Marvel's Princess - Chapter 31
Active attacks naturally negate the psychological effects of invisibility spells, fully revealing Bella’s form.
The Invisible Man, uncharacteristically agile for a scientist, falls to the ground and quickly draws a pistol, shooting at her repeatedly while lying on his back.
Firing upward at a tricky thirty-degree angle, his shots seem ineffective, but Bella struggles greatly from her position.
Suddenly, the enemy lies down, causing Bella to lose her target right before her. Inexperienced, she doesn’t think to kick immediately.
By the time she reacts, the bullets are already upon her.
The enemy’s dirty tricks catch Bella off guard, and she stumbles back, running behind a metal rack for cover while casually whistling.
“Got backup?” The Invisible Man hears movement behind him and turns to fire three more shots.
The bullets pass through Miss Pika without causing blood, injury, or even damaging her white dress.
With a pale face, Bella approaches the Invisible Man closely. His heart skips a beat as her bloodless lips draw a breath.
“It’s all fake!”
Confident like any scientist, especially one who has mastered optical physics like the Invisible Man, he dismisses the middle-aged woman’s screams of ghosts as mere technological tricks.
His calculation skills are impressive, and his intuitive understanding of light refraction and reflection is almost instinctual.
He turns and sees a steel panel set upright, convinced he’s seen through the enemy’s setup, and fires several shots at it.
Who is Bella hitting? Confused, she no longer hesitates and stealthily moves behind the Invisible Man, delivering a punch to the back of his neck.
In movies, such a strike might knock a person out, but it’s quite difficult to achieve in reality. Too much force might kill. Too little would be ineffective.
Regardless of whether it’s useful or not, Bella doesn’t care. If she can’t knock him out, maybe she can kill him.
After all, according to official documents, this man is already “dead.” Dying again wouldn’t matter much.
The Invisible Man goes down with a punch, and the optical lens at his neck shatters.
Bella uses the rope he had used on the middle-aged woman to tie him up, then waves Miss Pika back to the car for a rest.
“What was that earlier?!” The middle-aged woman is clearly frightened, still panicked, even seeing the man who tormented her for over a month knocked out.
“It’s all fake, just your hallucinations!”
Bella reassures her repeatedly, finally stabilizing the woman’s emotions.
She retrieves the invisibility cloak the Invisible Man had worn in the hospital and keeps it for herself.
Although not very useful to her since she values the strength inherent to herself and finds optical invisibility too vulnerable to exposure, she is reluctant to hand it over to the state, deciding to keep a set for herself.
Bella doesn’t know any high-end scientists except for Miss Natasha, a charming young woman knowledgeable in various fields who might even understand optical invisibility.
After Bella’s call, Claire’s siblings arrive.
Human nature is strange. Although previously terrified, upon regaining calm, the middle-aged woman picks up a pistol and fires randomly, killing the Invisible Man, who was supposedly already deceased.
Chris sighs repeatedly; his month of hard work is wasted. He had hoped to find clues about the Flight 180 disaster from the Invisible Man.
The middle-aged woman calmly declares her intent to confess to the police, not wanting to implicate the trio.
They can only express regret. To the law, the woman is insane. Having killed a sister and now her supposedly dead husband doesn’t seem so significant.
With the Invisible Man incident resolved, the trio bids farewell to the middle-aged woman and returns to the city center of Phoenix.
In less than twelve hours, the Grim Reaper’s killing pace intensifies.
The siblings plan to gather all survivors for protection while seeking the mastermind behind the disasters to avenge the victims.
Bella also secretly devises a plan to kill the Grim Reaper but needs to gather all survivors first.
She and Claire’s siblings split up to contact the survivors, but the prevailing ideology of freedom severely hinders their efforts.
Some claim they are too busy, others need to take their children to school, while the rest criticize the White House and state government for their ineffectiveness, insisting on their freedom rather than accepting protection.
Bella realizes she underestimated the challenge; her authority isn’t sufficient to rally all survivors, requiring official support.
Despite the siblings’ efforts, more victims continue to emerge.
A surviving female teacher suddenly falls in her kitchen, a knife plunging from a knife rack through the back of her head, exiting through her eye socket, killing her instantly.
Bella and Claire’s siblings visit the teacher’s modest home. She had a husband and a child, but both were distant. It was a neighbor’s dog that alerted the police to the blood smell.
When they arrived, the police had already cordoned off the area.
Chris shows his S.H.I.E.L.D. credentials to the police to learn about the scene. No clues were found, no signs of robbery, and motives like revenge or crimes of passion were ruled out. The initial assessment was that the female teacher died accidentally.
“That guy seems very cold,” Bella says, pointing beyond the police line to a tall, thin, black medical examiner with narrow eyes and thin lips.
The teacher’s death was gruesome, with a knife still embedded in her eye socket and her lens mixed with brain matter and blood covering her face. The officers pushing out the body looked pained, but the black medical examiner’s expression remained unchanged, even examining the angle of the knife with interest.
If Bella hadn’t pointed it out, the Claire siblings wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual. It’s normal for a medical examiner who deals with corpses daily to appear unhappy. Being too cheerful would be odd.
But upon her prompting, the siblings took another look and indeed noticed something odd about the examiner. His detachment was to the point of callousness as if the deceased were not a person but merely a toy or an insect.
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