Chapter 2Ba

Chapter 2Ba

The Ventriloquist sat down against the wall.

He held a gun in his hand, just like a helpless prisoner waiting for the heavy door to slowly open.

Judging by appearances alone, no one would ever have guessed that this balding, white man in his late fifties or early sixties—frail and shaking—was in fact the infamous Ventriloquist of the criminal underworld.

Frankly speaking, nothing about his trembling posture suggested he was any kind of threat.

Next to him, several hostages were huddled together like frightened quail.

They were all employees of the Forensics Bureau. One security guard was sprawled on the ground, gasping for breath, with half his body soaked in blood.

He had tried to resist, but before he could even draw his gun, the Ventriloquist had already shot him through the hand.

“Oh, Mr. Sockie…” A white woolen sock covered the Ventriloquist’s left hand. It was a makeshift personality he’d created as a stand-in for his missing puppet, Scarface.

“To hurt others like this... is it really the right thing to do?”

Timid and hesitant, he spoke cautiously to his own left hand:

“Look, he’s bleeding.”

“That’s enough, Mr. Ventriloquist. You’re being far too soft.”

His mouth remained tightly closed, yet the voice emerged from his belly. His sock-covered hand moved as if the sock were speaking, opening and closing with an eerie, unnatural rhythm.

“Fool. Without hostages, how are we supposed to trade for Scarface?”

The sock on his left hand twitched restlessly, like an aggressive viper: “If you want to show mercy, pick a better time. That idiot brought the bullet on himself. As long as they cooperate, I won’t hurt them—am I right?”

“But, but…”

“Shut up! Don’t waste energy on pointless things—Batman could storm in at any moment…”

The Ventriloquist began to sob quietly, stifling his voice, but he didn’t dare contradict Mr. Sockie. Instead, he turned tearfully toward the wounded guard and murmured an apology.

“I’m sorry…”

Thump thump thump!

Violent knocking cut him off mid-sentence.

The Ventriloquist instantly turned his gun on the hostages. His voice switched to Mr. Sockie’s tone—low, dark, filled with manic cruelty, like a beast whose territory had been invaded:

“I told you, if you come in, I’ll blow—”

“Knock knock, it’s Batman.”

Every hair on Arnold’s body stood on end. That voice—he knew it too well. It was Batman’s, no doubt. But something felt off today.

Everyone knew Batman never used the front door. And he definitely never knocked.

Arnold’s entire body tensed as he activated every muscle. Crawling to the ground, he raised the gun, ready to fire. If Batman dared come through, the bullets would lash at him like a tongue of flame—

“Hurry up and open the door. Daddy Bats is here to pump you full of justice’s sweet milk~”

“???”

The bizarre words coming out of the usually solemn Batman’s mouth made the Ventriloquist’s brain short-circuit for a second—just long enough for Lucen Kelith to slip through the door without triggering the attack that should have followed.

“Batman, you—” Arnold snapped back to awareness, but it was too late.

Lucen was already in the room, standing just meters away.

Without speaking, he held something out toward Arnold.

It was Scarface—the original puppet.

Arnold’s eyes widened in disbelief. His breath caught.

And in that instant of frozen focus, Lucen moved again. While offering Scarface forward with one hand, he reached in and tore Mr. Sockie from Arnold’s left wrist with the other.

“Scarface!”

Arnold lunged reflexively, grabbing the old puppet from Lucen’s hand. His fingers curled tightly around it, clutching it like a lifeline.

But the moment he did, his body lurched.

He staggered back a step as if something had been torn from his chest. The sock puppet was gone—his active persona stripped away—and Scarface was suddenly in his grasp again. The transition was instantaneous.

His right arm jerked upward. The hand holding the gun snapped rigid. His trigger finger froze in place, paralyzed mid-motion. He couldn’t lower the weapon. He couldn’t fire. The gun just hung in the air, clutched in a body that no longer fully obeyed him.

“Bastard! Give him back! Let me shoot him!”

The cry wasn’t directed at Lucen. It was aimed inward—toward whatever had taken control.

A new voice filled the room.

It didn’t come from Arnold’s lips. His mouth remained clamped shut. The sound emerged from the space between his ribs, pushed out from his diaphragm with mechanical precision.

In that instant, a new voice emerged. If Mr. Sockie’s voice had sounded like a raving lunatic, this one was the embodiment of darkness itself—a manifestation of the Ventriloquist’s inner evil.

A boundless malice seemed to ooze into the room, thick enough to drip like black ink.

The Ventriloquist rose to his feet. The cowardly, quivering old man was gone. He stood tall, his chest puffed, his back muscles flexed. It was as if a devil had taken residence in his small, aging body.

He kept his mouth sealed, and the puppet on his left hand opened and closed. The voice echoed throughout the tight space:

“Give him back. Give Mr. Sock—”

“No, don’t do this. I talked it over with Batman.”

The Ventriloquist froze.

The voice had come from Mr. Sock himself.

Lucen Kelith’s lips were shut.

So you think only you can throw your voice? For an actor, mimicry was a fundamental skill—including voices.

The Ventriloquist should have shot him in the head the moment they first met. But he didn’t.

And now, it was his stage.

He had never planned to cure the Ventriloquist through normal means.

Scarface sensed danger and shouted at Arnold to fire.

“Don’t shoot. I talked it over with Batman. You’re a good man. You only did bad things because I forced you, right?”

The voice came from Lucen, but it was spoken in the tone of Mr. Sock.

“No, no! That wasn’t Mr. Sock talking! I want you to shoot—shoot him now!”

That voice came from Arnold, but it carried the harsh cadence of Scarface.

“Yes, listen to Scarface. Fire the gun!”

Lucen mimicked the Scarface voice again—subtle, near-perfect.

“No! As Scarface, I order you to listen to Batman!”

Lucen switched tones mid-sentence, folding the Sock persona into Scarface’s phrasing.

“Stop—!”

The room was filled with layered shouting. Four distinct voices fought over a single mouth and a single weapon—Lucen Kelith’s ventriloquism pitted against Arnold’s fractured mind, both battling for control of Scarface’s identity.

This was the Ventriloquist’s fatal flaw: the split between his personalities made him vulnerable to interference. Lucen didn’t need to fight him physically—he only had to imitate, interrupt, and insert contradiction.

Arnold’s eyes darted around the room. His grip on the puppet trembled. His other hand, still locked on the gun, twitched but didn’t fire.

Lucen moved again.

His free hand reached into his satchel and pulled it open, revealing a row of hand puppets—some animal-shaped, some abstract, all worn from use.

Arnold’s attention snapped toward them. His expression blanked.

“What is this?” he muttered, confused.

Lucen didn’t answer. He thrust his hand forward.

“Damn it!”

A sharp metallic pop sounded.

In a burst of sparks and pressure, the barrel of the gun jerked upward. Arnold’s hand spasmed. The weapon snapped back, no longer aimed at Lucen’s head.

At the same time, Scarface’s voice gave another command, completely different from the last. Arnold's thoughts jammed up again.

Arnold’s mind faltered again.

By the time he realized what had happened, the puppet was already gone.

Lucen had taken Scarface out of his hand.

The weapon had been neutralized.

“No! Mr. Scarface!” Arnold screamed.

“What are you going to do to Mr. Scarface?”

His voice cracked. The presence in him dissolved.

Without the puppet, the Scarface persona had nowhere to reside. The Scarface persona had already been disrupted. With nothing left to anchor to, Arnold’s posture collapsed. His chest deflated. His arms dropped to his sides.

He reverted to the nervous, trembling old man he had always been.

Lucen Kelith ignored him. He kicked the pitiful old man into the corner. “You’re safe now. Get out.”

“Eeya—!”

The hostages looked at each other in disbelief, then screamed in unison and scrambled for the exit. Even the security guard who had just been playing dead on the ground suddenly got up, clutching his wounded hand, yelling as he ran—faster than a rabbit.

“……”

Maintaining his bat-like blank expression, Lucen Kelith stood still until the hall was completely empty. Then he walked up to the Ventriloquist, held up the reeking sock without a word—and tore it to shreds right in front of him.

“Nooooo!!!”

The Ventriloquist lunged forward as if he had just lost his parents, clutching the sock’s remains. “Ughhhhhh! No! Socky! How can I live without you—Socky! Socky, take me with you, take me with you, Socky—!”

But before he could even finish crying, Lucen Kelith grabbed him off the floor and slapped him twice across the face—hard.

“Stop crying. Look. What’s this?”

“Scarface!”

Arnold had just lunged forward when—crack—Lucen Kelith, right before his eyes, twisted the Scarface puppet into a mangled mess and then stomped it to pieces on the floor.

“Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!!”

“Get up!” Lucen Kelith yanked the old man up again just as he was about to break down and sob, smacking him left and right until stars danced before his eyes and the impending breakdown was beaten straight back into his gut.

Having forcibly redirected his attention through sheer physical means, Lucen Kelith threw him onto the duffel bag stuffed with dolls. “Stop clinging to the old puppets. Try some new ones. There’s dozens here—pick whichever you want.”

Dazed from the persona-correction punches, the Ventriloquist stared blankly ahead. Still reeling from the trauma of losing two personas in such quick succession, he had yet to recover.

He reached out hazily and grabbed one of the dolls, and in the very next second, a new voice echoed from deep within his belly…

Due to his extremely severe dissociative identity disorder, the Ventriloquist had a tendency to create evil alternate personas. At their core, these alternate personalities were all “protectors,” designed to shield the timid primary identity—Arnold.

But in just those few seconds, both of his protector personas had been violently destroyed by Lucen Kelith.

At this moment, he was experiencing a state of intense fear, left without any persona to shield him.

Under normal circumstances, the Ventriloquist would instinctively search for an object, assign it a personified identity, wear it on his hand, and create a new persona to protect himself—just as he had done with a regular wool sock to create the sinister “Mr. Sock.”

But… what happens when you suddenly throw dozens of toys at him in that exact moment?