The walk back up through the parking garage was a pilgrimage of fear. The silence was absolute, broken only by their own frantic heartbeats and the sound of their frictionless shoes gliding over the concrete. The heavy, rhythmic thumping of the new monster had faded, but its presence lingered in the air like a pressure front before a storm. Every shadow seemed to hold a colossal threat. Every concrete pillar seemed to hide an ambush.
They didn't speak. There were no words for the kind of terror that gripped them. They just moved, their eyes scanning the oppressive darkness, expecting to see a giant silhouette emerge from the gloom at any moment. But they saw nothing. The beast they had released was gone, having likely ascended to the upper floors to hunt, or descended even further into whatever pit it had been contained in.
When they finally reached the steel door leading to the lobby, Leo felt a wave of relief so profound his knees almost buckled. He pushed the door open cautiously.
The lobby was as they had left it: a silent, debris-strewn battlefield. The half-eaten corpse of the Corpse-Guzzler was still there, a testament to their earlier fight. But one thing had changed.
The heavy, reinforced door to the security office stood slightly ajar.
The pulsing red light of the Code Omega lockdown was gone. The low hum of the magnetic locks was silent. Their gambit had worked.
Evelyn practically sprinted across the lobby, her usual composure gone, replaced by a desperate need for answers. Leo followed close behind, his spear held at the ready, his eyes scanning the shadows for any sign of movement. The wet, squelching sound they'd heard from within the office was gone, but that wasn't necessarily a good sign.
Evelyn pushed the heavy door open. It swung inward with a low groan, revealing the scene within.
The security office was a fortress of technology, but it had become a tomb. A bank of over fifty monitors, most now dark, lined one wall. The main console was splattered with something dark and viscous. The air was thick with the same smell from the sub-basement: ozone and old blood.
There were two bodies. Both were security guards, clad in the same tactical gear as the ones outside. One was slumped in a chair, a look of horror frozen on his face, but with no visible wounds. The other lay on the floor near a sealed supply closet, his body twisted at an unnatural angle. This was Marcus, the head of security, a man Evelyn had described as competent and unshakable.
"What happened here?" Evelyn whispered, her hand covering her mouth.
Leo didn't answer. He was scanning the room with his Janitor's eye, his gaze falling on details others would miss. He saw the empty holster on the first guard's hip. He saw the faint, shimmering residue on the floor, the same amber-colored resin from the Conduit Leech's trap. He saw the small, puckered marks on the dead guards' necks.
And then he saw the ceiling.
Directly above the first guard's station was a ventilation grate. It had been bent outward, its screws torn free from the drywall. Whatever had killed these men had come from the vents. It had dropped down, fast and silent, and then retreated the same way.
He looked at the second body, Marcus, lying near the supply closet. His hand was outstretched, his fingers just inches from the closet's keypad. He had been trying to get inside.
Leo walked over to the closet. A small, laminated card was tucked into the top of Marcus's tactical vest. Leo pulled it out. It was a list of emergency protocols. One line was circled: Containment Breach - Protocol 7 - Safe Room Purge. Next to it was a handwritten number.
"He wasn't trying to get in," Leo realized. "He was trying to trigger a purge cycle. To sterilize the room."
A new creature, downloaded straight from the System's archives, formed in his mind.
[Lvl 7 Vent Creeper]
[Traits: Ambusher, Neurotoxin, Extreme Agility, Sound-dampening Skin.]
It was a perfect assassin. Small, fast, silent, and venomous. It had likely dropped on the first guard, injected him with a fast-acting neurotoxin that stopped his heart, then moved to the second. Marcus, being the veteran he was, must have realized what was happening and made a desperate dash for the purge controls. He hadn't made it.
"It's gone," Leo said, his voice grim. "It came through the vents and left the same way. It's probably hunting somewhere else in the building now." Another problem for another time.
Evelyn looked shaken, but she nodded, her resolve hardening. "Then let's not waste the opportunity they died for."
She moved to the main communications console. She wiped the viscous residue off the keyboard with a grimace and began typing, her fingers flying across the keys. A few of the monitors flickered to life, displaying static, error messages, or a frozen image of an empty hallway.
"Most of the external network is down," she said, her brow furrowed in concentration. "The city's whole infrastructure must have collapsed. But the internal hospital P2P network... it's firewalled, running on a separate backup grid. There's a chance..."
She typed in a series of commands. A new window popped up, a simple text-based interface. [MERCY GENERAL HOSPITAL - EMERGENCY NETWORK].
Leo's heart leaped into his throat. "Sarah," he breathed. "My sister. Dr. Sarah Miller. Is there a personnel log? A way to see who checked in?"
Evelyn's fingers danced across the keys. "Accessing personnel manifests... searching... Miller, S..." She fell silent. The cursor on the screen blinked, blinked, blinked.
"Evelyn?" Leo asked, his voice tight.
She turned to look at him, her expression unreadable. "Leo... she's not on the active staff roster. But her name is here. She's listed in the patient manifest."
The world seemed to tilt under Leo's feet. "Patient? What happened?"
"It says here she was admitted two days before... before all this. For 'exhaustion-induced collapse and severe respiratory infection'. Standard procedure for overworked residents. She was in a stable, isolated recovery ward on the third floor."
Isolated. The word hung in the air, a double-edged sword of hope and terror. It meant she might have been safe from the initial chaos. It also meant she might have been trapped, alone, and sick.
"Can you access the cameras?" he asked, his voice raw.
"Trying," Evelyn said. "Most of the hospital's internal feeds are down, but the recovery ward's security mainframe is still pinging. It's heavily encrypted... wait. I'm in."
A single, grainy, black-and-white image filled the largest monitor. It was a long, sterile-looking hallway. Hospital beds, some empty, some occupied, lined the walls. At the far end of the hall, a heavy door was barricaded from the inside with beds and medical equipment.
And standing guard in front of that barricade, holding what looked like a fire axe, was a figure in a doctor's coat. The image was too grainy to make out her face clearly, but the determined set of her shoulders, the way she held her ground—Leo knew.
"That's her," he whispered, a flood of relief and pride so powerful it almost brought him to his knees. "She's alive. She's fighting."
He looked at the monitor, memorizing every detail. The barricade was strong. Sarah was armed. There were other people, patients, huddled behind her. She wasn't just surviving; she was protecting them.
Suddenly, the image on the monitor flickered. A dark shape, humanoid but unnaturally tall and thin, darted past the camera's periphery at the near end of the hall, just out of Sarah's line of sight. It moved with a disjointed, twitching gait. It paused for a moment, its long, spindly fingers scraping against the wall, before it melted back into the shadows.
Evelyn saw it too. "What was that?"
Leo felt a cold dread that eclipsed everything else he'd felt that day. He knew that shape. He'd seen drawings of it in the darkest corners of the internet, in horror stories and urban legends. The System gave it a name, a name that confirmed his deepest fears.
[Lvl 9 Night-Stalker]
[Traits: Fear-Eater, Phasing, Psychological Warfare.]
It wasn't just a monster. It was a predator that fed on terror. And it was stalking the one person he had left in the world.
He looked at the grainy image of his sister, standing her ground, completely unaware of the high-level horror that was now hunting her and the terrified people she was protecting. He had to get to her. The thought was no longer just a motivation; it was a physical imperative, a fire in his veins.
"Evelyn," he said, his voice deadly serious, turning away from the screen. "Find me a map of the sewer system."
She stared at him, confused. "The sewer? Leo, what are you thinking?"
"The streets are a warzone. The building is crawling with things we can't fight," he said, his eyes burning with a new, ferocious intensity. "But everything has to go somewhere. All the drains, all the pipes, all the trash in this city... it all connects. It's the one path that no one else will take."
He looked at his hands, at his janitor's uniform. "I spent my life cleaning up the messes other people made, moving through the guts of the world where no one else wanted to go. The apocalypse isn't going to change that."