Chapter 170: King Arthur
Chapter 170: King Arthur
Chapter 170: King Arthur
Dragon Knight had an alternative nickname, which was King Arthur.
One of them was the name that he had given himself, while the other one was what the spectators liked to refer to him by.
He was called Dragon Knight because he was a Dragon Knight in the psychic world, and he was also known as King Arthur because his weapon was a golden sword that very much fit the description of the sword in the stone in the legends of King Arthur.
In the psychic world, King Arthur was a gallant male Dragon Knight in a suit of armor, but in the real world, she was actually a woman.
At the time of Adam's visit, she was drinking beer in a pub. In contrast with the lavish meal that Midget had been enjoying, there was only a glass of beer and three nuts laid out in front of her.
Her entire body was enshrouded in a cloak, and if it weren't for the information that he had received from the Green Gang, there was no way that Adam would've identified this homeless-looking person to be King Arthur.
"Lean Mean Killing Machine, right?"
King Arthur detected Adam as soon as he drew close.
Adam nodded in response.
"You're here to recruit me?"
"That's right."
King Arthur took a sip of beer, then reached out with a heavily calloused hand to break the shell of one of the nuts in front of her.
"You're very strong, and I've heard about your past. I have a question to ask you. If you can answer my question and fulfill a requirement from me, then I can become your teammate."
Adam was rather taken aback to hear this.
He had already resigned himself to the very real possibility that he wasn't going to be able to recruit anyone. On the way to the pub where King Arthur was, he had made an important realization, which was that he couldn't offer others anything to join his team.
His objective was to win, and his wish was to obtain Hook's footage.
Hence, not only was everyone on his team going to be exposed to the maximum amount of risk, the reward was something that wasn't valuable to anyone aside from Adam and his friends.
Outside of that, he couldn't provide anything else.
Money, status, reputation, even some illegal items... There was nothing that he could offer.
Hence, he was essentially asking others to risk their lives to achieve their goal for no compensation while abandoning their own objective, and it was simply a terrible deal.
After making this realization, Adam had come to terms with the fact that he most likely wasn't going to be able to recruit anyone, and he was only visiting King Arthur here to see if he could get something else out of the visit.
However, King Arthur's response was a little unexpected to him.
"What question could be so important to you?"
"I dug up some of the news going around in the outside world recently, and apparently, you worked with psychic mutants to slaughter children in a primary school, and you even helped the perpetrators attack a congressman from the southern congress during the chaos. Is that true?"
"No, it's fake news."
"In that case, would you be willing to show me your psychic world? I'll be able to discern the truth for myself."
King Arthur cracked open another nut as she spoke, and this time, Adam could see that not only were her hands covered in callouses, there were also scars on her wrists.
"That event should've left quite a deep impression on you, right? On top of that, it only happened recently, so there should be a psychic module of it in your psychic world. Would you mind showing it to me?"
"I definitely mind."
No one would be willing to casually display their psychic world to others, particularly someone like Adam, a blank slate with so many secrets. However...
"If you want to enter my psychic world, then you'll have to be accompanied by me at all times, and you can only see what happened on that day. Can you stick to that? If you go around doing as you please after you go in, then only one of us will be able to come back out alive."
At this point, Adam had the power to back up his words.
"I have no interest in seeing anything else."
"Alright, then I agree to your request." However, in order to ensure that King Arthur's other request was also one that he could fulfill, he asked in advance, "If you find out that I'm telling the truth, what is your other request?"
"I want you to help me uncover the secrets behind Carlin Asylum."
"That's something that I would've done myself anyway."
This was certainly not a request that Adam had to go out of his way to fulfill. Carlin Asylum, the southern congress, the Psychic Church, the Gaia Corporation, the Compassion Company, the human farm, the Ark Learning Children's Fund... Those were all organizations that he was going to investigate sooner or later.
Furthermore, they were all interconnected, so as long as he was able to make a breakthrough and infiltrate one of them, he would most likely be able to uncover all of the secrets one after another.
"Can I ask you why you care so much about what's going on behind the scenes at Carlin Asylum?"
Adam couldn't help but feel a little skeptical about how easy this teammate had been to come by.
This was an S tier combatant, and if she were joining him with ulterior motives or was a mole being planted in his team by his enemies, then he would be well and truly shooting himself in the foot by recruiting her.
"Because I used to be a psychic mutant. I grew up in Carlin Asylum as a child."
"You used to be a psychic mutant?" In Adam's mind, psychic mutants were all deranged individuals that were completely who had completely lost their sanity, yet no matter how he looked at her, King Arthur seemed to be a measured and rational person, completely going against his image of psychic mutants. "I thought it was impossible for psychic mutants to return to normal."
"I haven't returned to normal, it's just that I developed a new sane personality after I became a psychic mutant. My dragon steed isn't actually a dragon, and I'm not an invocator. Instead, that dragon is also me," King Arthur said, revealing one of her secrets.
She knew that she could only exchange for Adam's secrets with one of her own.
The quickest way for two people to establish a friendship was to show each other their scars.
Adam was quite surprised by this explanation, but he accepted it, nonetheless.
"If you still have some reservations, I can share with you some of my experiences as well," King Arthur added.
It was clear that she cared a great deal about uncovering the secrets behind Carlin Asylum.
"Sure."
At this point, there wasn't much left to be said, and Adam immediately dragged King Arthur into his psychic world without any hesitation.
King Arthur was a man of his word. As soon as he arrived in Adam's psychic world, he immediately closed his eyes. Sure enough, he was riding a rather strange-looking dragon steed, and he allowed Adam to take him to the relevant psychic module.
On the way there, he didn't look at anything and refrained from collecting any other information.
"We've arrived."
This psychic module contained the memory of what had transpired at Mirror Lake Primary School from Adam's perspective, so all of the tricks that Congressman Prince had pulled were naturally revealed.
.
The things that Prince had done weren't displayed in his footage, but from Adam's perspective, everything that he had done was as clear as day.
However, similarly, things in the psychic world couldn't be used as evidence in a court of law.
Memories could be faked, and there was also the matter of delusions.
However, King Arthur believed in what he was seeing. As an adapter, he had a far more in-depth understanding of the psychic world than the average person did, so he was better equipped to judge the authenticity of memories. He could tell that this was a genuine memory, but he was still extremely perplexed by what he was seeing.
"Why were you still hiding your power even at a time like that?"
In this psychic module, the combat prowess displayed by Adam was a far cry from what he had shown in his match against Oni no Hanzou.
King Arthur was convinced that no one could've possibly made such significant strides in such a short time.
The only possible explanation that he could think of was that Adam had been holding back, but he couldn't understand why.
"With your powers, you could've easily overwhelmed your enemies, and you wouldn't have ended up like this." King Arthur shook his head in befuddlement, and his dragon steed seemed to have sensed his emotions as it heaved a faint sigh. "Forget it. We don't know what your objective is, but from now on, we are teammates."