Chapter 135: False Truths
The darkness was brutally torn apart, like a veil ripped away from the light. Mordred was wrenched from his nightmare world... only to fall into another.
Isaac’s eyes flew open suddenly. The grayish ceiling, the vibrating neon lights, the enclosed room with its metallic and disinfectant smell. The return was brutal, immediate. His wrists instantly hurt the runic handcuffs still firmly in place behind his back. His body was bound to this metal chair, cold against his skin, and his muscles screamed with fatigue and pain.
And before him, just inches from his bruised face... Marc Lemaire’s smile.
A triumphant smile. Viscerally unwholesome. A predator’s smile who had just found a weakness, an opening, leverage.
- "You’re finally awake..." whispered the inspector, his voice flowing, sickeningly sweet. "Perfect."
Isaac clenched his jaw, his pupils still slightly clouded by the shock of his return. But the orange glow in the depths of his eyes still burned, even weakened. Even if the vise of pain from the other world still weighed on his consciousness, even if he was physically broken, he was not subdued. Not yet.
Marc Lemaire tapped something in his inside pocket and pulled out a small black vial connected to a translucent injector, the contents of which vibrated with a strange glow.
- "I found something you should like," he announced, his voice falsely jovial, tinged with barely contained sadism. "A very... special little gadget. Illegal, of course, but between us, who cares?"
He twirled the syringe between his fingers, as if presenting a work of art.
- "It’s a toxin... extracted from a very rare creature, found nowhere else but in a single dungeon in the world. Very unstable. Very... precious. It circulated for a long time on the black market before we got our hands on it."
He leaned even closer, his eyes gleaming with sick pride.