Chapter 29: The Face
Casanova sat on his car, a modified Chevrolee Talohe.
It was big enough for him to hold his concealed weapons inside it, fast enough incase he needed follow someone, and inconspicuous.
Every species: humans, animals, and even Nephilim have always had some shit-stains in need of cleaning.
Humanity appointed cops and soldiers to deal with them. The animal kingdom appointed the strongest ones of their ranks to get rid of them, while the Nephilim had people like Casanova.
Unofficially, though. Nobody had ever asked him to do that.
The Nephilim are mostly a solitary species, after all.
And if someone ran around, commending them to submit to a law, he would get killed just as soon as he ended his manifesto.
Letting people do what they want with no consequences is absurd.
There will always be a need for order—or punishment, if necessary.
The latter was the reason for Casanova's current mission. It was the first one in a long while, but he decided to accept it nonetheless.
From the reports that were sent to him by an old colleague, a lone Nephilim had kidnapped three young women and was keeping them locked inside an underground dungeon two cities away from Rosano.
The Nephilim was a fervent believer of an obscure medical book, called The Hermetical Canons of Immortality.
The Hermetical Canons of Immortality was an ancient book, dating from the early 1300s. It spoke about various method to achieve immortality, eternal youth, invincibility, and spiritual shedding of the bodily vessel.
Due to the gruesome methods employed in its pages, the nobility of the time decided to keep it away from the plebeian world, fearing a revolution filled with immortals souls, incapable of dying.
They stored it away in the hidden chambers, always to be guarded by knights who were unaware of the book's existence.
One day, hundreds of years after the book's writing, it's said that Elizabeth Bathory, the woman who would later be known as the inspiration behind Dracula, came to know about the book by an unspecified noble while attending the same party as him.
The woman bribed the knights who were guarding the hidden chambers with ease, coming to learn about the mystical book.
Since she herself was prone to seizures and was afraid of death, she decided to lock herself in the chambers and started to study The Hermetical Canons of Immortality, pairing it with other ancient, esoteric writings hidden in her castle.
She was especially fond of one passage of the book—one that advocated people to consume and bathe inside the blood of unsullied women to aid them into achieving eternal-youth.
Bathory was initially was fearful of the consequences of murdering people, since she was a Calvinist Protestant, but after a sudden and intense fit of seizures that almost killed her, she had no other choices left.
Using her connections with nobility and the trust people had in someone with a status as high as her, she employed many young, hopeful women that only wanted a good life for their families to work in her castle.
When the girls came, she applied the various methods written in the book, now her object of veneration.
Such were: burning her servants alive to eradicate their spirit, strangling girls with silk scarfs to later use their bloated corpse as a redirector of bad-luck, and her favorite, the drainage of virgin blood for eternal-youth.
She kept on murdering women, servants, and even random people for ten whole years, thinking that she was finally becoming an immortal.
But then, one late-night when she was 54 years old, while she was busy on torturing a peasant, the young girl mocked her, calling her an old, disgusting viper.
Enraged, Elizabeth murdered her, storming into her room.
She wiped her make-up with her bloodied hand, noticing he presence of more wrinkles.
She barged inside the hidden chambers and grabbed her holy book, deciding to employ its methods with even more fervor.
She summoned every single servant, staked them, and burnt them all while chanting the arcane writings of The Hermetical Canons of Immortality's, but to no avail, for she was still aging.
In her madness, she took the book, ripping its pages from the window of her castle, chanting the blasphemous and mystical verses she had come to learn from her intricate studies of the forgotten arts.
Most pages had been lost, carried away from the wind—but some ended up surviving, with one of them ending up in the hands of the lone Nephilim Casanova had to hunt.
From the intrinsic depth of the information Casanova had received—and the fact that she left many trails behind, he figured that she wasn't a Nephilim with the ability to enhance her brain power with quintessence.
One of the trails was the testimony from one of the girls who had been captured.
Five days before getting taken by the rogue Nephilim, she had complained to her mother about having seen an older woman always standing and staring at her as she stood on their courtyard.
Her mother thought that she possibly was someone ridden with dementia or any other age-relates issues, so she didn't fear for her daughter's safety.
She would come to regret her actions.
After she got kidnapped, the victim's mother contacted the police, turning the rogue Nephilim into the prime suspect, signaling her inexperience like a beacon in a moon-less night.
The police didn't have any leads on her identity or place of stay, so they couldn't just barge in her dungeon when she wasn't looking.
They did have a sketch made by the mother, though.
The rogue Nephilim was a wrinkled-ridden woman in her late-fifties, making it understandable of why she sought eternal life that badly.
For that, she resembled Elizabeth Bathory, the original owner of The Hermetical Canons of Immortality.
Casanova pulled down the sleeve of his forearm, exposing his imposing muscles.
He silently checked the clock, noticing it was thirty minutes to mid-day.
He was about to call Gray, to ask him about his meeting with Franz, when suddenly, his communication device rang.
'Gray?' he asked himself, wondering if the young man had encountered any problems.
As he reached for his pockets, he saw that the call came from Franz.
Casanova frowned, answering the the call.
"What's wrong," he asked.
Franz, who had just finished tending to his injured self, heaved.
"It's about Gray."
"Speak." Casanova ordered.
"It should be impossible for him, but he doesn't have only one Mercurial Fragment," Franz took a deep breath. "He has two—and somehow, it seems that his body isn't possessing any kind of symptoms."
Casanova's mind was now riddled with indecipherable thoughts and emotions. "How was the condition of his soul and his Mercurial Fragments?" he tersely asked.
"His soul was typical, free from any daemons—but I noticed the presence of dark amalgamations of shadows, keepers of images I couldn't see through."
"What you were seeing was the boy's memory. After a certain event, they got locked locked away, concealed behind those shadows," the older Nephilim explained briefly.
'How could it be that Gray, one who has just turned into a Nephilim, is ridden with things of which I'm unable to see through?' Franz thought, amazed.
"Tell me more about his Mercurial Fragments." Casanova stopped his car and left his vehicle.
He arrived inside the rogue Nephilim's city!
The town, called Corveno, was smaller and more rural than Rosano, to the point where its inhabitants had to travel a long distance to find supermarkets, police stations, and hospitals.
It made sense of why the rogue Nephilim had decided such city as her playing ground.
"One was relatively normal—its traits reflecting the nature of his ability."
"But the other…" Franz wiped the sweat away from his forehead. "It still terrifies me."
Taking a deep breath of air, he spoke.
"That 'thing' oozed a soul-shattering sense of maddening malice and greed, like a monster in need of being freed, like a black hole who sought to devour everything…"
"What I've seen is not a normal Mercurial Fragment—that being is intelligent, Casanova. His knowledge, His wisdom, His plans, and His wretched goals are something I can't even imagine."
"I saw abyssal, otherworldly tendrils slowly come from its abominable depths, piercing his other Mercurial Fragment."
"He caused it to change its form, but I was too terrified to even look."
"I felt my eyes getting immersed in lava; I felt my retinas scream for a moment of mercy; I felt my optic nerve melt away; and I almost felt my Mercurial Fragment shatter from the monstrous pressure."
"I was about to bask in His horrid, antediluvian glory, when the world stretched, our connection got off, and I found myself into my living room."
"All of that happened in less than one seconds, Casanova. Had I stared at Him for more than that, I wouldn't be alive to tell His tale."
"I don't know what kind of ungodly abomination that creature is, but if it were to be released…" Franz didn't continue speaking, leaving the meaning of the phrase out in the open.
Casanova stayed silent, his expression now encased in a permanent frown.
He walked on the bust-down sidewalk, circling his car.
He opened the trunk and took only two of his many suitcases filled with concealed weapons.
He opened one of them, gazing at its insides for a few moments.
Staring back at him was a realistic mask, lacking any expressions.
It's been a long time ever since Sahvin the Scarred has been taken out of its leathery prison.
Decades ago, Casanova had used the identity of Sahvin to punish the Nephilims he regarded as his enemies. Back then, he didn't care about order—all he needed was to get rid of those who wronged him.
"You always talked about being indebted with me, right?" still staring at the emotionless face of Sahvin, Casanova spoke, his voice hoarse.
"You freed my village, saving us from our captors. How could I not repay you?"
"Monitor Gray's condition. If the being you've seen is planning something with his body, you have to be the first one to know and inform me."
"And if something truly unfolds… I will have to take the matter into my hands."
Although his expression was tense, his heart was slowly sinking into the pits of his stomach.
'What would I even say to his sister, if the situation were to escalate? How would I be able to approach her, knowing the wretched details of the sin I committed?'
'Even so… In the grand scale of things, my personal feelings cannot matter."
It was a long time ever since Casanova had such conflicting emotions.
It annoyed him a great deal.
"I see." Franz replied.
As Casanova hung the call up, he grabbed the mask of Sahvin, slipping it on his face effortlessly, like he had always done all those years ago.
His emotions slowly dripped away, his heart gradually lightened, and his expression slowly turned dead-pan.
…
Franz slowly removed the still-bloodied bandages that covered his eyes.
Looking at himself in the mirror, he recognized his sickly, almost dead look.
Considering the great deal of peril he faced the hours earlier, he felt that his situation could have gone a lot worse.
Knowing that Gray could be in danger, saddened him greatly, however.
Being someone whose sense of entertainment was observing the people he regarded as intriguing, the possibility of losing someone as interesting as him hurt Franz deeply.
He sighed. "Believe me, my friend. I do hope that nothing harrowing happens to you."
"Even if meeting you caused me a great harm, I hope that we'll be able to talk, laugh, and have a great deal of fruitful conversations like we did last time."
His lips slowly curved upwards.
"And most importantly, I can't wait of seeing how you'll fare off in difficult situations, Gray."
"Will you succeed in utilizing the power of that abomination you possess as a Mercurial Fragment? Or rather, will you be crushed by it?"
He hunched over, clutching his bloodied eyes.
Soon after, what firstly was stifled laugh became a full, maniacal, pierrot-like chuckle.
"Casanova, I must thank you…" he said under his fits of laughter.
"First you make me encounter someone as interesting as him, and now you even let him come under my wing.."
"I can't wait to see how this situation will develop!"