Chapter 110: The Hound

Chapter 110: The Hound

Mr. Lutz was a well-respected man on Rainbridge Street. He had a respectable job, serving in the great "Sword of Justice"—that unlucky place that's always getting struck by lightning... er, I mean, the glorious institution. Though none of his neighbors knew exactly what he did, the salary was enough to afford his family a comfortable life. Naturally, Mr. Lutz was the envy of all.

Now thirty-four years old, this man had been married for ten years and was the father of two children, yet he was still head over heels for his wife. In the morning, after breakfast, he dressed neatly and stepped out the door. Beyond it lay a small garden, meticulously tended by his wife, who had a real eye for the finer things. Rose bushes heavy with blooms lined the fence.

Amid the flowers, Mr. Lutz kissed his wife. His two children clung tightly to his legs.

"Daddy's gonna bring you honey cakes today," Mr. Lutz said with a smile, ruffling both children's heads.

"You'll spoil them rotten," his wife chided playfully.

"I've got a feeling today's gonna be a big day at work. Why not celebrate?"

A smile spread across his face beneath his neatly trimmed beard. He whistled, and a dog emerged from the flower bushes, trotting toward its master.

It was a sleek, athletic hound with a glossy coat and a silver collar. Seemingly overjoyed to see its owner, the dog's tail wagged furiously—a tail that could leave a bruise if it smacked your shin.

Mr. Lutz had brought the hound home a year and a half ago. He'd built it a doghouse out in the garden.

Mr. Lutz didn't need a leash. One look, and the hound obediently followed him out of the garden and down Rainbridge Street toward the towering spire that jutted into the city skyline. Along the way, Mr. Lutz nodded greetings to neighbors passing by. They would first greet Mr. Lutz, then coo at the hound in baby talk. It had become a daily ritual.

"Heading to work with your master? What a good boy."

The hound barked in response, as if answering the neighbor's question.

Just like nobody knew what Mr. Lutz actually did at the Tribunal, nobody knew why he brought his beloved dog to work every day. Maybe he just really loved the dog.

From Rainbridge Street to the "Sword of Justice," the walk took about twenty minutes. The morning walk left the hound feeling great and all hyped up. Even when they got to the Tribunal's headquarters, it was still raring to go.

Two guards at the tower's entrance saluted Mr. Lutz. When they spotted the hound, the younger guard's face went pale with fear. The older guard shot him a warning glare.

Mr. Lutz headed up the stairs. The hound followed him like a pro through a series of heavily guarded doors, until they reached the fifteenth floor. Several men and women were already waiting in the corridor. Upon seeing Mr. Lutz, they bowed in unison.

"Good morning, my fellow scholars," Mr. Lutz said genially. "Are the new prisoners coming in today?"

The young man nearest to Mr. Lutz nodded. "Not until this afternoon. The prison's got a lot of paperwork to get through." The hound recognized him as Mr. Lutz's confidential secretary.

"No matter. A few dozen prisoners—I can get through them in an afternoon." Mr. Lutz smiled. "Now, I'm going to continue the experiment I left unfinished yesterday. Gentlemen, if you'll excuse me."

He went into the changing room, where his secretary helped him into a clean white robe (the ladies changed in a separate room), then he walked into the room at the end of the hall.

The hound followed silently. It knew that room well. It was Mr. Lutz's laboratory, where he spent most of his day. No one else was ever allowed inside—not even his secretary or assistants. But he let the hound lie by the door and take a nap. That was the very place where the hound had been changed.

The lab's walls were lined with shelves holding all sorts of instruments the hound didn't recognize, and anatomical specimens it did. They passed an especially large heart preserved in a jar, labeled "Heart, Giant-Bodied (A)."

In the middle of the lab was a steel operating table, and a big, burly guy was already strapped to it. His arms and legs were strapped down tight, his eyes covered with a black blindfold, a gag in his mouth, and drool running down his chin into his hair.

When he heard someone come in, he struggled against his restraints, but all he managed to do was rattle the chains and the table.

The hound, startled by the sudden noise, instinctively shrank back.

Humming a tune, Mr. Lutz laid out a row of tools on the workbench: scalpels of different sizes, hemostats, probes, drills, saws, and chisels.

The hound crouched by the door. It had sharp hearing—even through the iron door, it could hear what was going on outside. Mr. Lutz's subordinates were chatting in the corridor.

"Alright, everyone out. I can handle the rest myself," Mr. Lutz said.

"What's that test subject's supernatural ability?" a female voice asked.

"Stone skin. He can make parts of his skin as hard as rock. It's a C-rank ability, personally assessed by Mr. Lutz," replied his secretary.

"Not a high rank, but quite useful in combat!" the woman exclaimed. "If only that ability could be turned into a relic for our warriors."

The secretary said, "That's exactly what Mr. Lutz is researching—how to extract supernatural abilities and forge them into relics."

"Is... is that even possible? Don't relics only form after someone dies? And it's totally random—nobody knows if one will even show up..."

Another person said, "You're new, so you wouldn't know. A year and a half ago, Mr. Lutz made a discovery! When a superhuman uses their ability, if you cut out part of their brain, the ability keeps going."

"Oh? Really?" the female assistant marveled.

The others chimed in:

"Haven't you seen it? The one right next to Mr. Lutz..."

"But doing so also turns the test subject into an idiot."

"We need their abilities, not their brains. In fact, even the ones that fail end up more docile. The Church even uses them as servants or menial workers—they're way more useful than regular people."

"The prison's happy about it too, since it makes their job of watching them easier."

"But some of the Inquisitors are against it. They say that even prisoners shouldn't have their ability to think taken away, because people who can't think can't feel the grace of the God of Dawn. And besides, it's, uh, inhumane."

"Don't worry about what those 'hounds' think. Killing heretics is their thing. But when it comes to research, our department has the final say."

Mr. Lutz walked up to the man on the table with a probe. The man's ears weren't plugged. When he heard the footsteps, the exposed skin on his body instantly turned a granite-like color.

Mr. Lutz muttered to himself, "He's activated his ability. Probably out of defensiveness."

There were only the two of them in the room, but he naturally talked about the test subject in the third person, like he was describing a fact instead of talking to him.

"An ordinary scalpel might not pierce his 'stone skin.' Hmm, I should have anticipated this."

Mr. Lutz bent down to look at the man. Then, faster than you could blink, he ripped off the blindfold, revealing a pair of bloodshot eyes full of terror.

The sudden light made the man's pupils contract sharply, yet he couldn't close his eyes. Mr. Lutz tapped his eyelid with the probe. "Ah, just like I thought—once he's petrified, his eyelids can't move, but his eyeballs aren't affected by the 'stone skin.' I can go in from here."

He aimed the tip of the probe at the man's trembling eyeball.

The hound stretched its neck to see, but then noticed a pigeon sitting on the lab windowsill. Its attention was instantly grabbed by the bird. Every instinct in its body screamed at it to pounce, but that would definitely piss off Mr. Lutz.

So it stared intently at the pigeon, ignoring the smell of blood gradually spreading through the laboratory and the test subject's fading whimpers.

After a long while, Mr. Lutz finally stood up straight and washed the blood off his hands in a copper basin he'd set out. Then he opened the laboratory's iron door and stepped out to call his assistants. The hound followed nimbly, its claws scratching softly against the floor.

"Go get rid of the body," Mr. Lutz said calmly.

"What? He's dead?" the new female assistant said uneasily.

"I guess I was too rough. Too bad no relic formed." Mr. Lutz sounded genuinely regretful. "But you can use the body to practice dissecting."

The assistants went into the lab with mixed feelings. Before long, the female assistant came running out and started puking. Mr. Lutz gave her a disappointed look, shook his head, and sighed as he walked to his office.

In the corner of the office, there was a cushion just for the hound. It lay down obediently and watched Mr. Lutz sit behind his walnut desk to start the day's paperwork. He had to write up his research report and go through all the department's paperwork—as the head of the Research Department, it was a duty he couldn't avoid.

By afternoon, the prisoners from the Spring of Rebirth finally arrived at the "Sword of Justice." They were brought up to the Research Department's floor and lined up in the hallway, each one looking grim, like they were about to be led to the executioner.

The scene was amusing to the secretary. "Don't be so nervous. The Director just wants to meet you—he's not going to do anything to you. When I call your name, step forward—Nikola Millen."

A thin, frail prisoner with thick glasses shuffled forward from the line. His glasses were covered in cracks and grime, and the secretary couldn't help wondering how the guy could even see through those things.

The secretary opened the door to the minister's office a crack. Nikola whimpered and walked in looking like he was heading to his doom. Through the gap, the prisoners caught a glimpse of the hound darting around inside.

"Oh man, they're not gonna feed the scholar to the dog, are they?" a young man muttered.

The secretary shot him a glare and shut the door. The prisoners all went quiet, hunching their shoulders, wondering what was gonna happen to poor Nikola.

Before long, the door opened. Nikola walked out unscathed, his doom-and-gloom look swapped for a disappointed one. He returned to the line. The young man tugged at his tattered sleeve and whispered, "What did they do to you?"

"Nothing much. Just some guy stared at me with this scary look," Nikola said, hanging his head. "Then he just told me to get lost."

"They didn't sic the dog on you?"

"Dog? Oh, you mean that dog. No, it was real calm. It's just the way it stared at me gave me the creeps."

The secretary cleared his throat and growled, "Knock it off! No talking! Next!"

He called out another name, and another prisoner stepped forward.

The hound crouched by the door, watching the prisoners troop in and out of the office one by one.

Mr. Lutz rested his elbows on the desk, fingers steepled under his chin. When he stared at a prisoner, his eyes would flash with an eerie light. The light flashed and was gone, then Mr. Lutz waved his hand in annoyance. "Get out. Another useless piece of trash."

The hound watched the prisoners come and go. It spotted the same pigeon from the lab windowsill, now perched on the office windowsill. The pigeon seemed to be holding something, and the hound stretched its neck, trying to see what it was.

The office door opened again. This time, a young man walked in. He had long silver-white hair loosely tied back at the nape of his neck, messy and unkempt. His eyes were crimson, the color of blood.

He stood before Mr. Lutz. Though heavy shackles bound his hands, his back remained straight as a sword, like his spine was a blade that wouldn't bend.

Mr. Lutz initially looked at him with the same look of disgust he gave everyone else. But when that eerie, horrible light flickered once more in Mr. Lutz's eyes, his face froze in an instant.

Then his eyes went wider than they'd ever gone before, pupils dilating like he'd OD'd on hallucinogens, trembling violently. At the same time, the muscles in his face began twisting in ways you wouldn't believe, like he'd just seen a god come down from heaven, or the end of the world.

He shot to his feet, knocking his chair over with his leg.

"This is impossible! You—"

In a flash, the pigeon on the windowsill fluttered into the air and tossed something into the office. Even with the hound's sharp eyes, it couldn't see what was thrown in that instant.

The next moment, a weird puppet materialized out of thin air behind Mr. Lutz. The research minister immediately sensed something was wrong, but when he turned around, the puppet transformed in the blink of an eye into a dark, ghostly shadow, striking at Mr. Lutz like a black gust of wind.

The light in the office dimmed slightly, as if a sliver of darkness had slipped into the room, enveloping everything.

Mr. Lutz opened his mouth as if to scream. But the scream never came out.

From where the hound was sitting, all it could see was that strange shadow stopping in front of Mr. Lutz. Then, Mr. Lutz fell backward. A crimson dagger was sticking out of his chest.

The shadow vanished.

The hound wanted to bark, but just as it opened its mouth, the silver-haired young prisoner lunged at it and grabbed its snout.

"Don't bark," the pigeon on the windowsill hissed.

The hound stared at all this in total confusion, unable to comprehend what had happened. Mr. Lutz appeared to be dead—the shadow had killed him. But a moment later, Mr. Lutz's "corpse" suddenly twitched, and then, crazy enough, it staggered back to its feet!

A dead man, of course, couldn't stand up—the hound, though not as smart as Mr. Lutz, understood that much. So if Lutz could still move, did that mean he was alive?

"Uh." Mr. Lutz looked down at the dagger in his chest. He carefully pulled it out. Almost no blood came out, as if Mr. Lutz's blood had stopped circulating altogether.

The hound could just tell that Mr. Lutz had changed. Though the body was his, the soul within had been replaced by something entirely different.

"I'm gonna need a new shirt," "Mr. Lutz" muttered to himself.

He picked up the overturned chair, carefully removed his coat, and tore off the bloodstained, tattered shirt from his body. Bare-chested, with the wound on his chest gaping open, he was about to wipe away the blood with the shirt when tiny sparkles like stars suddenly flickered within the torn muscle.

Something that had no shape but was still solid flowed out of the wound. It was purer than a soul and dirtier than blood. It didn't fall to the ground but crawled across "Mr. Lutz's" chest, as if searching for something to inhabit.

"Mr. Lutz" tilted his head in thought, then materialized a pair of glasses out of thin air. The formless yet substantial thing rushed toward the glasses eagerly, coiled around them, and slowly seeped into them. The lenses glowed with an eerie light, just like the light in Mr. Lutz's eyes when he examined prisoners.

A few seconds later, the light faded. The glasses looked normal again.

"Mr. Lutz" smiled. He placed the glasses on the desk, made a new shirt appear out of thin air, and casually tossed the old one aside, where it vanished into the air.

He dressed himself neatly, put on his coat, and at a glance, he looked almost identical to the original Mr. Lutz. Who would notice he had changed shirts?

"Controlling a corpse feels terrible," "Mr. Lutz" said, looking up at the pigeon.

"Holy," the pigeon replied.

"Mr. Lutz" shrugged. He put on the glasses and examined himself in the mirror on the wall.

"Ah..." he murmured to himself, "Friend of All Things, Masterful Acting, Gravity Manipulation... I can actually see them."

The pigeon said, "I've always wondered how Mr. Lutz could see Supernatural Abilities."

"Text floats around the body," "Mr. Lutz" said.

He turned to the hound. Instantly, his eyes widened. The color drained from his face, and he took a step back, his throat churning.

"Good heavens," he whispered.

He walked over to the hound and looked down at the animal. The hound sat on its haunches, staring back at "Mr. Lutz," its snout still firmly grabbed by the silver-haired young prisoner.

"Good heavens," "Mr. Lutz" said again.

The pigeon asked, "What's wrong? What do you see?"

"...Animal Transformation," "Mr. Lutz" said in a low voice.

The term felt familiar to the hound. It tried hard to recall, but no matter how it tried, it couldn't remember where it had heard it before. What exactly had it forgotten? No, was it "it," or "he"...?

Knock, knock, knock. The sound of someone rapping on the door interrupted the hound's thoughts.

"Minister, are you alright?" the secretary's voice came from outside.

"Mr. Lutz" hurried back to the desk and sat down, pretending to be composed. The silver-haired young prisoner released the hound and stood obediently with his head bowed.

"Come in," "Mr. Lutz" said.

The secretary pushed the door open. "Mr. Lutz" pointed at the silver-haired young prisoner. "Take him to the laboratory."

"Oh? He has a Supernatural Ability? What is it?" the secretary asked, pleasantly surprised.

"Uh..." "Mr. Lutz" began to improvise, "Mother Tongue Mastery. Not a particularly strong ability—it just lets him learn any language in the world as easily as his native tongue."

"The records do note that this prisoner has mastered multiple languages. So it's because of his Supernatural Ability," the secretary said, looking down at the register. "What a pity. If he weren't a prisoner, he might have become a translator or a diplomat."

"Take him away. Next."

The silver-haired young prisoner was whimpering as the secretary led him to the laboratory. The prisoners in the corridor stirred restlessly. That young man, along with a prisoner named Nikola, called out, "What are you going to do to Lyman?!" In the end, the secretary had to summon the guards to rough Nikola up until he shut up.

The remaining prisoners were brought before "Mr. Lutz" one after another. After checking each one, he told the secretary to take them back.

It was almost quitting time. "Mr. Lutz" looked out at the sunset and wandered out of the office.

He said goodbye to each of his staff, went down the long, steep stairs, and stepped out of the "Sword of Justice." The pigeon circled overhead, cooing and guiding him.

"Sir, take this path," the pigeon said. "Don't forget to pick up the cake. I heard Mr. Lutz himself tell his wife this morning."

"Mr. Lutz" walked back along Main Street to Rainbridge Street, stopped at the corner to buy a basket of honey cakes. When he got back to the house with the little garden, Mrs. Lutz was out by the hedge playing with the kids.

"Darling, you're back!"

Mrs. Lutz gave "Mr. Lutz" a smile. She moved in to kiss him, but before she got close, he shoved a basket of cakes into her arms.

"For the children."

The kids cheered. Mrs. Lutz shrugged and told them to get inside and wash up.

"Did anything good happen today?" she asked.

"My research is coming along really well. Dear, could you bring dinner to the study? I've got a really important report to write tonight."

Mrs. Lutz was somewhat disappointed. Her husband had always valued time with the family and never missed dinner with the kids. But since he said he had important work today...

"Alright," she said. "We're having fish stew tonight. Oh, dear, why did you change your shirt?"

"Mr. Lutz" gave an apologetic smile.

"I accidentally tore it at work. I borrowed a clean one from a colleague," he said.

"Oh, you should have brought it home—I could have mended it for you."

The two stepped inside the house. "Mr. Lutz" climbed the stairs and headed for the study on the second floor. As he grasped the doorknob, Mrs. Lutz called up from below, "Where's Louis?"

"Louis?"

"The dog!" Mrs. Lutz reminded him. "Didn't you take him to work with you?"

She noticed the dog hadn't come home with him.

"Mr. Lutz" paused mid-step.

"I gave him away," he said. "A colleague really wanted a dog."

"What about the kids? They love Louis so much. How am I supposed to tell them?"

"I'll buy them a new one."

"Mr. Lutz" turned the doorknob. As he stepped into the study, Mrs. Lutz thought she heard a faint, almost imperceptible voice drift down from upstairs:

"So his name was Louis."