Chapter 30: Phantom Will Still Threaten You Even When He Is Dead
Everything had happened fast.
His advancement had taken only a short while. Even after Lamia got the key, she would still need time to pass it to the next layer of the organization without drawing attention. That meant he still had a window.
If he moved now, there was a real chance he could reach the laboratory before the Erhai School did.
The Black Bone incident had only just ended. The laboratory was hidden near the Black Bone Family's territory, so the odds of it being heavily guarded tonight were low enough to justify the risk.
Hodell avoided the main roads entirely, choosing instead to cut through broken stone ridges and dried riverbeds.
His Agility had risen so sharply that the rough terrain barely slowed him. He moved in clean, swift bursts, his steps landing so lightly that even loose gravel only shifted a little underfoot.
...
In a remote monitoring room, dozens of light screens cast a pale blue glow across the face of the man on night watch.
Night shifts were torture.
He yawned, rubbed his temples, and stared blankly at the data stream for a while.
Monitoring this desolate abandoned zone day after day could grind any sense of meaning out of a person.
Life really was just endless repetition, he thought. Same shift, same screens, same damned background noise.
Then a tiny movement flickered across the parameter log.
The man straightened at once and read it.
[Sector C 7. Energy Level: 0.03. Duration: 1.7 seconds. Spectral Characteristics: Unidentified. Monitoring Determination: Environmental Background Noise.]
"Again?"
He muttered under his breath, already annoyed. Every day, there were thousands of these sub threshold readings. Filtering them all was enough to make anyone numb.
Still, out of habit, he nudged the control stick and zoomed the night vision feed in on Sector C 7.
A dark figure appeared on the screen.
It moved like a shadow that had learned how to hunt, perfectly blending into the environment while advancing with an agility far beyond that of any ordinary person, straight toward a marked suspicious zone.
The man's drowsiness vanished.
His whole body jolted upright.
...
Hodell searched carefully along the old riverbed.
At first, all he saw was silt, weather worn rock, and scattered refuse caught in dead corners by wind and time. He checked every patch of shadow, every broken outcrop, every stretch of wall that looked even slightly out of place.
Time passed.
Just as he started wondering if Phantom had fed him bad information on purpose, his gaze sharpened and fixed on a section of rock wall shrouded in darkness and dead vines.
There.
An energy barrier.
A concealment array had been layered over the entrance so that anyone approaching would instinctively dismiss it and move on.
Hodell raised his hand. A sphere of energy with the same unique frequency as the key gathered slowly over his palm.
Then he pressed it against the barrier.
Ripples spread outward from his hand.
The rock wall blurred, turned transparent, and then melted soundlessly away, revealing a deep, narrow entrance just wide enough for one person to slip through.
Magic really was ridiculous sometimes.
He did not waste another second. The moment the passage appeared, he darted inside.
Behind him, the illusion sealed itself again, restoring the rock wall so perfectly that there was no sign anything had changed.
...
The laboratory was smaller than he had imagined.
Much smaller.
For a moment, Hodell genuinely wondered whether calling this place a laboratory was an insult to the concept.
Then he understood. If the place had been any larger, he probably would have run into permanent staff sooner or later. Small meant secrecy. Small meant fewer loose ends.
The room was cramped. The dim runes on the walls emitted a cold, eerie light. To the left stood a plain shelf packed with notebooks. To the right loomed a strange device. Several hibernation pods occupied the central space, making the whole room feel tight and claustrophobic.
Hodell checked the shelf first.
Most of the notebooks were tied to Black Bone's research. Experimental logs. Data comparisons. Process records.
So Phantom had not lied.
Then he turned to the machine.
It looked like a nest made from twisted branches of dark gold metal. At its center hung a massive crystal, suspended amid the tangle. Fine streams of energy stretched from it like blood vessels, some running toward nearby stone beds fitted with restraint straps, others disappearing beneath the floor.
Hodell walked over and flipped through the records near it.
The name written across the top of one file made his mouth twitch.
World Awakening Bell.
Arrogant.
The notes were dense with charts, observations, maintenance records, and experiment reports. He could not parse every line at a glance, but one thing was obvious enough. This place had been conducting long term research on the device.
"I can't make sense of all this data," he murmured to himself. "Better to use the one method I'm actually good at."
He stepped closer and raised his hand over the device.
The moment his palm hovered near its surface, a storm of broken thoughts stabbed straight into his consciousness.
No...
What is happening to my body...
Let me out...
I don't want to die...
Why me...
Hodell's whole body shivered.
The fragments carried raw, concentrated negative emotion. Fear. Resentment. Despair. Helplessness. Pain so vivid it felt almost physical. For one awful instant, he felt as though he had personally lived through the final moments of countless failed experimental subjects.
So this was what Phantom meant.
The laboratory really was tormenting Hybrid souls.
But why?
Why collect that much suffering? Why distill despair like a resource?
The answer did not come.
Instead, a warning came first.
Back in the monitoring room, the operator had already filed his report. Now, just after breathing a sigh of relief, he looked at another screen and froze.
Three new figures were moving straight toward the laboratory along the old riverbed, fast and direct, making no attempt at concealment.
...
[Analyzing energy structure...]
[Simulating energy...]
[Can be completed faster by consuming 30,000 EXP.]
Hodell made the decision immediately.
Accelerate.
Outside, the leader of the approaching trio raised a hand, signaling the two behind him to stop. He pressed his palm against the hidden barrier and frowned.
"The energy residue at the entrance is wrong," he said, voice low and tense. "This doesn't match our entry pattern. Someone deliberately erased the traces."
His heart sank.
"Someone is inside."
...
[Accelerating...]
[Progress: 12%... 45%... 78%... 98%...]
Hodell sensed the fluctuation at the same time.
His expression changed.
Not good.
The simulation had not quite finished, and the next problem had already arrived.
Then the panel flashed.
[Energy frequency replication complete.]
[Recorded: World Awakening Bell resonance frequency.]
[You have mastered skill blueprint: Spirit Net Node Tracking.]
Almost the same moment that prompt appeared, a strange noise echoed from the entrance.
Hodell moved at once, disappearing into shadow.
But the newcomers were fast. Illumination spells burst through the room, throwing harsh light into every corner. Three cloaked figures entered in a careful pincer formation, weapons ready, pressing step by step until he was boxed into the rear of the laboratory.
The leader's voice cut through the room.
"Who are you?"
He had no more exits. The three were strong. If he revealed too much, his identity could be exposed.
So he did what he had done best for a very long time.
He lied.
He dropped and rolled behind one of the hibernation pods. With his boosted Agility and accelerated movement, his body became a blur. In the same motion, he kicked the shelving unit toward them.
The shelf flew across the cramped room so fast that it seemed to jump in their vision.
The leader reacted instantly, throwing up an energy shield. The shelf smashed into it and exploded into splinters and scattered notes.
The three attacked without hesitation.
Magic missiles shrieked through the air and slammed into the cover Hodell had just abandoned. He slipped away again, using the room's clutter and blind angles to stay just ahead of the barrage.
Fast enough to be slippery.
Not fast enough to dominate.
Exactly the impression he wanted to leave.
The more they chased him, the stronger one thought became in the leader's mind.
"Phantom," he snarled. "You're not dead?"
It made perfect sense from his point of view. Who else but Phantom could enter this place so easily?
Hodell did not answer.
The leader took that silence as confirmation.
"Suppress him with energy spells!"
The three coordinated their pressure, shrinking his movement space little by little until at last he had the solid wall behind him and nowhere obvious left to run.
The leader raised his hand, magic ready.
"Phantom, you have nowhere left to go."
Hodell let out a cold laugh in reply.
"Is that so?"
He had already learned what he needed.
Fighting them here carried far more risk than reward. The misdirection had succeeded. Now all that remained was the exit.
He suddenly threw himself sideways with everything he had, as though forcing a breakthrough between two of them.
The trio reacted on instinct, shifting to cut him off.
But halfway through the movement, his body jerked to the side as if yanked by an invisible wire. The motion snapped unnaturally in midair, defying the logic of momentum.
It looked exactly like a short range teleport.
"Goodbye," he said in Phantom's tone.
[Character Summon Card: Phantom used.]
The moment his body hit the stone wall, he seemed to become a ghost. Without a sound, he merged directly into the rock and vanished.
The three men stared in horror.
He had phased through the wall.
"It really is him!"
The leader roared in fury. "After him!"
A spell blasted into the wall with a thunderous crash, sending stone chips flying everywhere, but all it left behind was a scorched crater.
There was no trace of anyone escaping.
...
Deep in a hidden stronghold, green light from a crystal lamp threw an eerie cast over the room.
Reed listened to the report in silence, thin fingers tapping the tabletop with slow, measured rhythm.
"So," he said at last, voice flat, "Phantom is not dead."
The man giving the report bowed his head. "Yes, Lord Reed. The speed, the phasing ability, the movement style, it could only have been Phantom."
Reed rose and circled the desk, approaching the three men who had returned from the laboratory cleanup.
"When you came back, did anything unusual happen on the way?"
"No, my lord. We avoided drawing attention and cleaned the site quickly. We were very careful during the return. We confirmed no one followed us."
"Did you."
Reed reached out and brushed the hem of the leader's cloak.
Several nearly invisible arcane motes were stripped free, revealed for only a second before Reed annihilated them.
That second was enough.
The room went cold.
All three men's faces turned pale.
"This..." the leader began, his voice shaking.
Reed withdrew his hand and sat down again.
"You allowed a traitor to escape from right under your noses," he said quietly, "and then you carried his gift all the way back to our door."
He interlaced his fingers and lowered his gaze in thought.
This was no random accident.
Everything outside pointed to Phantom being dead. The officials believed it. Even their own information channels believed it.
Yet less than a day later, Phantom had appeared alive in the laboratory.
A wall phasing spell? Reed dismissed the possibility almost immediately.
No.
Far more likely, Phantom had already been caught or turned. To gain official trust, he had surrendered the laboratory key and cooperated in staging his own death at Ryan's hands. That would convince the authorities of his value while also making the organization relax.
After that, the officials only needed enough time to replicate the key.
Phantom had chosen the timing deliberately.
He had not gone back to the laboratory to destroy it.
He had gone there to plant a trail.
He allowed himself to be discovered. Allowed himself to be chased. Then used that fake resurrection to leave an unforgettable impression before fleeing through the wall.
The three cleanup men would realize something was wrong and hurry back in person to report. And because they would fear magical communications being intercepted, they would not use the mana net immediately.
Which meant Phantom's real target had not been the laboratory at all.
It had been the route back.
The seed had already been planted.
"The authorities are no longer content to investigate from the shadows," Reed said softly, and for the first time that night, something heavy settled in his chest.
Still, not everything was lost.
The World Awakening Bell remained in place. That meant official contact with Phantom had been short. Too short for them to thoroughly study everything in the lab.
He stared at the crystal lamp's dim reflection and thought in silence.
...
By dawn, Hodell was back in his room, sitting at the table with one hand supporting his head.
Morning light filtered through the window, touching his face with a faint gray gold sheen.
The small black medicine bottle still sat before him.
Its faint energy traces remained.
Lamia had not come.
That was what bothered him most.
If Phantom's return had really shaken the organization, shouldn't she have appeared immediately to question him? To test him? To probe for discrepancies?
Unless she already knew enough.
Or unless the disguise had failed.
Hodell took a slow breath and pressed down the tension in his chest.
If the worst had happened, pacing around would only make him easier to isolate. Better to wait. Better to stay where his teammates could see him. If the organization moved openly, then the first thing they would want was to arrest him alive and dissect him for materials.
So he washed, changed into his standard Rapid Response Department uniform, and went to the briefing room with an expression as calm as always.
He stayed alert the entire way.
No obvious surveillance.
No tail.
No extra guards.
That did not ease him much.
When he reached the briefing room, it was empty for once. He sat in his usual place and waited.
Soon the others began to arrive.
Baron came in first, full of his usual rough energy. He dropped into his chair and slapped Hodell on the shoulder.
"Ryan, why are you so early today?"
Hodell smiled easily. "Slept well."
Eileen and Loyi entered together, speaking in low voices. Sasha took her usual seat in the corner, silent as a blade left in the dark.
Then Baron suddenly leaned forward, eyes bright.
"Have you heard?"
.....
[If you don't want to wait for the next update, read 10–50 chapters ahead on P@treon.]
[[email protected]/FanficLord03]