Mystery: Survival from the Secret Doll

Chapter 305 304 The Rebels

The leader of this group of intruders was a man who looked to be in his thirties or forties, with a burly and robust build, wearing a black, well-fitting uniform, and with a long scar running from his cheekbone to the corner of his mouth, and a fierce and cold expression.

He took out his revolver and fired several shots at the puppets on the ground. He was swift and decisive, and before the puppets' spiritual threads could reconnect, he blew their heads off.

The heads of the puppets whose spirit threads had been severed instantly burst open, spraying white and red substances everywhere.

The spirit threads on the slain puppets stretched out again, seemingly drifting in some direction, but soon they shattered unwillingly with the death of the puppets and the dissipation of their spirits, disappearing without a trace.

Not long after, all that remained were the remains of people who had been shot in the head, dismembered, or had their bodies riddled with bullets and their vital organs, such as the heart, completely shattered, along with a few people cleaning up the corpses.

"Captain, this batch of secret puppets has been dealt with."

One of the men, whose left hand was fractured and twisted, and who was grimacing in pain, walked up to the leader, a burly man in his thirties or forties, and whispered, "The other teams should have mostly succeeded as well, but..."

He was silent for a moment, then lowered his head and said, "Charn is dead."

Hillis slowly turned his head to look at the man with the twisted left arm. After a long silence, he said, "Chan is dead."

"Who the hell is controlling these damned things? And why are they doing this?"

Beside him, another person, dragging the corpse and preparing to take it away to extract its extraordinary properties, muttered a curse.

"What exactly does that guy hiding behind the scenes want? For so long, he hasn't even dared to show his face. He's just been constantly transforming the puppets, transforming, transforming, transforming. And then what? Is he or she going to fill every corner of Rune with those inhuman, ghostly, neither yin nor yang, neither good nor evil, and put on a silent play?"

Sirius let out a slow breath and said in a deep voice, "Alright, let's get out of here before the official Extraordinary Ones arrive."

"Official Beyonders... Hah, these guys are really laughable. Captain, why don't we just kill the Mystic Puppet among the Official Beyonders and avenge Griffin and Hend!"

Someone else dragged the corpse, cursing fiercely, thinking that they might as well kill the official extraordinary individuals as well.

It's truly laughable that even within the official Extraordinary, an organization under the Church of the Righteous God, there are puppets manipulated by puppet masters. Some of them have even risen to high positions, controlling the entire squads under the official Extraordinary, making it increasingly difficult for them, the wild Extraordinary who have discovered the truth, to survive.

“No.” Sirius calmly rejected the opinion of the person who wanted to fight to the death with the official Extraordinary.

They can't win, and there's no point in going against the official organization; it will only cause them to suffer even more casualties.

In this situation, unless the Church can examine its own organizational structure, identify the high-ranking Mystic within it, and eliminate that Mystic, the official Beyonders will only be enemies, not allies.

“Captain.” With his hand twisted in pain, the injured Simon couldn’t help but look at Sirius again. “These things have been happening more and more lately. I have a feeling that the mastermind behind this is about to appear.”

Lucky people's inspiration is always quite strong and accurate.

Just as Sirius was about to say something, a broken mirror in front of him suddenly flashed with light.

"Get out of the way!"

His expression changed, and he raised his gun to shoot at the mirror.

But Triss was faster; she grabbed the man with the broken arm by the ankle and, with a scream from Simon, dragged him swiftly into the mirror world.

The bullet struck the mirror, which was rapidly dimming. The mirror, which contained the world within it, shattered with a crack, but the person who had just been there had already vanished.

He was dragged into the world inside the mirror, and none of the people present had the extraordinary ability to enter the world inside the mirror through the mirror!
"Simon!"

The world was in ruins, with houses collapsed, and people quickly arrived.

The leader was a man dressed in a black clergy robe, with a calm and expressionless face, exuding a sense of tranquility like the night.

"Surround this area. Don't let anyone get close, and don't let anyone leave."

"Yes, Deacon!"

The deacon of the Church of the Night nodded, then tapped his teeth lightly. A huge spirit appeared above the collapsed building and began to seep downwards.

basement.

Looking at the things seeping down from the ceiling, which must be some kind of spirit creature, Hillis gritted his teeth.

Upon realizing that official Beyonders had arrived, Sirius had no choice but to abandon Simon, who had been dragged into the mirror world, and leave with the rest of them, along with the Beyonders they had extracted and the corpses that had not yet extracted their Beyonders.

Before leaving, he set the place ablaze, burning the corpses of the puppets, along with everything in this underground gathering, in a crimson inferno.

"Disrupt them, quick!"

We can't let those official extraordinary beings... and the guy who took Simon away, find them.

-

Simon, who had been transported through the mirror world to a relatively safe area behind the mirror, was now looking at the smiling lady in front of him, dazed and powerless to resist.

He had just recovered from the shock of being grabbed by the ankle and dragged into the mirror world when he saw this endlessly charming woman. His Adam's apple bobbed involuntarily, he swallowed hard, and then stammered, "..."
"Madam, how can I help you?"

A witch's allure power belonging to the demigod level, which is something that a lucky person with only Sequence 7 cannot resist.

Triss parted her lips slightly, looking at the lucky person she had chosen with a thoughtful expression, "You guys seem to know quite a bit about that kind of thing?"

Judging from their appearance, these people must have been dealing with the puppet masters' puppets for quite some time. They even possess extraordinary weapons capable of directly severing the threads of the spirit body, which is quite rare.

After all, the Master of the Puppet is the most difficult sequence to deal with among all pathways and sequences below the level of a demigod.

Not to mention, a Puppet Master who manipulates so many Puppets at a party is clearly not just a Sequence 5 Puppet Master.

Sequence 4, Sequence 3, or perhaps Sequence 2 of the Diviner's Path? Triss lowered her eyes, pondering to herself that at this point in time, it might be information from a high-ranking Diviner's Path individual of this level.

But she had nothing.

At this point in time, there shouldn't be such a person in Backlund.

Of course, in her previous life, Triss herself was always kept by Edsak Augustus's side by the Witch Cult and did not have much opportunity to come into contact with other forces in Backlund. Perhaps such an event did happen at this point, but she was unaware of it.

"Yes, it is."

Under the witch's allure, Simon spoke very frankly and rapidly, like spilling beans, to the woman before him, who seemed to have her heart and soul no matter what she was talking about: "That's a secret doll... Madam, do you know what a secret doll is?"

He seemed eager to explain the concept of Mystic Puppet, perhaps wanting to demonstrate his erudition, but Triss, who had seen many Mystic Puppets, simply nodded, not wanting to waste time on the subject: "Hmm, I've looked into it. Do you know who their Mystic Puppets are?"

Seeing this, Lucky Simon could only shake his head regretfully, "No, we still haven't found their Puppet Master..."

They still haven't found their master puppeteer?
Triss's eyes flickered, and then she casually said, "Before encountering these Mystics, I met quite a few Mystics like them in Backlund."

"Madam, stay away from them!"

Upon hearing that Triss had encountered the Mystics, Simon said urgently, "Don't go near those Mystics, or you'll be targeted too!"

Being targeted, being targeted by the Master of Puppets?
Triss's lips curled slightly, but her expression was quite bewildered: "But the number of marionettes here seems to be very, very large. Are they all controlled by the same marionette master? Won't the official extraordinary beings interfere with this?"

"Is there some hidden story here that I don't know about...?"

Simon quickly explained, "Yes, they are all controlled by the same puppet master. We tried to trace the direction of the spirit threads, and the spirit threads in different locations in Backlund are all drifting in the same direction..."

"But that damned Puppet Master has used some kind of trick, and every time we track them down, we end up coming back empty-handed. There are more and more puppets in Backlund, and even some of the official Beyonders have been turned into puppets..."

"Ever since someone reported to the official Beyonders that a relative had been turned into a puppet, and that person was also turned into a puppet, and someone else had contacted the official Beyonders, that person was eventually captured and imprisoned in the church's underground. After we learned that there were puppets among the official Beyonders, we stopped trusting the authorities and instead organized ourselves to rebel..."

“Those puppets… they’re becoming increasingly unaware of crowds. They appear almost in groups, and no one can find the puppet master. It’s like no one knows why more and more people are being turned into puppets, but no one seems to notice it…”

"You can sense that these people are puppets?" Triss had caught a crucial point. She scrutinized the seemingly ordinary young man in front of her, so ordinary that he would go unnoticed in a crowd.

How did you detect these secret puppets?

She asked.

The puppet master's puppet is a very high-level puppet. Such a puppet is difficult to detect in front of people who do not know the puppet master.

Even if someone is quite knowledgeable about puppet masters, as long as the puppet masters manipulate them well, the puppets they control can present a lifelike feeling, making it quite difficult to detect any problems.

How did this guy, who isn't even at Sequence 5, discover the Puppet Master's Puppet?

Before Triss saw the spirits of the dead puppets appear in the mirror, she never thought of them as puppets.

Simon, somewhat bewildered, scratched his head with his still-intact hand. "It's just a feeling, a very strong feeling, like they're not living beings, they have no self-awareness, they're a group of walking corpses..."

"The captain told me that it was a puppet, a humanoid puppet manipulated by a puppet master."

Triss fell silent.

This is the same feeling she had when she saw those secret puppets.
But before realizing that these feelings stemmed from their inhumanity, from their being puppets, Triss only found them strange and couldn't connect them with the puppets of the Puppet Master.

She then asked, "You, and all of you, have gathered together to fight against them?"

"Yes."

Simon said with certainty, “I, Captain, Charn, and many, many people want to turn those puppets back into corpses, instead of puppets being manipulated.”

"why?"

"Because we all have loved ones, and that's how we ended up like this."

As Simon spoke, he gritted his teeth, his eyes revealing clear hatred. "My grandmother, she was a devout follower of the Goddess of Night, but a few years ago she fell seriously ill. We sent her to Tingen, hoping to cure her, but the doctors there told us that her life was nearing its end and there was no point in trying to cure her..."

“We were heartbroken and took her back to Backlund. We had all begun to accept the outcome... but one day, she suddenly changed.”

"She became talkative and healthy, as if she had returned to the way she was before she got sick."

“Isn’t this a good thing?” Triss asked rhetorically, but she already had the answer.

“No, that’s not good at all.” Simon gritted his teeth, and under Triss’s deliberate instigation, he continued to tell his story: “My grandmother is dead. What’s moving is her corpse.”

"Although she looks healthy and has a good personality, just like my grandmother, she is no longer herself. The bitch who manipulates her defiles her body and wantonly plays with other people's feelings and hearts!"

"I could feel it. She became cold, stiff, and emotionless. Even with a kind smile on her face, just like before, inside she was a cold, emotionless monster."

"Then I said it, but everyone thought I was crazy, and then Grandma disappeared..."

Simon's eyes grew increasingly turbulent as he spoke, "We pulled a lot of strings, we prayed to the goddess, we searched for a very long time, and finally, we found Grandma."

“They killed so many people. My grandmother, she was a kind person, she wouldn’t even hurt small animals that could be eaten by the roadside, but she was smiling as she killed people…”

An elderly man, walking with faltering steps, led a young child by the hand. Holding playing cards, he smiled and, one card after another, severed the heads of those people. Blood splattered onto the old man, but he gave Simon, who was stunned, his usual kind smile.

(End of this chapter)