[He was prepared for the question when he'd offered the tidbit, of course, but he still takes a moment to blink owlishly at John, as though surprised.]

Ah...I was shot. You could say I was in the wrong place at the right time!

[This is bullshit, but letting John know that he allowed a sniper to shoot him in order to get information from someone who thought he'd outmaneuvered him is entirely too many cards to put on the table. And technically, he's not lying so much as deliberately framing facts to give a different impression than the reality. There's only so much you can glean from non-reactions, at a certain point. So it was worth another little push.]

But wow, I didn't even realize that real monsters existed outside of stories and the like...

[Also not precisely a lie; Lovecraft was an unusual case, certainly, but nearly every supernatural phenomenon in Yokohama was the result of Ability users. People, as usual, were the real monsters. He had been one of those things that went bump in the night for quite some time, himself.]

Have you fought any of these monsters yourself?