The Psychological Turmoil
Sophia Laurent's fingers unconsciously tightened around the grip of her service pistol as the implications of Investigator Steelgrave's words sank in. The warmth spreading across her cheeks betrayed her professional composure, and she found herself mentally recoiling from the unexpected direction of her own thoughts.
"Could there truly be... that kind of interest?" The question echoed through her mind with unsettling persistence. As a career police officer, Sophia had always prided herself on rational thinking, yet now her disciplined mind was betraying her with unwelcome speculation. She shook her head slightly, the motion barely perceptible, as if physically dispelling the notion.
The rational part of her brain immediately countered: "Don't be absurd. A man like that wouldn't..." But the seed had been planted, and against her will, she found herself recalling the subtle nuances of Ethan's demeanor - the way his piercing gaze had lingered just a fraction too long during their negotiations, the almost imperceptible softening of his typically impassive expression when she'd mentioned her sister's predicament.
With deliberate effort, Sophia forced her attention back to the crumbling building before them. Such thoughts were dangerous distractions. Violette's survival was all that mattered now. And as she watched Ethan disappear into the structure's gaping maw with the casual confidence of a predator returning to its den, she allowed herself a moment of cautious optimism.
If anyone could defy the impossible and bring her sister back from that hellish place, it would be the inscrutable man who had just annihilated two D+-ranked Entities without breaking stride.
The Haunted Elevator
The elevator's antiquated mechanisms groaned in protest as it ascended, each shuddering movement accompanied by the screech of unoiled gears. Ethan stood motionless in the center of the compartment, his enhanced senses cataloging every detail of his surroundings. The flickering fluorescent light cast erratic shadows across the rust-stained walls, while the scent of mildew and something far more sinister - the coppery tang of old blood - permeated the stale air.
When the doors parted at the eighteenth floor, the darkness beyond was absolute - a wall of blackness that seemed to swallow the weak illumination from the elevator whole. Ethan's lips curved into a faint, humorless smile. The building was putting on quite the theatrical display. How quaint.
He stepped forward.
The reaction was instantaneous. With a resounding crash that echoed through the empty shaft, the elevator doors slammed shut behind him with unnatural force. Simultaneously, the lights extinguished, plunging the compartment into perfect darkness. The temperature plummeted, his breath materializing as frosty vapor in the suddenly frigid air.
Then came the sound - the faintest whisper of movement from directly behind him, where the cracked full-length mirror hung. Ethan didn't need to turn to know what was coming. His curse-enhanced perception mapped the attack before it even began: the gradual emergence of a desiccated, corpse-gray arm from the reflective surface, its elongated fingers terminating in jagged, yellowed nails that scraped against the glass with a sound like bones rattling in a tin can.
The entity's assault was textbook - a classic ambush predator's strike. The withered hand shot forward with terrifying speed, its clawed fingers aimed unerringly for the space between his shoulder blades, where they would puncture flesh and bone to seize his still-beating heart.
RIIIP.
Razor-sharp nails tore through fabric with ease, only to encounter unexpected resistance. Instead of warm, pulsing muscle, the entity's fingers closed around something dry and fibrous - the unmistakable texture of tightly woven straw.
Ethan remained perfectly still, not even bothering to turn his head. "Disappointing," he murmured, his voice carrying the weight of a professor grading a subpar thesis.
CRUNCH.
The mirror entity squeezed with all its supernatural strength.
And in that exact instant, its own cursed heart - now transformed into a fragile straw replica deep within its spectral form - imploded violently.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic. The mirror's surface erupted into a spiderweb of fractures as an ear-splitting shriek filled the confined space - a sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once, reverberating through the elevator's metal walls. The entity's final moments were a study in poetic justice, trapped in an endless feedback loop of its own lethal intent, forced to experience the agony it had intended to inflict.
[Ding! Host has slain D-Rank Entity: Mirror Wraith. Reward: 1.5 Supernatural Points.]
As the echoes of the entity's death throes faded, Ethan's straw heart reconstituted itself with eerie fluidity, the individual strands weaving back together like snakes coiling into a nest. Within seconds, his chest bore no evidence of the attack, his human physiology restored without so much as a scar to mark the encounter.
"Pathetic," he repeated, this time with genuine disdain. Most victims would have died screaming in that elevator, their final moments filled with terror and incomprehension. To Ethan? This had been barely worth noting - a trivial exercise in pest control.
The Gauntlet of Horrors
What followed was nothing short of systematic extermination. Over the next thirty minutes, Ethan moved through the building with methodical precision, his very presence acting as bait for the Entities lurking within. Floor by floor, he allowed them to reveal themselves, to commit to their attacks, only to perish by their own hands.
In what had once been an open-plan office, a possessed ergonomic chair (D-Rank) skittered across the carpet on spindly wooden legs, its leather upholstery splitting open to reveal rows of needle-like teeth. It launched itself at Ethan's throat with startling speed - only to explode into a shower of splinters mid-air as the curse rebound obliterated its malignant consciousness.
[Ding! Host has slain D-Rank Entity: Chair Demon. Reward: 1.5 SP.]
On the twelfth floor, a grotesque hybrid of lion and scorpion (D+) dropped from the ceiling tiles, its chitinous tail poised to deliver a killing strike. The venom-dripping stinger never found its mark - the creature's own musculature turned against it, its internal organs liquefying as the curse took hold.
[Ding! Host has slain D+ Rank Entity: Manticore Specter. Reward: 3 SP.]
The ninth floor presented a more unsettling opponent - a spider the size of a large dog, its bloated abdomen bearing the perfectly preserved face of a young woman frozen in eternal scream (D+). It moved with uncanny silence, dropping from its web directly above Ethan's head. The face's mouth stretched impossibly wide, revealing a second set of dripping fangs - just before the entire creature collapsed inward on itself like a deflating balloon, its essence unraveling at the molecular level.
[Ding! Host has slain D+ Rank Entity: Widow's Visage. Reward: 2.5 SP.]
By the time Ethan's boots touched the ground floor's cracked linoleum, his SP reserves had grown substantially, while the building's spectral population had been noticeably thinned. What to Bureau operatives represented nightmares made flesh were, to Ethan, little more than walking experience points - obstacles to be efficiently processed and discarded.
The Charnel House
The stairwell to the underground garage exhaled a breath of frigid, foul air as Ethan pushed open the heavy fire door. His enhanced senses were immediately assaulted:
The metallic stench of congealed blood, so thick it coated the back of his throat.
The sweet, cloying perfume of rotting meat in various stages of decomposition.
The acrid tang of voided bowels and ruptured internal organs.
And beneath it all, something else - something electric and ancient that raised the fine hairs on his arms.
His footsteps echoed with deliberate loudness as he descended, each impact of his boots against concrete a challenge to whatever waited below. The darkness here was different from the floors above - thicker, more purposeful. It clung to the corners and pooled in the hollows between support pillars like liquid obsidian.
The garage revealed itself in stages as Ethan's eyes adjusted. First came the outlines - the angular silhouettes of long-abandoned vehicles, their windows opaque with decades of grime. Then the details emerged, each more gruesome than the last:
A Roaming Corpse pinned to the concrete wall by its own severed arm, the bones protruding like grotesque nails.
A cluster of Giant Zombies arranged in a bizarre tableau, their entrails woven together in a macabre tapestry that stretched between support pillars.
Dozens of headless D+ Rank Entities arranged in concentric circles, their missing skulls creating a haunting pattern of absence.
This was no random violence. This was display. This was territory marking.
And at the center of it all, in a cleared space near the garage's deepest recess, stood the pièce de résistance - a massive block of perfectly clear ice, its surface so flawless it might have been carved from diamond. Encased within, visible in horrifying detail, stood Violette Nocturne.
The Ice Queen's prison captured her in a moment of fierce determination, her combat suit torn in multiple places but her expression one of defiant rage rather than fear. Her right arm was extended, fingers splayed as if she'd been mid-cast when frozen. The ice had preserved her perfectly - every strand of her raven-black hair, every droplet of blood on her pale skin, even the faint mist of her final breath suspended before her lips.
Ethan's smile returned, wider this time, as he detected movement in the darkness beyond the ice. Something massive shifted in the shadows, its bulk displacing air with a low, resonant frequency that vibrated in his bones. The true master of this charnel house had revealed itself at last.
And it was hungry.