Chapter 28: Leaving

Dewitt Nair looked at the grayish-white, rotting heart, his expression shifting from terror to calm.

When he looked up again, not a trace of emotion could be seen, only a pair of eyes filled with an irresolvable venomous and cold hatred.

He just remembered that he was already dead!

Dewitt stretched out his hands, lunging towards Yvette Lambe, who was controlling the chains, like a living corpse craving flesh and blood.

But someone was one step ahead of him.

Mullen Reed moved sideways like a phantom, nimbly flipping the dagger in his hand.

In an instant, Dewitt’s hands and head had already hit the floor, and blood spurted onto the floorboards like a fountain.

At the same time, Harvey Michelson seemed to have been prepared.

He pulled a pistol from his coat and fired at Jesse Holmes, who had been silent at the very back.

Simultaneously, he threw a silver amulet forward with his left hand.

The amber-yellow bullet passed through Jesse’s head.

No blood flowed from the empty wound.

The man’s wooden eyes suddenly found focus.

With a squelch, a small, shriveled hand reached out from his wound, its sallow nails a mix of red and white, bloody and bizarre.

“Purify!”

Following Harvey’s low shout, the pure silver amulet first lit up, then burned fiercely, and finally, turned into a pillar of fire that engulfed Jesse Holmes.

Yvette Lambe had also entered the final stage.

She turned her wrist, palm facing up, and her three fingers suddenly clenched.

“Seal.”

A chain extended from Bev Hardy’s half-open mouth into her oral cavity, then with a forceful pull, it dragged out a mass of moist filth.

Looking closely, it was a tangled knot of hair, with half a grayish-white, rotting heart hidden within.

“Bind.”

Yvette’s expression remained unchanged as she coldly uttered the last word.

Layer upon layer of light-blue chains coiled around the heart, forming an irregular, massive chain ball.

Bev Hardy went limp all over, like a puppet with its strings cut, and fell to the ground.

The three of them had a clear division of labor, clean and efficient.

From the moment the mutation occurred to its resolution, it had only taken a dozen seconds, which made Rosie’s action of pulling Hermann to find cover seem a bit silly.

“Uhm.”

Fearing that her action would be misunderstood as fleeing out of guilt, Rosie immediately let go of the hand pulling a certain person and gave a French military salute.

Hermann, who had been inexplicably pulled to run and then inexplicably let go, was a little helpless.

He glanced at the officials in front of him who specialized in dealing with ‘heretics.’

He showed no awareness of being a wild Covenanter himself, not a hint of panic, and even took the initiative to strike up a conversation.

“You officers acted so quickly. It seems you were well-prepared.”

Harvey adjusted his hat, which had been blown slightly askew by the blast of air, and looked at Hermann without hiding anything.

“This covenant agreement can distinguish whether the signatory has been mentally contaminated or possessed.”

“We originally thought only Jesse Holmes had a problem.”

“We didn’t expect Dewitt Nair and Bev Hardy to have been so severely contaminated as well.”

After he finished speaking, he glanced at Hermann and Rosie.

Although he didn’t continue, the meaning was already clear.

In the same environment, when everyone else had problems, the ones with no problems at all might be the biggest trouble.

“It might be because Miss Moulton and I didn’t completely follow the ‘ritual’s’ instructions and continue to stay in that room,” Hermann explained.

‘Sure enough, there was a big problem with that room.’

The maddening whispers from the first night still circled in Rosie’s mind like a maggot gnawing on bone.

Whenever she recalled this memory, her thoughts would become stagnant.

After all, these two had passed the test of the ‘Oath-Keeping Covenant.’

Although the people from the Sunwheel Church were a bit unhinged, their methods for dealing with evil gods were the most numerous and most complete.

A detailed investigation would still require returning to the church and using some special artifacts for confirmation.

With this in mind, Harvey didn’t continue his questioning but instead instructed his colleagues to handle the aftermath.

‘This should be the end of it, right?’

Rosie breathed a sigh of relief in her heart, then felt a little apprehensive again.

This meant she would soon have to interact with the Viscount Moulton’s family as ‘Rosie Moulton.’

‘Will I blow my cover? As a woman, and a noble young lady at that, can a former high school boy like me pull it off?’

The more she thought, the more chaotic it became, her nervousness no less than the first time she browsed a certain kind of website and chose to “insist on visiting.”

‘The door to a new world is right ahead!’

‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. First, let’s get out of this d*mn place.’

Rosie stopped overthinking and asked about the issue she was most concerned about right now.

“Officer Michelson, may I ask, how do we leave this old castle?”

“Old castle?”

Harvey shook his head.

“There is no so-called old castle.”

“We are inside a mirror.”

…

After coming out of the mirror in Hannah Carter’s room, exhaustion and hunger descended upon her, pressing down on Rosie’s body without reason.

Her stomach churned with acid, and her eyelids were heavy.

Only then did she belatedly realize that during her time in the ‘old castle,’ she had not eaten at all.

What was even more terrifying was that she had been completely untroubled by it, completely unaware of the concepts of ‘hunger and food,’ even though she had been staying in a dining room the whole time!

Rosie placed a hand on her lower abdomen, and her mouth began to secrete a large amount of saliva, a physiological phenomenon of craving food.

If she had come out a few days later, regardless of whether she went mad or not, she was afraid she would have starved to death on the spot.

‘Is this also an ‘ability’ of this mirror?’

She couldn’t help but look back.

The half-person-high mirror had already been covered by Harvey Michelson’s greatcoat.

It looked completely ordinary, with no hint of anything unusual.

Her stomach began to protest again, and along with the twitching, it let out an ungraceful sound.

“Grumble~~“

Rosie frowned, her somewhat puzzled gaze shifting to Hermann.

Then, her gaze moved down and stopped on the man’s abdomen, while a look of sudden realization appeared on her face.

“You’re hungry?”

Hermann, “???”

After coming out of the mirror world, there were many follow-up issues to deal with, so naturally, there was no time to find a restaurant for the two of them to have a full meal.

After contacting the church and the police department, Rosie and Hermann were granted the opportunity to be ‘bailed out and sent home.’

Of course, to ‘protect’ their personal safety, Yvette and Mullen were assigned as bodyguards until the church was ready for the ‘interrogation.’

In the carriage, Rosie, who was so hungry she could eat a whole cow but had to chew slowly and eat gracefully due to her noble young lady persona, swallowed the last small bite of her pie.

‘Mm, this pie is made with beef brisket mixed with onions and some kind of unknown fruit chunks.’

‘The savory flavor is mixed with a hint of fruity tartness that neutralizes the greasiness of the meat.’

‘It’s quite good.’

‘It’s just that the portion is a little small.’

Rosie raised her eyes, her misty-blue gaze landing on the man sitting opposite her.

Perhaps Hermann’s ‘stomach’ had protested too obviously, as Mullen had specially brought him an extra Pusey pie.

At this moment, the scapegoat was eating his second pie.

When he caught Rosie peeking over from the corner of his eye, he even raised an eyebrow provocatively.

Rosie, “…”

‘D*mn it, this ungrateful man!’