40k: Midnight Blade

Chapter 644 27. Interlude: Standard interrogation (5k)

Zabriel took off his robe, shook his hands, and slowly pushed the sleeves of his gray training shirt to his elbows.

The air was cold, and the pale light descended from above his head, filling the interrogation room with hints - 'No room to hide', the pale light whispered.

In the other corner of the room, a hung woman struggled profusely with sweat.

The iron chain swayed, and the iron hook that passed through the gap between her muscles and bones began to punish her silently. Blood flowed out and soon gathered into a new pool at her feet.

Zabriel turned his head calmly, and a combat dagger appeared in his hand.

He was not a professional interrogator, nor was he some pervert who liked to torture humans, so the only thing he could use in this situation was this combat dagger of an inappropriate size.

But it probably didn't matter. His interrogation target was actually about to collapse after being put on the Edge of Reason. Zabril felt that he probably only needed to cut a little skin to get the truth.

But he didn't really want to use his knife, especially after knowing what this woman had done.

Holding the knife, Zabril walked towards her: "Leona de Laer?"

"Please, please"

The witch, whose real name was pointed out again, spoke with fear, and then gave a rather strange response.

"I beg you, sir, don't say that name again."

Zabril frowned and turned his head to look at the wall on the right, but didn't get any response, so he asked directly.

"What do you mean?"

"That name doesn't belong to me anymore."

The witch answered hoarsely, shaking her head, blood and sweat dripping from her golden hair. Her blue eyes had widened to a limit, full of bloodshot, and she looked as if she had fallen into a state of madness.

Zabril pondered for a moment, walked in front of her, gently took her left hand, pinched the witch's thumb with his index and middle fingers, slightly exerted force, bent it, and then rotated it.

Until it reached a certain limit, a thumb connected to the bone was pinched between Zabril's fingers. He raised his hand and showed it to the hung witch, asking again amid her screams.

"Why, Leona de Lare? Why do you say that this name doesn't belong to you?"

"Don't say it again!"

She roared in response, crying bitterly, blood splashed out of the hole in her left hand, and the remnants of nerves and blood vessels could still be vaguely seen in that cruel flesh and blood cave.

It looked pitiful, but Zabril had no kindness in his heart-Leona de Lare was a real witch, and had long been wanted by the Ministry of Justice and the Tribunal.

Her crimes were innumerable, one of which was "stealing someone else's identity", which seemed ordinary, but she did it by skinning the victim and eating his flesh and soul to get his memory, and finally use the skin for herself.

In other words, the real Catherine Fahn and countless other victims suffered ten thousand times more before they died than she did now.

"Then tell me the truth," the old knight said coldly. "Or do you want more punishment, Leona de Laer?"

The witch's head, which had been drooping in pain, suddenly raised up, followed by a snap, and her jaw suddenly cracked, tearing the white and tight human skin and muscles together.

The bones creaked, the jaw and tongue turned and twisted together, and countless living insects burst out from the depths of her throat with a supernatural scream, and the whole room was instantly filled with a foul smell.

Zabril frowned and took a few steps back, but heard a strange muffled sound again.

Are there more evil spells?

He subconsciously raised his knife to kill the witch, but heard a word of dissuasion in his ear: "No, there is no need to do this, Zabril, she is just being punished."

Punishment?

"Yes. It seems that someone has taken her name and she is not allowed to use it again. As long as someone calls her by this name, she will be punished. It's an interesting method, but I think it is probably beyond your professional scope?"

The old knight nodded imperceptibly.

"So, do you need a helper?"

Who?

"An experienced inquisitor's squire, he will be here soon."

Squire?

Zabriel put away his knife without knowing why, and took a few steps back to avoid his boots being touched by the insects still twisting on the ground.

He did not reject help from the inquisitor, even if it was the annoying Shefa, after all, the person who just spoke to him was actually the founder of the Inquisition in a strict sense.

But, a squire? Is he really capable of solving this kind of thing?

Three dull knocks sounded the next moment, and Zabril walked over to open the door and saw a strong mortal. The man was wearing a black uniform, and his muscles made the cuffs bulge. The emblem of the Tribunal was pinned on his chest and wiped spotlessly.

He was not wearing a hat, revealing a head full of very short stubble, a high nose bridge, and habitually turned down lips, looking like a difficult thorn. Even when he opened the door and saw Zabril, an expressionless giant, he did not change his expression.

"Excuse me, sir, I'm here to help." He said so.

Zabreel stepped aside to let him in and closed the door. In the heavy echo, the man began to introduce himself.

"My name is Rental Sable, and I am the armed squire and personal guard of Inquisitor Serrano Van Derlev. I have been assigned by Lord Khalil Lohars to provide you with some professional theories. Knowledge explanation. For the sake of the Emperor, I hope we can have a happy cooperation."

Zabriel watched him walk into the swarm of insects. Within half a second after introducing himself, he squatted down, grabbed a handful of insects with mucus and blood in them with his bare hands, and even put them up to the tip of his nose. Smell carefully.

".Well, it's true, it's the Heart-Eating Insect."

"Heart-eater?"

"A subspace creature."

Sable replied nonchalantly and threw the handful of bugs to his feet, then lifted up his coat and took out a small metal bottle from his belt.

He turned his head sideways and said to Zabriel: "Sir, please step back a little more."

"What are you going to do?"

Sable smiled dryly: "The heart-eating bug will quickly suck out the host's soul about a minute after leaving the host's body and aggregate into a heart-eating beast, a powerful demon about four meters high. The two of us are no matter what. There is no way to defeat it.”

"So, in other words, my lord, I have to kill these little bastards before they eat the souls of our interrogation subjects through evil magic links and kill us."

Zabriel did not comment on his words, but silently took a few steps back, watching Sable open the metal bottle and throw it into the swarm of squirming insects.

Some kind of pale ashes quickly poured out from the bottle, and quickly covered the entire insect swarm as if being pulled. However, they did not react at all, but suddenly stopped squirming.

A few seconds later, without Zabriel blinking during the entire process, the insects in this area suddenly turned into curls of smoke, floating silently towards the ceiling.

Sable knelt down again, picked up his bottle and put it back on his belt. Then he walked over to Leona de Lar, who was suspended by the iron chain. He stretched out his hand to straighten her head and asked casual questions.

"My lord, how do you want to interrogate her next?"

".What?" Zabriel asked instinctively - he had not yet recovered from the scene just now.

Sable reached out, pulled off the witch's jaw, and tossed it aside.

The sticky sound of hitting the ground disappeared in a flash, but he reached out and grabbed the witch's tongue as if nothing was wrong. Then he stretched out his right hand, and a golden light penetrated the bloody tongue like lightning, nailing it firmly. On the witch's chest.

Zabriel looked closely and found that it turned out to be a polished and sharp gold-inlaid finger bone.

Leona de Lal let out a vague cry and woke up leisurely.

"I have three options to recommend."

Sable said so, with his hands behind his back, he stood beside her and shrugged.

"The first is to maintain the status quo and just review one question one by one. It's not efficient, but she can't play any tricks. Moreover, if the answers to some questions are cursed, she can bear it on our behalf."

"The second is to directly take out her brain and put it into a wetware culture tank, and retrieve all her memories through data means. This is the fastest way to do it, but it requires analysis and translation, as well as the company of a pious mechanical priest."

"The third thing is——"

"--bass."

Zabriel pulled out his combat dagger with a sullen face, and the sound of the sharp blade scraping against the scabbard interrupted Sable's words.

He smiled knowingly and said nothing more. He just bent down and picked up the witch's chin, then pulled out the phalanx and used it as a nail to separate the bloody chin and Leona de Lar's. The faces are connected.

She struggled painfully, and the original blue color of her eyes disappeared without a trace, leaving only a turbid white color.

"So, you choose the old way?"

"I would rather use the old method." The old knight said expressionlessly, came to the witch with the dagger, and then asked again.

"What is your relationship with Wanyan, the traitor war gang?"

Sable raised his right hand in time and turned the bone nail. The golden light flashed away again, and Leona de Lar wailed and opened her mouth, her voice surprisingly clear.

"I am their spy!"

"Tell me more details."

Zabriel ordered, looking at Sable. The latter understood and rotated the bone nail again.

The witch's screams became louder and louder, and the excrement slid across her thighs and pooled in the blood. The blood vessels as dense as a spider web silently pushed up her skin, which was dark and heterogeneous, and there was some kind of twisted living thing crawling rapidly inside.

"I serve them."

Leona replied coughing, dusty blood and decaying internal organs pouring out of her throat.

"The Ten Thousand Eyes gave me the power to transcend my mediocre destiny. As a price, I will always work for them and pass on information."

"Lies!" Zabriel scolded in a thunderous voice. "You are clearly cooperating with the alien scum!"

Sable tapped the bone nail.

"That's because they lost contact with me!" screamed the witch. "They haven't contacted me in almost a century!"

"How did they contact you?"

"Sacrifice. Use the flesh and blood of living people as the essence to awaken the horn they gave me. As long as you blow towards it, they will find me, no matter where I am."

Zabriel took a deep breath, and some unspeakable hatred began to revive in his heart.

Different from the hatred for the aliens, this is a hatred that has existed in his chest since before the lion returned.

As a Terran veteran, Zabril had seen most of the dirty things in the world in the first twenty years of his service. Like what Leona de Laer just said, he had seen with his own eyes that humans of the same Terran descent did it to their compatriots without regret.

Only this time, this sacrifice might really work.

"How many times have you done this? How many people did you kill at a time?" Sable suddenly asked.

Facing Zabril's questioning eyes, he smiled without warmth and explained: "We in the Inquisition have to write written reports when we do things, sir, and this aspect is also included in everything."

"Twenty-eight times. One hundred people at a time!"

The witch screamed to interrupt them, and her turbid eyes began to deteriorate again. The outer membrane of the eyeball melted first, then the vascular membrane and retina, the lens and vitreous body.

In an indescribable way, they melted into a pool of boiling viscous liquid in the witch's eye sockets, scalding her face, melting all the skin, flesh, bones and other things, and forcibly creating two irregular linear holes on her face.

Sable sighed and shook his head with disgust: "I'm really annoyed by you demon summoners. You have no technical content at all, and you only know how to make contracts and sacrifices. How about the pain brought by the backlash of the contract? Do you still like it?"

He sneered and took a step back, returning the initiative to Zabril.

Despite this, the old knight didn't want to continue now. He had an urge to vomit.

It's not that he hadn't dealt with some things related to supernatural powers, but throughout his entire military career and the more than 300 years of escape, he had never seen anything like this.

His cognition was refreshed in a way that he didn't want to admit or accept at all.

"My lord?"

"It's okay." Zabril said, and turned his focus back to the witch. "Where is the so-called horn?"

"In my body."

Zabriel frowned, raised his right hand, put the dagger close to her neck, and then shouted again: "Speak clearly! Where is it?!"

He got an answer he didn't really want to know.

"My spine." Leona de Las said with a dead look.

The sable whistled and pulled out the gold-plated finger bone with some joy, without a drop of blood on it.

The witch's chin slipped again, and she immediately spit out a series of turbid curses. The captive who had been obedient just now was so crazy that he dared to insult Zabril in person, and his broken face was full of resentment and madness.

But this seemed to be the last thing she could do. Before Zabril swung the knife to chop off her head, the traitor trembled and melted, turning into a pool of unspeakable blood and flesh mixture.

The old knight took a step back in disgust, not wanting to have anything to do with the car, but Sable, contrary to his usual behavior, pursed his lips, reached into it with both hands, and took out a broken, bloody human skin.

Zabril saw a little sadness on his face.

"What are you going to do?"

"The lord named Faan." Sable paused. "He and his wife have a three-year-old daughter, and she misses her mother very much."

Zabril looked at him in disbelief, frowning suddenly: "Don't say you want to give this to a child!"

"No, of course I won't do that. I work for the Tribunal, my lord." Sable shrugged self-deprecatingly. "It's just that I don't think the victim should be burned with the perpetrator."

He retracted his left hand and took out another metal bottle from his waist. Half a minute later, two flames bloomed quietly in the interrogation room.

The flames reflected in Gabriel's eyes, reflecting a cold hatred.

——

Khalil folded his hands and watched Shefa walk out of the door of another interrogation room. He had a blank expression on his face, and his uniform was still on his body, not stained with blood. He was just wiping his hands with a blood-stained handkerchief.

He walked up to Khalil, bowed his head, and said, "The situation is clear, my lord. This alien scum has no connection with the Ten Thousand Eyes Warband we are pursuing."

"So, he is just unlucky?" Khalil asked humorously.

"I wouldn't say that. All aliens deserve to die, especially the Eldar like them." Shefa replied. "But, is this trial really necessary?"

"Why do you say that?"

"I think you already know all the information we need the moment you saw him, don't you? The direction of the Rational Front is the best evidence--"

Shefa raised his hand and pointed to the porthole. Stars twinkled, and a pool of gravel passed silently through the thick window.

Khalil laughed dumbly, nodded simply, and admitted Shefa's speculation: "Yes, I dug out his head as soon as I saw him."

"So?" Shefa asked doubtfully, pointing at himself.

Khalil said gently: "The investigation of the Ten Thousand Eyes War Gang is a major event jointly participated by three inquisitors. According to the internal regulations of the Tribunal, each inquisitor involved must report every detail."

"Whether you like it or not, Shefa, you have already participated in this matter, so - if you are not allowed to interrogate him, how are you going to write a report? Write 400,000 or 500,000 words based on your imagination and submit it to the seal holder for review?"

Shefa was silent for a full minute before he made a sound.

".I see."

He said so, then bowed and turned around, ready to leave, but paused before taking a step, and whispered another sentence.

"My Lord, you are really completely different from the person described in the records."

Khalil watched him leave, but his smile did not subside.

In his shadow, a voice sounded faintly: "I am now more convinced that you are actually a person with a bad character, Khalil."

"Save this for other brothers who will be teased by you in the future." Khalil said. "Especially Corax."

A cold snort came from the shadow.