Shane walked up to the resurrected, orange-skinned Mongul.
Mongul remained seated upright on the floor.
His eyes were vacant and dazed.
Rachel watched Mongul, who had not even stood up despite Shane getting close enough to kill him, and felt utterly bewildered.
"What did he see in the illusion? Why was he still like this after breaking free?"
Shane raised his hand, not to slice Mongul's throat open with a knife-hand strike, but to rub the top of his own head helplessly.
"I don't know. Honestly, I don't want to think back on it right now, either."
He looked around. All of Warworld lay deathly still. The self-replicating Black Mercy plants were like the facehuggers from the Alien movies, clamping onto every living creature inside the metal planet and bringing them down.
Shane turned back and, gritting his teeth, kicked the dazed Mongul in the face.
"You piece of shit! Where did you get something this disgusting?"
Mongul's massive body crashed to the floor, and a flicker of awareness finally stirred in his vacant eyes.
But he was still dazed overall. "Unbelievable!"
Shane was at a loss with Mongul, who was practically frozen like a crashed computer.
Although this asshole had also arranged a fallback that would let him break free on his own, he clearly had never experienced the horror of Black Mercy firsthand.
That was why, driven by rage and a desire for revenge, he had unleashed all the black mercy seeds at once.
Now, even after breaking free, he was still acting like some dementia-stricken idiot.
All he needed was a strand of drool hanging from his mouth, and he could cosplay a severely ill but nonviolent patient at the psychiatric hospital Shane had seen in his illusion.
The nightmares Lobo had mentioned were far from the