The room was filled with the raucous noise of twenty-five gamblers, eight waiters and dealers, and two guards.
Henry closed the door behind him and unleashed a storm of flying steel. The two guards, his first targets, fell, and then, in the next three seconds, the rest of the room's occupants collapsed, each with a knife in their throat.
He cleared the next room in the same manner. In the third, he found them: the three treacherous stable hands who had sold his horses. They looked up at him in surprise, but no fear. They didn't even have time to register who he was before his knives and his rapier had ended their short, miserable lives.
In half an hour, he had cleared the entire floor, "releasing" another 116 souls. He emptied the floor's safe, adding another $36,880 to his swelling fortune, then continued his ascent.
The two guards on the fourth floor were dead before they could even raise their heads. He did the same on the fifth.
As he neared the top of the stairs to the sixth and final floor, he heard footsteps. He threw six knives, his aim guided by sound and smell alone. He heard six choked cries, and then he was at the top of the stairs, and six more knives flew, finishing the job.
The sixth floor was a series of ten private suites. He opened the first. A man and a woman were asleep in the master bedroom. It was 1 PM. A decadent, unhealthy lifestyle. He woke them with the cold steel of his rapier, then looted their room, finding only a paltry fifty-six dollars.
In the next suite, he found two middle-aged German men, smoking cigars. He killed them without a word. He knew from the files that these were likely the founders of the Lagan's Colts, the men who had built their empire on a foundation of slaughter and terror.
He found their secret safe. It was a treasure trove: stacks of cash, bearer bonds, 38,600 ounces of gold, a trove of jewels, and eight property deeds. His hard work had paid off.
He cleared the rest of the floor, then piled the bodies of all the building's occupants in one of the empty rooms, doused them with kerosene, and set them ablaze. He went to the fifth floor and found six more guards who had just woken up. He killed them and added them to the pile. He found eight more on the fourth floor and did the same.
He felt like a busy, tireless worker bee.
He went down to the second floor and, with the building now a raging inferno, he put on his mask, strapped on his gun belt, and walked out the front door.
The thirty guards at the main entrance saw him and moved to intercept. In three seconds of furious, close-quarters gunfighting, they were all dead. He then took out the eleven men who were running for their lives down the street, and the six guards from the neighboring hotel who had dared to fire at him.
He walked into the hotel. The lobby was deserted. He went up to the second floor. Two men were waiting in ambush. He killed them. He moved through the halls, his senses a perfect, 360-degree map of the building. He was a hunter, and they were his prey. He killed another nineteen guards, and then, in the manager's office, he blew the lock with his Sharps rifle, kicked the door in, and put a bullet through the head of the last man.
He planted a 10-pound TNT charge in the hotel's telegraph office, then walked back to the burning headquarters. He waited.
Twelve minutes passed. The building was a roaring inferno. No one had come out.
He checked his status. His progress bar had silently ticked over. He was now at Level 4, 0.012%.
The dark golden sphere in his vision had expanded, and his storage space was now a massive 267 cubic meters.
And on his panel, a new stat had appeared:
Lifespan.
It was time to leave. He walked to the hotel's stables, shot the three stable hands who were there, and then interrogated the last, wounded man.
"Where are my other thirty-two horses?"
"I don't know which ones are yours, sir!" the man gasped. "But a few dozen of the boys rode back to the main headquarters in Aurora yesterday. They took forty of the best horses with them."