There was no verbal answer. No sarcastic voice in my head. There was only a mechanical, wet click inside the gun, like somebody snapping a tiny bone.
The black metal in my hand heated instantly, from warm to burning, syncing with my racing pulse.
"Kill them!" Father Thomas howled, spitting madness and saliva, whipping his filthy cassock. "The Node must be protected from the impure!"
The three gargoyles that flanked the church entrance launched from their pedestals. They didn't fall like stone — they landed with the agility of biological predators. The concrete of their bodies cracked, revealing gray synthetic muscles and eyes that glowed with red lights, identical to security-camera sensors.
They were drones. Monstrosities of technology and superstition.
The first beast lunged at me, jaws open, hunting my throat.
I raised the Nightmare .45.
I didn't aim with my eyes. I let the gun steer my arm, trusting that borrowed muscle memory that made me want to choke.
I squeezed the trigger.
There was no boom. No deafening gunfire.
There was a scream. A sharp, inhuman wail that came from the gun's barrel.
The recoil didn't strike my shoulder; it struck my mind. I felt a jolt of absolute cold in my brain.
The projectile — a trail of liquid darkness — hit the gargoyle mid-leap.
It didn't pierce it. It expanded.
The darkness swamped the drone like ink in water. The machine screamed as metal and synthetic flesh dissolved, consumed by the voracious shadow. In less than two seconds the gargoyle collapsed into a steaming pool of black sludge.
The gun didn't destroy. The gun ate.
"Impossible…" Father Thomas breathed, stumbling back, tripping on the hem of his cassock.
The other two gargoyles hesitated. Their processors didn't compute what had just happened.
"Down!" I yelled to Sofía, shoving her behind a stone bench in the atrium.
The second gargoyle flanked from the right.
I spun and fired again.
SCREEE!
The shot tore its head off, leaving a plume of black smoke that seemed to have claws.
My hand shook — not with fear, but with pleasure. The weapon pumped dopamine into me, rewarding the violence.
"More," the metal whispered against my skin. "Feed me more."
I bit my tongue to anchor myself to real pain and not the fake ecstasy.
I aimed at the third gargoyle. Smarter, it tried to flee by climbing the church wall. I shot at the wall just above it. The shadow expanded and fell over the beast like a net, dragging it down as it unraveled.
Silence. Only rain against stone and my uneven breathing.
---
I walked toward Father Thomas. The priest crawled across the mud toward the reinforced oak door, staining his tattered black robes.
"Get away, mistake!" he shrieked, pulling a dark metal amulet from his pocket and pointing it at me as if it could stop me. "The Order rejects you! You have no right to be here!"
I stopped two steps from him. The pistol in my hand felt like a ton.
"It's harvest end, Father," I said, and my voice sounded hollow, emotionlessly flat. It wasn't me speaking; it was Anima's residue. "Open the door."
The man burst into hysterical laughter, half-fear, half-fanatical zeal.
"Do you think you can stop the Process? The Syndicate gave us purpose! We turn suffering into pure gold!"
He raised his free hand. He had a detonator.
"If I die, the Extraction Level seals! She dies down there!"
Lena.
Panic tried to cloud my judgment, but the gun suppressed it.
"Shoot the hand," the cold voice suggested. "Cut off the fingers."
I raised the weapon. Thomas squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for death.
I fired.
But not at his head. Not at his chest.
I shot his right thigh.
The shadow projectile struck flesh.
Thomas howled. But it wasn't a cry of physical pain — it was a scream of pure terror. I watched, horrified, as the munition's effect unfolded in a living human.
The wound didn't bleed red blood. It bled smoke. Veins around the impact blackened and spread like rotten roots under his skin.
Thomas clawed at his face, scratching at his eyes.
"No! Take them out! The shadows! They're coming through my eyes!"
The gun didn't only wound the body. It infected the mind with concentrated nightmares. The man was living his own private hell in real time.
"Drop the detonator!" I yelled, kicking the device from his hand.
Thomas didn't hear me. He curled in a fetal position, babbling about codes and cold fire.
Sofía stepped from her hiding place. She walked to the priest, weaving through the black slush left by the gargoyles. She crouched beside him without fear and stripped the pockets of his cassock with a heartbreaking efficiency.
She pulled out a bundle of magnetic keys and a small control device.
"The key doesn't open inward," Sofía said, remembering her mother's message. "It opens downward."
She stood and pointed at the black stone altar, which was shifted a few centimeters.
"It's there."
I looked at Father Thomas, writhing in the mud, ruined by a single shot from my gun. I felt bile rise. I am a healer. I want to be a healer. And I had just condemned a man to madness.
"Let's go," I said, tucking the pistol away. The metal cooled abruptly, as if disappointed the fun was over.
---
We pushed the altar. It was heavy, but it slid smoothly on hidden hydraulic rails.
Below were not ancient crypts. There was an industrial spiral staircase lit by red emergency lights. The smell rising was chemical: ozone, antiseptic, and something like burnt meat.
"Stay behind me," I told Sofía.
We went down. Each step echoed in the hollow shaft. I counted — three floors down.
At the bottom, a reinforced security door. Sofía waved the magnetic key she'd stolen from the priest. The light switched from red to green.
Ssshh-clack. The door opened.
The change was brutal. Above was ruin. Below was a high-tech laboratory carved into living rock. Pristine white walls, monitors flashing biometric readouts, the constant hum of giant fans.
But worst were the "assets."
Along the corridor, behind glass walls, row after row of gurneys stood. Men, women, some children.
They were in comas, hooked to machines pumping a golden, shimmering fluid from their heads into central containers.
"What is this?" I whispered, approaching a pane.
"Dust," Sofía said, her voice trembling for the first time. "Mom said the Syndicate sells dreams. They steal imagination from special people and make it into a drug."
I froze.
Vitality. Imagination. Dream energy.
They were milking people like cattle.
"Mom!" Sofía screamed, running to the end of the hallway.
"Wait!"
I ran after her. We reached a circular room at the end of the complex. Lena wasn't there.
In the center, in what looked like a medical throne surrounded by cables and monitors, sat a man.
He wore a shredded police uniform. His head was shaved and connected to three thick tubes sucking golden fluid at an alarming pace. His skin was gray, translucent. His eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling, bloodshot.
It was Lieutenant Vargas.
Sofía stopped cold.
"It's not her…"
I stepped to the glass. Vargas seemed to register my presence. His eyes turned slowly toward me. There was recognition buried under layers of infinite agony. He tried to speak; his lips moved, but the tube in his throat muffled any sound.
I read the monitors.
SUBJECT: VARGAS. EXTRACTION LEVEL: 85%. IMMINENT BRAIN COLLAPSE.
They were killing him. No — they were draining him slowly like they'd done to Méndez, but drop by drop, to sell his essence.
Vargas lifted a trembling hand and pounded the glass. Once. Twice. Then, with an effort that must have cost him the rest of his life, he pointed at my waist. At the pistol.
I read his lips. He wasn't asking for help. Not pleading for rescue. He asked a single word. Kill me.
The Nightmare .45's weight on my hip became unbearable. Vargas — the man who'd tried to do right, the man who'd tried to help me — was begging me to use the cursed weapon to free him.
"Eduur…" Sofía whispered. "Someone's coming."
The hydraulic lift on the far side of the room activated with a resonant thrum. Someone was descending to the Extraction Level. Someone important.
I looked at Vargas, trapped in his golden hell. I looked at the elevator door opening. I looked at my hand — the hand of a healer that now only knew how to hold death.
The Syndicate were not mere criminals. They were soul-vampires. And I was standing at the heart of their nest.