Chapter 160#
The Hunt 11#
“Enough,” Murphy said, then frowned and glanced at Anfi. Only now did he notice that something was still off about Anfi’s state.
What kind of Main God would tell Sheena point-blank I don’t think you’re very bright?
— Though, Murphy had to admit, he himself sometimes wanted to say the same thing to Sheena.
But right now, Anfi’s mind was clear and unbroken, with no sign of slipping into resonance.
It seemed like a recovery, but not a complete one. What exactly had Yu Feichen done to Him? And if something was wrong, why hadn’t He said anything? Murphy’s gaze toward Yu Feichen shifted again.
With the Main God present, he couldn’t say anything too harsh. He settled for boring a hole through Yu Feichen with his eyes.
Yu Feichen looked back calmly, and mouthed a few wordless words at Murphy.
Not your business.
He had already started to feel his IQ being dragged down by Murphy’s presence, and now he wanted the man gone as soon as possible. The divine officials of Paradise all seemed to have something wrong with their heads. Even Anfi in his drifting state was more reliable than any of them.
That thought had barely crossed his mind when the “mentally adrift” Anfi beside him turned his head in his direction.
Frost-blue eyes, empty of any emotion. His gaze swept past everyone with an expression that was perfectly blank — and yet it carried the arrogance of someone born to power, as though even glancing at people from the corner of his eye was a privilege granted to them.
His tone matched it: “You’re paying a lot of attention to him.”
“Hardly,” Yu Feichen said. “I just think he’s not very smart either.”
The Goddess of Wisdom: “?”
Anfi said coolly: “Mind yourself.”
Having been spoken ill of, He’d spoken up — and reined Yu Feichen in in the process. Murphy smiled faintly.
Yu Feichen felt Murphy had gotten the wrong idea, but had no proof. He had nothing to say about it.
He pulled his gaze away from Murphy and made sure it settled only on Anfi — and in this way, minded himself.
The last time he’d heard the words mind yourself was at the Oakvalley Containment Facility, when he’d been testing Commissioner Anfield.
That wasn’t so long ago. Looking back on that moment now, he felt the strangeness of how fate shifted without warning. At some point, without his quite noticing, his relationship with Anfi had become what it was today.
The Goddess of Wisdom leaned lazily against her Gatling, arms folded, letting her gaze drift between the three of them before breaking into an enigmatic smile. “How entertaining.”
Windsor: “Indeed.”
Bai Song: “Indeed.”
The three of them exchanged a look. The relationship between Paradise’s humans and its deity had, quite suddenly, become remarkably warm and harmonious.
With greetings out of the way, and a certain ease established between them, it was time to get to business.
Having heard the deity’s intentions, Sheena said: “The circus has a complex internal layout — hidden passages, a maze — it can’t be broken into easily from the outside. It’s ideal as a base of operations. That’s also why I chose to set up here.”
“However… if we want to use it to shelter everyone being hunted, there’s one very significant problem.”
Sheena pointed down toward the packed audience seats below, and the circus performers on stage. “The carnival runs for three days and three nights without pause. During that time, every seat is filled.”
Which meant — this place would be swarming with countless, countless NPCs, from now until the hunt concluded.
They had already experienced firsthand the NPCs’ obsessive fixation on their prey, back in the department store. The scattered shop assistants had been threatening enough. The dense crowds of audience members and performers in the circus would be something far worse.
“Don’t you think so, Fate?” Sheena tilted her head up toward the air above.
There was someone up there?
Yu Feichen looked up.
There was, indeed, someone up there.
A figure cloaked from head to foot in a heavy dark-green mantle, apparently standing on air.
To support high-difficulty acts and stage effects, extremely tall pipe scaffolding had been erected around the circus building, connected by taut steel wires so fine they were nearly invisible. The wires crisscrossed overhead, weaving into a vast net that spanned the entire space above the circus.
— And the person Sheena had called “Fate” was standing on one of those wires.
Among Paradise’s divine officials, there was only one associated with that word — the Goddess of Fate, one of the three goddesses.
Called out by name, Fate grasped one of the adjustable looped wires and descended slowly from mid-air.
“Incredible,” Windsor said. “When we arrived, I didn’t see anyone up there at all.”
He watched the figure descend with genuine curiosity. “Even now, her presence feels… barely there.”
Sheena smiled. “Isn’t that what fate itself is like? You can’t perceive its towering presence — only in the small hours when you look back on the past and jolt awake do you finally see that fate has been there all along, a shadow at your side.”
As her words faded, the Goddess of Fate touched down lightly on the ground.
Fate pushed back the wide brim of her cloak’s hood, revealing her face.
It was the face of a girl on the cusp of adulthood. Her hair was a pure, snow-like white; her irises a pale, washed-out violet. Her features were fine and still, and when her gaze drifted slowly across the room, it seemed to carry a sadness like smoke.
She inclined her head gently toward Anfi. “You’ve come.”
Then added: “The circus currently holds three thousand audience members and two hundred performers and performing animals.”
Anfi stood at the railing, looking down at the circus performance below.
The monkey fire-ring act was drawing to a close. The human-height monkeys leapt one by one through a final combination of rings, then arranged themselves behind the hoops in a stacked acrobatic formation — bodies linked to bodies, assembling into another great ring standing upright on the ground — and drew a wave of roaring applause from the stands.
They had a monkey’s fur, a monkey’s tail, a monkey’s face — and yet, looking more closely, they didn’t quite seem like monkeys anymore.
Every monkey’s posture and use of its limbs was eerily human. And on those furry faces, where the all-black animal eyes should have been, there were instead the black-and-white eyes that belonged only to humans. As the audience watched them, they watched the audience back, showing their teeth in a strange, contorted grin.
The music reached its conclusion. The monkeys broke formation one by one, lining up across the stage in a long row, and walked off upright, upper limbs hanging naturally at their sides — exactly like any ordinary person.
The audience saw them off with an even louder roar of cheering. In the fever of the atmosphere, every face in the crowd wore the exact same expression.
The sun blazed overhead. High up, the wind stirred Anfi’s robes.
Anfi spoke: “Clear the venue.”
Unless pursuing prey, NPCs would not leave their posts.
Even when pursuing prey, an NPC would return to its original position once the chase ended or the target was lost.
So Anfi’s “clear the venue” was not a matter of luring them away. It was a literal clearance — eliminate them. All of them.
The Goddess of Wisdom finally spotted an opening for a retort. She tucked herself carefully behind the shelter of her Gatling and said: “You don’t look like you have very much mercy right now.”
Anfi lowered his eyes, gazing down over everything below.
“They’re nothing but phantoms of hatred.”