The city was by now shrouded in darkness, a misty fog filling the empty streets with a damp chill that stung to the bone. The air was damp and cold in the seaside city, and now that it was nightfall, the darkness pressed in on the homeless like a pervasive demon.
Hawthrone breathed into his hands and was about to find a place to get through the long, cold night ahead of him.
Just then, several police cars burst out of the road and surrounded the area. A large group of police officers rushed down, armed and ready with guns in hand, their blackened guns pointed at the unarmed Hawthrone.
"Hands in the air!" The policeman in charge yelled, "Don't advance any further!"
A cold wind blew, a little chilly indeed for the thinly dressed Hawthrone, and he couldn't help but shiver. He raised his eyes and sized up the officer in charge.
He wore a dark heavy trench coat and a pair of spectacles and looked to be in his forties or fifties, with a sharp gaze, biting air and an extraordinarily spirited appearance, the fearlessness of a young man and the composure of a middle-aged man simultaneously manifesting themselves in his body without the slightest contradiction.
He carries a rather long strip of sanity on his head, longer, visually, than the two unlucky men just now put together.
[Sanity Value 100/100, Pollution Level: 0%]
Hawthrone brightened up as if he had found a high-scoring exam paper in a pile of failing papers, and immediately took a not-so-subtle interest in the officer.
One hundred points of sanity ...... is quite good, should he find a way to make a believer out of him?
Seeing no reaction from him, Chief James Wright's grip on his gun tightened and he yelled again, "Hands in the air!"
Hawthrone glanced around at the blackened muzzles of the guns and at the panicked walkers running around the streets, and after a moment of contemplation.
He gave up resistance decisively and raised his hands.
James was relieved to see that Hawthrone was cooperating. The seemingly harmless youth in front of him had done something terrible that other citizens might not understand, but he knew all about it.
The crime scenes of his cases were so bizarre, bloody and horrific that even in a place as dirty as -----------, they could be called horrific. All those he targeted were dead and mad, destroying their bodies as if they had lost their minds - banging them against walls, tearing their flesh, even destroying their senses and shoving their fists down their throats ......
There is nothing you can't think of that they can't do, and some of them even defy the rules of physics and are theoretically impossible to achieve, but they do succeed.
In a world where supernatural forces exist, this can only mean one thing...
This citizen, Dylan Hawthrone, is truly a bit of a monster.
"You're involved in a major ...... murder case," James said, pausing to say "murder".
The case Hawthrone was involved in didn't seem to be a homicide, technically speaking, because all the victims had committed suicide.
Even if they had committed suicide in a bizarre, strange, unscientific manner, they had indeed gone mad and committed suicide.
So James changed his tone and said, "...... a major case, please cooperate with the police investigation."
Hawthrone slowly raised one eyebrow.
Just as James was ready for a great battle with the madman, Hawthrone said, "Yes, officer."
He acted rather casually and matter-of-fact, which would have looked like a perfectly normal, ordinary citizen on a normal day, but on this occasion, it can bring shivers down an experienced police officer's spine.
He allowed the police to handcuff him, and before entering the police car, he raised his eyes one last time to look at James. Those eyes seemed to take on a slight smirk and even a touch of curiosity as if he had seen someone of particular interest to him.
...
"I can't believe he really listened, looks like we finally meet a sane person." a man joked.
"J, you know they are monsters." he then added to himself.
...
In the interrogation room, a stack of photographs was thrown in front of Hawthrone.
Hawthrone lowered his head and flicked the stacked photos, unsurprisingly finding all the drop-dead images of the ceremony scene.
"What do these patterns mean?" James asked, pointing to one of the photographs.
Hawthrone fixed his eyes on a totem painted in red on a white wall, extremely abstract, looking like an eye framed by a regular diamond shape, with many rays spreading out around it like light.
The eye stared straight at the person outside the photograph with magical quality, as if it were a living creature, even though it was a dead one taken from the photograph. James stared at Hawthrone's face, trying to see the change in his expression.
The totem was so bizarre that no one in the police department dared to look at it, as if the simple figure had some deadly magic that made it almost impossible to look away, only to stare at it in confusion until someone repeatedly woke them up and brought them back to reality.
Hawthrone just took one look at the mark on the photo and averted his eyes. It looked like the [Eye of the Secret Star]. The eyes represented the power of observation, the diamond shape was the compulsory qualification of all existence by fate and rules, and the rays like light were an abstraction of the trajectory of countless civilisations.
A little embarrassed that the mark was drawn just a little ugly, Hawthrone said, "A symbol that represents faith - actually, it's supposed to look better than this, believe me."
"Faith?" James continued to ask, his tone noticeably aggravated, "What kind of faith would make you drive twenty-one people mad, six of them even dying on the spot?"
Hawthrone glanced at the photos of the gruesome ritual scene.
To be honest, the photos were a little too much, and even Hawthorne, who was used to seeing a lot of things, felt a little bit of physical revulsion. But to be honest, he can't take the blame for this, can he?
So he said, "Officer, they started it, I had nothing to do with it."
"If you got stabbed by a cactus, you can't ask the cactus to pay for the medical expenses, right? They went crazy at the same time, that's it"
James gave him a death stare, "You're not going to say it's a punishment from God or some such nonsense, are you?"
"Shouldn't these people who hurt others for fun and indirectly get themselves killed be punished?" Hawthrone asked.
The corners of his mouth drifted into a faint smile, and this extremely ill-timed wisp of a smile made the whole interrogation room's picture suddenly become extraordinarily eerie.
James had been watching Hawthrone's expression with deadly interest, and his heart tightened at the sight of a suppressed smile in his black eyes, which glowed with a treacherous and inexplicable stream of light.
"God's punishment ...... it is okay to say so." Hawthrone didn't affirm or deny.
It was just twenty-one people.
Those who had gotten him this far, there were still a lot of people who hadn't settled their scores.
James, who had been staring dead into Hawthrone's eyes, noticed immediately that his eyes seemed to have become even more dark and treacherous.
James had seen such a look before.
It was a certain madness and hatred that had bottomed out after being desperate and repressed to the point of no return.
The boy, who had only recently come of age, was perhaps on the verge of a breakdown ...... or, indeed, he might well have gone mad.
James, who had spent years dealing with psychopaths, knew he couldn't be carried away by his bizarre logic, so he ignored Hawthrone and turned to, "You know the Scarecrow?"
"A scarecrow?" Hawthrone's head instantly went to the pumpkin head erected in the field.
"The monster, it is one of your kind."
James ignored Hawthrone's answer, continued to stare at his expression, not missing a single change.
Hawthrone was a little confused, what was all this and what not?
James frowned when he saw this puzzled look on Hawthrone's face, he rubbed his brow and lowered his head to the file, slightly annoyed.
It looked like this madman really didn't know the Scarecrow, and those who had gone mad were not caused by the Scarecrow's power to create hallucinations in order to make them into scarecrows just like himself.
In fact, the Scarecrow would only drive people into fear and slowly disintegrate their will over a long period of time, not so much as to completely destroy their sanity in such a short period of time, or even make them commit suicide in such an unconscionable manner in their madness.
The Scarecrow is not yet so powerful.
...... But that's nothing to be happy about because it only means that Dylan Hawthrone is an even scarier madman than the Scarecrow.
James glanced at the picture of the Eye of the Secret Star that sat on the table and, suddenly thinking of something, continued, "Can I know more about the deity you speak of?"
Hawthrone stared at him.
Hawthrone was instantly pleased and asked with a raised eyebrow, "Why are you asking this?"
"Just the usual questions." James's tone was gentle and smooth, and he tried not to irritate this madman's emotions.
Hawthrone looked at James with his dark, almost bottomless eyes for a long time before he said slowly, word for word:
"The pen that sculpts civilisation, the eye that observes the universe, the insighter of the trajectories of a thousand destinies, the eye of the secret star that lies dormant in the depths of the stars."
"When you are ready, you may call upon His name and He will hear you."
James froze slightly as he listened to Hawthorne's words.
The young man's calm and cold voice was like some kind of magic, obviously, there was nothing out of ordinary in his tone, but it was like a magic sound through the ears, making a man's heart beat faster.
And yet the chanting of the divine name was so magical that when the words rang in the ears, it was as if everything around him suddenly darkened, leaving only the divine name echoing in the ears, so evil that it was enchanting.
The officers gathered around could only stare at him in dumbfounded amazement as the san value of their heads suddenly dropped again in unison.
Not even Chief James Wright was spared this time; he froze for a moment, seemingly lost in thought for a brief moment in those eyes staring at Hawthrone before he jerked his gaze away from his eyes.
His sanity moved visibly and reluctantly dropped a little.
Hawthrone, who had been keeping an eye on everyone's sanity, sighed in relief.
It seemed that just hearing the name of his god would not affect the humans, and the little sanity he had lost would be regained after a good night's sleep. It was good that humans were not as fragile as he had thought.
What Hawthrone didn't know was that everyone in the police station who had heard his voice was now buzzing in their heads, their skulls tingling, and all they could think about was...
Of all the different kinds of lunatics and psychopaths they've dealt with, they've never seen anything this horrible.
"Chief Wright, stop asking questions and send Dylan Hawthrone to the city asylum! We can't take any more questions!" the speaker above ringed with a panicked voice.
James didn't think that would work either, so he calmed down and said without expression, "I know. You'll be in the police station for a while and a doctor will come to assess your mental state. Maybe you won't be charged, but if the doctor decides you're mentally ill, we'll still send you to the asylum."
Given this insane state, he was in, being sent to the asylum was almost a certainty.
"...... Where?" Hawthrone asked.
"The asylum," James Wright repeated patiently.