Free Web NovelChapter 135: Chapter 131: The Red Room
The last ghoul went down without ceremony. Tyson stomped its skull flat with the dull finality of a man closing a door. Maddie’s sign caught the next one across the jaw and that was it. No more screaming. No more wet sounds. Just dripping, and breathing, and the strobing emergency lights catching everything in stutters.
Nobody cheered.
"My battery’s completely dead," Maddie said. She stared at the heavy highway sign like it had personally betrayed her. "Won’t hold a charge at all."
"So are they," Tyson said, nodding at the corpses. "Stop swinging it. You’re done."
"Tell my arms that." She held one out. It wouldn’t stop shaking. The tremors came from her body running on empty, nothing left to burn. "They didn’t get the memo."
Will didn’t sheathe the saber. He stood at the new threshold and looked through the doorway.
The violet-gold light didn’t get swallowed anymore. It landed on ordinary tile. Steel handrails ran along the walls. A directional sign remained bolted to the drywall, perfectly legible: RESEARCH WING B. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Somehow that was worse than the dark had been.
"Everyone breathe for ten seconds," Will said. "Then we move."
From the catwalk above, Don’s voice came down flat. "Copy. Reloading anyway."
The corridor beyond the breach was cold and dry. It smelled like raw industrial bleach fighting a war it had been losing for twenty years. The temperature dropped drastically the deeper they walked. The warm, biological air from the kill-box gave way to a sterile chill that belonged in a corporate morgue.
Fifty feet down the hall, a dead P.A.C.I.F.I.C. security contractor lay slumped against the wall.
The guard had not been killed by the horde. The heavy blast doors at the end of the hall were sealed from the outside. He had been locked out by his own employers and left to starve. Maya stepped over a dried puddle of black fluid to inspect the corpse.
She didn’t offer a prayer. She stripped the tactical rig off the skeleton.
The gear was pristine. It was a matte-black kinetic-dampening harness made of interlaced carbon weave, completely untouched by the rot consuming the bunker. Maya ran her thumb over the smooth, high-tech locking mechanisms. She wore a scavenged, rusted canvas vest held together by zip-ties and desperation. The corporate harness probably cost more than her entire home sector generated in a decade.
She tossed her ruined vest onto the floor. She strapped the corporate rig over her shoulders and pulled the straps tight. The dampeners immediately adjusted to her posture, taking the punishing weight off her bruised spine with a low pneumatic hiss.
"Fits," Maya said.
Don checked the dead guard’s primary weapon. "The firing pin is stripped. Useless."
"Leave it," Will ordered. "Keep moving."
Zeraya void-stepped ahead. Fifteen meters, gone, back in under two seconds. She didn’t say anything when she reappeared. She didn’t have to. Her face did the heavy lifting.
They reached the set of reinforced double doors. Both panes of thick security glass were shattered outward. Whatever had happened here, it had happened from the inside, violently pushing out into the corridor.
"There’s a room," Zeraya said. "You need to see it before you walk in."
"Bad?" Will asked.
"I don’t have a word for it." A beat. "Khan might."
I have a word for it, Khan said, flat and immediate in the back of Will’s skull. You will not like it.
"Tell me anyway."
Nursery.
The Red Room was two stories tall and perfectly circular. The walls were lined with massive glass containment vats from floor to ceiling. Most of the heavy glass cylinders were shattered. The few still intact held shapes suspended in thick, rust-colored fluid. The shapes had once been people. freēwebnovel.com
Will walked past the first intact column. A woman floated in the chemical sludge. Her ribs were spread and wired permanently open. Thick black chitin had been forced violently between the bones where her lungs should have been, housing a second heart. The massive, alien organ sat perfectly still, having stopped beating God knew how long ago.
A teenager hung in the next vat over. Heavy iron heat-sinks sat bolted directly into his exposed spinal column in a neat row. It looked like a brutal, industrial radiator grafted straight onto a human nervous system to keep the body from cooking itself under the massive demonic mana load.
Every vat featured a laminated nameplate bolted to the base. Names. Ages. Intake dates.
The horror was not just physical. It was entirely systemic. P.A.C.I.F.I.C. had been actively hacking the world’s underlying mechanics.
A jagged red LitRPG diagnostic prompt flickered weakly above the teenager’s vat.
[Mana Pathway Splicing: FAILED. Soul Capacity Exceeded. Awaiting Incineration.]
Nobody spoke. Even Maddie didn’t have a sarcastic line for this.
Will walked the perimeter. He read one nameplate, then another, until he stopped at one that was different. The glass behind it remained intact, pristine, and completely empty.
SUBJECT 0014-B. AGE 17. INTAKE: PRE-COLLAPSE +9 DAYS. STATUS: SUCCESSFUL INTEGRATION. TRANSFERRED, SECTOR 77.
Elizabeth read the tag over his shoulder and went very still.
"Sector 77 isn’t here," she said. "Sector 77 was never built here."
"Then where is it?" Will asked.
"I don’t know yet." She gestured at the total wreckage around them, pointing at the shattered vats and the massive breaches in the containment glass. "Everything else in this room either failed, or it’s still in there. This one worked. And they took it somewhere."
"Seventeen," Tyson said quietly.
"Don’t read the ages, Tyson," Don said.
"Too late."
"Spread out," Will said. "Don’t touch the vats. Elizabeth, find a terminal."
Allison had stopped at a different nameplate across the circular room. This one featured a standard P.A.C.I.F.I.C. employee badge fused into the casing instead of a refugee intake tag. Her voice carried a very quiet, cold edge.
"Will. Some of these aren’t refugees."
Will looked over his shoulder. He stared at the corporate logo on the badge, then looked at the dead, mutated shape floating above it. The corporation ate its own people when it ran out of test subjects.
"File it," Will said, his voice entirely devoid of shock. "We’ll find the bastard who signed the transfer orders."
The primary operating theater sat in the dead center of the massive room. A rusted surgical table stood bolted directly into the concrete floor. It featured heavy industrial restraints instead of standard medical straps. The thick iron cuffs were heavily bent and violently warped from years of people fighting against them. A blood-stained corporate terminal flickered weakly on a metal desk nearby, sitting next to a surgical tray of bone saws and rusted scalpels.
A laminated ledger rested on top of the tray. Will picked it up.
The text didn’t say demons. The text didn’t mention magic or souls. It read: Subject 44: Biological input accepted. Qliphothic graft integration at 40 percent. Subject expired due to catastrophic central nervous system failure. Recommend higher voltage for next batch.
Will read it exactly once. He didn’t process the morality of the words. He didn’t summarize the evil. He operated entirely on pure, territorial rage.
He let the ledger drop onto the tile.
He stepped up to the table.
The overhead light fixture above the butcher’s block flickered as he moved into its arc. The corporate P.A.C.I.F.I.C. logo sat proudly stamped right into the metal housing. The dying light caught the underside of the heavy iron table. Someone had scratched words deep into the metal by hand. Over and over. Dozens of desperate attempts layered over each other until the steel was nearly worn entirely through.
PLEASE NOT AGAIN.
Will took off his blood-soaked glove. He traced the deep, jagged gouges with his bare fingers. He physically felt the frantic, screaming depth of the desperation ground directly into the steel. His muscles tightened.
He drove his heavy boot into the main support column with every single ounce of his unsuppressed Strength stat.
The thick iron bolts sheared completely out of the concrete floor in a single deafening crack. The table violently flipped over. It slammed sideways into the nearest bank of shattered vats, creating a screaming collapse of glass and rusted iron that echoed through the massive chamber for a long time after the wreckage finally stopped moving.
Will stood in the heavy silence afterward. He stared strictly at the empty space where the table had been.
Maddie’s hand found Allison’s in the dark. Neither of them looked at the other. Tyson turned away from the wreckage entirely. The Vanguard’s heavy muscle didn’t turn away out of weakness. He turned because there was absolutely nothing left to hit, and he needed a long second before he fully trusted his own hands again.
"Elizabeth," Will said. His voice was flat. It was the voice of a man who had finished one calculation and automatically started a much larger, bloodier one. "The terminal. Now."
"On it," Elizabeth replied, already moving toward the desk.
I have burned cities for less than this room, boy, Khan said quietly. I am not going to tell you to be merciful.
A heavy pause filled Will’s skull.
I am going to tell you to be thorough.
The overhead light, knocked entirely loose by the impact, flickered once more and died. The Red Room went completely dark. A second later, the blood-stained corporate terminal flared to life, casting a harsh green glow across the tile. Elizabeth’s hands hit the keyboard.
