kicking off the concrete and no lingering gust of wind. The knight crossed the distance in a zero-second blur, materializing directly at Hide's left flank.

The jagged broadsword swung in a vicious, horizontal arc aimed straight at Hide's abdomen.

Hide's reaction was instantaneous.

His agility, augmented by Abyssal Carapace, far surpassed ordinary A-Rank Exterminator's. Without moving his feet, Hide snapped his torso backward, his spine bending at an impossible angle as the five-foot blade whistled harmlessly through empty air, slicing only the draft of his movement.

In that same microsecond, Hide launched his counter.

Driving his weight back forward, Hide's scaled fist accelerated with the force of a piston, aiming directly for Arius's scarred face. A strike of that caliber would have caved the knight's skull in like an eggshell.

SWISH.

Hide's fist struck nothing.

There was no impact or resistance of bone, and no friction of skin. Hide's dark-scaled gauntlet passed completely through Arius's head as if the man were nothing more than a trick of the light, a projection of smoke and mirrors.

'Intangibility?!' Hide's eyes widened beneath his visor.

Arius capitalized on the missed strike instantly. Ducking low beneath the phased fist, Arius's illusory torso dropped toward the floor, sweeping his right boot directly into the back of Hide's left knee.

THUD!

The kick struck with brutal solidity. The unexpected impact broke Hide's balance, causing his left leg to buckle and forcing him to stagger a half-step forward onto the debris.

"Die, beast!" Arius snarled.

Using the momentum of the sweep, Arius spun his body, bringing the jagged broadsword down in a cleave aimed at Hide's neck.

Hide didn't have room to retreat. Relying on the near-indestructible defense of his Abyssal Scale Carapace, Hide threw his left arm upward, his scaled palm and forearm braced to catch the falling blade mid-air.

SWOOSH.

The broadsword did not clash against the black scales.

Just like Arius's skull, the massive steel blade lost its physical cohesion the instant before contact. The weapon phased effortlessly through Hide's dark scales, through his skin, through his muscle fibers, and directly through the radius and bones of his left forearm.

Hide felt no cut. There was no pain, no bleeding, and no disruption to his nervous system. The sword simply existed in the exact same spatial plane as his arm, hovering halfway through his flesh like an incorporeal object.

Then, Arius's single eye flashed with silver.

SCHLUCK—CRACK!

The broadsword forcefully snapped back into physical reality.

In an instant of physics, two solid masses could not occupy the same space. The meteoric steel displaced bone, severed arteries, and sheared through the impenetrable scales.

SPLAT!

Hide's severed left hand, sheared cleanly off three inches above the wrist—tumbled through the air, hitting the floor with a wet, heavy thud as dark crimson blood sprayed across the floor.

"GAH—!"

A sharp, ragged grunt tore from Hide's throat.

Most warriors would have frozen in shock or collapsed from the agonizing trauma of losing a limb.

Hide was not most warriors.

His pain suppression instantly flared, and instead of pulling backward to nurse the bleeding stump, he attacked.

Pivoting on his right foot, Hide whipped his left leg around in a savage, blind spinning mule kick, driving his scaled heel straight into Arius's exposed chest and right shoulder.

CRUNCH!

The concussive force struck Arius before the knight could phase his body again.

The lifted lifted the bulky warrior completely off his boots, launching him across the laboratory like a ragdoll.

KABOOM!

Arius crashed into a load-bearing concrete pillar on the far side of the hall, cracking the foundation and bringing down a shower of plaster, pulverized stone, and severed electrical cables. The broadsword slipped from his shattered right arm, clattering noisily across the tiles.

Hide didn't spare the groaning knight a second glance.

He dropped to one knee, scooping up his severed, scale-clad hand from the blood-slicked stone. Aligning the severed edges, Hide pressed the cold stump of the hand firmly against the bleeding ruin of his left wrist.

'Abyssal Healing!' Hide commanded.

A torrential, blinding wave of brilliant emerald light erupted.

The severed blood vessels surged toward each other, weaving together like living threads. Muscle fibers knit, bone marrow fused with a succession of rapid pops, and the black scales sealed across his wrist, obliterating any trace of the amputation in less than three seconds.

Hide stood back up, rotating his left wrist in a smooth, effortless circle, his fingers flexing into talons.

Across the room, amidst the settling dust and concrete rubble, Arius dragged himself upright.

His red coat was torn, coated in white plaster dust. His right arm dangled limply at his side, bent at an unnatural angle. He leaned against the cracked pillar, coughing a mouthful of blood onto his lapel as he looked across the hall.

When his eye landed on Hide—standing tall, entirely uninjured, his severed hand fully restored without a scar, his face contorted into revulsion.

"You are more like a fucking Calamity Lord than a human," Arius spat, his voice trembling with disgust as blood dripped from his cracked lips. "We made a mistake. We should have killed you two months ago when we brought you here."

Hide stopped mid-step.

'Two... months?!'