Their hair stood on ends at the eerie sight, and Marline instinctively made a gripping gesture, a phantom rifle outlining itself in her arms.
"Step back right now!" she urgently commanded the officers, then turned to Harry, who wore a frightened expression. "Snap out of it, Harry, and tell me that thing is not looking at us."
Harry, taking out a revolver, stammered a reply. "I-I think it is."
"Then cancel the reenactment!"
"I can't! It's as though the ownership has been hijacked!"
At this point, he had tears of blood streaming down his eyes as the misty scene collapsed, leaving only green eyes that didn't make a move but just gazed at them eerily.
Though it did nothing, it's mere presence made them feel like lamb before a wolf.
The atmosphere remained tense until the mist suddenly dispersed, and the predatory gaze along with it.
Immediately, Marline collapsed to the ground, the rifle dissolving into motes of light, and her back slick with sweat.
She turned to a disheveled Harry and asked, "W-what was that?"
He shook his head. "I don't know, but it's at least a Disaster-Class." Dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief, he cleaned the trailing blood and sighed. "At least we have an idea of what happened."
And in response, Marline lay on the ground, mumbling, "I ain't paid enough for this."
The alley, now devoid of the supernatural reenactment, returned to its eerie stillness. The police lights continued to flash warning colors, casting intermittent shadows that seemed to dance with the memory of the scene they had just witnessed.
Finn, the young officer, broke the silence. "What in the world was that? And what's a Disaster-Class?"
Harry, still recovering from the shock, offered a brief explanation. "It's a classification system for Supernaturals. Disaster-Class is one of the higher tiers, indicating immense power and danger. That blurry figure is beyond our league."
Finn seemed stunned. "Am I supposed to know this?"
What he received in response was a cheerful jab. "Hey, you asked. And besides, you'll inevitably encounter similar cases, the supernatural can never be completely separated from the mundane."
Harry with his sunglasses back on, looked as though nothing serious had just happened.
Marline, now sitting up, wiped sweat from her forehead. "We need to get the eyewitness and get a proper testimony. Whatever happened here is way above our pay grade."
As they prepared to leave the alley, the lingering unease lingered like an invisible fog, and the memory of those intense green eyes haunted their thoughts. They were stepping into a realm of supernatural mysteries that went far beyond their previous encounters.
---
Sopatra led Seraphina into the kitchen, and in response to her request for something sweet, he walked to the refrigerator and searched for a moment, his gaze going over a certain part of the fridge, and after a moment of what seemed to be an internal struggle, he let out a barely audible sigh and took out a bag of carefully wrapped cookies.
He took out a generous amount and placed it in the microwave, switching on the timer.
Turning around, he saw that Seraphina seemed to be in a daze, her eyes strangely blank as though her consciousness had left her body.
He frowned at the sight, and just when he was about to walk to her, the microwaves dinged, indicating the cookies were ready, and just about the same time, Seraphina's eyes regained clarity, looking at him with a cryptic gaze.
"I must say, your world is very interesting."
Disregarding her words, he turned back to the fridge, emerging with a keg of milk.
Seemingly discontent with his response, she pouted. "Aren't you supposed to ask me why I said so?"
He took out the plate and divided the cookies into two equal—no, nearly equal amounts, and placed them on the counter before turning to her "If you wanted to tell me, I wouldn't need to ask." Then he took out two glasses and began pouring out the milk.
Seraphina felt like strangling him, why didn't he always play according to the cards? Besides, wasn't it normal to want to please a beautiful woman?
She was about to retort when her sensitive nose picked up the bewitching aroma of the cookies, before she knew it she had already taken one and stuffed it in her her mouth.
Fireworks erupted in her taste buds, and she couldn't help but moan in delight.
Taking another, she sighed. "Augh..." Not until she saw Sopatra's weird expression, her cheeks reddened. "Hey, I couldn't help it, this "cookie" of a thing tastes too gooood."
"Sopatra shrugged and pushed a glass of milk to her. "Tastes even better with this."
Strangely, her positive reaction to the cookies seemed to have erased his unwillingness to share them.
Seraphina saw as he took a bite, then gulped some milk along with it. But then a memory flashed in her mind, memories belonging to the disgusting rapist.
Yet, in a daze, she followed the images and dipped the cookie in the milk, much to Sopatra's visible disapproval, and when she took a bite, it tasted so good, with sprinkle of nostalgia all over, but immediately after, there was a very bitter aftertaste on her tongue, she felt bile rising to her throat and suddenly, she burst into tears, a crushing sadness washing over her.
It was as though her heart had been ripped from her chest.
Sopatra, witnessing this unexpected outpouring, approached her, a hint of unease flickering on his usually indifferent face.
"Seraphina? What's wrong?"
She turned to him, falling into his arms, crying and wailing. As her soft body pressed against his chest, Sopatra froze, feeling somewhat flustered. Glancing down, he was thankful that she wasn't looking at him and took a deep breath to compose himself.
Stretching across the counter, he retrieved a roll of tissue, offering it to her. Seraphina, taking it with a strangely familiar gesture, dabbed her eyes and blew her nose, then crumpled the tissue into a ball and tossed it to the trashcan in the corner of the room.
Except there was no trashcan, and it landed on the floor by the door of the kitchen.
This action seemed to have broken her trance as she immediately jumped from Sopatra's arm blushing furiously. Why was he always seeing her embarrassing side?
With a sigh, Sopatra looked at his soaked shirt and asked. "What just happened?"
At his question she let out a dazed "Ahh..." and turned strangely quiet for a moment. Then she sighed, a familiar sense of helplessness and frustration bubbling inside. "It's an inherent flaw of my ability."
In summary, whenever she absorbed someone's, it was like absorbing their personality itself, essentially becoming a chimera in body and mind.
It would also be accompanied by the individual's unique habits and mannerisms, and also gave a deep immersion in the memories of the individual.
Over the years she'd learnt to tweak the ability in a way that the emotional aspect wouldn't accompany the memories, but this came along with the price of it having a distant, gray perspective, like watching a black and white movie.
But even this solution wasn't perfect, because for the first few days of absorbing the memories, as long as the conditions were right or there was something that triggered them, these foreign emotions would surface in waves.
This was why the memory absorption was a last-minute measure.
And in this case it was the sight of a plate of cookies beside a glass of milk.
Crossing his arms, he leaned over the counter and asked. "What exactly did you see?"
Taking another cookie, this time without the milk, she bit into it and described the scene.
It was from a bird's-eye point of view, and instead of black-and-white, the memory was filled with a splash of beautiful colors. In a simple but homely dining room, a man sat down drinking a glass of milk—Paul, as Seraphina recognized him.
Compared to the haggard and crazed look he had before she killed him, he had a warm and peaceful smile, the image of a family man.
At that moment, a teenage girl burst out of the kitchen with cookies in her arms, followed by an identical, though older, version of her, both wearing smiles. The girl presented the cookie before the man with an excited tone. "Dad! You've got to try them! They weren't burnt this time!"
The woman, likely her mother and Paul's wife, chuckled. "She was so excited she nearly forgot the muffins when taking them out."
The man rubbed the girl's head and took the cookies, dipping them in the glass of milk before eating. He immediately broke into a smile, cheering for her. "It's absolutely delicious, my dear!"
The scene was warm, evoking a sense of joy for anyone watching.
Except that both mother and daughter died in an accident two days later.
Sopatra looked at her for a moment, then asked. "The person you killed..."
"He wasn't innocent! He really wasn't! Believe me he nearly raped a woman. And besides, he attacked me first. Yes, my retaliation was justified."
Sopatra gave her a strange look and said. "Alright calm down. I'm sure people change."
Because Seraphina had taken to biting her fingers, it was as though she had turned skeptical of herself, believing she had killed an innocent.
Of course what she didn't tell him was that the warm memories had given her a sense of incongruity and so she had decided to go through his memories of just before his death, and she came before a startling discovery, his memories of assaulting the woman and then attacking her was blurry, like a trance.
And this had happened on two occasions when she absorbed memories, and it later turned out they were being mind-controlled.
If this case was the same then just who was the lady that he assaulted? What was the purpose of the person who hypnotized him?
Seraphina felt plagued with uncertainty.
It could be false, yes. But if it turned out true, then it meant she had killed an innocent in cold-blood.