Season 3 chapter 84
The Meaningless Arsenal
The unknown figure slowly turned around. His face remained entirely hidden within the suffocating black shadows of his deep hood. He looked at the repaired sword in the doctor's hand and let out a highly exhausted, mocking chuckle.
"What are you guys even doing here?" the unknown figure joked lazily. "I honestly thought you would never come back here. And seriously, why are you using your fucking silly sword in front of me? There is no actual use against me. It will absolutely not work against me. Just get that fucking thing in your mind right now. It would be the best for you if you don't want to die."
The doctor gritted his teeth, pure fury flaring up at the sheer disrespect.
The assistant, entirely done with the dialogue, lightning-drew a heavy, high-caliber revolver from his coat. Without a single word of warning, he aimed directly at the center of the figure's chest and pulled the trigger.
BANG!
The heavy lead bullet tore through the air at supersonic speed. But the exact microsecond it made physical contact with the outer layer of the grey cloak, it didn't pierce the fabric. It didn't even bounce off.
The bullet simply ceased to exist, instantaneously dissolving into nothingness.
The assistant lowered his gun, his jaw dropping in absolute bewilderment.
"What the fuck are you?" the assistant breathed out.
As the wind picked up across the dead farmland, it caught the edge of the figure's heavy grey cloak, blowing it slightly to the side. Sewn directly into the inner lining, unmistakably clear in the dim purple light, was the official crest and flag of the Democratic Republic of DI.
The assistant squinted, entirely thrown off by the symbol.
"What the fuck?" the assistant questioned, thoroughly confused. "You are DI'an? Well, it is kind of weird to say, but why the hell are you wearing the country's flag on the inside of your cloak? Do you think everyone will magically misunderstand you as a patriot and think you are doing something good? What the fuck is that even for?"
The Kinetic Rejection
The unknown figure didn't answer.
Instead, a low, terrifying hum began to vibrate from the very center of his being. He didn't raise his hands. He didn't chant.
A massive, invisible wave of pure, unfiltered kinetic energy violently erupted from his body in a 360-degree radius.
BOOOOOOM!
The force of the blast was so massive it physically tore the top layer of dirt off the farmland. The doctor and his assistant didn't even have a microsecond to brace themselves. The energy wall slammed into them like a freight train, completely crushing their stances.
They were violently launched backward through the air. They crashed brutally into the dirt, rolling aggressively over the dead, destroyed crops for nearly a hundred meters before the sheer momentum finally bled out.
Standing entirely untouched in the center of the massive crater he had just created, the unknown figure shook his head.
"Well," the figure muttered lazily to himself. "I never expected you guys would become doctors. It was totally unexceptional. Well I have the flag of the country on my cloak what it has do with you, you idiots !"
Far down the dirt road, the doctor and the assistant groaned, violently coughing up mud. Slowly, they regained control of their battered bodies, pushing themselves off the ruined ground. They walked back toward the figure, but this time, they stopped a good fifty meters away, maintaining a highly respectful, terrified distance.
The doctor wiped the dirt from his ruined white coat, glaring at the shadows beneath the hood.
"Who the hell are you?" the doctor demanded, his voice echoing over the quiet farmland. "Tell me your name."
The Suspension of Suspense
The doctor wiped the dirt from his ruined white coat, glaring at the shadows beneath the hood of the unknown figure.
"Who the hell are you?" the doctor demanded, his voice echoing over the quiet farmland. "How do you know so much about us? How are you doing this?"
The unknown figure tilted his head, acting entirely unbothered by the hostility. He let out a long, theatrical sigh.
"Well," the figure murmured, casually crossing his arms inside the cloak. "I think so I should probably introduce myself. I am Mantous—"
He stopped mid-sentence. He slowly uncrossed his arms, tapping his chin through the fabric of the hood as if he had just realized something profoundly important.
"Wait a minute," the figure muttered, waving his hand dismissively. "I think so I absolutely should not tell you about me right now. I want a suspense scene here. Because if I just bluntly tell you who I am, it will not be a thing of suspense at all. And honestly, I really like movies. It is highly important for the narrative structure to maintain a layer of mystery. What do you think about it?"
The doctor's jaw dropped. The sheer, unparalleled absurdity of the statement caused his brain to momentarily completely freeze.
"What the fuck?!" the doctor shrieked, his medical composure completely breaking. "Are you absolutely insane?! This is not a fucking movie! This is real life! We are literally standing in a mass graveyard that you just reversed, and you are talking about narrative suspense?! What the fuck are you even saying right now?!"
The False Alias
The assistant, entirely ignoring the doctor's outrage, stepped forward, his eyes narrowing as he analyzed the figure's height and posture.
"Wait a minute," the assistant intervened, his voice dropping into a serious, highly analytical tone. "Did you just say you were Mantouse? Are you Mantouse Adeius?"
The unknown figure let out a loud, highly exhausted scoff.
"Do you honestly think I look like him?" the figure replied lazily. "My face is entirely different. But you can't see me, and I can't really see your exact facial expressions right now because it is the fucking evening time, and the lighting here is terrible. Our faces are entirely hidden in the shadows. But I know exactly who you are from your voices, and you cannot possibly know who I am. This is the distinct difference between us."
The figure kicked another pebble, clearly bored with the dialogue.
"This is exactly why I am playing the role of the villain here," he rambled on, "even though I am literally healing dying people while wearing the flag of DI inside my coat. It is kind of really, really weird, to be honest. But whatever it is, I don't give a single fuck about it."
The doctor aggressively rubbed his temples, feeling an incoming migraine.
"You are really, really invested in spy thriller movies, aren't you?" the doctor mocked, shaking his head. "You watch too much cheap cinema."
He turned to his assistant. "And no, you idiot, he is absolutely not Mantouse Adeius. Mantouse is a highly lethal, completely calculating corporate warlord. This guy just acts like a deeply exhausted office worker trying to be dramatic. He is something entirely different. We just don't know what."
The unknown figure chuckled softly. "Well, I guess the suspense works."
Before either the doctor or the assistant could say another word, the air around the figure violently rippled.
FZT.
Without any dramatic hand gestures or final words, the cloaked figure completely vanished, instantly teleporting away and leaving nothing behind but the whispering wind across the dead crops.
The Abandoned Miracle
The doctor and his assistant stood in absolute silence, staring at the empty space where the most powerful entity they had ever encountered was standing just a second ago.
"What the hell just happened?" the assistant muttered, holstering his useless revolver. "Why was he violently healing all these people here? And how did he possess the kinetic force to actually pull their lives back from the brink of absolute death?"
The doctor didn't answer immediately. He walked over to one of the nearby victims—a young man who had previously been suffering from a fatal chest wound. The doctor knelt down, pressing two fingers against the man's neck.
A strong, steady pulse beat against his fingertips.
"They were completely dead," the doctor observed, his voice hushed with awe and professional horror. "And now they are alive."
He pulled back the man's torn shirt, examining the wound. The catastrophic tissue damage had sealed shut, but the surrounding flesh was still violently bruised, and the breathing was incredibly shallow.
"But the process was entirely abandoned in between," the doctor diagnosed, standing back up and grabbing his leather medical bag. "Because we interrupted him with our useless combat display, he didn't finish the healing sequence. They are alive, but they are not well-fixed. Their vitals are crashing again."
"So what do we do?" the assistant asked, looking at the dozens of bodies scattered across the fields.
"We do our actual jobs," the doctor snapped, throwing a roll of bandages to the assistant. "They still need to go to a highly equipped hospital, or they will die a second time. Start stabilizing the critical ones. We have a massive amount of work to do."