Chapter 239 — Kamel

"Are you real?"

The humanoid creature, seemingly formed of coalesced arcane energy, let out a startled cry, and that cry alone brought Gao Yang and everyone else to a halt.

This creature could speak! This creature could communicate!

Gao Yang forcibly checked the "Steel Storm" that was about to be released, keeping his longsword angled defensively before him while he stared at the mana creature. Behind him, Tir spread both hands wide, and a hazy veil of water mist enveloped the creature. Though it was impossible to tell what the mist actually did, it was clearly a powerful magical effect, for the lightning crackling all over the mana creature's body dimmed by more than half in an instant.

"You can talk?!" Gao Yang demanded in a low voice. "Who are you? Why are you here?"

But the mana creature seemed not to hear the others at all. He merely looked down at the dented slash mark on the armor plate over his chest, then glanced at the Cecil soldiers poised on full alert around him, and kept muttering to himself: "Real? Fake? Real? Fake? Real..."

"Hey, what real and fake!" Tir could not help shouting. "If you don't explain yourself right now, I'll let you taste a sea crab's pincers!"

"I... I..." The mana creature finally seemed to register the shift in the atmosphere around him. But he had likely gone far too long without communicating with anyone; even if he retained the capacity for speech, he was severely lacking in logic. He merely swayed in place, at a loss, not knowing how to answer the others' questions or how to express his own thoughts. After a period of violent inner conflict, he suddenly let out a shrill shriek and began shouting, "I need to check the barrier! I need to check the barrier! I need to check the barrier!"

Amid these seemingly deranged cries, the figure of the humanoid creature formed of arcane energy gradually grew unstable, and then, before everyone's eyes, he abruptly transformed into a bolt of lightning, leaping and flickering with a crackle before vanishing from sight.

Leaving Gao Yang and the others staring at one another. Tir was still standing there with both hands raised in a great-wing-spread (fish-fin) pose, but clearly her mist barrier had failed to bind that bizarre mana creature.

"What just happened..." Miss Siren wagged the tip of her tail in confusion. "Where'd the lightning guy go?"

"I don't know, but I suspect he'll be back," Gao Yang said, not sheathing his longsword but keeping a wary eye on every stir in the hall. "If I'm not mistaken, he should be..."

Before Gao Yang could finish, a series of strange noises suddenly came from deep within the facility.

The sounds were chaotic and confused, impossible to tell whether they were boulders rolling or steel grinding, as though a mass of disordered machinery had started up deep inside the building. And with this chaotic noise, lightning flickered once more through the semicircular hall, and after a series of crackling sounds, the humanoid creature brimming with lightning appeared before everyone again.

Tir immediately struck another great-wing-spread (fish-fin) pose...

But before the mist barrier could form, the humanoid creature suddenly raised both hands—or rather, the two leaping arcs of lightning that resembled arms—and a shout tinged with an eerie tremor came from between his armor plates: "Wait! We are not enemies!"

"You attacked us first," Heddy said, leveling her staff at him. "What exactly are you... a person?"

"As expected... as expected... a hallucination wouldn't have this many variables... a hallucination wouldn't be this logical..." Yet the humanoid creature only kept muttering to himself, lucid one moment and mad the next, until Gao Yang repeated Heddy's question, and only then did the creature suddenly react. "Ah... ah... right, self-introduction, self-introduction, I am... I am..."

But the creature went on with "I am" for quite some time without managing to produce a definite name. After a long effort at recollection, he suddenly fell into agitation: "Who am I? Who am I?! I have a name... I should have a name! Who exactly am I?!"

Crackling lightning once again bled from his body's surface, and the whole space began to fill with an unsettling, powerful magic. Heddy instantly raised a mana barrier, but the cold sweat continuously breaking out on her and her pallid face made it clear she was no match for this magic.

But just before the situation could worsen again, Gao Yang suddenly called out: "Kamel. Your name is Kamel Srain."

The mana creature froze the moment he heard this name; those few syllables seemed to press some switch, abruptly hauling him back from the brink of losing control. He murmured the name in a low voice, and only after a long while did he raise his "head," two bright points of lightning turning toward Gao Yang: "How do you know?! Do you know me?!"

"The armor on your chest," Gao Yang said, pointing at the armor plates on the other's body. "Your name is written on it."

The "mana creature" lowered his head a little sluggishly, and saw that one of the rune-inscribed armor plates floating at his body's surface was indeed carved with text. It was a single sentence:

My name is Kamel Srain. I am the watcher of the "Defiance" Fortress.

"My name is Kamel Srain. I am the watcher of the 'Defiance' Fortress..." The mana creature called "Kamel" slowly repeated the sentence on the armor plate, and with those words, his state stabilized with astonishing speed.

A moment later, under everyone's tense gaze, he raised his head again. The arcane energy surging over his body was far calmer than before. He looked around in confusion, then suddenly drifted toward Gao Yang, asking urgently: "Who are you? Humans? Imperials? Survivors? Are there still people alive? How is the world outside? How goes our empire?!"

Heddy instinctively raised her staff. "An Ancestor!"

"Don't worry!" Gao Yang waved a hand, signaling those around him to stay calm, while he himself shifted a couple of steps to the side, reopening the distance between himself and "Kamel." "First, calm down. Answer me one question first—are you a magister of the Gondor Empire who entered this facility during the Spark Era?"

"The Spark Era..." Kamel blanked for a moment, as though he had not heard that term in a very long time. Only after a pause did he respond sluggishly. "Ah, yes, the Spark Era... I was then... back then I was still human..."

The soldiers on guard around them stirred slightly, and someone could not help exclaiming in a low voice: "Human? He really was a person once?!" "How does a human turn into this?"

Tir was also greatly startled, and turned to look at Heddy: "You humans can transform too?"

This piece of seafood's thought process was completely on a different frequency from everyone else's...

Gao Yang ignored the whispers around him (and Tir's loud voice). He fixed his gaze on "Kamel" before him: "You can rest easy—we are human, except for this long one here; she is our ally. We are indeed descendants of the Gondor Empire."

"Humans! Descendants of the Gondor Empire! You survived! Our plan from back then worked!" Kamel grew suddenly excited, but this time he kept the energy bleeding from his body well under control; he only crackled for a spell before settling down again. "So the empire has been rebuilt? How many years have passed now? Who is leading everyone? Is it Norton's bloodline? What of the rest of the continent? Has it all been rebuilt as well?"

"Kamel's" questions came one after another, and he himself was in a state of extreme agitation. Gao Yang had to pour a basin of cold water first to quiet this ancient soul (though in his eyes the fellow still seemed rather young): "I have bad news. The Gondor Empire is already history."

"...What does that mean?"