"So you stumbled upon this near the town of Morse?"
After listening to Klein's story, Dunn's gray eyes examined the antique silver mirror placed on the table and asked in a mellow voice.
Klein, who was sitting at the table, yawned and replied:
"Ha, yes, this was found in the home of a small town resident."
Because they discovered this mirror yesterday, they stayed in the local area to conduct some investigation. It was close to midnight when they returned to Tingen. Klein, who is not a "sleepless person", went home directly after filling out the report. He did not wait until the next day
Only in the morning did I have the energy to make a detailed report to the captain.
Dunn took a sip of the still steaming Filmor coffee at hand and said calmly:
"I will eventually report this matter to the Holy Church, and it will be counted as the joint merit of the three of you."
As he spoke, he smiled less seriously:
"To be honest, even I am a little jealous of you. In the past, we might not be able to encounter a wandering sealed artifact every year. Your luck is so good. This will make you less likely to be reviewed by the Holy Church.
It is easier to pass, which will be more conducive to your subsequent promotion."
But I don’t want to be noticed by the church... Although Klein thought so, he still nodded with a smile:
"I also hope vetting will be easier."
After a few words of greeting, Klein took the initiative to say goodbye to Dunn, left the captain's office, and walked out of Hengduan.
"Klein, are you going to visit Old Neil with me later?" Roxanne, who was sitting at the front desk, put down the newspaper and asked lively in a raised voice.
Klein rubbed his sore eyebrows and asked with some concern:
"What happened to Old Neil? Didn't he come today?"
He was worried that after knowing the "acting method", Old Neil found it difficult to accept it and suddenly became ill due to psychological reasons. After all, the elderly are mentally fragile and will always cause a chain reaction.
Luo Shan listened and said with a slightly worried tone:
"He sent someone to ask for leave from the captain this morning. He said he was sick."
Klein nodded after hearing this and couldn't help but sigh:
"He suffered some blows before, but he didn't expect to be really sick. Alas, we went to see him at noon. After all, he had been alone for so many years, and his wife passed away early..."
"What did you say!" Rosanne's eyes widened suddenly and she asked in surprise, "When did Old Neil get married?"
Klein immediately raised his head, his face also full of surprise. He looked at Roshan who was talking to herself in the distance and asked:
"Isn't Old Neil ever married?"
Luo Shan was stunned for a moment, then changed into a look of realization, nodded, and said:
"By the way, Klein joined the team relatively late. When I was still relatively young, I heard my father say that they had been trying to persuade Old Neil to find a wife, but he always used various reasons to fool him.
.....”
Klein froze on the spot, listening to Roxanne talking to herself, and many fragmented memory scenes quickly flashed through his mind. Some of those scenes were connected in series, and some were superimposed on each other, gradually piecing together a terrifying fact.
Klein swallowed, lubricated his dry throat, interrupted Roxanne's soliloquy, and said in a hoarse voice:
"Roxanne, let me go to the bathroom first. I'll come back later."
Then, he ignored Luo Shan's surprise, walked into the bathroom with quick and stiff steps, and locked the door.
Klein huddled in the small space and carefully walked four steps backwards. He quickly passed through the roars and murmurs and entered above the gray mist.
He materialized paper and pen with great skill and quickly wrote the divination sentence in his mind:
"Old Neil's current state is not right?"
Then Klein leaned back, leaned against the high-backed chair, and entered the dreamland.
In the turbid darkness, Klein saw the only light, and saw Old Neil with only one head hanging in the air, looking happily at the piano he had seen before.
His eyes were mixed with nostalgia, intoxication, and deep love, and he stared deeply at the young "lady" sitting in front of the piano, playing the music, a soul that was no different from a real person.
Behind him, a pair of eyelashless, cold, distant eyes were watching all this, examining it, as if they wanted to analyze and read something from it.
Klein silently exited the dream, staring blankly at the gray fog in front of him that seemed to be eternal. After a long silence, he sighed, extended his spirituality to wrap himself up, and returned to reality.
With a squeak, Klein, with gloomy eyes, walked out of the bathroom and walked firmly towards the captain's office in Hengduan.
He gently knocked on the ajar door, and did not heed Dunn's invitation to sit down. He just stood blankly by the door frame and said in a low voice:
"Captain, Old Neil is out of control."
............
"Captain, that pirate seems to be out of control!"
A rough man dressed as a sailor shouted to Alger.
Alger glanced at the pale green figure in the distance with fins growing out of his back, and immediately ordered:
"You stay here to watch the pirate who has lost his mobility. I will go and recover him."
"Captain, are you alone?" The man dressed as a sailor asked loudly and wondered.
Alger casually broke a pirate's neck and explained in a calm tone:
"He is at least Sequence Eight. Are you going to die if you chase him?"
"And these things on the ground are also meritorious services. We usually float on the sea and have no chance to perform meritorious service. Do you want to give these to the 'punishers' on the shore?"
Seeing the tangled sailor in front of him, Alger patted the sailor on the shoulder, quickly left the group, and quickly chased after him alone.
He clung to the pirate who had completely lost control and turned into a "fish-man". He kept a few steps away from him, and from time to time he made some water bombs and threw them at him, forcing him to change the direction of escape according to his own ideas.
Suddenly, the fishman seemed to smell something, and gave up escaping for a moment, baring his teeth and running in the opposite direction from the coast.
Alger couldn't help but smile when he saw the fish-man in front of him suddenly changed his escape route.
He quickly adjusted his body shape while running and leaped onto the roof next to him.
Anyway, the fish-man has attracted most of the attention. No one will pay attention to a normal-looking middle-aged man, right?
Although the fish-man was attracted by the strange smell of art floating in the distance, he did not completely lose his mind. He glanced back and found that the figure that had been chasing him disappeared. He glanced at it and threw himself towards a random road.
The frightened female worker tore off one of the man's arms and stuffed it into her mouth randomly, as if she wanted to relieve her sudden hunger.
He hastily filled his mouth, stopped the continuous flow of saliva, and continued to run forward until he reached the place where the strange fragrance wafted.
The pale blue fish-man jumped up with all his strength, turned around in the air, and fell into a small closed box.
He saw a box of thoroughly roasted fat meat, with golden oil beads hanging on the surface of the barbecue, and black marks scattered here and there.
His Adam's apple visibly squirmed, and he spit out the stump of the body that he had not yet swallowed, and strode towards the wooden box containing the barbecue.
When, when, when
Just when he was about to touch the piece of barbecue on the top of the box, bullets from the steam rifle instantly penetrated the barbecue and rushed deeper into the wooden box, making a strange metal collision sound.
The pale green fish-man was about to get angry and opened his jaws wide, but found that the wooden box next to him exploded strangely, and a huge cloud of black smoke quickly covered his figure.
At this time, a figure fell from the sky - it was Alger who suddenly disappeared during the pursuit just now!
The muscles in his arms bulged, and pieces of dark blue illusory scales emerged, and two ferocious, sharp arm blades condensed on the sides of his two forearms.
He slashed sideways with one hand, and with his good night vision, he accurately hit the fish-man who was stunned on the spot, splitting half of the opponent's huge triangular head.
"Ouch!"
The fishman roared in pain and suddenly regained consciousness. Holding half of his head with a few strips of flesh attached to it in both hands, he jumped out of the black mist that was dispersed by the explosion.
He roared and roughly stuffed the severed half of his head back, relying on his own strong recovery power to stick it to his neck.
Alger didn't give him any time to buffer. Taking advantage of the opponent's moment of incompetence and rage, he lowered his back, exerted force on his legs, and shot out straight into the fishman's chest.
He put his hands into palms, and his strong body instantly stopped in front of the fish man with huge inertia. He quickly avoided the opponent's thick right arm with several bone spurs, twisted his waist slightly, and instantly adjusted his posture.
.
He took a step back with his left foot, moved his arm with his belt, swelled the muscles of his right hand, and with a vigorous swing, he used the illusory solid arm blade to directly cut the opponent's trachea.
Immediately afterwards, he quickly turned his palm into a fist, followed the cut wound, and punched into the fragile throat of the fish man, forcefully pulling out the spinal bones hidden in it, which were covered with various kinds of mucus.
The fish-man who had just glued his head on was twitching all of a sudden, waving his arms wildly, scratching his broken throat with one hand, and swinging his semi-paralyzed upper body. After struggling a few times,
He fell straight to the ground.
Alger was not careless and carefully approached the fallen fishman, quickly pulled out his hand and punched the opponent's roughly spliced head.
boom!
The pale blue "shell" burst open, and white, red, and yellow things stuck to the ground.
Alger waited for a while, and after confirming that there was no corpse, he pawed at the other party for a while, and pulled out a piece of parchment with some oil stains on it from the broken and dirty clothes.
He opened it and glanced at it casually, a smile appeared on his originally tense and rough face, nodded, and quickly and carefully tightened the parchment in his arms.
He looked away from the fish-man's broken corpse and raised his head.
Suddenly, Alger's body trembled, and he froze on the ground, trembling continuously.
An earthly angel, Edmund Jason, was standing in front of him, watching him quietly and silently.
............
Klein stood quietly in the living room of Old Neil's house. His dark brown pupils reflected Old Neil's decayed, crimson "corpse" scattered on the floor, and reflected the painful body that was also looking at him.
, dark red, crystal eyes.
He felt extremely peaceful, felt that he had lost the ability to think, and felt that he was far away from everything.
Klein was silent until Dunn's depressed voice, which hinted at loss, broke the silence. He watched the captain collect the body of his old friend, and the originally tall figure was slightly rickety.
"We are guardians, and we are also a group of poor people who are always fighting against danger and madness."