Leo was adrift in a sea of childhood terror. The world here was a twisted, grotesque version of the Pediatric Ward he had just walked through. The cheerful jungle murals on the walls writhed and pulsed, the painted animals' eyes glowing with hunger. The floor was made of grasping hands that reached for his ankles, and the air was filled with the sound of distorted lullabies sung in discordant keys.
This was the little girl's mind. Her name was Lily—he knew this with an instinctual certainty. And her mind was the Night-Stalker's playground.
A shadowy, exaggerated version of the Orderly monster pushed a gurney made of bones toward him. A colossal version of the Vent Creeper skittered across the ceiling. These weren't real threats; they were phantoms, fear-echoes left behind by the girl's trauma. He walked straight through them, their forms dissolving like smoke. They were symptoms, not the disease.
He needed to find the source. He needed to find Lily.
In the center of the nightmare-ward stood a single, rusty crib, its bars twisted into sharp spikes. Inside, a small, whimpering light—the spark of Lily's consciousness—flickered weakly. And wrapped around the crib, feeding on that light, was the true source of the contamination.
It was a psychic symbiote, an afterbirth of the Night-Stalker's attack. It looked like a pulsing tumor made of black tar and shadow, its tendrils sunk deep into the essence of the girl's mind. As it fed on her fear, the nightmares grew more intense.
Leo understood. This was not a battle of strength. This was an extermination.
He strode toward the crib, the grasping hands on the floor recoiling from the quiet, orderly certainty of his presence. He was an anomaly here, a janitor who had shown up to clean a house that was supposed to be haunted forever.
The tar-like tumor sensed him. It had no eyes, but it turned its full, malevolent attention on him. It tried to use its power, to flood his mind with his own fears. An image of Sarah, pale and lifeless, flashed before his eyes. An image of the world, burnt to a cinder.
But Leo had already faced these fears. He had scoured them clean from his own mind in the stairwell. The tumor's weapons were useless. It was like trying to stain a sheet of clean Teflon.
"My turn," Leo said, his voice echoing with an unnatural authority in this mental space.
He raised his hand. It glowed with the same soft, golden light as before, the Poultice of Purity manifesting here in its raw, conceptual form. He plunged his hand directly into the writhing, corrupt mass of the fear-symbiote.
It was like touching absolute cold, a soul-deep filth that tried to cling to him. But the golden light of his janitorial power was anathema to it. The light spread from his hand, not burning, but cleansing. The tar-like substance hissed and retreated, dissolving under the purifying touch of pure Order. The tendrils connected to Lily's consciousness withered and snapped.
The creature let out a silent, psychic scream that shook the foundations of the nightmare world. The grasping hands, the monster-phantoms, the twisted walls—they all began to crumble and fade as their power source was systematically erased.
Finally, with one last, concentrated pulse of golden light, the last remnant of the fear-symbiote was gone. Scoured clean.
The nightmare dissolved. The world around him reformed into a simple, quiet space—a child's bedroom, bathed in soft sunlight from a window. The little girl, Lily, stood in the center of the room, no longer a flickering light, but a solid, real child. She looked at him, her eyes wide not with fear, but with a drowsy, sleepy curiosity.
She smiled a small, tired smile, then curled up on the floor and fell into a peaceful, natural sleep.
Leo's consciousness snapped back to reality. He gasped, pulling his hand back from the girl's forehead as if burned. He was back in the hospital ward, the sound of the real, beeping monitors filling his ears.
Sarah was staring at him, her hand over her mouth. "Leo... what happened?"
He looked at the girl. The ugly violet haze was gone. Her face, which had been pale and strained, was now relaxed. Her breathing was deep and even. On the EEG monitor, the chaotic, spiky waveforms had smoothed out into the gentle, rolling hills of a healthy, deep sleep.
"I took out the trash," Leo said, his voice hoarse with exhaustion. He had won. He had faced a creature's psychic poison on its own turf and had mopped the floor with it.
It was then that Ben, the engineer, ran back over, his face pale.
"I've got good news and bad news," he said, breathing heavily. "Good news: the generators are stable. Bad news: I was watching the security feeds. From the lobby. Something just came in the front door."
Leo felt a chill. "Something we let out?"
Ben shook his head grimly. "Worse. Something that let itself in."
He pointed to a monitor. It showed a grainy feed of the hospital lobby Leo had just left. The doors, which had been shut, were torn from their hinges. And standing in the center of the lobby was a new figure.
It was a man, dressed in a pristine, perfectly tailored black suit that seemed to drink the light around it. His face was sharp, intelligent, and utterly devoid of emotion. He adjusted his tie, his movements economical and precise. He then looked directly up at the security camera, as if he knew they were watching. A thin, cruel smile touched his lips.
[Warning. A High-Tier Threat has entered your zone.]
[Designation: The Adjuster (Lvl ??)]
[Mission: Asset Retrieval.]