The dome of the laboratory was pouring cold blue light, and the surface of the Sinan-like instrument was floating with dark spots of light, as dazzling as an ancient star map. Logan stared at the frozen "0%" character on the screen, the number was like countless transparent tentacles wrapped around his retina.
"0%? The instrument is broken?"
The numbers on the instrument that flickered with an ethereal blue light didn't change again, as if saying that it was an established fact.
"The machine is not broken."
A faint, timid voice spread out from the shadows.
"Who?"
When the crowd turned their heads, they happened to catch a glimpse of the curtain at the back of the reactor-like apparatus being lifted at one corner, and a girl with shade-green hair was currently huddled in the shadow of the reactor. Since just now, she had been hiding behind the apparatus and surveying their every move.
"Juno?" Mina's buckskin boots tapped out a freckling rhythm on the titanium floor, and when she wrapped her arms around the single figure, the girl didn't resist, acquiescing to the act.
"Why are you the one here? Where's Mr. Angle?" Lee asked.
"The teacher went on a mission." Juno trilled each word, "Will be back later."
"The machine isn't damaged, so why is my 'delusion factor' concentration at 0%?" Logan asked.
"Not sure, my forbidden market is called 'Precision', it's not very combat capable, but it can detect the durability of basically any instrument and use them at the same time." The tail end of Juno's reply hit a few people in their cochlea.
?
Large question marks appeared in Logan's mind.
"No, then why isn't he even a 'Fringe'?" Lee voiced the inquiry in his mind.
"Not sure, the machine isn't damaged." Juno doggedly declared this opinion of his.
"Haha, everyone is believing you, they just find it a bit unbelievable." Mina rounded up.
"Next you should get your powers tested." Lee spoke as he led Logan towards one of the rooms, a plain looking white wooden door with a hanging sign on the surface - "Do Not Disturb".
"No... No!" Juno suddenly raised her voice to stop it.
"Why?" They could see that the little girl seemed to be hiding something.
"He... He's not even a 'Fringe', inside .... The equipment inside is of no use to him at all!" Juno had already run up to a few people, reaching out to stop them.
Lee's gaze was like a torch, his flickering pupils seemed to be able to see through everything, Juno sheepishly looked away.
Mina smiles and touches Juno's head, saying, "Little Juno, this is not a very good reason for you, oh, because I'm pretty sure he's the 'Enforcer' because..." In the gap of speaking Mina rolled up the clothes on her abdomen, for a moment the light of spring came out, but what was shocking was that there was a large black-flooded hole in her abdomen, the skin around the hole was constantly decaying and regenerating, it seemed that there were two different forces fighting against each other, "I can recover from this shot but it'll take a bit of time."
The remaining two looked at Logan with a strong look of shock.
"So that means we need to go see what his forbidden ruins are." Mina said to Juno with a smile as she rearranged her clothes.
"That... That won't do, the instruments inside are broken... Broken!"
Seeing Lee take another step forward, Juno panicked even more, in an instant, the red light of countless alarms filled the entire lab like a blood mist, Juno's Forbidden Ruin was unleashed, countless instruments flashed a terrifyingly dazzling red light with fiddly warning colors.
Mina was also putting away her smile at this moment, the whole space was only filled with cluttered alarms.
"What the hell is in there?" It took Logan a moment to realize that the Companion at his waist was already hot enough to burn his skin. The silver-gray revolver's barrel was trembling at a high frequency, as if there were countless ghosts hissing in the brass bullet nests. He subconsciously pressed down on the grip of the gun, and blue smoke seeped out from between his fingers! There was not the slightest pain of being burned on his hand!
His aura was as if some sort of change had occurred, and the sound of bullets being loaded rang out of thin air.
"Really... You really are the 'Enforcer'." Juno was incoherent, but the color of caution in his eyes didn't diminish in the slightest.
"Juno, what's in there?" Mina asked in a low voice as she squeezed Logan's arm.
"I... I don't know... Teacher, he... He seems..." Little Juno looked towards Mina, wanting to say something.
Almost instantly, a powerful sense of suffocation surged directly into Juno's body, and Juno's trailing voice was suddenly strangled in her throat, as if a transparent hand had clutched her windpipe. In a flash, her face was like white wax.
"Come in." A kind and gentle male voice rang out from the room in front of her, making people feel as if they were bathed in spring light.
As he spoke, Juno's entire body stumbled and fell to the ground like a deflated ball.
"Snap."
The door shaft made a friction sound as it turned.
The wood grain was exposed where the ghastly white paint of the door peeled off, and those curling years looked like some kind of ancient code.
When the doorway opened completely, the air in the entire room suddenly froze - hundreds of silver-gray instruments were arrayed in columns, like an honor guard frozen in time. The condensation on the surface of the thermostat was slowly flowing, etching a certain style of vine pattern on the glass, and an old man was standing in front of the experiment table.
Behind the amber lenses of his goggles, the old man's cloudy pupils were reflecting the shimmering light of the cluster of test tubes. Those dark brown glass vessels were gulping cobalt blue mist, and the dewdrops condensed on the walls of the tubes refracted the star chart-like spots of light. His age-spotted fingers were adjusting the dispensing funnel with the precision of a puppet on strings-each joint bent at an exact angle.
"Mr. Anger?" With a slight question, the old man was tapped on the shoulder.
The old man turned his head, his face red and full.
"Came over to test the Forbidden Ruins, I guess, it's been a while since there was a new 'Enforcer'." The old man set the jar down and turned his head to look at Logan.
"Mr. Anger, was that you who just stepped in?" Lee asked, pointing to Juno, who had half her head exposed in the doorway.
"No." Mr. Anger spread his hands, not in the least bit avoiding the sight that Lee shot his way.
The two of them stared at each other for a long time, but it was Ange who averted his eyes and said, "She was contaminated, the instrument couldn't detect it."
"Contaminated?" Mina pulled Juno into the room and wrapped her arms around her.
"A contamination that causes hallucinations, and while not contagious, contaminants occasionally see things in certain hallucinations." Ange looked over at Juno with a hint of an unknown meaning in her eyes before continuing to pound the jars in her hands, "I'm making her some sort of potion that should cure her."
"Then what she just had." Mina's fingertips still lingered on the touch of Juno's hair.
"Yes, she's worse, it might even be life threatening back there."
The girl with the shade green hair had her pupils shrunk to the size of pinpoints, living like a kitten drenched in a rainstorm, and she seemed to fear Mr. Ange in front of her.
Lee nodded thoughtfully, then pulled out a paper and pen and turned on the chest video recorder, "Mr. Anger, a word of questioning for you, have you ever abused Juno."
"No." Anger shook his head firmly.
"Did she become your experiment?" Lee questioned again.
"Are you questioning me? Agent Lee?" Anger's demeanor wasn't as gentle as it had been just moments before, and the words fell on his ears with a hint of mockery.
"Answer me!" Lee's pen made deep marks on the transcript, the ink fainting away, and the chest recorder began to flicker as Logan caught the familiar scent of smoke and the two men's sights faced each other again as they had at the beginning.
After about half a minute, Anger sighed.
"There." Anger's brow furrowed as if she was deliberating something, "And please turn off the recorder."
Lee considered it for a moment and pressed the instrument's bright red button, a look of remembrance coming into the old man's eyes.
"It was about a year ago, I think, when we rescued Juno when we smashed one of the branches of the Church of Desire, but at that time she was so thin and frail that it seemed as if she would die at any moment."
"There was nothing anyone could do, and I just happened to discover a certain potion among the branches at the time - one that could turn a person into an 'Enforcer', but the stability of which was poor, so I set out to begin the next step of my research, and finally in the the next few days, a breakthrough was made."
A hint of pride surfaced in the old man's eyes.
"That potion became stabilized, and it was even able to turn a newborn baby into an 'Enforcer'! Looking at Juno, who wasn't going to live long, I hurriedly injected the potion into her, so she gained a decent system, or at least she could survive! The body of an Enforcer is stronger than the average person's!"
"But in the second month, I realized the flaw of the potion! She needs regular injections to survive, otherwise she might just become a 'Pseudo'! Or even skip the stage of 'False Person'! At the end of every month, she'll have some kind of hallucination! You know, she's still so young..."
Lee's fingertips were no longer roaming the paper.
The older man couldn't hide the two flushes of excitement on his cheeks. The two ratty whiskers on his lips resembled the wings of a startled crow, rising and falling with the spittle-flecked words, tracing anxious ink marks under his graying temples.
"No... No!" Juno interrupted out loud, "He's lying! That night I... I saw it, he's not human!"