"No." Hawthrone refused instantly.
"It has the best psychiatrists in Utopia." James said, "You'll get great treatment."
"I'm not sick," Hawthrone said.
"You'll need to be examined to find out," James stated.
"Do you understand, officer?"
Hawthrone stood up, a gesture that alerted everyone in the room, even as some police officers had begun to touch their guns, but he continued as if he didn't care, "The test results don't show that I'm sick or not sick, merely that some people want me to be sick or not sick."
The corruption in the upper echelons of Utopia had gone to the bone, and his antagonism to Falcone had long been made known with the help of the media, and even if Falcone himself was indifferent, there would naturally be people who wanted him to suck up.
"...... You're implying that someone is trying to hurt you?" James furrowed his brow.
Hawthrone frowned, the smile on his face finally disappearing as he gave a slight mocking chuckle, "You haven't even investigated why I summoned the gods, have you? You think I'm a madman, but you don't even bother to understand why I'm mad?"
James was silent.
It wasn't that he hadn't investigated.
Rather, by the time he realised he should have investigated, all the information the police department could find out relating to Hawthrone had all been cleared out. It was true that they could find out more information in a more discreet way, but that would take time.
The police have a complex system of operations, so they are not yet that efficient.
Perhaps, this is a side note that this incident of mass insanity may not be as simple as it seems.
"We will protect you and your diagnosis will not be affected by anyone. Trust us."
Gordon looked into Hawthrone's eyes and said sincerely.
Hawthrone felt a little amused.
If it were really that easy, he wouldn't be so desperate as to ask for help from a strange god who didn't know good from evil, and Utopia wouldn't be this rotten.
Hawthrone still shook her head, "I am not going to the asylum."
James frowned, he wanted to inform Hawthrone that it wasn't up to him, but then thinking that he didn't have to explain anything to the madman, he stood up and said, "We'll put you in a holding cell for now, if you have a lawyer ......"
"Let's put it this way, officer, I think that you may have gotten something wrong." Hawthrone interrupted.
It wasn't their side of the Police Department that was dominating the scene in this interrogation.
James Wright's heart missed a beat.
He looked over at Dylan Hawthrone, and the next second he saw a strange light raging in the latter's eyes. Then he heard, in a calm, even gentle tone, the madman before him say
"As I said, officer, there are always things in this world that you want to try to do but are unable to do, just as you tried to send me into the asylum when you knew it would never be possible on your own ......"
Before the words were out of his mouth, the handcuffs on his hands suddenly came off of their own accord and fell to the ground with a crisp sound.
"Pretty hard to take isn't it?"
"You - what's wrong with you!"
James was stunned by the unscientific scene before him, had he just failed to get the handcuffs on securely? No way, with all the prisoners he'd caught, how could he have made such a simple mistake!
"Officer, you must have been through a lot of force to get to this position."
Hawthrone said softly, his voice carrying a certain indefinable sense of compulsion as if another voice was hidden within it, forming some sort of weird and numbing harmony, "Tell me, in that situation, would you fight your way out of the muck on your own, or would you stay put and wait for someone who was in trouble himself to reach out towards you? Or ...... is it to seek help from some supreme being?"
His body began to gradually fog up.
"Wait! Stop!"
James's pupils snapped shut as he watched the scene before him. He reacted extremely quickly and pulled out his gun, and before he could say anything, he saw Hawthrone reach out his already fogged hand and gently press down.
James lost his footing for a moment and nearly fell straight to his knees.
The police station crackled and fell, no one could immediately adjust to the sudden heavy pressure, even the chandelier on the ceiling swayed frantically and nearly fell down.
James struggled with the pressure on his body and failed to stand up, and could only raise his head with difficulty to look at Hawthrone. It was as if he was the only one unaffected in the entire police station, his trim body standing, his dark, cold eyes looking down on everyone.
"Thank you, officer. Goodbye."
Hawthrone said a few final words before completely fogging up and disappearing within the police station.
James looked at this before him in shock, his perceptions turned upside down in this moment.
Maybe Hawthrone was a mutant, but he subconsciously thought he wasn't.
No other mutant could give him such a strange, vast, mysterious and distant feeling.
As Hawthrone himself had said, it was almost like the work of God.
Could it be that what he said was true?
Did a god that transcended the limits of human imagination and spanned beyond dimensions really exist in this world ......?
Hawthrone stumbled and appeared out of nowhere in a nearby alley. He held onto the wall and coughed violently for half a day, a thick grey mist gushing out from between his mouth and nose and dissipating into the air.
He was about to take a breather when he heard another racket coming from behind him. Hawthrone coughed as he took in his surroundings.
This appeared to be an alleyway.
In Utopia, such alleys were generally not very safe, let alone on a starless, moonless night like this.
"Bang, bang, bang!"
There was a sharp and violent slamming of the door.
Hawthrone looked back and saw a large, drunken man with a bottle banging on the door of a house, his features fierce, his cheeks red from drunkenness, and his face full of hostility.
"Open the door!" He yelled, "For fuck's sake..."
The drunkard continued to yell.
"I know you're in there! Get your ass over here and open the door for me, you bitch, if you play dead again I'll beat you to death today, you've got some fucking nerve ......"
The back of the room was full of unpleasant obscenities.
Hawthrone pulled out her ears and said, "Hey, be quiet. Swearing bites your tongue."
The drunken man froze for a moment as if he hadn't expected anyone to stand up for him. As if his anger had suddenly found its outlet, he looked fiercely in Hawthrone's direction and without hesitation, he smashed the bottle in his hand -
"Shut up! Shut up, you nosy bastard, or I'll kill you!"
Hawthrone looked at the flying glass bottle and with a slight movement of his fingers, the bottle shattered out of thin air not far in front of him.
"Don't be so angry in the middle of the night."
He said with a smile, "What a nuisance."
With a crisp cracking sound, the shards of glass flew past him with inertia as if they had been manipulated, and none of them actually landed on him. This bizarre scene caught the eye of someone hiding in the shadows, causing his pupils to suddenly shrink and reveal a somewhat stunned look.
The drunkard was so drunk that he didn't know what was happening. When he heard the sound of breaking glass, he thought it was crooked and cursed "what good luckk you had, bastard".
Before the words left his mouth, he suddenly screamed and covered his mouth, blood dripping from his booze-stained mouth.
"Fuck!" he roared, followed by an even harsher scream, blood spurting straight out with the pronunciation of the foul word.
He covered his bleeding mouth as if he wanted to open it to say something, but the scream had hissed out uncontrollably, creepily in the darkness of the night.
It was as if the curse had been fulfilled.
He really does bite his tongue when he swears.
Turning away, Hawthrone glanced back with little cure.
Dylan Hawthrone was, after all, too low on sanity and not very good at fighting, and now that he was being targeted by Falcone's men and was at the dangerous point where the contamination level was critical, someone had to protect him. He turned and left the alleyway as if nothing had happened, leaving the foul-mouthed male still spewing filth and covering his mouth as he screamed.
After an unknown amount of time, the door was finally opened.
A woman with dishevelled hair and a pale face opened the door and looked fearfully at the man with red eyes and blood sprayed all over the floor.
The man saw that his wife had finally opened the door, and his pain-fueled rage made him explode on the spot, casually picking up another empty bottle on the floor and trying to hit someone, yelling vaguely, "Bitch, you've kept me waitin' for too long!"
There was another scream, another wound added to his bruised tongue, and the raised bottle smashed straight towards the panicked woman.
"Pop!"
The sound of breaking glass rang out, but it was not the bottle that hit the man, but a daggar that flew out of nowhere and smashed the bottle.
J, in his uniform, swung down from atop the tall building and kicked the domestic violence man to the ground. He grabbed the jaw of the drunken man, who was howling in pain and wrenched it violently, forcing him to open his mouth, before pulling a mini torch out of nowhere and shining it straight into his mouth.
-- The tongue was already a bloody mess and the crimson liquid was pouring out, making the man grumble on his words.
But even then, the drunk didn't pass out from the pain, just lived with the excruciating pain and screamed in frantic agony.
J almost froze.
It was in this moment of straightforward terror that he realised.
Perhaps a monster in the true sense of the word had finally been born in this city shrouded in night.