While Elias was in the hotel room racking his brains to comfort the weeping Charlotte...
The battle on the other side had reached a gruesome conclusion.
Two blocks away.
On the edge of the East District of Hope County, near the outskirts.
On the water-slicked cobblestone road, several swaying figures were reflected.
Cecil stood in the middle of the street.
She was gasping for air.
Every breath felt like a rusty steel file scraping against her lungs, bringing waves of tearing pain.
Her hands gripped two very different weapons.
In her left hand was a short-barreled shotgun emitting a faint blue light.
The metal surface of the barrel was covered in dense supernatural patterns, now radiating searing heat from being overcharged.
Even through her gloves, Cecil could feel the heat.
In her right hand, she held a heavy, ancient-looking long-barreled percussion cap gun.
She watched the man standing a short distance away with vigilance.
Beside Cecil, the once-full elite squad of the Seventh Agency was in a tragic state.
Only three people were still barely standing.
Finn didn't have a single patch of intact skin on his body.
His coat had long since turned into tattered rags, and dark red blood dripped from his fingertips into the puddles.
The other one still standing was a man wearing a silk top hat and a handlebar mustache.
His condition was even worse.
His entire left arm was gone, the stump crudely tied off with a belt, appearing a necrotic purple-black.
He pressed his remaining right hand firmly against the wound, leaning against the damp brick wall, his face as pale as death-room paper.
As for the other two investigators.
They lay in a pool of blood filled with mud and shredded flesh.
Only the faint rise and fall of their chests and the bloody foam occasionally bubbling from their mouths proved these two poor souls were still clinging to the world of the living.
"Mester, you are under arrest."
Cecil spoke coldly.
Her voice was devoid of emotion, carrying a chilling pressure.
This was her final ultimatum.
She knew very well she had no patience left, nor any resources to engage in even one more round of combat.
Her biggest mistake was misjudging Mester.
The investigator who had previously entered Mester's Treatment Room clearly mentioned he was only at Scale Two.
But the man before her was clearly at Scale Four.
This had led to the current situation.
The life signs of the two investigators on the ground were fading rapidly.
If the battle didn't end and first aid wasn't administered within ten minutes, they would become cold corpses.
More importantly.
From the corner of her eye, Cecil stared at the brass instrument on her waist.
It was a spirit-measuring device issued by the Seventh Agency.
This precise and complex instrument was invented to prevent terrifying creatures not belonging to the material realm from interfering with reality.
It was hyper-sensitive to the aura of the spirit world and any abnormal spiritual fluctuations outside the paths of the Seven Orthodox Gods.
As long as it was within a five-kilometer range.
Once it detected evil spirituality from outside the material realm, it would emit a piercing alarm and point its needle toward the source.
And at a certain moment during the peak of the battle just now.
The device had suddenly gone haywire, letting out a shrill buzz.
It was the scent of hell!
What Cecil found most unbelievable was the direction the needle was locked onto.
It was exactly where they had come from—St. John's Cross!
Cecil felt her temples throbbing.
She never expected the situation to collapse to this extent.
Just yesterday, Branch Manager Guardian had returned covered in blood with a noble's child.
That child was being hunted like a rabid dog by the Mist Veil Society, an evil cult hiding in the shadows.
That matter was already troublesome enough, involving cultist undercurrents and Wayland Capital.
And today.
Even hell had entered the fray!
Cecil gritted her teeth, a strong taste of blood rising in her throat.
She thought her trip to Hope County was just a routine business trip.
After all, it was just to catch a habitual thief on the run.
He had only stolen some documents transferred from the Storm Inquisition to the Seventh Agency.
And a containment object of unknown function.
The result?
She had stepped into a bottomless quagmire!
It seemed Hope County really was a place that kept giving...
More and more hopeful by the second...
She couldn't understand.
Why would such a complete lunatic be hidden in an industrial city like Hope County?
This man named Mester.
On the surface, he was a respected psychiatrist.
In secret, he was a butcher who used cruel methods to extract the souls of his patients to create soul coins!
From that infernal aura, it was clear this guy even had connections with demons.
How could a normal human being.
Actively seek contact with demons that represented absolute madness and corruption?
"Hehehe..."
Facing Cecil's cold barrel and final ultimatum.
The man opposite her, Mester, suddenly split his lips into a grin.
The laughter was extremely grating.
In the fierce battle just now, Mester had also paid a heavy price.
His once-clean and sophisticated doctor's coat was now full of torn holes.
Several shocking, through-and-through bullet holes marred his body beneath the coat.
Those were courtesy of the two supernatural firearms in Cecil's hands.
Besides that, several deep, bone-deep sword wounds were on his shoulders and abdomen.
Finn had carved those out with his longsword at the cost of his own severe injuries.
But the strange thing was.
Despite such fatal injuries, Mester hadn't fallen, nor had he bled much normal red blood.
"Lady Investigator."
Mester's voice held an undisguised fervor and mockery.
"I have to admit."
"As low-Scale transcendents, you can indeed rely solely on those powerful containment objects to bridge the massive gap between our Scales."
"You did quite well. You almost really killed me."
At this point, Mester paused.
He slowly raised his head, and in his eyes that once belonged to a human, a terrifying, irrational, and frantic light now flickered.
"But you guessed one thing wrong."
"And that is..."
"If I wanted to leave you all here, it would be extremely simple!"
The moment his words fell.
Mester suddenly raised both hands and violently grabbed the collar of his tattered shirt.
With the sound of fabric being torn apart.
Mester's entire chest was completely exposed to the cold air.
Cecil suddenly felt a chill run down her spine.
Beneath the shirt, it wasn't a normal human body at all!
It was a bizarre skeleton made entirely of dizzyingly complex brass tubes, steel bearings, and unknown black metal!
In the center of this cold, oily metal skeleton.
A mechanical heart, sewn together from countless gears and pulsing flesh, was embedded where the heart should be!
In that instant, all the pieces clicked together in Cecil's mind.
She finally understood!
No wonder the investigator who entered the treatment room said Mester was only at Scale Two.
No wonder many of the spells she cast had mysteriously failed when they hit him.
No wonder he could still talk to her normally after disabling his own hearing during his escape.
Because the psychiatrist standing before them was actually an alchemy puppet!
Then where was the real Mester?
Cecil felt a surge of fury.
If the original body escaped, it would be a massive stain on her career!
In a flash.
Several dark red incantations carrying the aura of destruction suddenly erupted from Mester's metal fingers.
An intense sense of mortal danger gripped Cecil's throat like a physical hand.
"Bring the two of them over, now!"
Cecil had no time to worry about her anger and let out a blood-curdling roar.
"Get behind me!!!"
In the split second she reacted.
Muscle memory surpassed her brain's speed of thought.
She suddenly raised the heavy long-barreled percussion cap gun in her right hand and pulled the trigger.
"Bang!"
The hammer slammed down.
The muzzle didn't spray gunpowder smoke or lethal lead bullets.
Instead, a supernatural gem, highly compressed and flashing with a blinding blue light, whistled out with a sharp sonic boom.
However, she was still one fatal step too late.
The moment the gem, carrying terrifying kinetic energy, accurately pierced the metal skeleton of Mester's chest.
A strong surge of energy distortion erupted.
But an attack of this level only caused the self-destructing alchemy puppet to stall for a mere second.
One second.
An infinitesimal gap.
Next, a vast, desperate wave of destructive energy, thick with the scent of hell, used Mester's mechanical body as an axis and exploded outward in a sphere.
The surrounding cobblestones were instantly blown away and vaporized like paper.
The air wailed in agony under the high temperature and pressure.
In the final moment of life or death.
The battered Finn and the one-armed investigator with the mustache exploded with the most terrifying survival potential of their lives.
Each of them grabbed a comatose colleague by the collar, dragging them across the cobblestones and leaving two long trails of blood.
They scrambled and crawled, dragging the people behind Ms. Cecil.
The wild energy in the distance suddenly imploded inward.
Soon, that destructive energy, compressed to its limit, was released entirely without any restraint.
"Boom!"
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