"No — please, don't. I'm begging you," Sunny sobbed, tears carving clean tracks down his cheeks. "Please… she doesn't know anything. She's innocent. Please…!" He thrashed on the ground, every muscle fighting, but the guards held him like iron. The harder he struggled, the more his body bruised against the cold concrete.
"Do you think I give a fuck?" Brock sneered. He was a first-generation tycoon, the kind of man who'd been handed everything on a silver platter. His smile was a predator's. "No matter what happens today, I'm going to have my way with your younger sister. So will my men." His lips curled; saliva trembled as he licked them. "You're a freak — a fucking pedophile. You'll pay for this. Even the gods won't spare you."
Pain carved deeper into Sunny's face. Rage ignited something raw and dangerous within him. "I curse you — and your generations," he spat, voice torn, each word a dagger from his soul.
Brock's steps were slow, deliberate, as he closed the distance. "What did you say?" His voice was calm, but every syllable carried the promise of violence. Sunny could only see the black tips of Brock's sneakers as they neared.
"Are you deaf, or just pretending?" Brock snapped. "I said—" He never let Sunny finish. The kick came like a professional striker's blow: precise, brutal. The world blurred; pain seared through Sunny's skull. Blood slicked his face as vision tunneled and went dark.
Brock kicked again, harder, until one of his guards — Fin — stumbled forward, face pale. "Sir… I think he's passed out," the guard stammered.
Brock only smiled. "I figured," he lied. Then, with the casual cruelty of a man who'd grown accustomed to death, he added, "Throw him off the roof." Fin's knees buckled. He fell to his hands and begged, voice cracking, but his pleas dissolved in the rain.
"Please! Mercy —!" Fin cried, pounding the wet ground. His desperate banging was an obscene rhythm against the storm. Two guards seized him and dragged him to the edge. "I beg you — please!" he screamed, but Brock's face was impassive under the lash of thunder. Without hesitation, they shoved Fin over. His scream was cut off by the impact below.
Brock crouched by Sunny's limp body and crushed a cigarette beneath his boot. "Make sure he stays dead," he ordered. "The same goes for his family." He turned away, already orchestrating the next cruelty. Six men stripped Sunny, dragged a sloshing bucket of ice-cold water over him, and emptied it until sunlight felt like an insult. Sunny's eyes snapped open with a keening howl. A headache exploded behind his eyes and he clutched at his head like a madman.
"How adorable," someone jeered. "Looks like our princess is struggling with his mental health." Laughter curled like smoke through the rain. "Strap him to the chair."
"Where the hell is his sister?" Brock barked as thunder rolled like a gavel. A guard stepped forward, voice trembling. "Unit Six is on their way with her, sir. They ran into an obstacle."
Brock's patience thinned like old cloth. He lit another cigarette and watched the rain make stars of the city lights. He turned his cold gaze on a trembling young guard nearby. "What's your name, boy?"
"Lucid. It's Lucid," the man choked out, every syllable a small, brittle thing.
"Lucid," Brock mused, as if savoring the name. He sat in a metal chair close enough to hear the slack of straps. "Any wife? Kids?"
"Yes. A beautiful wife and two children," Lucid managed, heart battering his ribs.
Brock's eyes glittered. "Good. Honest men deserve reward." He let the words hang, then smiled with the sort of cruelty that made the rain feel colder. "I'll give you fifteen minutes. Every five minutes that passes without Unit Six delivering her, one family member dies." He flicked ash into the storm and laughed, a sound so light it made Lucid's blood run cold. "You have four minutes. If they don't arrive in four minutes, either your child or your wife dies."
Lucid's collapse was instant, the strength leaving him like breath in winter. "Mercy! Mercy!" he sobbed, flailing on the slick ground, voice breaking against the thunder. Each pleading syllable only brought Brock brighter excitement. Dark and shifting, something like smoke — black and red — swirled faintly around Lucid as his panic magnified. The air seemed to hum; Brock's smile widened. He'd wanted a reaction, and the man's despair fed him.
"Chain him," Brock ordered. Men hauled Lucid up with all the strength of four guards. He was stripped and bound with a heavy chain that glinted like rusted iron in the lightning. Brock watched with a kind of religious fervor. "This will begin the Pacts of Emotion," he cried into the storm. Lightning answered him as if in affirmation.
Orders flew like bullets: "Seal the area! No one in, no one out without Master's permission!" Helicopters shrieked overhead, cars and drones sealed streets, and soldiers moved like cogs in a monstrous machine. A man with a deep facial scar, his coat whipped by the wind, bellowed commands from atop a tank. "Unit One — east! Unit Two — west! Unit Four — south! Unit Five — north! Seal sixty-five meters!" His voice cut through rain and roar. "If anyone tries to force entry, open fire. Now move!"
Farther in, a black trailer waited like an animal. Inside, something inhuman stirred. Anita, cigarette glowing, tapped an earpiece. "Release the hounds," she said, and the trailer breathed out a nightmare: three-headed dogs the size of horses, slobbering fangs like knives, eyes burning like coals. Men raised rifles, but the creatures leaked terror and tore the first man who hesitated into shreds. Blood slicked the floor. Ninety men entered; fifteen emerged. Rose — who had once been forced to kill her closest friend to survive a trial they'd been made to endure — watched without flinch. Death had hollowed her out; nothing in her chest moved anymore.
The sounds of monstrous beasts, of frantic riders, of machines converging — it all braided into one single hunger that the chosen answered willingly. "North, east, south," Mantis ordered, mounting a hellhound so massive the ground shook with every step. His voice was low and hard. "Spread out."
Back on the rooftop, Brock paced before Lucid like a priest before an altar. Below, the rain washed away the city's sins but nowhere was clean enough now. Inside a white castle elsewhere — a place crowned with a cross — twelve robed figures sat around a table. Mary presided like a woman carrying the weight of a weathered world. "The chosen have started their lockdown," she announced. "We cannot allow him to unlock Malith. If he does, the world will enter a new era; curses will be loose."
Debate fractured the room. Sedric argued urgency; Rosella slammed her palm on the table and rejected the notion of cheapening righteousness with the same violence they opposed. "We are the Church," she snapped. "If we murder in the name of salvation, how are we different?"
Linfrink — an old man wrapped in gray — watched and weighed the conscience of the group. "If we do nothing," he said quietly, "the cost will be worse. Someone must carry the burden." The question of the sacrifice cut through them like a blade. Each answer felt like an indictment.
"We don't have time to waste," Mary said at last. The room fell into a silence that carried the weight of an approaching storm. "If nothing is done in a matter of days, I fear it may already be too late."
Outside the castle, units moved, signals were sent, and a thousand hands prepared for war. Brock, his patience frayed down to a hard edge, felt for the truth in his visions — the same visions he'd claimed came from God. He could not accept failure. Thirty meters below, Lucid's sobs turned to a kind of hollow sound; above, the sky cracked and spit the kind of rain that drowned sound and hope together.
When they finished with the man they had hurled from the roof, they collected what remained — what could still be used or studied — and placed it in tubes. Gore and ruin were cataloged and sealed away, not for spectacle, but as instruments for whatever monstrous science Brock intended to feed. The raven — a man with a purple sash — ordered, "Send the blood-devouring rats. See if they can find what the rain hid." They released a box of hybrid creatures that scuttled like rodents doubled on two legs into the sewer's mouth, hunting for the last traces.
Lucid fell to his knees and wailed, certain that his family had been murdered. "No! Nooooo!" His grief tore at the air; it was a sound so full of loss it seemed to twist the space around him. Brock watched, delighted — the dark mist of emotion made visible — and in that delight he tasted the promise of something greater: an experiment, an unlocking. He believed that his thousandth test subject would yield the results he sought. The chain secured, the storm roared, and in the heart of the chaos, men in black prepared for the ritual that would change everything.