The new safe house, a condemned textile mill secured by the Pale Choir, was silent, but Ethan now carried the Reality Warping chaos.
He was standing by a peeling steel door when the anomaly flared. He wasn't thinking of anything specific, merely monitoring the lingering energy of the contained Anima. A sudden, cold pressure radiated from his core; the door handle momentarily warped into the shape of a small, dead goldfish before snapping back to its original form.
The effect was entirely localised, entirely random, and utterly terrifying. He was leaking reality. If a simple moment of mental drift could replace a door handle with marine life, a moment of high-stress combat could turn the entire street into a singularity.
He fought to contain it, realising the chaotic energy was drawn to his existing Gluttony core—the power that sought to consume and integrate all things. He couldn't burn it out; Wrath would only amplify the instability. He had to manage it.
He sat, forcing his mind into absolute discipline, channelling the Gluttony into an aggressive, internal absorption pattern. He was consuming the chaos itself, trying to reduce the Reality Warping flares to mere, controllable energetic hums. It was exhausting, demanding absolute perfection to prevent the next goldfish from escaping.
The distraction was broken by the arrival of Elias. She didn't enter the main room, but instead slid a sealed, simple dossier beneath the rusted door. The Pale Choir's efficiency was now their single virtue.
The dossier detailed the next target: a low-level soul of Sloth, not Gluttony, that had escaped millennia ago. It wasn't actively malicious; it simply promoted inertia and overwhelming apathy in its host.
Target: Marcus Dene.
Sin: Sloth (Overwhelming Apathy).
Location: Abandoned docks district, Sector 7. A vast, derelict warehouse complex known as the 'Graveyard of Industry.'
The location was strategically perfect. The abandoned docks district was a spiritual marsh—a high-density zone of passive, stagnant sin where decades of neglect and apathy had choked out the normal flow of spiritual life. The sin was thick, constant, and silent.
Ethan immediately recognised the advantage. The intense, stagnant sin of Sloth would be a spiritual anchor, providing the deepest camouflage yet against Seraphina's pure, celestial light. The sheer inertia of the environment would absorb and neutralise the Angel's active, bright energy signature.
However, this environment was terrible for managing Kane. The stagnant sin wouldn't stop a physical hunter. Kane wouldn't track the chaos; he would track the disturbance.
Ethan ran a cold calculation: Seraphina was the existential, moral threat; Kane was the immediate, physical one. He needed to focus on the Angel first, using the Sloth environment as his tactical canvas. He would draw the Angel in, secure the soul, and then worry about the human hunter.
The Kinetic Tracker
Miles away, Kane was anything but stagnant. He stood in the wreckage of the power station where his scanner had died, his face smeared with grease, installing replacement equipment.
He had removed the high-sensitivity, spiritually based scanner. In its place, he wired a crude, redundant array of kinetic, thermal, and sub-audio monitors—less precise, but immune to the Emissary's electromagnetic absorption attack.
"You like your high-frequency tricks, demon," Kane growled, testing the equipment with a hammer blow. "Let's see you hack a set of microphones."
He tracked the residue of physical disturbance. The residual heat signature from Ethan's Gatewalks was small but distinct. It wasn't spiritual tracking; it was forensics. He followed the faint path of microfractures in the concrete and the displaced air pressure from the Emissary's flight path.
His trackers led him directly toward the derelict docks district. The spiritual static of the Sloth sin was terrible, a deafening white noise on his audio feed. But that wasn't what he was listening for. He was listening for the sound of one entity moving against the silence of decades of decay.
Kane smiled grimly. "You think you're hiding in the filth? Fine. I'll just scrape the filth off you."
He checked the thermal read on his gauntlet. The heat flare from the last Gatewalk was hours old, but it gave him a clear trajectory. He was closing the distance, relying on the predictable physics of his enemy's body.
In Motion
Ethan felt the cold pressure of Kane's presence shifting—the hunter was no longer relying on distant spiritual tracking. He was closing in, relying on simple, physical pursuit. The danger had become imminent.
Ethan prepared his gear. He needed to be swift. He activated a controlled, low-power Gatewalk to the outskirts of the docks, minimising the thermal signature and the time spent exposed to the sun before the camouflage effect kicked in.
As he materialised in the shadow of a massive, rusted loading crane, the Reality Warping flared again. The steel crane's shadow stretched, detaching from the physical object for a dizzying half second, then snapping back. The Gluttony core shuddered under the strain, nearly losing control.
He forced the energy down, the sweet, dangerous rush of the power fighting the terrifying anxiety of the chaos. He was now operating on a clock measured by two entirely different threats: Seraphina, who saw his soul, and Kane, who tracked his footsteps.
He took his first step toward the centre of the Sloth soul's domain, moving through the overwhelming stench of decay and stagnation, a reluctant, walking storm of fire and chaos, hunting the essence of apathy.