Lynn Was Terrible at Lying

"Lynn, did you not sleep well?"

The study door opened silently, and John stood barefoot in the doorway in his pajamas.

He was holding a baseball bearing the Metropolis Meteors logo, his delicate little face filled with just the right amount of confusion and concern.

Lynn's heart still ached faintly, and the throbbing of the Blood Jade left him struggling for breath.

But he forced himself to endure the discomfort, lowered the hand pressed to his chest, casually closed the Top Secret File on the desk, and managed a composed smile.

"It's nothing. I probably ate too much pasta tonight. My stomach's a little upset."

Lynn discreetly took a deep breath, stood, and walked toward John. "Why are you awake? Did the thunder outside wake you?"

"Yes. The thunder was really loud."

John obediently let Lynn take his hand and looked up. "Lynn, are you really okay? Your heart's beating twenty percent faster than usual."

"I'm really fine. Go back to sleep, little champ."

Lynn took John back to his bedroom, tucked him in, and sat beside the bed for a while. Only after watching the boy "close his eyes" and begin breathing evenly did he quietly leave.

The moment he returned to the study and closed the door, the relaxed expression vanished from Lynn's face.

He tugged open his shirt collar and looked down at his chest.

The eerie red glow beneath his skin slowly faded, finally returning to stillness.

Lynn walked to the window and watched the pouring rain outside.

His mind raced.

Black Noir had seized this Yasakani Blood Jade from the Japanese Onmyōji Takeda.

Now that it had suddenly reacted so strongly, as though locked onto by radar, there was only one explanation:

Its original owner-or rather, the original owner's associates-had come looking for him.

"The Manor's perimeter has a top-of-the-line security system, with drones in the sky and vibration sensors underground. If someone had really broken in, the alarm would have gone off already."

Lynn's gaze turned utterly cold.

There were only two possible reasons the alarm hadn't sounded.

First, whoever had come was using supernatural powers entirely outside the physical realm, evading technological detection; second, Stan Edgar had tacitly allowed this.

"The big boss is using me as bait. He wants to test how John or I react to unconventional supernatural powers in actual combat." Lynn clenched his fists, his knuckles whitening slightly.

He had to come up with a countermeasure.

If those Onmyōji with their bizarre spells really slipped into the Manor, it would be difficult to resolve things without exposing John's brutal nature.

What Lynn didn't know, however, was that while he racked his brains for a countermeasure, the boy who should have been fast asleep in the bedroom next door had already silently taken his place before the open window.

John looked toward the study, a trace of disdain flashing through his clear blue eyes.

"A stomachache? Lynn's terrible at lying."

The boy turned his head and closed his eyes. His super hearing instantly reached beyond the wind and rain, spreading toward New York City like an invisible net.

Dripping water, police sirens, even announcements in subway cars dozens of kilometers away... he rapidly filtered through countless sounds.

He was searching for the specific frequency of that Paper Crow's wings rubbing against the air earlier.

"Found you."

John's eyes snapped open.

He neither put on a raincoat nor changed into his suit.

Still wearing nothing but those cotton pajamas, he bent his knees slightly, and then-

Whoosh!

There was no sonic boom, nor did he alert the security guards patrolling downstairs.

John controlled his strength at an incredibly precise and terrifying threshold. Like a ghostly bullet tearing through the curtain of rain, his body vanished into the night sky over Long Island in an instant.

The surveillance cameras around the Manor's perimeter recorded at twenty-four frames per second.

And in that second, the cameras captured only a rain-distorted afterimage, which even the security room's AI system automatically classified as a passing nocturnal bird.

An underground warehouse in Flushing, Queens, New York.

The kimono-clad man-Takeda's junior fellow disciple, Takahashi-was staring intently at the Paper Crow that had returned to the Compass before him.

The crow turned back into a sheet of Talisman Paper, but its edges had already blackened.

"We found it, Master!"

A young apprentice beside him said excitedly, "The Blood Jade's fluctuations are coming from a manor on Long Island. But... that's Vought International's territory. It's extremely heavily guarded."

Takahashi sneered and stood, arrogance appearing on his pale face.

"Vought International? Nothing but a bunch of circus clowns created by pumping them full of drugs. Their guns and lasers might stop physical penetration, but they certainly can't stop assassination by the shikigami of our Great Japan Onmyōdō."

Takahashi walked over to a huge water vat in the center of the warehouse.

Nauseating black, bloody water churned inside it.

"Prepare Yasha. Tonight, I'll use the most covert Curse-Killing Technique to drain the souls of whoever took the Blood Jade, along with every living thing around them, in their sleep!"

The apprentice hurriedly nodded and began lighting a ring of thick red candles around the vat. These candles gave off a pungent mixture of sulfur and spices, a necessary catalyst for performing large-scale cursed techniques.

Just then, an extremely faint sound of metal scraping came from the underground warehouse's ventilation duct.

Neither Takahashi nor the apprentice paid it any attention, assuming it was merely the wind and rain outside.

They had no idea that a blond boy in pajamas was hovering silently in the rain more than ten meters above their heads.

John activated his X-ray Vision, his gaze penetrating the concrete roof to clearly reveal the two people lighting candles inside, as well as the foul-smelling vat.

Gloomy, filthy, weak.

John made a precise assessment of the two in his mind.

With his old temper, he would have ripped the roof off, charged inside, and sliced the two into ten thousand pieces with his Heat Vision.

But Lynn's words echoed in his mind: "You don't need to dirty your hands dealing with small fry like these, much less expose your powers. As long as the outcome is good, the more the process looks like an accident, the better."

John tilted his head in midair and swept his gaze around the underground warehouse.

He soon locked onto his target.

It was a rust-covered city natural gas main pipeline running across the entire warehouse ceiling.

And directly beneath that pipe was the ring of red candles the Onmyōji apprentice was lighting.

The corners of John's mouth slowly curled into an innocent yet spine-chilling smile.

He narrowed his eyes slightly.

Rather than firing thick beams of light, he condensed two hair-thin rays of Microscopic Heat Vision deep within his pupils, each carrying temperatures of several thousand degrees.

These two high-temperature rays, completely invisible to the naked eye, passed through the curtain of rain and gaps in the roof, striking a rusted valve on the natural gas pipe with extreme precision.

Sizzle-

In less than a tenth of a second, the intense heat melted a minuscule crack in the rusted metal valve.

High-pressure natural gas instantly hissed out, and the colorless, odorless, flammable gas began rapidly accumulating near the ceiling of the relatively enclosed underground warehouse.

"Master, do you smell something?"

After lighting the last candle, the apprentice sniffed and looked up in mild confusion.