Chương 57: Dutiful Scarecrow

After a twenty-two-day voyage, June was finally free to kiss the ground again. Well, that was his pretty way of saying that he tripped over the second he left the royal tumbler's elevator. June's movements were natural-looking, albeit a bit clumsy. The rehabilitation challenges he went through during the coming weeks were a bit tough. June pushed himself up and wiped the blood dripping from his nose.

'God, I hope Lilia didn't see that.' She did The healing process of his body used to be automatic, but now it was exceedingly and annoyingly a manual process; it was like being aware of your breathing for one second, and then the part of the brain that automated it took off on a vacation. June pressed his nose between his palms. Crick He could have just used his ability to set it, but it required jumping through a couple more hoops to activate than it used to.

June took his new sunglasses off and blew some hot air onto the lenses before wiping them with his shirt. His eyes remained closed during the entirety of the process. After June got a new perspective on things, specifically as several hundred chunks from a violent explosion, June's body was reformed. Mortimer seemed to think that June was at the midway point of ascending, but June wasn't too sure of that; after all, he hadn't done much to ascend in the first place.

But at the same time, it could have also happened due to his new, incredibly hot and sexy passenger, who was also in charge of narrating his adventures.

'No, you don't even have a face? How could you be hot or sexy if you're built like a toe' June failed to comprehend the true and absolutely masculine physique of a person who sat in front of a computer all day coding.

'Come on, man, I don't want to think about school right now.' June had lost several months of his life to a coma, and his summer break was coming to an impending end; on the other hand, Mortimer had gone out of his way to build a suitable story for his mother and watch over his dog while he was out of commission.

'There you go, nosebleed has stopped.' June craned his head to look up at the giant tumbler. It had four wheels, it was sleek despite being dozens of meters tall, and it frankly looked like an isosceles triangle.

'It kinda looks like the tumbler from that one Batman movie.' June failed to comprehend copyright laws and I, the humble narrator, would rather not make such direct references.

'Jesus' The rehab process was long; he was able to move with more ease than he used to, but the problem was moving normally as a human would; his body was more slurry now than it used to be, so instead of turning his body to look at someone behind him as a regular human would, he had to keep in mind that his head could turn around fully and had to consciously prevent that. The strings that replaced his body were able to move freely, stretch, and shrink; in fact, his body didn't even need organs or skin to function.

It, weirdly enough, just did. Not to mention that he no longer had any proper organs, he had imitations of them woven from string; even if all the blood in his body was drained, he would still be able to function a little. He also had lost his voice when he woke up, which was the reason why he was unable to speak when he tried, but the voice had taught him how to speak regardless. It was an odd use of will, but June was now able to vibrate the air manually with his will to make sounds and voices.

The hard part, of course, was that he had to lip sync every word and sound he made so the disconnect didn't freak people out. His will had gotten potent in the past few days, especially enough so that he had to keep his eyes shut even with sunglasses on; it had its perks, and his senses did get boosted once again during his reformation, but it was a little tedious, not to mention annoying, having to keep his eyes closed 24/7.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. It was disappointing to once again have his apprenticeship with Mortimer delayed, especially with June's last defeat accentuating how useless he really was. He was like an adult fighting a child when he went against an Aspirant, but fighting another adult, especially one with superpowers, was a bit harder.

The voice, on the other hand, liked bouncing ideas off June once in a while; June knew it could teach him more, but he was satisfied with what he got since it was like having a second brain that was older and more experienced than he was. For now, it was both his impromptu teacher and his passenger princess.

Lilia and the rest of the family were socializing with another royal family, so June just awkwardly stood to the side and appreciated being on solid ground again, not to mention being able to move his body, and his eyes again felt so freeing, considering that he spent the last few months unable to move. He looked at his bracelets; he had Lilia's and Shade's gifts, and he had gained two more. In fact, he actually gained four new accessories on the voyage, three new revenants, and a new pair of sunglasses.

Lilia was currently borrowing the boss's spare. June looked at her and the family with a watchful eye, looking for rats scurrying around. Like the three whom he had killed during the voyage. His first kill was his most aggressive. This was the man who broke into Lilia's room, and June smelled something that he didn't like from him. Lust. Maybe it was the voice's mind mixing with his own, but he felt a different, new emotion boiling within.

MALICE The voice shared his ethics; in fact, the voice specified that both of their ethics were the same as the body's.

'Whatever that means.' The difference between June and the Voice was that one lived significantly longer than the other. June didn't question the emotion; he felt weird that he would sympathize with himself, especially with how confusing his situation was. He didn't have the full picture; he didn't have the same memories as the voice, but he felt it. He felt its pain; he felt its mistakes, because its mistakes were also his own.

People who attacked him deserved mercy; people who attacked others deserved retribution. People who went a step further deserved punishment. What could have caused June to willfully adopt a new tenet into his ethics? Maybe because June had this hidden malice within him all along? But no, in fact, neither he nor his voice was born with it. Maybe it was a one-time thing, a new emotion blooming from the mistaken scent? But no, this feeling felt deeper, it felt storied, and experienced.

The reason June adopted it so easily was for the same reason the voice struggled to adopt it long before. EXPERIENCE June and the voice were part of the same thing, fragments of it even. The voice knew everything about June, but June intuitively knew about the voice. June intuitively understood some things quickly, because the voice and himself did this before. Not in this life, but before. The emotion he smelled from the first assassin was vile because it was misdirected.

lust, lust towards someone who was defenseless in the moment. And in that moment, June felt it, the voice remembered it. So June and the voice unanimously dragged the man across the halls, interrogated him with less care than he would usually spare, and then parted the man as a warning to others. He wasn't dead, he'll be back soon. June had a new earring, one that hid the rest of itself within his skull. It carried the remnant will of Silence. The last spell the man used before being assimilated.

The other two had nicer deaths. While June wandered the halls to practice his motor skills and sang to practice lip syncing, he found two more suspicious individuals. Both went into the Verident family subspace. The assassin was going to kill a daughter of the main family, but they first decided to creep on one of the elders' sons and their partner before striking one of the king's daughters, who was in a different room.

June dragged them away, before they got to watch the more sensitive parts, and as he did with the first intruder, he lightly interrogated them, parted them, and took their torso. The torso became a bracelet with the power to make him invisible. The second assassin wasn't as much of a degenerate as the first two, but his target was an infant, the grandson of the Verident family.

This kill was his hardest, not because the assassin put up much of a fight, but because he didn't want to wake the baby; he had to gently lull it back to sleep while holding his struggling prey still. He even sprouted spare arms while carrying his victim away and weaved a charm to protect the child out of the strings that held his body together at the voice's suggestion. It would be a simple knit doll, but inevitably, it was a puppet that would come to life when someone directed malice at its young owner.

So June dragged his prey back, interrogated him, and by the time the interrogation ended, the small knit horse came to life, strangled the man with its strings, and trotted back to its ward. June took the assassin's legs and turned them into another bracelet. It carried the remnant will of a body enhancement the previous owner was using. June didn't feel good about any of these kills, except the first; he saved lives, but at the same time, he mutilated corpses as warnings.

He felt bad, disappointed himself; he felt evil, he was evil. He was alright being the monster who kept other monsters at bay. Someone had to be the callous one, and this time it was him. This was not his way; this was the right way. Why fight when you can make others quiver? Why silently battle an onslaught of assassins when you could part one with a smile? It hurts, but if he kept smiling, if he kept tearing, and mutilating, and breaking, everyone else can be safe. Was this the influence of the voice?

Was this the influence of understanding the voice's pain? Did June even have any other choice? He did. He could have played bystander. He could have let the voyeur keep watching, the infant die, the doctor try to have his way. But he didn't. He was used to this conundrum. The voice was.