"What's your full name?"
"Luke…"
"When were you born?"
"I was born on July 15, 1979."
"Do you have any family or acquaintances involved in supernatural activities?"
Luke looked at the man with a scar on his face in confusion and asked, "Do I have to answer that question? I've told you everything I know three times; we were just exploring to honor our best friend's death."
The guard assigned to this interrogation looked up, placed his gun on the table, and asked again, "Do you have any family or acquaintances involved in supernatural activities?"
"No, none so far." Luke knew nothing more about his friends; he hadn't seen them since these people had taken them away.
"Have you experienced any sudden changes in behavior or personality?"
"No, besides the anxiety after wandering through the forest over and over, ending up in the same place no matter where we went."
"Have you ever felt strange presences around you?"
Luke nodded. "I had severe nightmares; all my friends did. One of them even prayed in his sleep to a strange statue."
…
"How are they?" Anton, after wiping the blood from his face, entered a special truck that had been brought to the nearest road.
"They've all responded exactly the same; there's no reason for them to lie."
He was also watching the interrogation. Even after a long time, he didn't notice anything strange about them. They were all clean, but a psychological evaluation was needed to understand the damage they had sustained from this supernatural experience.
"What are our casualties?"
"There haven't been any extreme deaths, Archbishop. We confirm three allied losses and ten men with minor injuries." An assistant showed Anton a smart tablet with detailed information about the events.
More than four hundred subjects belonging to a sect associated with the incidents in the village had been neutralized. This would put an end to the intensive search for these individuals, but it was still not enough.
A warlock must have been involved in this sect for the enemy to have such sophisticated dark magic. This is a much bigger problem because it suggests that today's events could happen again.
"We've discovered that this sect was also active in Japan before being eliminated by the Japanese government. They weren't as lucky as us because, by the time they arrived, more than five hundred people had committed suicide."
Anton looked at the images of that incident. His gaze fell on all those corpses, and he showed no expression. He had learned to leave all the bad behind; he would have time in the future to accept all that pain, but for now, there was a world that needed him.
"I'll take care of interrogating these people. Gather them all in one room to speed up the process. Let's finish this soon," Anton said as he left the room.
Things were about to get a bit grimmer. Dealing with these people should have fallen into other hands, but Anton wanted to teach Akira this very important process of mutual understanding between the affected and a priest.
"Guardian!" The soldiers standing on either side of the door in the interrogation room greeted Anton with a standard salute.
Anton nodded and asked, "Are they all inside the room?"
"Yes, Guardian. Do you need assistance?"
"I'll take it from here."
"Understood!"
…
"What the hell are these people going to do to us? Luke, what did they ask you?"
Luke looked up a bit dazed and said, "The same as everyone else; nothing new to add to what you all said."
Crack!
Anton entered the room, lighting a cigarette. His calm gaze passed over these people, and he walked to a chair and pulled it up to a metal table. "You're lucky, boys."
"Is that so? What the hell makes you think that? You know perfectly well that we lost a friend. Maybe you don't understand what that means, but we certainly do." Hutch got so agitated that he wanted to stand up to fight, but when he saw Anton's eyes and all those scars on his face, he fell silent.
Anton looked at some documents on the table and said, "Hutch, Luke, Phil, and Fiend... How are you?"
"We're fine. We're very grateful that you helped us." Luke was smarter in the conversation than the others.
Anton smiled slightly; he obviously knew these people were scared. "Forgive my rudeness; I apologize for what I said, but given my job, I don't give importance to the deaths that you might consider significant."
"Anyway, I can see that you haven't been affected by anything other than psychological damage, which will be addressed during the quarantine you'll spend confined in a facility." Anton wanted to take a deeper look at these people.
Luke sighed with relief, but his other friends couldn't wait.
"What about our families?"
"They'll be informed."
"Can we call them?"
Anton nodded and said, "I don't see why you can't."
They were about to speak more when the door to the interrogation room was opened again, and Rafael quickly approached Anton with a very worried look.