Illusion Report

Chapter 320: Chapter 276: Brianna: What Do You Want?

A stocky, burly middle-aged police officer came to pick her up.

Half an hour earlier, as he had picked his way across the rocky beach step by step, Brianna had watched him for a while from a distance.

He had his thumb hooked in his utility belt, his baton swinging back and forth at his waist. Every step betrayed his impatience. It was as if he couldn’t understand why he had to come all this way to pick someone up from a beach where you couldn’t even find a patch of flat ground.

"Hey!"

The officer had no intention of climbing any further down. He stood on the slope and shouted, "Are you Green? Get up here, I’m here to pick you up! This place is a goddamn long way out."

Even though it was an order from the chief, he was still in a foul mood.

’I wonder what excuse Ashley used to get the police to pick me up?’

Brianna gathered her limbs, righted the head that had been lolling on her shoulder, and slowly pushed her body up from the rocky ground.

She could almost feel the officer tense up as he watched her.

Brianna could still barely manage to reach into Green’s body and prop him up to move, just like before. But if the old Green had been a plastic doll that could stand on its own, he was now an empty cloth puppet, constantly threatening to flop over limply.

As she walked, her head wobbled back and forth, and from side to side. Every few seconds, she had to straighten her torso again.

"Are you drunk or something?"

The officer watched her stagger closer, a wary look on his face. His hand instinctively went to his waist.

"I haven’t been drinking,"

Brianna said, her voice slightly muffled as she covered the dark hole in her face, a wound left by a Noh mask fragment.

"Then why can’t you go home on your own?" the officer asked. "Are you and the chief—"

He didn’t finish his sentence. His throat seemed to catch, letting out a strangled GACK.

’He must have seen the gunshot wound on my temple.’

Green’s hair wasn’t long. Brianna had just wet it with seawater, trying to plaster the damp strands over her temple to hide the deep, gruesome, torn-open hole and the powder burns from the gunshot.

The officer’s eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring like a pair of flapping wings.

He stared fixedly at Brianna and took two steps back.

Under his gaze, she couldn’t help but reach up and touch it—pulling a few shards of bone from her wet hair.

"I... accidentally bumped my head," Brianna said, giving a completely unconvincing explanation as she discreetly wiped a bit of clinging brain tissue onto her pants.

You could tell the officer wanted to scream, to run, to pull his gun and shoot her in the face—but when faced with a fear that defies all common sense, people, like a drowning man, will clutch at any explanation, no matter how flimsy or ridiculous, as if it were a life-saving straw.

"H-How did you... get hurt...?"

"I hit it on a rock," Brianna said.

The officer stood with his mouth half-open, his tongue lolling in a pool of saliva. It moved a few times, but no words came out.

"Don’t worry," Brianna said, walking toward the police car still running on the road. "It just looks serious. All it really needs is a band-aid. The chief told you, right? I need to go see her as soon as possible."

To put him at ease, she got into the back seat of the patrol car—the suspect’s seat, which was separated from the driver’s seat by a partition.

Brianna had been settled in for a while before the officer finally walked over, shuffling hesitantly as if in a daze.

Throughout the drive, he kept glancing at Brianna in the rearview mirror, his face a pale, sickly green.

Humans really are masters of self-deception. Even a police officer who had clearly seen she was a dead person seemed to have convinced himself by the time they reached the station that Brianna was perhaps just badly injured. He could even manage a few words of casual small talk.

"Why do you keep covering your face?" he asked, mustering his courage as Brianna got out of the car. "Is your face hurt, too?"

’For the first time, she felt that emotion.’

It was both sadistic and masochistic, a cruel pleasure mixed with self-loathing abandon.

Brianna lowered her hand, revealing a deep hole in her cheek.

While the officer stood frozen, she met his gaze and slowly, slowly pushed her index finger into the dark hole in her face, all the way to the last knuckle.

"...Green!"

She turned her head at the sound of the voice and saw a dark-skinned, professional-looking woman standing by the main entrance of the Central Police Station. This time, the finger she’d pushed into the dark hole didn’t emerge from the other person’s eye socket.

Ashley Page frowned, her expression disapproving, but she held her tongue. She just said, "This way. Come with me."

Brianna pulled out her finger, covered her face again, and turned toward Ashley. As the two of them entered the building, she faintly heard the sound of dry heaving from behind her.

’That’s the right reaction. This is how it should be.’

"You’re making this very difficult for me to explain,"

Ashley said, unhappily shutting her office door and pulling the blinds. "I thought you’d understand that people in our situation should be especially careful."

Brianna slumped into a chair and noticed how the strong, foul, fishy smell of the sea clinging to her was jarringly out of place in this ordinary office, filled with the scents of leather, paper, and coffee.

’Will this body, Green’s body, start to decay?’

’He’s been dead for a long time, but after I put him on, he never decayed... But this time, something seems different.’

’It’s so clumsy. Is it because his brain was damaged?’

"Hey, are you listening?"

Ashley called out, tossing a few large-sized adhesive bandages onto the desk.

Brianna snapped back to reality and picked up a bandage. "You said ’our situation’... I’m curious, what situation is that, exactly? How much do you know?"

"Holes."

Ashley sat on the edge of her desk. It seemed this answer had been forming in her mind for a long time, and it slipped out instantly.

"What?"

"We’ve become ’holes’."

Ashley didn’t look at her, staring at the opposite wall instead. "The Nest... Ha, I still find it hard to believe something like the Nest actually exists. Anyway, to use an analogy, if the Nest and the human world are separated by a wall, then we are the holes chiseled into that wall. Residents of the Nest can reach their hands into the human world through me. That’s not a metaphor. They can literally reach their hands through.

"Chaisi Monroe was the one who turned me into a hole... You too, right? That whole thing back then was your idea. Of course he wouldn’t let you get away with it."

Ashley tried to hold it back, but she couldn’t suppress the cold, sarcastic fury in her voice. "And in the end, it was your finger that came out of my eye socket... Ha. I guess you could say we’re bound by fate."

For a moment, Brianna didn’t understand what she meant. ’How am I a hole? Residents of the Nest have never reached through me, never put their hands into— Wait.’

She suddenly understood.

’...Ashley is still misunderstanding.’

She had never revealed that she was Brianna, Westley’s daughter.

The identity of "Brianna" was only meaningful when facing one specific person. So, even though she always thought of herself as Brianna, to the outside world, she always presented herself as Green.

On the beach, when they spoke through the hole in her face, she had said she was George Green.

When she had approached Chief Ashley and suggested the Central Police Station arrest Chaisi, she had also been Westley’s secretary, George Green.

Naturally, Ashley believed the person sitting before her was George Green—a man who, after being shot by a vengeful Chaisi, had somehow not died and had instead formed a connection with the Nest.

In another sense, however, Ashley wasn’t wrong.

George Green might indeed be a "hole," but this hole no longer had any consciousness of its own.

It was a resident—the resident Brianna—who was using Green to reach into the human world.

Ashley didn’t know that the person actually speaking to her right now was a half-resident.

"Why did you target Chaisi Monroe’s adoptive father back then? Was it because you knew about the Nest? Can you and I ever go back to how we were before?"

While Brianna was lost in thought, Ashley fired off a series of questions. "I still don’t fully understand what he did to our station. You were the one who started all this, and he turned you into a hole, too. At this point, you should tell me the whole truth."

Brianna tapped her fingers lightly on the desktop. Green’s fingers were unsteady, tapping too hard then too soft, swaying from side to side. She couldn’t control the pressure.

’It seems the brain really is broken. When the central nervous system that controls motor functions has to be run by a half-resident, it’s naturally not going to work very well.’

"...I underestimated Chaisi Monroe’s feelings for his adoptive father. That’s the only reason my plan failed. He’s quick-witted. Of course it was possible he’d suspect the police arrested him just to tie him up while someone else was making a move on Kai Luonan... I had considered that possibility.

"But I thought he would wait to be released, or escape, or call someone else for backup. I never, ever imagined that he would be willing to resort to scorched-earth tactics, to bloodshed and murder, dragging the entire police department down with him just to get free immediately and save the man himself."

’Why?’

Brianna truly couldn’t imagine it.

’Forget that he was just an adoptive father with no blood relation, one who treated him like a dog. Even if it were her own biological father—if Westley were in danger, would she be willing to bury the entire police department just to save him? What a joke.’

’Having afternoon tea, getting her hair done, then strolling over to check on the situation—that was one possibility.’

’The other possibility...’ Brianna gave a silent smile.

’That one wasn’t even worth mentioning.’

"In short, he called in a group of Hunter Mercenaries at the time. It must have been the Mercenary leader, Mercury, who used an Illusion called the ’Nest Network’ on you. To put it simply, your entire police station became something the Nest could grab with an outstretched hand."

She realized her slip of the tongue and gave a slight smile. "Oh, I forgot. A hand really did reach out of your eye socket."

Ashley’s expression was grim. "This feud between you Hunters... it dragged us into it, is that what you mean?"

"Yes."

Ashley let out an angry laugh that sounded like a shard of broken glass. "Do you have any idea what our station went through afterward? In less than ten days, four officers were hospitalized for psychological breakdowns, three resigned, and our data systems crashed—"

Brianna cut her off.

"You only agreed back then because you were looking out for your own interests, right? The only reason you’re the chief of the Central Police Station is because of Westley, isn’t it? The man who paved the way for your meteoric rise asked you for a small favor... I remember you agreed in a heartbeat, no questions asked. You were quite eager, in fact."

Seeing Ashley’s face turn cold as she stood up from the desk, Brianna added in a placating tone, "But don’t get me wrong, I’m not mocking you. I’d be in a real bind without you. I’m very grateful... Now that things have come to this, I have a question for you."

"What is it?"

"What do you want to do now?" Brianna asked in a low voice. "Do you want to go back to normal? Do you want revenge? Or... do you want to obtain a power from the Nest that humans can’t even imagine?"

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!