David burst out of Thomas's office, boots striking the polished floor with urgency.
But the corridor was empty.
"Joseph?" he called, scanning left, then right. Nothing. Only the low hum of the air vents and the echo of his own heartbeat. It was as if Joseph had evaporated into the air itself.
David stepped farther out, disbelief flickering across his face.
"He couldn't have just vanished..."
He raked a hand through his hair, jaw tight. "Where the hell is he now?" he muttered, the weight in his voice betraying the dread already crawling up his spine. Something in his gut whispered that trouble was already in motion.
Footsteps approached from behind.
"Sir David?"
Amayra's voice was calm but curious, her eyes narrowing as she took in his expression.
"You look... tense. Is everything okay?"
David turned, forcing his composure. "Yeah. Everything's fine. At least—for now."
"You look like you lost something," she said, arms folding, studying him. "Should I help you find it?"
He hesitated before meeting her gaze. His voice dropped to something quieter, older. "Yeah... I lost something." He swallowed hard, words tasting bitter. "And if I don't find it soon, it'll destroy itself... and maybe everything else with it."
Amayra's face softened. "You mean Joseph, don't you?"
David gave a single, grim nod. "Find Adam," he said, his tone clipped. "Joseph's going to him. And if I'm right... it won't end well."
Amayra inhaled sharply, realizing what he meant. "I'll look," she said, already turning.
Outside, the clouds thickened. The morning light dimmed into a bruised twilight.
RUMBLE...
Thunder rolled somewhere distant.
Rooftop — Enigma Tower
BANG!
The heavy door at the top of the building slammed open.
A boot struck the frame, and Joseph emerged from the stairwell, drenched in fury. He wasn't alone.
He was dragging someone behind him — limp, half-conscious. Adam's shirt collar was locked in Joseph's iron grip, his shoes scraping trails across the rooftop gravel.
Joseph hauled him forward like dead weight and threw him.
THACK!
Adam's body crashed into an old metal container, the clang echoing across the skyline. Dust burst upward. Blood dripped from Adam's split lip, his breath shallow and ragged.
Joseph advanced, every step deliberate, heavy.
Then—
WHAM!
A punch cracked into Adam's ribs. The sound was sickening. Adam folded to his knees, gasping for air.
"Where is Lopez?" Joseph's voice was low but carried through the storm. "Where is she?!"
He didn't wait for an answer. The next blow came faster, sharper—his control slipping with every heartbeat.
Adam spat blood, forcing a weak grin. "You've lost it," he rasped. "I don't even know what you're talking about!"
Joseph grabbed him by the collar, hauling him upright until they were face to face. His eyes were no longer brown. They burned crimson. His skin glimmered faintly with dark energy beneath the rain. The veins on his temples pulsed black.
"You don't get to play innocent," Joseph hissed. His voice vibrated with restrained violence. "You think your little pact can hide the truth from me? You think I can't smell the corruption on you?"
Adam's grin trembled but didn't fade. He leaned forward, laughing wetly.
"Was she really that special to you?"
The words hit Joseph like a blade. His breath hitched; the red in his eyes flared brighter.
"You'll do anything," Adam taunted. "You'll burn everything—"
Joseph's hand tightened until Adam gagged. He leaned so close Adam could see the raw hunger in his face.
"Believe me, I will not hesitate to end you. With that demon at your shoulder." His voice was a low promise, edged in ice.
Adam's smirk faltered for the first time.
KRAK!
Lightning cracked overhead.
Adam coughed, laughing weakly.
"You think you can save her with that temper? You're nothing but a ticking bomb, Joseph. You'll burn her... just like you burn everything else."
The rooftop fell silent except for the rain.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
The tension between them was electric—Joseph's fury versus Adam's twisted satisfaction.
Joseph's voice dropped to a near whisper.
"You think I won't do it?"
His hand trembled around Adam's collar.
"You have no idea how close I am."
Adam smirked.
"Then do it. Show me what kind of monster you really are."
KRA-KOOOM!
Lightning cracked above them. The thunder answered.
For a moment, Joseph almost did. But something—fear, guilt, or the flicker of Lopez's memory—made him hesitate. His grip loosened.
The red in his eyes dimmed slightly as he turned to walk away.
Inside the Building — Lobby
David and Amayra crossed paths at the main hall, both breathless.
"Did you find Adam?" David asked.
Amayra shook her head. "No trace. What about Joseph?"
David's jaw flexed. "Gone. Completely off the radar."
He thought aloud, pacing. "If I were interrogating someone—someone I didn't want others to find—I'd take them somewhere isolated. Somewhere high. Somewhere no one ever goes."
Both their eyes snapped up at the same moment.
"...The rooftop," they said in unison.
David's expression hardened.
"Let's move—now!"
They sprinted toward the elevator.
DING!
The metallic sound echoed through the lobby.
Behind them, the television at the reception desk blared:
"Breaking News: Multiple corpses have been discovered across the city—each one completely drained, their bodies left dry like husks..."
"Experts claim there are no visible wounds. It's as if something vacuumed their souls out..."
The anchors' voices faded as the elevator doors closed.
Later on, Rooftop —
Rain poured harder now, sheets of water whipping across the open rooftop. Adam was struggling to stand, one hand gripping the railing for support.
"You'll get nothing from me!" he spat. "I'm not the one who started this!"
Joseph stood a few feet away, his coat soaked, hair plastered to his forehead. The water running down his hands was pink where it mixed with Adam's blood. His breathing came heavy, uneven.
"Then who did?" he demanded. "Tell me—who's pulling your strings?!"
Adam's laugh was a wet, broken sound.
"You still don't get it, do you? It was never about me."
Joseph took a step forward—but froze as Adam's body began to twitch. His pupils dilated, his veins darkened. His grin split wider, too wide.
Then came a second voice.
Low. Gravelly. Not human.
"You always fail to protect what's yours, Joseph..."
Joseph's breath stilled. That voice—it wasn't Adam's.
The words came again, doubled now, overlapping with Adam's voice like two records spinning at once.
"You defeated me once... but I've fed well since then. Fed on the rage of men like him. On jealousy. On grief."
Steam rose off Joseph's coat where the rain struck him. The air rippled with heat—his power boiling just beneath the surface.
The demon laughed, deep and vibrating through Adam's throat.
"You're the reason Lopez is gone. You're the reason your mother—"
Joseph moved.
In a blink, his hand clamped around Adam's face, and he slammed him into the concrete with inhuman force.
BOOM!
The rooftop shuddered under the impact. Dust and debris burst upward like shrapnel.
Far below, the employees in the upper floors felt the tremor and froze mid-task, whispering—
"Was that... an earthquake?"
The storm howled. Lightning split the sky again, casting Joseph's silhouette over Adam's broken body—red eyes blazing, smoke coiling off his back like wings unseen.
The rooftop was silent except for the rain hissing on the concrete and Joseph's trembling breath. The demonic energy within him began to stir, responding to his fury. Black smoke bled faintly from the wound on his chest—proof that the corruption was spreading, silent and alive beneath his skin.
The silence was brief, broken by a low, guttural chuckle that was not Adam's.
The broken body beneath Joseph's hand began to change.
Adam's spine arched violently, bones cracking and realigning with sickening pops. His skin darkened to a bruised, charcoal grey, splitting as obsidian-hard plates pushed their way to the surface. His limbs elongated, claws tearing through his fingertips, scraping grooves into the concrete.
His face stretched, jaw unhinging to reveal rows of serrated teeth, and two curved, wicked horns spiraled from his brow. The demon, Volkov, had fully manifested, casting off the last vestiges of his human disguise.
"You want a fight, little prince?" the demon roared, its voice a symphony of shattered glass and furnace heat. "YOU SHALL HAVE ONE!"
A shockwave of pure force erupted from the demon, throwing Joseph back. He skidded across the gravel, his boots tearing furrows in the roof.
Joseph did not rise slowly. He launched himself upright, his own form responding to the threat. A snarl ripped from his throat, his canines elongating into deadly fangs. His nails sharpened into black talons. From his brow, two polished silver horns spiraled out, catching the storm-light. And from his back, with a sound like a celestial banner unfurling, erupted massive, pristine white wings—a stark, beautiful, and terrifying contrast to the demonic corruption swirling within him.
The two titans stood facing each other, one a creature of hellish darkness, the other a paradoxical angel of vengeance and vampiric fury.
Then, they moved.
The rooftop vanished beneath them. They became a blur of black and white, colliding in the center with a CONCUSSIVE BOOM that shattered every window on the Enigma Tower's top ten floors. The building itself groaned in protest.
Joseph's claws screeched across Volkov's plated chest—sparks and black ichor bursting outward like molten tar. The demon retaliated with a sweep of his scythe-arm, carving a crescent of red light through the storm. Each strike was a symphony of ruin—rain, blood, and thunder composing the rhythm of apocalypse.
Inside, the tremor was apocalyptic. Ceiling tiles rained down. Lights flickered and died.
"—the hell was that? An earthquake?" a man's voice yelled over the screaming.
"It came from the roof! Look at the windows!"
A voice, hysterical with fear, screamed over the PA system:
"EVACUATE! TOTAL BUILDING EVACUATE! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!"
The scene in the lobby became a river of panic. Employees stampeded for the exits, a sea of terrified faces. David and Amayra, halfway to the elevator, were nearly swept away by the tide.
"He's unleashed!" David yelled over the din, grabbing Amayra's arm to steady her. "We need to get to the roof, now!"
On the rooftop, the fight escalated into pure, unadulterated destruction. Joseph moved with blinding speed, his talons shearing through the demon's armored hide, black ichor spraying into the rain. Volkov responded with brute force, backhanding Joseph with a blow that sent him crashing through the rooftop's ventilation unit.
CRUNCH! SCREECH!
The metal structure buckled and shrieked as it was torn apart.
Joseph exploded from the wreckage, his white wings beating hard, lifting him into the storm. Where his wings passed, the rain turned to hissing steam. Volkov beat his own leathery wings and gave chase, the air around him crackling with malevolent energy, the very lightning bleeding a sickly red as it neared him.
"LOOK! UP THERE!" a woman shrieked from the street below.
The evacuating crowd and gathered reporters looked up, their phones lifting in unison. The scene they captured was beyond belief.
"My God... are they making a movie?"
"That's no movie! That's the Enigma Tower!"
Cars screeched to a halt. News drones pivoted mid-air, focusing on the storm's heart. Children clung to their parents, staring as light and darkness clashed above the skyline like gods rewriting heaven.
Sirens began to wail in the distance, a chorus of rising panic.
The two beings clashed mid-air like rival gods. Volkov, sensing an opening, roared as the shadows coalesced around his right arm. The limb contorted, stretching and sharpening until it was no longer a hand but a massive, wicked scythe of solidified darkness, humming with a sound that promised oblivion.
"A gift from my realm, princeling!" the demon bellowed.
He lunged. Joseph twisted, but not fast enough.
SHLICK!
The shadowy blade slammed clean through Joseph's left shoulder, erupting from his back in a spray of crimson. A grunt of agony was torn from Joseph's lips, the corrupting energy within him flaring in sympathetic, painful resonance.
"You, see?" Volkov's voice was a venomous whisper in his mind. "This is the pain you caused Lopez. This is the emptiness your mother felt! The heavens abandoned you, and now even your blood betrays you."
The taunt was a spark on a fuel-soaked heart. With a roar that was half pain, half incandescent fury, Joseph ignored the blade buried in his flesh. His right hand shot up, talons clamping around the demon's scythe-arm just below the joint. With a final, brutal surge of strength, he
RRRIP!
tore the entire limb from its socket.
SKREEEEE—!
Volkov howled, not in pain, but in fury. Black smoke and ichor geysered from the wound, but instead of a stump, tendrils of darkness immediately writhed and knit together, regenerating the arm in seconds.
"You cannot destroy what is born of nothingness!"
Joseph ripped the death-scythe from his own shoulder, letting it dissipate into smoke. He saw it now—where the limb had been torn away, the corresponding horn on the demon's head was splintered and leaking dark energy.
Enraged, he grabbed the demon by the throat and his one remaining, intact horn, became a comet of white fury, and smashed him directly onto the roof of the adjacent Chronos Plaza building.
CRASH!
The concrete roof cracked like a pane of glass under the impact. Before Volkov could rise, Joseph's eyes fell on a massive, discarded signal tower assembly lying nearby. He seized the 30-foot steel pole and, with a guttural cry, hurled it like a divine javelin.
SHOOOOOM!
It struck true. The pole punched straight through the demon's stomach, pinning him to the ruined roof like a grotesque insect specimen. The steel vibrated with a low, ominous hum.
For a moment, it was over.
Then, Volkov laughed, a wet, bubbling sound. He gripped the pole with both regenerated hands.
"You bleed for their salvation, yet they'll build monuments to fear your name. Tell me, Joseph — who's really the monster here?"
With a final, titanic effort, the demon wrenched the pole upward, not to free himself, but to use it as a lever. The force was catastrophic.
GROOOAN... CRUMBLE!
The entire roof structure beneath him buckled, then collapsed, a chain reaction of failing supports that swallowed the demon and sent the top three floors of the Chronos Plaza crashing down in an avalanche of steel and glass into the floors below.
The fight became a trail of devastation across the skyline. They burst from the cloud of dust, a whirlwind of destruction careening through the city's canyons, exiting one skyscraper only to rupture the next.
Volkov, realizing sheer power was failing, changed tactics. His voice slithered into Joseph's mind once more.
"You fight with such passion, Little Prince. But it's just fear. Fear that you are too late. Again. You think rage can build what love could not? You destroy everything you touch, half-breed — lover, mother, and this world."
The words were a blade twisting in a wound that never healed. Joseph's rage spiked, his attacks becoming wilder, less precise, the control he fought so hard to maintain beginning to slip.
As they hurtled through the shattered skeleton of an office, Volkov spotted his chance. A young woman, frozen in terror, was hiding under a desk. With a vicious grin, he ignored the scattered debris around him—no steel beam, no javelin. He would use a far more effective weapon.
He simply grabbed her.
"Let's see you choose, Prince! Your prey, or this pathetic human?"
Before Joseph could react, the demon spun and hurled the screaming woman through the gaping hole in the building's wall, sending her tumbling into the open sky towards the street far below.
Joseph's eyes widened. For a moment he saw Lopez, terrified and alone. Then the memory of his mother Aria, dying. The sight of another innocent falling because of him ignited a cold fire. Without a second thought, he broke off his attack. He became a streak of white, diving down in a blur that cut through the rain.
WHOOSH!
He caught the woman mere stories from the pavement, the force of his descent cracking the asphalt as he landed. He set her down, his crimson eyes meeting her stunned gaze for a fleeting second. The ozone taste of his power was thick on his tongue.
On the street, a stunned silence fell, broken only by the sirens. Then, a new sound rose: a mix of screams, cheers, and prayers.
"He... he saved her..."
"What is he?"
The crowd was a sea of conflicting emotions—confused, terrified, yet momentarily assured by the act of salvation.
It was all the opening Volkov needed. He turned to flee, bursting out of the building. He was heading towards a new skyscraper where people were still visible in the windows, maybe to devour them and recharge his power.
He spoke as he flew,
"Let me recharge a little, then your end, Joseph!"
A cold, focused rage settled over Joseph. The time for games was over. He shot forward, faster than before, a streak of white against the bruised sky. He overtook the demon just as it reached the pinnacle of the OmniCorp tower.
For an instant, through the storm and screaming metal, a memory — her laughter, soft and human — slipped through the noise. His grip trembled. Then the rage returned. The storm answered him.
Joseph didn't tackle him. He simply grabbed one of the demon's wings, planted his feet on its back, and pulled.
RRRIIIPPPP!
The sound was hideous, a wet, tearing crunch. The leathery wing came away in Joseph's hand, and Volkov screamed, a raw, agonized sound, as he spiraled out of control.
Joseph descended upon him. He grabbed the demon by the throat and his one remaining horn—the last anchor holding his monstrous form together.
"This ends now!"
With a final, world-ending surge of strength, he wrenched.
CRACK!
The sound wasn't just of breaking bone, but of shattering essence. The horn splintered in his grip.
Volkov's scream was cut into silence, not by death, but by dissolution.
The life fled from his eyes as the connection to his power was severed. Without the horns to focus his form, the monstrous body could no longer hold itself together. It began to dissolve into foul-smelling black smoke and ash, the demon's essence scattering into the storm-wind until all that was left was the broken, human form of Adam, clutched in Joseph's grip.
The storm raged on. Joseph hovered for a moment, his wings beating steadily, his chest heaving. The corrupting energy within him pulsed, a black poison held at bay only by his sheer will. He looked at Adam's limp, nearly lifeless body.
Then, Adam's eyes fluttered open. For a single, lucid moment, the possession was gone, replaced by a profound, human terror and guilt. He choked, blood bubbling on his lips as he grasped Joseph's arm.
"I am sorry..." he gasped, his voice a shredded whisper. "But it was not me... that demon... Volkov... took her to the Demonic Realm! Please... save Sabrina Lopez!"
His eyes rolled back, consciousness fleeing once more. A single tear, hot with remorse, traced a clean path through the grime and blood on his cheek before falling into the void below.
With a final, powerful beat of his wings, Joseph flew back towards the shattered apex of the Enigma Tower. He landed softly on the ravaged rooftop, the gravel now a battlefield of craters and debris. He walked toward David and Amayra, who had finally reached the top, their faces pale with shock.
Without a word, Joseph thrust Adam's body into David's arms.
"He's alive. Barely," Joseph's voice was gravel, stripped of all emotion.
David staggered under the weight, looking down at Adam's critical condition. He then looked up at Joseph, his expression a mix of awe and horror. But as his gaze went past Joseph, it fixed on the horizon. His eyes widened.
Joseph followed his look.
There, emerging from the storm clouds, flying in tight, menacing formation, were three military helicopters, their searchlights cutting through the gloom. And higher still, the sleek, deadly shapes of F-35 fighter jets screamed past, banking hard to circle the Enigma Tower.
To be Continued...
Chapter 42 ends.