Marvel Magic Case Files

Chapter 1341 The God of the Bison (First Update)

The bone-chilling cold of the glacial meltwater instantly snapped her awake, and her drowsy state vanished in the blink of an eye.

Victoria Hand had been living here for several days. Aside from the old professor (referring to Master Hamil) who had led her into the valley and a few clueless young men, she hadn't seen anyone. Even her lessons were written on printed paper instead of being read from printed books like the others. Initially, she had prepared herself to eat wild animals every day, but unexpectedly, her food consisted entirely of vegetables and meat brought up the mountain by packhorses from the herders at the foot of the mountain, and food from all over the world delivered here by cargo planes from the First Secret Service. However, this didn't change the fact that this place was isolated from the world. If it weren't for the excellent communication system here, with a constant stream of news from Latvia, she wouldn't even remember why she was studying here.

Every day, the information she received, the stories she heard, and the sights she saw told her that the troubles she once considered a huge threat to world peace and the survival of the human race were just insignificant minor setbacks. A terrorist detonating a nuclear bomb would not have a devastating impact on the entire human society, and certain murderers with special abilities who were on the watch list would not remain at large for long, much less destroy all the civilization that human society had created to this day.

This group of people, whose origins are unknown and who have been stationed here for thousands of years, are always on guard against a real enemy.

In these people's eyes, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s self-proclaimed role as humanity's protectors was a laughable display of ignorance and arrogance. Victoria Hand, initially proud of her S.H.I.E.L.D. affiliation, was somewhat annoyed. However, as she learned more about the story, she increasingly realized her past ignorance. Victoria Hand now understood why the Emperor had shown such disgust from the very beginning. It wasn't because S.H.I.E.L.D. received government funding or did dirty work for the US behind the scenes—the Emperor didn't care about the petty squabbles of secular society—but because he despised S.H.I.E.L.D. for never knowing who the real enemy was.

If you can't aim your gun at the real enemy, then even the most powerful weapon is just scrap metal.

The Emperor brought her here to guide her to the true enemy, to help her understand what truly needed to be confronted. He hoped she would support him in this endeavor. Although her years of experience as a special agent told her that the old professor was hiding many secrets during his lectures, the relics of ancient wars, the myths unraveling the fog, the spoils of the Eternal War, and the supernatural creatures captured at great cost were enough to prove that this organization was indeed fulfilling its duty—protecting those who could not protect themselves from a formidable foe—just as they claimed.

"I want to know about yesterday." Having regained her senses, Victoria Hand didn't immediately begin the lesson, but instead inquired about the deformed object she had seen yesterday. "I want to know the story behind that thing."

Yesterday, the old professor told her that the Himalayan Yeti footprints seen many years ago were actually the product of illegal magical creature experiments conducted by an escaped prisoner. This wasn't particularly surprising news to Victoria Hand, because yesterday she had witnessed far more terrifying creatures—humans deformed and demented by magic, utterly insane, and spewing blasphemous language. This was originally a healthy adult, and the reason for this person's descent into such a state was simply ignorant rural superstition.

Superstition drove this adult to do something irreversible.

She killed her family and ate their flesh because the end of the world was coming.

This happened in 2012 in a rural village in the American Northwest. Although the village was predominantly Christian, its Protestant characteristics blended with local Native American customs and legends. This syncretic faith had become a local tradition since the ancestors of these white people returned to the village. The Chitauri invasion was widely reported on television, and numerous superstitious cults, such as alien apocalypse cults and doomsday propagation, spread rapidly. Drug use combined with superstition led to a mass hysteria. Following the guidance of custom, everyone performed the ritual. When the Kamar-Taj sorcerers arrived at the scene after receiving an alert from the planetary defense system, only the deformed woman whose skin and muscles on her chest and abdomen were completely fused with her thighs survived.

The evidence from the live autopsy suggests that this enormous mass of flesh, which was once a human, should have died long ago.

Her arms were raised high and fused to her cheeks, her fingers forcibly straightened and held in a fixed gesture. Her eyes almost bulged out of their sockets, her eyelids completely gone. Her birth canal had grown unnaturally and widened to dozens of times the size of an ordinary person's, her internal organs tangled together in a chaotic mess, as if a giant had been born from a human body. Yet she lived without eating or drinking, torn apart alive yet still alive, as if some supernatural force sustained her consciousness and healed her body. Her soul was utterly desecrated; even the most experienced interrogators could not glean the full story from her, nor could they know what had been born after the ritual.

"The Buffalo God—this is the conclusion we deduced from local documents, stemming from ancient Native American beliefs. It's certain that the entity responding to the ritual wasn't some buffalo god, but something far darker, but for now, we can only refer to it as the Buffalo God." Under Victoria Hand's persistent questioning, Master Hamil finally revealed a few secrets. "Because we believe that the woman gave birth to a cow, or some supernatural creature resembling a cow. Before that, the village posed no danger, and the fusion of Native American customs with Christianity wasn't particularly unusual. Even their sacred texts for preaching were just nonsense, devoid of witchcraft. Nevertheless, the ritual worked; something responded to the call and descended to earth."

"How was this resolved in the end?" she asked. "Did you find the creature?"

After a long silence, the mage Hamil sighed. "No, we didn't." He opened his eyes and looked at Victoria. "There's nothing but pastures and wilderness nearby. We found nothing. There haven't been any more murders in that area since then. No drug addicts, no killers. Nobody knows when that creature will commit a bloody crime."

"Isn't there even the slightest clue?" she asked. "Has this happened many times before?"

"Questions must be answered one by one." Master Hamil wasn't annoyed by Victoria's impatience. He had taught many students, and Victoria's patience was already quite good. "There are no clues. Divination indicates that the monster has been roaming the Montana wilderness. We've organized hunts, but to no avail."

"The second question."

"It doesn't happen often, but that's because we're vigilant enough, and the boundary between reality and illusion is solid enough. If we're lucky enough, that thing might be worn down and disappear by the laws of reality; if we're unlucky, it might develop into a cult and summon more of its kind. The latter is more likely, since those terrifying beings don't respond to summons without reason," said Master Hamil. "However, the boundary between reality and illusion is not immutable. You can imagine how terrifying the rituals performed by well-trained cultists would be if superstitious people could summon extradimensional spiritual entities with fabricated scriptures. More and more powerful extradimensional entities would acquire physical bodies in the real universe, disguising themselves as victims. Even experienced sorcerers wouldn't be able to discern the entity beneath the skin at first glance, and even genetic coding tests would be useless."

"So how do we eliminate such infiltration tactics?" Victoria Hand quickly grasped the key point. "I'm not a wizard; I can only think through my professional skills," she said. "Or are some defensive measures I'm unaware of already in place?"

Please vote for me!

(End of this chapter)