Dewitt Neal stared at that grayish, rotting heart.
His expression shifted from terror to calm.
When he looked up again, not a trace of emotion remained—only his eyes glinted with lingering malice and chilling resentment.
He suddenly remembered—he was already dead!
Dewitt stretched out both hands, lunging at Yvette Lamb, who was manipulating the chains, like a ghoul craving flesh and blood.
But someone moved even faster. Marlon Reed slipped forward like a phantom, deftly flipping the dagger in his hand.
In a flash, Dewitt’s hands—and his head—fell to the floor, blood spraying like a fountain across the boards.
At the same time, Harvey Mitchelson, as if prepared in advance, drew a pistol from his coat and fired at Jessie Holmes, who had been silent at the rear all this time.
With his left hand, he tossed forward a Silver Amulet.
The amber bullet pierced Jessie’s skull. No blood flowed from the hollow wound. Suddenly, a spark of focus lit in the man’s dull eyes.
With a wet squelch, a shriveled little hand reached out from his wound, its yellowed nails streaked with red and white—sinister and gruesome.
“Purification!”
As Harvey shouted low, the pure silver amulet first shone, then burst into fierce flames, and finally transformed into a pillar of fire that engulfed Jessie Holmes.
Yvette Lamb was already wrapping things up. She twisted her wrist, palm up, and suddenly curled three fingers inward.
“Knock.”
A chain stretched from Bev Hardy’s half-open mouth into her throat.
With a sharp tug, it drew out a clump of wet filth.
Looking closely, it was a tangled knot of hair, with half a gray, rotten heart hidden inside.
“Seal.”
Yvette’s expression didn’t change as she coldly uttered the final word.
Layer after layer, the pale blue chains wound around the heart, forming a large, irregular chain ball.
Bev Hardy’s whole body went limp, like a puppet whose strings had snapped, and she collapsed to the floor.
The three worked with clear roles and crisp efficiency.
From the outbreak of the mutation to its resolution, it took only a dozen seconds—so much so that Lothie’s frantic scrambling for cover with Herman seemed a bit silly in comparison.
“Uh…”
Lothie, afraid her actions would be mistaken for an attempted escape, immediately let go of the hand she’d been holding and snapped off a French military salute.
Herman, who had been inexplicably dragged along and then just as inexplicably let go, looked a little helpless.
He glanced at the official team specializing in ‘heretical cults’, showing none of the self-awareness of a Wild Pactmaker.
He didn’t look the least bit panicked, and even took the initiative to strike up conversation.
“You officers moved so quickly—it looks like you were prepared for this.”
Harvey straightened his hat, which had been knocked askew by the shockwave, and looked at Herman without any attempt to hide the truth.
“This Oathkeeper Contract allows us to determine whether the signatory has suffered spiritual contamination or possession.”
“We originally thought only Jessie Holmes had a problem.”
“We didn’t expect Dewitt Neal and Bev Hardy to be so badly corrupted as well.”
After speaking, he glanced at Herman and Lothie.
Though he didn’t say more, the meaning was clear.
In the same environment, when everyone else has problems, the ones who seem perfectly fine might actually be the most troublesome.
“Maybe it’s because Miss Moulton and I didn’t follow the ‘ritual’ exactly, and kept staying in that room,” Herman explained.
Sure enough, that room was a huge problem.
The maddening whispers from the first night still clung to Lothie’s mind like worms gnawing at her bones. Every time she recalled that memory, her thoughts seemed to freeze.
After all, these two had passed the Oathkeeper Contract’s screening.
Although the folks from the Church of the Sun were all a bit… odd in the head, their methods against evil gods were certainly the most plentiful and refined.
A thorough examination would require returning to the church and using some special relics for confirmation.
With that in mind, Harvey didn’t ask further and instead directed his colleagues to handle the aftermath.
It should be over now, right?
Lothie let out a breath of relief, but then grew anxious again.
This meant she was about to meet the Moulton Viscount’s family as ‘Lothie Moulton’.
Would she give herself away? As a woman, and a noble family’s young lady, could she, a former male high school student, really pull this off?
The more she thought about it, the more flustered she became—her nerves now rivaled the feeling she’d had the first time she’d stubbornly persisted in visiting a certain kind of website.
Ahead lay the door to a new world!
Whatever comes, she’d face it head-on. First, she needed to get out of this haunted place.
Lothie stopped overthinking and asked the question weighing most on her mind.
“Officer Mitchelson, how do we leave this castle?”
“Castle?”
Harvey shook his head. “There’s no so-called castle.”
“We’re inside a mirror.”
After stepping out from the mirror in Hannah Carter’s room, a wave of exhaustion and hunger crashed over Lothie, crushing her without mercy.
Her stomach churned with acid, her eyelids drooped—only then did she realize that during her entire time in the ‘castle’, she hadn’t eaten once.
What was worse, she hadn’t even noticed anything odd about it—not a single thought about ‘hunger’ or ‘food’, even though she’d spent the whole time in a restaurant!
Lothie pressed a hand to her belly as her mouth began to water—an instinctive reaction to the thought of food.
If she’d stayed inside even a few days longer, she might have died of starvation right then and there, madness or not.
Was this another ‘ability’ of the mirror?
She couldn’t help but glance back.
The half-height mirror was now covered by Harvey Mitchelson’s coat, looking utterly ordinary, giving away nothing strange.
Her stomach protested again, twitching and letting out a most unseemly sound.
“Gurururu~~”
Lothie frowned, her confused gaze drifting over to Herman.
Then her eyes dropped to his stomach, and realization dawned on her face.
“You’re hungry?”
Herman, “???”
After leaving the Mirror World, there were still many matters to deal with, so there was no time to find a restaurant for a proper meal.
After contacting the church and the police headquarters, Lothie and Herman were granted ‘bail to go home’.
Of course, for their ‘safety’, until the church was ready for ‘questioning’, Yvette and Marlon were assigned as their bodyguards.
In the carriage, though she was hungry enough to eat a whole cow, Lothie had to nibble delicately and eat gracefully to maintain her noble young lady persona as she swallowed the last bite of pie.
Hmm, this pie was made with beef brisket, onions, and some unknown fruit.
The salty flavor was balanced by a hint of fruity tartness, cutting through the richness of the meat—really quite good.
Only, the portion was a bit small.
Lothie looked up, her misty blue eyes glancing at the man sitting opposite.
Perhaps because Herman’s ‘stomach’ had protested too loudly, Marlon had brought him an extra Puxi Pie.
At this moment, the scapegoat was eating his second pie.
Catching Lothie’s sideways glance, he even raised his brow in a deliberately provocative way.
Lothie, “……”
Ugh, this ungrateful man!