Chapter 93: Mole
Chapter 93: Mole
Chapter 93: Mole
After alerting everyone to the ongoing situation, Adam was still concerned for the safety of the children, and he rushed back to the corridor, where he saw a few teachers organizing the children to be evacuated through the fire exit.
He looked around with a wary expression, but didn't spot any suspicious individuals. He then turned to Orster, only to find that she had been rather slow to react and had only just completed her transformation.
Even if you were an adapter, you wouldn't undergo your normal transformation if you weren't aware that you were in the psychic world.
Orster's psychic body was a stunning beauty, in stark contrast with her unremarkable appearance in real life. In this form, she had a voluptuous chest and backside, and her lips were full and alluring. She was very beautiful, for sure, but it was a little too over the top.
In particular, her massive rear end resembled a millstone, and it seemed like it was only going to weigh her down in battle.
Adam wanted to see what her psychic body looked like so he didn't end up mistakenly targeting her during the upcoming battle.
However, his arrival kicked off a small-scale panic. Some of the children had just witnessed Hellhound blasting an Explosive Fireball into the sky, and with Adam's arrival, the children were also exposed to the sight of Mummy, and many of them began crying and screaming in horror.
"Hey, no running! Don't be afraid, this is a Halloween dress rehearsal organized by our school."
The teachers were frantically yelling over the screaming children to maintain order, and after ensuring that everything was fine, Adam temporarily retreated back to the fire exit. At the same time, he withdrew his invoked entities.
All of these children were still in primary school, and even the oldest among them were only 11 or 12 years old, while the youngest ones were only six or seven years of age. As such, their comprehension ability was very limited. In addition to that, even the average adult had very limited exposure to concepts such as adapters and psychic worlds, so it was certainly unreasonable to expect children to understand.
Thankfully, it was clear that the teachers held a great deal of authority in the hearts of the students, and it didn't take long for them to restore order after fabricating some lying and cajoling.
"Hurry up and get into a line, everyone, just like we practiced before! Stop running, Michael! You're going to step on someone!"
The fire alarm was still ringing, and the teachers were still yelling frantically over the alarm. Even though the situation was very chaotic, the students were still able to make their way to the fire escape without much further delay.
Inside the passageway, Adam's telegnosis was fully activated, and he was constantly looking out for sneak attacks. However, the students made it all the way to the bottom floor without a hitch.
What's going on here? Why are they not attacking after dragging everyone into the psychic world?
Adam was very perplexed. After all, according to what May had told them, stalling for time would only be beneficial to them and detrimental to the enemy.
The longer this went on, the greater the chance that Mechguard's attention would be drawn to the scene.
Something's not right here.
Adam couldn't think of a reason why the enemy would do this, so as a precautionary measure, he invoked Clown and Nun and instructed them to scout the nearby area.
Both of the anomalies were at an infantile stage and didn't possess much combat prowess, but one of them was able to conjure up illusions and had a concealment ability, while the other was able to possess objects and manifest darkness, so both made for great scouts.
After the two miniature anomalies were invoked, Clown leaped forward a few times before concealing itself, vanishing on the spot. Meanwhile, Nun took some time to inspect the environment around itself, then flew into the body of a boy as a streak of black light.
The boy was the one that the teacher had referred to as Michael earlier. He was a real troublemaker, and while everyone was evacuating in an orderly fashion under the instructions of the teachers, he was constantly darting around, tripping over the students beside him on several occasions.
He seemed to revel in causing chaos, and the louder the fire alarm became, the more excited he grew, and he wasn't considering the consequences of his actions at all.
His egregious personality immediately resonated with Nun, and it instantly possessed the little boy, drawn to him by the negative energy that he was giving off. The possession process went without a hitch, and Nun didn't encounter any obstruction before the possession was complete.
Following the possession, Michael's face instantly turned as white as a sheet, which only worked to further accentuate the dark rings that had appeared around his eyes. He quickly inspected his surroundings, and while the teachers weren't looking, he snuck out of the line.
Adam was witnessing all of this as it unfolded, but he did nothing to stop it. Michael's presence already posed a severe threat to the safety of others, so it was a good thing that he was detaching himself from the rest of the students.
Adam's mission was to protect everyone, so Michael's departure was a perfect development in his eyes.
The students slowly scaled down the fire exit staircase amid the chaos, from the fourth floor all the way down to the front of the school building. It was rather cramped with so many people gathered together, and everyone began to move toward the clearing in front of the Mirror Lake according to the original plan.
During this time, Adam still didn't spot any attack signals, and the children continued to move toward the Mirror Lake as they had rehearsed many times in past fire drills.
However, right at this moment, a child suddenly rushed toward Adam at a speed far faster than what the average person should've been capable of. The child was none other than Michael.
He arrived by Adam's side, then pointed at the lake in the distance as he said in a dry and raspy voice, "Anomalic... power..."
"What do you mean?"
Adam cast his gaze toward the lake in the distance, but failed to detect anything.
"Under... the... lake..."
As an anomaly that was capable of possession, Nun was most sensitive to special types of power out of all of Adam's anomalies, and that allowed it to sense some things that Adam couldn't.
At this point, it was already abundantly clear what Nun was referring to.
There was anomalic power under the lake. Anomalic power was something that was possessed by both emotional anomalies and psychic mutants, and the presence of anomalic power under the lake indicated that the psychic mutants had already set up an ambush there in advance.
They were waiting for all the children to make their way to the lake before launching their attack!
Everything makes sense now!
Ever since the psychic mutants were released, their objective had always been to sow panic in the masses, and in order to achieve this goal, they had to manufacture a serious incident.
Their goal couldn't just be achieved by killing a few people or causing a small-scale incident.
If they wanted an overwhelming majority of the general public to support the establishment of an adapter inspection department, then they needed to perpetrate an incident that affected a massive scale. Ideally, the victims would be children, and a large number of children, at that. Just killing a few or even several dozen children wasn't enough, they had to wipe out an entire school.
Hence, they were waiting for the perfect opportunity. The fire exit passageway was a good place to lurk, but it still wasn't good enough. They wanted to gather everyone in one place and wipe them all out in one fell swoop.
How do they know that all of the children will be evacuated to the lake?
Adam inspected the surrounding landscape, and even though the school wasn't exactly massive, it wasn't a small establishment, either, and there was more than one place that could fit all of the children at once.
It was quite a stretch to say that they predicted that all of the students would gather at the clearing beside the lake solely because they had heard the fire alarm.
Could it be that someone tipped them off in advance?
Adam's gaze roamed over the surrounding area before settling on the representative of the southern congress.
Her form in the psychic world was much the same as his appearance in the real world. The only difference of note was that he was wearing a pair of strange and heavy-looking metal gloves, and at the moment, he was in the process of instructing everyone to proceed toward the lake.
Adam didn't know who it was that had leaked this information, but regardless of who it was, he had to stop this right away.
"Everyone, stay where you are! Don't go to the lake!" Adam yelled, and the people around him reflexively stopped in their tracks.
However, his voice still wasn't loud enough to reach everyone, and he inhaled deeply before yelling in an even louder voice, "Everyone, stay where you are! There's danger by the lake!"