Cameraman Never Dies-Chapter 256: Countless Questions and The Quill That Writes Itself

Chapter 256: Countless Questions and The Quill That Writes Itself

The courtyard was a graveyard of architecture. Stone arches drooped like guilty men caught mid-crime, and dust swirled in lazy, traumatized circles. The air crackled with the aftertaste of too many unhinged principles — gravity was somehow still working, time was getting ready to be manipulated, and somewhere in the chaos, Satan was being puppeteered like a soap opera character who’d lost creative control of his own show.

Judge’s hand hovered above the parchment. The quill quivered, waiting. The first line he wrote wasn’t elegant or restrained — he kept his usual self and tried to sound as incompetent as possible.

"Satan adjusts his stance, cloak torn, ego slightly less so. He grins. The cowardice evaporates, replaced by something almost respectable — competence."

And like that, the recorder moved.

The moment the quill’s nib left the paper, Satan’s body snapped upright. His smirk appeared like it had been downloaded from a better dimension. He raised a hand, and the air behind him folded — surprisingly not into a shield, but into a vacuum that instantly neutralized an explosion behind him.

Percival blinked. "You’re good at this, servant of the Princeps." He paused and continued. "Shall we take it up a notch?"

"Please," Satan replied, though the voice wasn’t his — it was Judge’s, filtered through enough arrogance that was second only to Lucifer when he was not in the presence of Judge. "I’m improvising."

Without enough time to chat, he quickly made a jagged transparent sphere out of something that resembled ice, but was still different.

The frozen sphere detonated outward, but instead of ice, it stopped time. The debris in the courtyard froze mid-flight, and even the flickering torches halted, flames locked in eternal hesitation. Percival’s next attack met the suspended moment and... didn’t.

Judge’s quill scratched rapidly across the page.

"He bends the halted time into a decisive strike."

Satan’s hand moved before thought had time to argue. The black ice that once coated his leg spiraled up his arm, crystallizing into a jagged blade that hummed with condensed silence.

He slashed, which turned out to be too fast due to the time delay — and the sound barrier cracked like cheap glass. Percival was sent crashing through the air, his body leaving streaks of afterimages that lagged behind like bad animation frames.

The quill paused, as if impressed by its own genius. Judge’s lips tightened, and he exhaled through his nose like someone trying very hard not to enjoy themselves. But even without him, the quill still wrote — in his tone.

"Percival recovers before impact. Because of course he does."

Reality complied with a grunt. Percival twisted mid-air, snapped his fingers, and tore the gravity field into a knot. Satan was instantly pulled backward, his body bending at uncomfortable narrative angles. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

Judge’s fingers tightened around the quill. "Oh no, you don’t."

"He redefines gravity as a matter of personal preference."

Gravity sulked, then gave up entirely. Satan hung in the air, weightless, staring at Percival with a look that could only be described as smug physics denial.

Percival’s eyes narrowed. "You’re not fighting me," he hissed. "Someone else is."

Satan tilted his head. "You say that like it’s supposed to be a problem."

"I just hope it is the princeps."

Percival lunged, slamming his arm forward — metal fingers flickering with runic sigils. The ground beneath Satan twisted into something both solid and liquid, both floor and not-floor. It was the kind of attack that made philosophers go blind and mathematicians quit teaching.

Judge’s quill didn’t slow.

"He meets the attack with spatial transposition. The floor dreams of being air."

The earth beneath Satan turned transparent and intangible. Percival’s attack fell through, but before it could hit the ground beneath, Satan switched the two spaces back.

Percival was still testing the grounds with a normal explosion, and the blast was now in the air, having been previously on the ground and now switched back. The resulting boom sent tremors through the courtyard, almost impressive for an attack to test the waters.

Judge painfully realised one thing — Satan can’t beat Percival. No, he had realised it before, and hoped otherwise. But reality was often painful; his cracked face was a reminder.

The quill’s glow deepened — amber bleeding into crimson. Judge’s breathing grew harsher, the air around him shimmering with heat. His control wasn’t clean anymore; his will was burning through the page.

"He shapes the aftermath into an advantage. He..."

Satan flicked his fingers, and the smoke solidified into blades of pure flames — each one humming with a heat so intense, it could scorch the very air itself, all of them sharp enough to wound the mind. He flung them at Percival, who swatted them aside, but each cut left not blood, but mind. The flames were hot enough to burn the world, and sharp enough to cut the mind.

Satan grinned, almost pitying him. "What’s wrong? You seem... unsure."

Percival’s voice was a snarl wrapped in divine static. "You think your little tricks can trouble me? Oh, how far you’ve fallen, dear Princeps. Or perhaps do you not realise who I am?"

The quill hesitated mid-sentence.

"Percival has been completely taken over." Judge, pale and trembling, whispered, "It is Tenebris."

"Satan gets alarmed as he frowns and utters a single name — "Tenebris". His foe was not so simple."

"Oh, you do know me." Percival smiled brightly, "Or is it the princeps talking?"

"Who is Princeps?" Satan countered; they were curious, both he and Judge.

However, Percival’s reply was a far cry from how they expected it to be. He simply laughed; surprisingly, it was not menacing, nor was it eerie — he was laughing because he simply found it funny.

"Amusing... it is truly humorous," He ceased his laughter just as he started it. Simply preternatural, but of course, this was a god — and gods work in mysterious ways.

"The princeps doesn’t remember me?" He seemed more confused than Satan or Judge, "The Faber sigillatores himself?"

Judge frowned more over his already frowning face, which was a tall task, but he made it work. Thinking about it carefully, Tenebris is thinking that Judge was someone called Princeps. And he most likely understood it from the divinity radiating from the purple eyes he lent Satan. Those purple eyes were the most mysterious.

He had seen those eyes in two other people; one was an assassin with great skills, but nothing interesting. The other was a mysterious woman with a bandaged face and a lab coat. She had appeared near Satan when he was still Finn.

Countless questions popped up in his head that he wanted to ask, but there was one question he was the most curious about — or rather, it stood out the most since the first time seeing Tenebris.

""How did you get out of the seal?" Satan asked unknowingly."

Judge wrote, but just as he finished writing... the letters vanished. The quill crackled, as if issuing a warning.