Chapter 84: Seth’s Changes

Chapter 84: Chapter 84: Seth’s Changes

Chapter 84: Seth’s Changes

The lights of Greenville gradually faded behind the truck until the little Louisiana town disappeared completely into the night. Inside Seth’s battered utility vehicle, however, the atmosphere remained strangely quiet. Carrie White sat stiffly in the rear passenger area with both hands gripping the hem of her clothes, while Lionel Cosgrove occasionally glanced toward her as though trying to think of something friendly to say and repeatedly failing.

In the end, Axel Vance was the one who broke the silence. He leaned back in the passenger seat and looked toward Dr. Seth Brundle behind the wheel. "Seth, how exactly did you two find me? That thing carried me far enough that I woke up in another state."

Seth immediately grinned. "Excellent question. The answer is science, superior intelligence, and a small amount of extraterrestrial brain damage." He tapped one finger against his temple without taking his eyes from the highway.

Axel gave him a flat look. "Get to the useful part."

"I’m getting there." Seth looked almost offended before his excitement returned. "Remember that impossible Color Papa Jupiter released? It nearly cooked my brain from the inside, but apparently it left a few interesting changes behind."

Seth’s smile widened as he continued driving. "Things that used to take me hours to model now connect almost instantly. Patterns, variables, probability chains—I can look at a problem and see relationships I would have needed pages of calculations to notice before." He paused dramatically and added, "At this point, I’m probably worth three PhDs. Maybe five on a good morning."

Carrie stared at the back of Seth’s head as though she had no idea whether he was joking.

Axel sighed. "And that helped you find me how?"

"Deduction." Seth sounded delighted simply saying the word. "Once the Creeper carried you away, I reconstructed its likely flight corridor from the direction it disappeared, wind conditions, terrain, road networks, and every place where something carrying a grown man might eventually come down."

He continued explaining while keeping both hands on the wheel. "Then Lionel and I followed the corridor east, checked anything unusual reported along the roads, and eventually found evidence of a school bus getting wrecked in a way no normal traffic accident could explain. After that, your call to the local police station confirmed Greenville."

Lionel leaned forward from the back. "What he’s leaving out is the part where he talked nonstop for hours about wind vectors and bird migration while I kept asking whether we were actually going the right way." He pointed toward Seth and added, "And every time he gets excited, he forgets there are other people in the truck."

"I found him, didn’t I?" Seth replied.

Axel had to admit that part was difficult to argue with. Whatever the Color had done to Seth, the scientist’s ability to connect scattered information had clearly improved far beyond ordinary intuition. Against supernatural enemies that could vanish across entire states, that kind of mind might prove more useful than another gun.

Carrie quietly looked from Seth to Lionel and then toward Axel. A police officer who fought monsters with a chainsaw, a scientist whose brain had apparently been altered by something from space, and a man whose body could survive wounds that should have killed him several times over were now casually discussing their week around her. She had the strange feeling that she had accidentally joined the world’s most dysfunctional club.

Yet for some reason, Carrie slowly relaxed.

The tension that had lived inside her body for eighteen years was still there, but it no longer felt quite as suffocating. These people were bizarre, possibly insane, and clearly accustomed to impossible things, yet nobody had called her evil or demanded that she repent for what she could do. For the first time, being strange did not automatically mean being alone.

The truck continued through the night with dark farmland and stretches of forest passing beyond the windows. Axel closed his eyes and tried to rest, but his thoughts returned almost immediately to the leather-bound book he had destroyed inside the White house. The more he considered the supposed missionary who had fathered Carrie, the less accidental the entire situation appeared.

An organization had almost certainly been behind him.

At least, that was Axel’s working theory.

If Carrie’s father had deliberately chosen Margaret, manipulated her beliefs, left behind a manual designed to intensify Carrie’s fear and emotional repression, and then disappeared at exactly the right moment, the obvious purpose was to create something. Carrie’s telekinetic power had grown under eighteen years of psychological pressure, which meant the experiment—if it truly was one—had worked frighteningly well.

Now Axel had removed the subject.

He had taken Carrie away from Greenville before whatever final event her father or his organization might have been waiting for. If someone had invested eighteen years into creating a supernatural weapon, Axel doubted they would simply shrug and move on.

The question was not whether they would respond.

It was how quickly.

Axel had just opened his eyes when Seth suddenly hit the brakes.

The tires screamed across the pavement, and the utility truck lurched hard enough to throw Lionel and Carrie forward against their restraints. Seth fought the wheel until the vehicle stopped in the middle of the deserted highway.

"What happened?" Lionel demanded.

Axel looked through the windshield.

Someone was standing directly in the center of the road.

The figure wore a long black cloak with an oversized hood pulled low enough to conceal almost the entire face. Only the bottom of an unnaturally pale chin was visible beneath the fabric, and the person remained completely motionless inside the truck’s headlights.

Seth frowned and tapped the horn several times. "What is this, midnight performance art?" When the figure did not react, he added, "Because if this is somebody’s attempt at staging an accident for insurance money, they picked the wrong truck."

Lionel leaned forward between the seats and stared through the windshield.

His expression changed.

"Don’t get out."

Seth glanced toward him. "Why?"

Lionel’s eyes remained fixed on the stranger. "I don’t feel anything from him. No normal living presence at all."

Carrie took one look at the cloaked figure and immediately recoiled.

Her face went pale.

Both arms wrapped around herself as she pressed farther back into the seat, while an inexplicable terror made her entire body tremble. Whatever stood on the road frightened her on a level deeper than ordinary fear.

Seth reached for his seat belt. "I’ll take a look. If it’s some idiot pretending to be dead in the road, I’ll explain why this is a terrible hobby."

"Don’t move."

Axel’s voice stopped him instantly.

Seth’s hand remained on the buckle.

Axel stared at the figure ahead.

They had just removed Carrie from an eighteen-year supernatural experiment, they were driving through an isolated stretch of highway in the middle of the night, Lionel sensed no ordinary life from the person blocking them, and Carrie was reacting like prey in front of a predator. Axel did not believe in coincidences that generous.

"Seth."

"What?"

Axel’s expression did not change.

"Drive through it."

Silence filled the truck.

Even Seth turned toward him to make sure he had heard correctly.

Axel kept watching the hooded figure. "Whatever that is, it came here for us. We’re not getting out and letting it choose the distance."

Seth looked forward again.

Then a grin appeared.

"I appreciate straightforward problem solving."

He gripped the wheel firmly and accelerated.

The truck surged forward.

Lionel braced himself and warned, "Seth, keep it straight."

Carrie squeezed her eyes shut.

The cloaked figure finally moved.

One pale hand emerged from beneath the robe as though it intended to stop the approaching vehicle, but there was no longer enough time. The truck slammed into it with a heavy bang, and the entire front end shuddered from the impact.

Red fluid splashed across part of the windshield.

The figure disappeared beneath the hood.

A second violent jolt passed beneath the wheels.

Seth kept driving.

"Don’t stop," Axel ordered.

"Wasn’t planning to."

The engine roared as the utility truck accelerated back into the darkness. Within minutes, the stretch of highway where the collision had occurred had vanished completely behind them.

Carrie slowly opened her eyes.

She stared first at the windshield and then at Axel.

After several seconds, she cautiously reached forward and tugged at his sleeve. "What... was that?"

"I don’t know yet."

"Then why did we hit it?"

Axel considered how to answer without giving Carrie the wrong lesson. "Because Lionel couldn’t sense a living person, you reacted to it like something supernatural was standing outside, and it deliberately blocked an empty highway in the middle of the night." He glanced back at her and added, "If something clearly inhuman is trying to make you leave the safety of a vehicle, don’t walk up and politely ask what it wants."

Carrie nodded slowly.

"So we leave."

"Exactly."

Lionel looked toward Axel. "That explanation sounded much healthier than what I expected you to say."

Axel ignored him.

Several miles behind them, the black-cloaked figure lay twisted across the highway.

Its arms and legs bent at impossible angles.

Dark red fluid spread beneath the body.

For several seconds, nothing moved.

Then one finger twitched.

A faint click sounded.

Another followed.

The figure’s shattered arm suddenly rotated against the pavement as though invisible hands had grabbed it. Bone and joint shifted beneath the cloak until the limb snapped back into something resembling its proper position.

The second arm followed.

Then both legs.

Each movement produced another series of dry, unnatural clicks as the ruined body reconstructed itself piece by piece. When the process finally ended, the figure slowly pushed itself upright.

The hood slipped backward.

A bloodless face emerged beneath it.

There were no visible pupils.

Both eyes were completely black.

The figure stared down the highway in the direction Seth’s truck had disappeared. Its damaged lips moved with almost no emotion.

"The test subject has left the original experimental area."

The black eyes remained fixed on the empty road.

"The mission is approaching failure."

A final crack sounded as the figure straightened its neck.

Then it spoke again.

"We must bring the witch back at all costs."

[Community Goals Ongoing]

500 PS = +1 Extra Chapter

10 Reviews = +1 Extra Chapter

Reviews are always appreciated.

P1treon Soulforger (20+advance Chapters)