Chapter _7 Shopping district

'What. Have. You. Done?!'. Samuel said each syllable with a stop before the next one, with a voice that made him sound as if he was a person afraid of snakes looking in the mirror and watching his own reflection turning into a snake.

The horror.

He was so frightened that if an instrument used to measure the amount of fear a man was experiencing had been invented, the device would have surely malfunctioned due to an overload.

'You-you...you killed him!.

'He's dead!. What if his friends find us, what if he was still a virgin?!!'.

"You are unbelievable. Yes his brothers will find us and slit our one and only throat if you don't get yourself together!". But what C9 said did nothing to tame Samuel's flaring temper, if anything, his words and actions were the very lighter that set Sam's inner psychopath ablaze.

''Murderer!''.

Since C9 was the one who had the whole user manual on how the tan mannequin vessel operated, it was only natural that he was the de facto pilot of their shared body...but that was soon to change.

The moment Sam managed to scream that one word out loud was when he flipped the whole book about 'mannequin body possession'. This was because his anger was the factor that jumpstarted his conscious node and flooded the whole conscious core with his presence, and this greatly weakened the Custodian. His vision turned crimson red.

'What in the world..?'.

All that talk about C9 being the greatest and most glorified creation in the whole of mankind's history was rendered useless at that instant, because the moment Sam assumed total control of the body was when all hell broke loose.

Sinners of every calibre, crazed murderers of the worst kind and malevolent spirits with no regard for human life are what are known to be the inhabitants of hell...now imagine if all these creatures broke loose from the clutches of hell.

That was what Sam was about to put C9 through.

Bam!

'What the...!'.

Before C9 finished getting surprised, punches had already started raining on his face. He could not dodge, and he could not block moves he could not trace either.

But there was no enemy.

There was only a simple lone mannequin standing in an ancient looking temple decorated with cobblestones, patterned in such a way that made it look like it was created by an insanely talented artist over a course of a million years.

Patterns that could not be deciphered were everywhere, the walls, the ground and even the roof. This temple was so resilient that it looked as if it was about to crumble at any moment, but there was a mysterious force holding everything in place. It was as if it knew that its time was up and it was time to weather away, but it was too shy to do so.

There is nothing as distressing as fighting an enemy you cannot see and what the Custodian was going through was no different from receiving love confessions and love letters from a ghost, the traumatic experience was directly proportional, in a way. In fact the confusion felt by C9 overshadowed the amount of pain brought by the concoction of punches being brewed on his face.

After a seemingly endless amount of time being sucker punched by the invisible enemy, the Custodian punching bag was finally released from his torture...the enemy was getting weaker and weaker and so was the intensity of the punches.

'You've got to be kidding me'.

The reason why C9 could not track the flurry of fists was because they were too fast for his eyes to follow, yes, as a Custodian he was meant to be one of the strongest and fastest beings to ever been created...but that changed when he was wounded during the War of The Mainlands.

Now that he was able to see the origin of his misery the man was at a loss for words.

He did not know whether to laugh or cry, and the reason being?. It turned out that the villain was the very body he was possessing.

And the culprit?. His crazed roommate, Samuel Wang.

'Stop this madness you dumb piece of work!.

'What in the world do you think you're doing?!'. But the Custodian's words fell upon deaf ears. In fact, it was as if his words had reignited the crazed Samuel's murderous intent.

'Seems you can't be reasoned with...guess I have no other choice but to drag you back into that torture chamber'.

Using his Custodian privileges, he focused his consciousness and formed a steel-strong blue thread which was warping and dancing akin to a real worm, as if it had its own life. The sharp worm-like thread slithered around the conscious core and made itself comfortable on Sam's section of the core.

Then pain.

Excruciating pain.

"AHHHHHHHHHH!!!'. Since Samuel was the one on the pilot's seat this time, he could very well talk, feel, smell and most importantly...scream.

His three-second shrill scream escaped into the quiet night, and it was so bone chilling that even the dead would terrified as well. Then his vision that was seeing things in red went black, and with that...the man was out of commission.

"It all makes sense now...so that is why the world consciousness chose him.

"His bloodline carries the crimson rage and if it is tamed it could be a source of great power but if not, he could become a ticking time bomb...what a pain". C9 felt like a giant headache was about to visit him soon.

"He had no reason to rage, seems like that glass-attribute core was too much for him to take in, so the only way to expel the residual power was rage and burn all the energy".

"The rookie's got a pretty neat and powerful bloodline, but it could consume his very being unless properly harnessed".

"So goes the saying, fire is a bad master but a powerful servant. Seems like I have no choice but to be his nanny for the time being... what have I gotten myself into.

Then C9 subconsciously touched his face and he was absolutely horrified by the results. His face was smashed and had caved in like it was a miniature volcanic crater.

Fortunately for the man, he was blessed with varying attributes, and creation was one of them.

In a matter of seconds, the mannequin was as good as new...not a dent on its shiny outer exterior. Its [*1]fibreglass 'skin' had regained life, if you could even call it that.

"The assimilation process has been completed, looks like the vessel can now perform most tasks without straining the core. All that is left now is to suck dry a few more low tier cores and this suit is back in peak condition". C9 found himself having a conversation all by himself, a quirky habit of his that was deeply ingrained into his very being...and there was not a way to change it.

'The creepy glassman is going to kill us!...hang on, where is he?'. Sam eventually started showing signs of life after the great knockout, but the way he made his debut was not the best one.

C9 outrightly ignored his pestering roommate.

After a while of stumbling and tripping on rock debris of different shapes and sizes in the dark around the abandoned temple, the tan mannequin finally made it out of the ruin.

The moment he stepped on the first cobblestone on the temple's outer yard, the space behind them started to twist and turn...the same way a tornado does but a little bit slower. Just like that, the ancient mystical temple was no more, vanished into thin air as if everything that happened before was all a bad lie.

In the beautiful night sky, the moon shined brightly on the mannequin's outer exterior, completely highlighting the sleekness and smoothness of its fibreglass skin.

"Hmmm..seems like the old temple can still be summoned and unsummoned at will, but how that Rodinian found us still baffles me.

"Could it be that...?. But no, that's quite an impossibility.

"The only thing that makes sense is that he left a tracking signature on me during the Great War of The Mainlands".

If not for the fact that C9 had found a way of isolating Samuel's thoughts and sealing them off, he would have already been under fire from another round of Sam's endless barrage of questions.

One, two, three steps and buildings with bright lights started materializing into existence out of thin air, a clear sign that the previous realm they were in had started overlapping with the real world.

The mannequin just found itself in front of an extravagantly decorated store in the middle of a busy street at night, with the crowd bustling up and down carrying various shopping bags...a clear sign that they were going about their late night shopping.

"Crap this is bad". And the mannequin fell limply onto the ground, with all signs of life gone...and it was no different from your average mannequin you always see on a shop window in your favorite shopping district.

A neatly dressed and elegant young man was doing his routine checkups on each and every dress form that was used to decorate clothes and apparel sold by his company then spotted a mannequin sprawled on the ground.

"Did I leave this outside?... hmmm in any case I'll just bring it in. It's creepy enough that it has to lie in front of the store like that, will deal with it later".

The young man unknowingly dragged the ticking time bomb inside his family store, completely unaware of the weapon of mass destruction he was carrying.

[*1] Fibreglass is a material used to manufacture some mannequins' solid forms.