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Just how long had they been walking down these corridors? Claude could no longer tell. Inside this maze of corridors, his track of time had already been thrown severely off-mark.
Not long after abandoning the chamber where Samantha’s replica dissolved into memory, so did the gaudy screens and their electric hum start to recede, replaced once more by those ornate walls he had already grown sick and tired of. Every now and then, Claude could still feel it —that sensation of being watched, tracked. But this time, the gaze felt weary, as if whatever their stalker was had recognized they carried more than just flesh and bone within them.
He still supported Jagdhund —or at least pretended that he did. Despite the veteran detective’s numerous wounds, his steps retained their characteristic steadiness. If anything, the old man only appeared to be humoring Claude’s attempt at assistance, too proud or too stubborn to fully lean against his smaller frame. Not that the rookie minded the deception much. He knew full well that he couldn’t carry the man’s burly physique all by himself.
And much more important than that was the conversation they held during their journey forward.
“So its name didn’t just… Come to you right away?” Claude pressed, searching for some common ground between their experiences. “What if you try to dig a bit deeper? There must be something there.”
Getting Jagdhund to discuss their newfound capabilities felt like pulling teeth from a particularly resistant cadaver. The detective even held a stoic silence, refusing to engage, only until Claude reinstated that the specters might be temporary effects of whatever madness plagued the Seagrave mansion. That suggestion helped the old man lose some of his tension, the possibility of impermanence making the whole thing more palatable to him.
Clade, however, knew better. Common sense was a fragile lantern in the face of the supernatural. A part of him wished he’d paid more attention to his mother’s teachings, though that was hardly a regret that could help him now.
He was at least satisfied to see Jagdhund retreating into a more pensive state for a moment, Claude being aware of how hard it must be for him to follow such an esoteric line of reasoning. At times, he noticed the detective straining his nose, as if the acrid smell of paint in the air could somehow help him reach an answer.
“Rust… I think.” The old man finally grunted, testing the name with a frown on his face as if he still needed some convincing.
“Rust, huh.” Claude repeated, the cogs of his mind turning. Aside from the obvious, he wondered what else differed between it and Pendulum. Those cryptic messages that haunted him so insistently since this morning —could Jagdhund also be receiving them? “Can you feel its presence? Did it tell you its name directly?”
A grunt escaped the detective as he crossed his head, one that carried volumes of discomfort. Be it due to physical pain, or metaphysical uncertainty, the line blurred.
“More of a feeling than certainty.” Jagdhund elaborated, words dragged from some deep, reluctant place. “Like remembering something I’d known all along but forgotten.”
>> “The way you sometimes recall the name of a childhood friend decades later.”
“So your childhood friends had three heads too?” Claude couldn’t keep at bay a light chuckle, though he regretted the invasive thought almost immediately.
His attempt at levity withered quickly in the stale air, Samantha’s recent final moments pressing against his conscience —a passing the two of them were yet to fully mourn. They had survived, yes, but the achievement felt hollow when purchased with the young girl’s extinction.
The weight of her dissolution onto nothingness refused to fully settle in his chest despite Jagdhund’s reassurance, a cold knot of guilt that no amount of rationalization could fully untangle. Even knowing she was but an imperfect recreation devised by the mansion, even accepting they could have never reached her in time… Claude could hardly dismiss the moments they spent together, the promises made, and the light conversations shared —now forever lost to the hungry darkness prowling beyond sight.
Of course, what truly haunted him wasn’t her death alone, but how it had come to happen too. The ghostly blades that manifested at his command, carving through her flesh, answering his call without a second’s hesitation.
As if it had always been there, waiting for this moment…
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Words crashed through his skull like a lightning bolt once more, sending waves of vertigo cascading down his senses —a sensation he doubted he could ever grow accustomed to. Claude’s legs buckled beneath him, the world tilting dangerously on its axis. Before he could crash into the carpeted floor, Jagdhund’s grip caught his shoulder, steadying him with an ease that confirmed his earlier guesses about the detective’s recovered strength.
“Easy there, kid.” The old man’s voice carried a gruff concern, making the support feel a tiny bit less patronizing.
His hand instinctively moved to press against his temple, willing away the lingering resonance of those Delphic verses. The timing could’ve been worse, he supposed —at least they hadn’t struck mid-confrontation like the previous two. Still, their increased frequency was starting to feel like a countdown to something he wasn’t prepared to face.
“You’ve been having these episodes more and more.” Jagdhund observed, now walking tall by his side with only a phantom of his previous limp. The statement wasn’t really a question, but rather an invitation to elaborate.
“I’ve always had them, ever since I was young.” Claude admitted, hoping that their special circumstances might normalize such preternatural occurrence. “They’re getting much stronger though. More… Specific, somehow.”
>> “Like they’re trying to tell me something.”
Jagdhund’s nostrils flared slightly, as if testing the very concept for a scent.
“… Premonitions?”
A smirk rose on Claude’s face, thinking it darkly humorous for someone like Jagdhund —who seemed ripped straight from the pages of a hard-boiled detective novel— to be entertaining such notions. The veteran’s absolutely serious expression, however, killed the gesture as swiftly as it came.
Somehow he now looked like a man who needed no explanations for the impossible.
“I can’t tell. They sound like nonsense to me, to be honest.” The rookie detective followed with a weary sigh.
“They might be important. Perhaps you should try to jot them down, once we’re out of danger.”
“Jagdhund…” Claude tried to breach the gap between their experiences, hoping that perhaps he wasn’t so alone in this sea of uncertainty. “Earlier, when Rust first appeared… Did you hear anything similar? Words that went directly to your soul?”
“None of the sort.” The old man clarified, the weathered features in his chiseled face creasing in concentration. “I just feel things, like an instinct.”
>> “Like catching a familiar scent that triggers old memories. The kind that makes your hackles rise before your brain catches up to why.”
The manner in which he described things, and how he kept sampling the air around them made Claude think. Jagdhund had always been prone to that sort of odd behavior, enough to warrant all those funky nicknames at the station. Now it carried another layer of significance altogether —as if his nose had always known things the rest of him was only beginning to understand.
“Say, that instinct of yours is tied to your sense of smell, isn’t it? Is that how you’ve been knowing stuff you couldn’t have?”
“Not only that.” Jagdhund’s eyes drifted shut as he drew in a deep breath, as if trying to parse a language that existed beyond words. “I can perceive them. Scents that shouldn’t exist. This whole place, for example.”
>> “It reeks of fear, self-disgust…”
>> “… And rot.”
“Can you follow it?”
“All the way to its source.” The certainty in the detective’s tone carried something predatory in its quality, a present like that of a hunting dog. “It’s Seagrave. He’s waiting for us at the end of this maze. Rust can smell him.”
>> “He’s the key out, but I can’t tell if he can be saved… Or if there’s anything human left to save at all.”
For a brief period, they stood in complete silence. It was difficult to intercede Jagdhund’s statements, each of the old man’s inhalations carrying a purposeful weight, inhabiting a state that Claude felt ill-equipped to comprehend.
At least until his facial expression hardened, not in fear, but with a recognition that froze Claude in his spot. The veteran detective went unnaturally still, a hunter caught in a moment of absolute focus.
“Cole is there with him.” He muttered, the words emerging like a fragment of prophecy. The gravity of that sentence hung unchallenged, pressing heavy against Claude’s chest. The officer’s life was potentially balancing on a very brittle thread, if Seagrave was the one responsible for all this mess.
The urgent need to bridge the distance rose inside his organism, to move faster, do anything. Yet Jagdhund’s frame turned back towards the corridor they had already traversed, an inkling of viciousness awakening in his stance.
“Us two would never make it in time.” He continued, inscrutable as the mansion’s shadows. “Not if you have to drag a wounded old dog there.”
>> “Besides, someone has to deal with what’s coming.”
The transition was electric. Claude’s body coiled tight, a knot of dread forming in the pit of his stomach. Though couldn’t hear or feel anything that betrayed the presence of any creature chasing them, the certainty in the old man’s expression and posture allowed no room for doubt.
“Go. Now.” Jagdhund’s commands had already moved past any suggestion, even when a hint of something deeper could be ascertained between them —it was paternal protection, one that transcended professional bond. His voice held no tremor, even as he wordlessly admitted that the wounds mapping his body would prevent him from moving quickly.
Claude’s reluctance felt almost like a physical, tangible entity threatening to choke him. He wanted to argue, to try and convince him that separating now would feel like one more bad horror movie trope to add to the pile. But the old man stood before him not as a self-sacrificing hero, but as someone with a fundamental awareness of survival’s cruel mathematics.
Their eyes met. Years of partnership crystallized in that singular moment, a trust that could never be spoken, there being no point in even trying to. A love that he’d never be able to wring out of the old man’s mouth —now fully conveyed in only a gaze.
Jagdhund was right. If Cole was in danger, Claude needed to move.
His muscles tensed in preparation for the sprint to come, at least until his mentor’s voice broke his concentration one final time, uncharacteristically mellow in its tone —revealing vulnerabilities that felt out of place from the grizzled detective.
“Hey, rookie.” The ghost of a smile played across his lips, a gesture so rare that it fleetingly fractured the mansion’s gloom. “There’s something for Ione in my car’s glove compartment. A birthday gift.”
>> “My plan was to give it to her myself, but if…”
“Don’t.” Claude's reaction was instantaneous, visceral. He didn’t care if there’d be no other opportunity for this conversation. Even considering it sent waves of rejection crashing against him. “Just. Don’t.” The shift in their dynamic crackled like lightning —apprentice momentarily defying mentor. “I’ll be waiting for you, old mutt.”
>> “Is that understood?”
There was no stark reaction to his defiance, only a slight huff from Jagdhund as he turned on his back again, more of a breath of resignation than a gesture of protest. This was fine. Claude had no time to spare for prolonged farewells that would hollow themselves the moment they were spoken. They would reunite soon.
With that certitude echoing in his head he broke into a run, the underground gallery dissolving into a blur of motion, focus narrowing on the path forward alone. His wounded legs pumped with a reinvigorated tempo, coagulated blood sliding from his skin like an afterthought. Any remnant of pain was muted into something distant, overshadowed by the urgent pulse of purpose thundering through his veins.
The underground gallery transformed further after every winding path, across every twisted corner traversed. Naive as it might be, Claude chose to trust Samantha’s original teachings —that all roads converged, no matter their lack of rhyme or reason.
His progress across the mansion was punctuated tangibly, art pieces gradually mutating into peripheral nightmares he ignored deliberately. Hard as it might be, it was better to blind himself to the ever-darkening atrocities framed on walls, to the sculptures tracking him down from the upper display alcoves.
Chandeliers hung high overhead mirrored the rising dusk, losing their luminescent strength the more of them he passed. It was either that, or the shadows themselves growing fiercer, devouring light with sentient hunger, creeping onto the carpet’s rich red hues to make them bleed into something deeper, more primordial.
Eventually, all the artificial lighting gave way to an absolute penumbra, the walls themselves becoming his only beacon guiding the path forward. Their color was no longer a static stillness, but a writhing, pulsing, breathing incandescence —like a layer of blood adhering to the surface, beating to the rhythm of Claude’s frantic heart.
Gravity became a loose proposal rather than a law. The corridors’ geometry tilted at impossible angles while Claude’s body remained perfectly balanced, moving with a fluidity that transcended human locomotion.
Was he even running at this point, or was the mansion carrying him forward? The distinction was no longer there, or rather, it became meaningless.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
The final stretch revealed itself not as a threshold to cross, but as what appeared something akin to a membrane —uncompromisingly black yet simultaneously translucent. A vibrating divide between planes of existence, whispering promises of transformation. Iridescent but dark, both thick and thin, an ephemeral veil capable of complete dissolution.
Something primal within Claude screamed at him to retreat. That approaching further would not bring mere traversal, but a more metamorphic change.
But Claude didn’t hesitate. Couldn’t hesitate. Stopping in and of itself felt like inviting whatever lurking maws that pursued him to snap shut.
So he launched himself forward, straight into the unknown.
When his body crashed against the barrier, it dissolved around him like ink bleeding through fragile paper. The transition felt different from his first descent into this surreal netherworld —more akin to suspension than falling, seconds stretching into an eternity so brief he couldn’t even measure its full terror.
Once his feet reunited with the ground, they made no sound whatsoever.
A vast black space enveloped him whole, a canvas of absolute darkness punctured by a singular ray of light, so sharp it appeared almost surgical in its precision. The air hung thick and viscous, a gaseous layer of dissipating paint that clung to his lungs, making each breath feel more like an unwanted absorption than inhalation. Pigment droplets drifted aimlessly around the space, creating a misty veil that transformed every movement into a spectral dance of small particles.
If circumstances were different, Claude might have paused to study both the place and himself. To examine if anything had changed in his body, to seek a ceiling beyond the light, or to confirm if there was any way to turn back. Contemplation was a luxury he couldn’t no longer afford.
The chaotic scene before him demanded his immediate attention.
Another brand new nightmare given flesh claimed dominion inside the suffocating hall —a towering centipede that defied the natural order. Its exoskeleton devoured any light it touched, an ink-black carapace so glossy it seemed to contain liquid swirling underneath. Contrasting that obscurity, its inner anatomy revealed a phantasmagorical white —needle-sharp limbs and segmented appendages that moved with a hypnotic fluidity, a choreography of sickening motion.
Enduring its prowl, Cole was locked in a dance of desperation, narrowly avoiding the certain destruction of those sharp legs crawling all around him. Blood saturated his torn uniform, a testament to a losing battle against the creature. Each slice told a story of resistance, jagged tears revealing glimpses of flesh devoured by flowing crimson.
Yet his arms appeared to remain a safe haven as they nestled a small young boy protectively. Claude identified him immediately. Ethan Seagrave, ten years old —the only child ever to be associated with the mansion’s obscure records.
As the detective forced every thought back to bring himself into motion, the centipede’s massive form coiled, preparing itself to strike. Claude could hear the sound of mandibles clicking with anticipation, a millisecond from transforming Cole and Ethan into nothing more than splatter and memories.
Pendulum responded before conscious thought, its ghostly blade materializing high at Claude’s command. Ethereal rope tensed painfully around his hand as it sang through the musty, paint-laden air, the edge descending like a guillotine to carve through the creature without an ounce of mercy.
The blade cleaved through segmented flesh with ease, chitinous appendages crashing down to the floor to writhe in grotesque independence. Black ichor sprayed instead of blood, more akin to liquefied shadow and smoke than anything organic —the same vile essence that had once seeped from LaCaze’s decaying body.
A primal, bone-rattling hiss erupted from the centipede, the sound so forceful it seemed to make even the vast hall tremble —or perhaps it was Claude’s own skull reverberating with the unnatural resonance. The creature’s immense body undulated as it retreated, too large to fully conceal itself in the surrounding darkness.
"Claude!" Cole shouted as the two of them reunited, ragged with relief and exhaustion that bordered on agonizing. His arms trembled over Ethan’s half-unconscious form as he succumbed to his knees, a contrast of fragility to his blood-soaked clothes and the horror now lurking for a new angle to strike.
“Stay down!” Claude warned, wielding Pendulum defensively to consolidate their own front, the black blade dancing around them to keep the centipede back, gradually enveloping them in a defensive barricade of pale-blue afterimages. “It's not over yet!”
“You took your time, Detective Cavendish.” A new voice emerged from the darkness, liquid and distorted, with the quality of something profoundly wrong. “I see you have one of your own.”
>> “A Punisher.”
The term landed like a hex, foreign yet laden with meaning. Claude’s grip instinctively tightened on Pendulum’s rope, something alive and anticipatory humming between his fingers and the spectral blade.
“A what now?” The detective asked, more reflex than genuine expectation of an answer, commanding the dark blade to dissipate back to the ether.
The laughter that ensued sent chills down his spine, defeating his attempt at nonchalance. Part insect chittering, part human derision. It crawled freely across the air, enveloping them from all places at one, unconstrained by physical limitations. Nothing more than fragments of disjointed conversation, the rambling monologue of a mind long divorced from sanity.
“Seagrave, no?” It didn’t take much deduction for Claude to piece things together. The question was performed merely in custom.
Motions challenged by a shivering cough, Cole nodded, his eyes growing unfocused due to all the lost blood. Could he even see the blade that saved him? Claude was unable to tell.
“Your gun…” The officer mumbled, extending an expectant trembling hand. “Mine… Ran out of bullets.”
Claude hesitated. Even if the service weapon provided little use for him to keep, Cole was far too gone to wield it effectively. Yet he understood the human need for something tangible, and he preferred the officer to have something to focus on instead of bleeding helplessly on the floor. The additional life of defense was similarly valuable, were things to spiral completely out of control.
Doubting fingers exchanged the cold metal from hands, until that too ended interrupted once Miles Seagrave emerged fully, giving Claude one hell of a welcome reception —his sight, man and monster intertwined in defiance to any sort of categorization.
Gray, necrotic skin stretched through the upper part of a torso, converged blasphemously between taxonomy and atrocity. A withered wing, more like a broken dream of flight, sprouted from his right shoulder blade, its counterpart on the left a mutilated vestige that gave Claude the feeling of an incomplete transformation. Thick, grimy black hair fell to his shoulders, doing little to soften the horror beneath. Where eyes should have been, two insect antennae twitched, sensing motion with revolting awareness. Other human features remained —almost mockingly so— preserving just enough humanity to make the monstrosity ever more terrible.
All of it atop a centipede head staring them down with tiny black eyes, mandibles and menacing arms clicking together with a rhythm that suggested conversation, or a depredation far more complex than mere hunger.
Claude felt something inside him go very still. Not terror, or at least not just that alone. There was also… Recognition.
The kind that could only come once the world raised a curtain, revealing something fundamentally, irrevocably different from everything he’d ever thought possible.
His breath began coming in ragged bursts, each exhalation raising his chest unevenly in the struggle to maintain composure. Claude suddenly felt very tiny, stripped of the spirit that propelled him to the conflict —stride he needed to quickly recover, no matter the cost.
“Doubt I can get you to teach me painting techniques now.” Claude managed, a frail smirk cutting through his trembling lips. The joke was probably delivered with obvious transparency of his mental state —but it was enough. An anchor. Something to keep him away from complete psychological fracture. Any more surrender to terror, and they’d all be dead.
Seagrave’s form undulated forward in its grotesque ripples, each movement a brushstroke of malevolence gaining speed, each motion a revolting wave of tiny limbs, eager to chase and trample its prey.
“Is that an attempt at comedy, Detective?”
Claude’s reaction came milliseconds too late. While he repositioned himself sufficiently away to keep Cole and Ethan from immediate danger, it wasn’t nearly fast enough to avoid the centipede’s ram. His body was lifted from the ground, weightless, helpless, as it resented the sheer force of the tackle.
“Are you so simplistic that no sin ever catches up to you?”
Pendulum manifested close to Clause in defense, his hands holding on precariously to the dull parts of the blade before those vicious mandibles could sink into his flesh. The tremor of Seagrave’s clasping jaws coursed through the spectral steel, traveling all the way to his bones.
“Why, if that’s not an enviable virtue…”
Suspended mid-air, oxygen locking in his lungs, Claude watched the scene unfold as he was thrown unceremoniously across the room —separated from those who needed his protection.
“Did you not stutter while executing Miss Marlowe, despite promising her salvation?”
His eyes were lured to the sound of Cole’s gunfire during the flight. A futile effort, the centipede’s middle segments reorganizing themselves despite the bullets, poised to skewer the officer and his young protegee.
“Now isn’t that fortunate. To be that pristine. To kill without consequence.”
Bracing for the inevitable impact would have to wait. As the descent began, Claude commanded one of Pendulum’s afterimages to run its recursive trajectory, slicing off the assaulting limbs.
“How I wish I could be like that. To not have guilt gnawing on my conscience like the utter fool that I am.”
Though the centipede head hissed in agony as it pivoted, correcting its course to charge exclusively at Claude, Miles' deranged speech carried on unchallenged —impervious to harm and hurt.
“Is that your Punisher makes no effort to devour your heart, Detective? Or is it as merciful as my Mirage Asylum is cruel?”
That term again. Punisher. The detective wished for a reprieve to piece together the puzzle, but the pain of his back hitting the floor overshadowed all coherent thoughts.
“Do not mistake my words as scornful.”
Resenting the slam against the surface was a luxury taken away from him. Seagrave’s coils, terrifyingly swift for their size, had already begun to encircle Claude before he could bring himself upwards.
“This lack of insight and effectiveness of mine… I, too, regret it.”
Claude’s muscles screamed in protest as he rolled, narrowly avoiding a wave of sharp feet attempting to pierce him. The borderline maneuver was punctuated with a horizontal swing of Pendulum, ethereal rope tensing over both hands as the blade cut deep into the centipede’s carapace —his knee height not low enough to completely dismember a set of limbs like he originally envisioned.
“Had I surrendered to my ordained role earlier…”
With another, more furious hiss, the creature corrected its massive form, clicking with a sound like broken scissors as it prepared to deliver a killing blow. One that Claude couldn’t as easily dodge this time around. His heart condensed into a singular beat, realizing he was seconds away from a brutal demise.
“… Perhaps much of this suffering could’ve been dealt with a gentler hand.”
Holding to it once more for dear life, Pendulum became the only barrier keeping the maws of the centipede from shredding his body to pieces. The crushing weight, however, remained more than enough to tear agonized screams from Claude. It felt like his body could begin rupturing from inside out at any given moment.
“I would have granted you all a much more merciful death.”
Another series of gunshots echoed through the vast emptiness. It was clear he had underestimated Cole’s marksmanship, for the bullets accurately punctured both of Seagrave’s forms. The centipede head retreated as it suffered the most of the damage, but another round also pierced Miles’ human jaw —surprisingly interrupting his deranged soliloquy.
The creature’s resulting thrashing gave Claude a precious opening, one he dared not to waste despite how his body demanded recovery. Pendulum darted upward in a fluid arc, slicing cleanly through the softer undersides and splitting its mouth in two, dividing the monstrous flesh and releasing a blackened rain now falling on him.
It wasn’t dead, and the savage tantrum that ensued threatened to collapse the very void around them… But this moment of Seagrave’s silence was exactly what Claude needed. A proper reprieve to bring his thoughts somewhere adjacent to coherency, now that he didn’t need to focus on the struggle for survival alone.
Fallacies, contradictions and false corollaries aside, Miles was still capable of speech. He wasn’t fully lost. In that fractured communication there was a possibility —however frail— of understanding, of learning.
Not to condemn, but to unravel this nightmare’s intricate, bleeding logic. Not to judge the monster, but to find a path ahead through its relentless darkness.
His thoughts drifted, momentarily, to Ione. What could he possibly say now, that could rekindle the ember of humanity that might be able to connect them?
“I won’t give up on you.” Claude spoke, his voice a razor of determination cutting through the suffocating darkness. Tremors of exertion coursed down his body, blackened blood and sweat painting a macabre canvas across his features. “I can tell that you’ve seen things I can’t even begin to imagine.”
>> “But if there’s a way for us all to survive, to make sense of the impossible… Then maybe we can forge a tomorrow that doesn’t involv—”
“Baseless ideals, while beautiful, are nothing more than a fragile illusion, crumbling too easily beneath the weight of inevitability.” Miles’ interruption emerged like poison seeping through cracked porcelain, the centipede frame stabilizing. There was a smile on his deteriorated face, but not one of mockery. To Claude, it appeared born out of self-pity. “I have witnessed the end, Detective Cavendish.”
>> “And mortal hands are but dust against her approaching storm. Trust that I have your best interest in mind, for the other side might offer you a more lasting peace.”
>> “My advice is that you quiet down and accept my design.”
Claude wiped a streak of obsidian from his cheek, a challenging smile breaking free across his lips as he stood up. Frustration began to simmer in him, even if it wasn’t complete anger just yet.
“Yeah, sorry.” The detective replied, Pendulum hanging with thrumming anticipation at his side. “That won’t happen.”
>> “I’d prefer you alive. But I’m sure as hell not about to let you do as you please with us.”
“Have it your way.” Seagrave hissed.
The partially mutilated form of the centipede recoiled, then surged forward with vicious intent. Perhaps precisely due to their discussion, Miles had failed to fully identify Pendulum’s ability —a mistake Claude was more than ready to exploit.
As the creature crossed the afterimage of Pendulum’s last attack, Claude summoned back its recursive strike from within it. The ghost blade carved backwards through inner anatomy, halting the centipede in the spot as another precipice of its foul, inner substances blossomed due to the destructive internal damage.
Giving tangible motion to his resolve, Claude swung Pendulum in one final arc, this one decisive. The horizontal slash bisected cleanly the remaining pieces of flesh that kept the centipede together. Its head crashed down, decapitated remains writhing in grotesque mindlessness.
Not over, Claude knew, but now it was the only chance he’d get to determine whether Seagrave could be separated or not from this architecture of corruption.
Moving again released jolts of pain that coursed through his body like fire. Though he’d rather not think about it, something had very likely broken inside him —a rib, or perhaps… He drove the notion away, focusing instead on bringing himself closer to the disembodied centipede head.
Miles Seagrave’s pale, malnourished torso emerged before him as he took careful steps, mindful of every residual spasm. He looked grotesquely like a decaying tumour hanging from the black exoskeleton, welded at the hips with his hands sunken deep into the chitin. The proximity revealed more grotesque details, like his bones protruding on the sickly skin, and the thin darkened veins across his flesh that pulsed with a life not entirely his own.
“To think I, too, would fall victim to your ruthless promises of comfort…” Seagrave muttered, black blood pooling around Claude’s boots like a spreading infection.
“Shut up, will you? I’m not trying to kill you.” The detective’s hands ran across the exoskeleton, fingers seeking for any gap between the seamless shell. It still felt disturbingly alive, breathing in a rhythm that remained unsettling even in its lack of motion. “I’m going to cut. Try not to move.”
“It’s useless.” The artist whispered with yet another self-serving smile. “It didn’t interfere only because it expected better of me.”
>> “But it’s not going to let me go. As long as I live… This plight…”
Before Claude’s eyebrow could twitch in annoyance, the vast dark hall rumbled.
It wasn’t only sound. It was a presence. An unsurmountable, enormous force that had just taken firm hold of reality itself. Pigment droplets scattered in the air like terrified wraiths, swirling in chaotic, unstable patterns. The sole piece of furniture in the room —a white canvas laying pitifully on the floor— began to shake, not from the tremors, but from something it held beneath its blank surface.
Concerned, Claude’s gaze darted to Cole, who clutched Ethan firmly while forcing himself upright despite wounds that would have felled a lesser man. Beneath the officer’s feet, the stark surface was no longer mere absence of light. It was alive, ebbing, flowing, receding.
No, not just beneath Cole. It was the entire room. The blackness itself seemed to crawl, moving with purposeful convergence towards the abandoned canvas.
“Aha… It’s coming now.” Seagrave voice carried a note of resignation, a complete lack of movement in the antennae he had for eyes. “There won’t be more chances.”
>> “Kill me, Detective.”
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