He and It Chapter 12: The King’s Pearl (12)

Chapter 12: The King’s Pearl (12)

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: KarateChopMonkey

For a moment, Jiang Mian subconsciously cowered all his reactions, all his emotions, into a snail’s shell. He lifted his hands, raising them protectively to his chest.

“So, you’re crazy.” He said quietly, letting the over-the-top insult slip unmarked from his blank demeanor, “I think I need to unilaterally abort this conversation, I…”

The air froze as he spoke and stepped back, but Fabian suddenly grabbed his slim shoulders, his iron-clamp-like ten fingers set deep into his flesh, causing Jiang Mian to scream out in pain.

“Do you think I didn’t notice the sickening little gestures between you?” Fabian asked sternly, “The way you blushed and mumbled and lifted your eyelashes to look at it as if you were its whore! Did you really think I didn’t notice?!”

“Get lost!” Jiang Mian shouted, resisting with all his might, “That’s none of your business!”

The German ripped off his gloves and slapped Jiang Mian across the face!

Jiang Mian’s skull buzzed and his nose bled across his lips, but he was unaware of it, because once the glove was off, Fabian’s skin overflowed with a revolting oil scent that clung to Jiang Mian’s face and instantly sent his empty stomach into spasms.

Jiang Mian wanted to vomit, but he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to throw up anything but his intestines.

“Oh!” Fabian exclaimed pretentiously, “The glass beauty is allergic to fish attractants, why did I forget to wash my hands? I’m really sorry! You’re not hurt, are you?”

Jiang Mian’s limbs were paralyzed, his body shuddered, and even his nail caps were about to explode. The German’s wrist was a full circle thicker than his, and snapping him could be said to be effortless.

“Do you think… this is good for it?” As if a viper had emerged from its hole, Fabian hissed in Jiang Mian’s ear, “You treat it like a human being now, talking and laughing with it, but in the end you still want to dig its flesh and squeeze its blood? You give it hope, but you’re actually the one who will stab it the deepest in the future… Sometimes, I do appreciate your hypocrisy, pretty thing.”

Jiang Mian’s ears were ringing and his eyes were burning, he was scared, scared and disgusted, but anger finally overwhelmed all other emotions and he spat with all his might, mixed with nosebleed, in the German’s face, “Coward!”

“Thanks for the compliment!” Fabian turned his face away, wiped off the blood with a light expression, licked it again and said with a fake smile, “You’re sweet, my dear.”

“You’re always afraid to do anything rash, because you know what Raperth can do…” Jiang Mian struggled between loathing and vomiting, “Even if you trap him in a cage, he’s still a force beyond your control… You fear him, as I reach out toward him, and you… Lock yourself behind everything that is safe…”

Fabian’s smile froze for a moment.

“It does seem that you and that freak have a special way of communicating.”

At that moment, the office door swept open from the outside and Fabian’s second-in-command burst in in a hurry with a couple of heavily armed guards, saying in alarm, “Doctor! The experiment is rioting!”

The fresh air rushed into the completely closed space and washed away the greasy aroma, giving Jiang Mian’s blood-starved brain a moment to catch its breath. In the haze, he also heard the distant raging clamor.

Fabian seemed to freeze for a moment, then stared at the Jiang Mian in his hands.

“You’re right, not unloading it while it was unconscious was the only miscalculated decision I’ve ever made in my life.” He whispered, “But after seeing how you guys acted last night, I must admit with surprise that this matter is not without room for maneuvering…”

He grabbed Jiang Mian’s hair with one hand and forced him up to his chest, hissing against the youth’s ear, “A sudden surprise, right? But that’s the essence of blitzkrieg! I can’t control him, but I can control you, pretty thing. That’s why everything has its weaknesses, even monsters.”

Jiang Mian kicked him hard in the calf bone, and the man just frowned and pressed a hand coated with fish attractant directly against his mouth and nose.

“Come on,” Fabian smiled rather idly, “the classic Beauty and the Beast scene is one I certainly can’t miss.”

—

The mermaid growled.

He bared his teeth and roared, and the wide fins glued to his arms and the floor burst into life, as if they had sprouted out of thin air in several pairs of brilliantly colored wings.

The researchers at the station really didn’t understand what was going on, because early that morning, Dr. Fabian, who was in charge, wasn’t there, and he also took the handler with him.

It didn’t matter, they thought, they could handle a single mermaid.

—In fact, they really couldn’t.

According to the surveillance video, at 6:24 a.m., the subject suddenly opened its eyes and displayed a disturbing agitation. Ten minutes later, its shoulder muscles suddenly reacted with a slight contracture, and then, without warning, it slammed into the glass wall with such force and noise that it almost scared some of the older scholars into having a heart attack.

No one tried to calm it down, and no one dared to approach. In desperation, they drained the water and activated the CIWS system again. As a result of the previous experience, this time the punishment wasn’t the least bit merciful.

However, with a rate of fire of 2,000 rounds a minute, a massive flood of ammunition poured down, exploding with an appalling heat of light and clamor, completely inferior to high-voltage electric sparks, the mermaid didn’t dodge. His body instantly curled up, muscle plates, bones locked together, fish tail scales like layers of armor, emitting a crisp knocking sound, by the time three minutes of gun torture had passed, the ground was full of broken armor-piercing shrapnel, the surface of the mermaid’s skin, also like a hedgehog stabbed with long, sharp shells.

Three minutes was the limit for enabling a CIWS.

The experimental station was silent, people just looked at the monster in the cage, stunned.

The shell casings were expelled from the hard muscles and splashed noisily to the ground like a hailstorm. They saw the mermaid incline its head and touch its left cheek with its fingertips in a dazed, careful manner, its ear fins trembling with a frequency as if in painful convulsions.

“…Damn.” A researcher’s eyes widened, “Load ammunition, load ammunition! It’s going to counterattack! It’s going to—”

It was all too late as the male mermaid turned in a strangely twisted gesture toward the wall where he had already smashed a large, hooded crack into it.

He opened his thin lips, revealing snow-white fangs, a blood-red mouth with a long tongue—

He revealed a tunnel leading into the abyss.

Subsonic waves, indistinguishable to the human ear, ripple through the air in the tiniest of ways. They pass unhindered through polyurethane glass, through all sorts of soundproofing devices that they thought were useful, through thick protective suits, intimately close to the guards’ fascia and bone marrow, fondling their bright red, sticky guts, they began to shudder compulsively.

——You have chosen your own path to death, and I am happy to oblige!

At this moment, the scholars at the experimental station didn’t see with their own eyes how gruesome the sight of bursting blood vessels and shattered lungs were, they only saw swollen skin as thin as paper on the ground, which, with the slightest poke, would burst with a clatter of human jelly.

The mermaid’s level of manipulation of sound waves, with the peak to describe all seem like a humiliation. It created a huge amount of subcutaneous bleeding, dissolving almost all the organs in the human body, and then locked the entire slurry intact in the bloated skin.

Raperth’s diamond-shaped pupils were black as ink, dilated and then contracted, a frenzied rage boiling in the sky, about to burn the mermaid’s two hearts.

How dare… How dare they? He was willing to sing soft songs all night long, coaxing Jiang Mian to sleep peacefully in the calm sweet darkness of the night, how dare they break the atmosphere of this safe nest, how dare they hurt him!

“Infrasound…” Ted’s voice was hoarse, unable to hide his fear.

“Its vocal organs can actually support it to manipulate infrasound?!”

Ted’s assertion was like a stone breaking the surface of the water, from the coldest silence to the loudest noise, in the blink of an eye, the room immediately became a mess. Fierce arguments erupted, about the flow of data and access of information. The cacophony of voices was incessant.

“But six years ago…”

“…Six years ago the living female no longer has reference value! After all, apart from the flesh and blood and extremely strong self-healing ability, it has nothing special worth recording!”

“Mermaids themselves possess a distinct hierarchy, and now we see just how much difference there really is between individuals of different ranks…”

“Now is not the time for sentimentality! Put down the valves for liquid nitrogen and liquid helium, fifteen tons all in, cast!”

“Open the particle cutter, we just need blood, hurry!”

The red light of the particle cutter immediately appeared in the observation room, and the milky white mist close to minus three hundred degrees climbed in along the walls, condensing a crisp freezing sound… People’s eyes were glued to the real time surveillance, waiting for the results.

Raperth, sensing a real threat, was indifferent to hypothermia, but the red light that shot out splashed a burning penetrating wound on his arm.

Even with the strength of the deep-sea mermaid’s body, he still couldn’t take the power of the particle cutter hard and unguarded.

His tail and waist and abdomen snapped to life, leaping high off the waterless floor, avoiding most of the stray laser bars, and slowly spilling light red blood, staining the mermaid’s long hair.

Raperth bounced down on the other side of the clearing, moving faster than lightning. His waist arched, his fish tail resembling a snake’s belly, and in a flash he tightened into a ball, his gill patterns fluctuating rapidly, sending out a deadly sonic boom—

The wall of alloy phantom, instantly visible to the naked eye frequency of warfare. Just as a singer could ascend and descend at will, Raperth also easily harnessed the hertz of infrasound, shattering the internal parts of the machinery with precision.

“Damn!” Someone in the experiment station yelled, “Fucking monster! Where’s its handler?”

“His handler is here.”

The door opened and Ted turned his head to see the tall German standing behind all of them, carrying a Jiang Mian with red, bloodied cheeks and struggling weakly in his hands.

“Oh my God, what are you doing Dr. Fabian?!” Dr. Brown shouted, “Why did you hurt him when we needed him most?”

Fabian said coldly, “Because, this is the moment that really shows his worth.”

He took the defenseless youth hostage, strapped him to his body like a shield, and with a brazen smile on his face, he stepped out of the vacuum shield without a care in the world.

“It’s good to see that this special relationship can arise between you!” Standing in front of the torn glass wall, he shouted to the mermaid.

The fish attractant was violently affecting Jiang Mian’s body, and he did his best to keep the surging stomach acid locked behind his teeth.

Raperth, go, go… 

Black completely covered the pupils of the male mermaid’s eyes, he wanted to completely tear and rip the flesh and blood of that land people, and then snatch Jiang Mian back immediately, rub into his arms, make him laugh, make him happy, make him eat, feel warm, comfortable and safe, and keep him away from all dangers.

The longing was so urgent that it was like lava, burning his whole body with pain.

Raperth’s long hair twisted like a swarm of snakes, and the fin bones all over his body seemed to explode with thorns. He stood tall and hovered slowly, supporting his body with a strong fishtail, just like a giant alien idol, casting a completely oppressive shadow that completely enveloped the top of the German’s skull.

[Let him go.] The hidden roar was like thunder, simmering in the mermaid’s chest.

Fabian gave a dry laugh, even though Jiang Mian was dizzy under the torment of vomiting and regurgitation, he could still hear the tightness and displeasure in his opponent’s laugh.

Should it break its own tail, or cut open its own chest and abdomen, tearing open the vocal cords until it was seriously injured to the point of being unable to resist?

Fabian’s mind raced with all sorts of threatening and sinister thoughts, but in the end, he glanced at the Jiang Mian in his hand.

Stupid idealists, he had seen too many in his life, they were always willing to give everything for what they were defending, even if they gave their lives without hesitation, and didn’t feel sorry… Although hostages worked well, if you pushed too far and turned him into a hostage willing to sacrifice for the coerced, it didn’t work well at all.

“I can let him go, but on one condition.” He lifted his head and tried to spit as clearly and as loudly as he could, “Leave your blood, that’s the ransom we need!”

The mermaid paused for a moment as he looked down on Fabian’s face, his expression certainly grim, the depths of his gaze adding a hint of malevolent sarcasm.

“You want… my blood?”

Jiang Mian gouged and broke free from Fabian’s fingers, “No, don’t give…”

[Shhh, shhh…] Raperth softened his brow and chirped lowly, [Don’t be nervous, Pearl. Take it easy, they don’t know what kind of end they’re asking for…]

“Save the sweet talk for when you go to hell!” Fabian said in a loud voice, “Yes, or no?”

Raperth stared at him steadily, time slowed like drops of water on a stalactite, not sure how long had passed, whether it was a second, a minute, or an hour, when the expression on the mermaid’s face finally changed.

The corners of his mouth grinned almost to the roots of his ears, and his long bloody tongue, snaking behind the dense sharp teeth — a ghastly smile that was only bestial and inhumane.

“Okay.” The mermaid replied slowly, “You want blood, I’ll give you blood.”