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The silence in the church library had a new texture. It was no longer the quiet of solitude, but the tense, watchful silence of a bunker after the first shell has landed too close. Jack stood at the same lead-framed window, but the cityscape outside felt different. Every flicker of a distant siren, every flash of headlights on the freeway, felt like a potential probe. The enemy was no longer a company with a lab; it was a ghost in the machine of the city itself.
He had laid it all out for them. Elsa, returned from the Bloodstone archives with armfuls of dusty folios, and Morbius, back from the underworld with whispers and warnings, had listened in grim silence as he described the man in the grey suit, the suppressor, the cold, corporate declaration of his own status as intellectual property.
Elsa broke the silence, slapping a heavy, leather-bound book onto the desk. The sound was like a gunshot in the quiet room. "They have a name. Or, a shadow of one. The people who funded Promethean, the ones who would operate like this... my family's records have whispers. They're called the Aegis Consortium."
Jack turned from the window. "Aegis? Like a shield?"
"A shield that wants to own everything it protects," Morbius intoned from the shadows. "The whispers confirm it. They are a trans-global collective of industrialists, futurists, and amoral scientists. They do not seek to destroy the supernatural world. They seek to monetize it. To patent it. Your lycanthropy is not their first attempt. Merely their most promising."
Elsa opened the book, revealing intricate, hand-drawn schematics of bizarre creatures and complex devices. "They've been trying to bottle magic and replicate monsters for over a century. They were behind the 'New Men' project in the 50s, the Chimeric outbreaks in the 80s... They always work through proxies, like Promethean. They are ghosts. Untouchable."
"And now they've seen me," Jack stated, his voice flat. "They know I can resist their tech. That makes me both a prime asset and a critical threat." He finally moved from the window and picked up the small, inert Cry of the Void box from the desk. It was the only card he held that they didn't know about. The crystal was safe, silenced. For now.
"The rules have changed," Jack said, looking from Elsa to Morbius. "We can't just react. We can't wait for them to build a new lab. We need to find a way to hit the Consortium itself."
"And how do you propose we do that?" Elsa asked, crossing her arms. "We can't shoot a ghost."
"No," Jack agreed, a dangerous, calculated light in his eyes. "But we can follow a trail of blood. Their blood." He tapped the Cry of the Void box. "They want to own the unknown. So we use the unknown against them. That creature in the basin was a symptom of a tear. The Consortium's experiments, their energy signatures... they could be causing these rifts. Or making them worse."
He placed the box back on the desk, his plan solidifying.
"We don't wait for their next move. We find the next rift before they do. We see what comes through. And we follow the chaos right back to their doorstep."
He was no longer just protecting people from the monsters in the dark. He was planning to lead a much larger, more dangerous monster directly to the hunters.
The plan was a dangerous gamble, a bet that the Aegis Consortium's hunger for new assets would outpace their caution. They wouldn't be able to resist a fresh, unstable dimensional rift. It was a new vein of ore for their corporate machinery, and Jack intended to be the canary in that mine shaft.
The first step was finding the next tear. The creature in the Sepulveda Basin had left a psychic scar, a faint, bleeding wound in the local reality. But it was already fading. They needed a way to detect new ones as they formed.
"The creature was drawn to the crystal's energy," Morbius mused, his gaze fixed on the Cry of the Void box. "It sought a stable power source to anchor its unstable form. The principle is not unlike a moth to a flame."
Elsa nodded, catching his meaning. "So we don't use the crystal itself. That's like lighting a bonfire. We need a... a spark. A tiny, controlled flicker of the same energy. Just enough to act as a lure or a sensor."
Jack's eyes narrowed in thought. "The energy has a signature. A specific frequency. If we can't replicate the power, can we replicate the scent?"
An hour later, the library looked like a cross between a medieval alchemist's den and a modern electronics workshop. Elsa had procured a series of finely tuned thaumaturgic resonators—small, tuning-fork-like devices made of silver and obsidian. Morbius, with his preternatural patience and steady hands, was using a laser etcher to inscribe microscopic runes onto their surfaces, based on the energy patterns Jack had seared into his memory from his encounter with the crystal and the suppressor.
Jack's role was the most delicate. He sat perfectly still, a single, inactive resonator held between his fingers. He focused, not on transforming, but on the barest whisper of the curse within him. He let a sliver of that primal, lunar-touched energy flow down his arm, not to change his form, but to imbue the metal. It was like trying to bleed a specific color of light. His brow was beaded with sweat, the strain of such minute control immense.
A faint, silvery sheen, barely visible to the naked eye, momentarily coated the resonator before sinking into the etched runes. The device hummed, once, a pitch so high it was felt more than heard, and then fell silent.
"It is done," Morbius stated, examining the device with his dark, perceptive eyes. "It holds an echo. A ghost of the true power. It should be detectable to any entity operating on a similar dimensional wavelength, yet too faint for the Consortium's broad-spectrum sensors to easily pinpoint."
Elsa gathered the three finished resonators. "Alright. We plant these at triangulation points where the city's ley lines are weakest. The old zoo in Griffith Park, the abandoned theater on Bunker Hill, the drainage canals near the river. If something starts to bleed through from the other side, these should light up like a Christmas tree."
It was a net. A fragile, experimental net cast into the deep, dark waters of a city they were only just beginning to understand was built on a foundation of fault lines both geological and supernatural.
As Elsa and Morbius prepared to deploy the sensors, Jack remained at the desk, staring at his hands. The effort of the precise energy transfer had left him feeling hollowed out. He had spent so long building walls to keep the beast contained. Now, he was learning to poke tiny, deliberate holes in those walls, not to let the beast out, but to let a controlled trickle of its essence through.
It was a new kind of control. A more dangerous kind. He was no longer just the warden of his own prison.
He was becoming its engineer.
The deployment was swift and silent. Under the cover of a moonless night, the three resonators were placed at the chosen loci of latent power. The air at each site was heavy with forgotten memories and stagnant magic, and the tiny devices hummed in sympathetic vibration, becoming nearly invisible needles in the city's supernatural haystack.
Now, they waited. The library became their command center. Elsa had rigged a central monitor to a receiver tuned to the resonators' frequency—a simple light that would turn a glaring, bloody red if any of them were triggered.
For two days, nothing. The tension was a coiled spring in the room. Jack paced, the confinement grating on his instincts. Morbius stood sentinel, a statue of patience. Elsa cleaned her weapons, then cleaned them again.
On the third night, as a thin rain began to patter against the stained-glass windows, it happened.
A single, piercing shriek tore through the library's silence, not from the monitor, but from the city itself. It was a sound of rending metal and shattering concrete, followed by a deep, guttural roar that vibrated through the very foundations of the building. It didn't come from Griffith Park, Bunker Hill, or the river.
It came from downtown.
Elsa was on her feet in an instant, her eyes glued to the monitor. "The sensors are quiet! Nothing!"
"They were bypassed," Morbius hissed, his form seeming to elongate in the shadows. "This is not a random rift. This is a targeted incursion."
Jack was already at the door, his body thrumming with a new, terrible understanding. "It's not a breach they found. It's a door they opened."
They spilled out into the rain-slicked night, the city's ambient noise swallowed by the distant, chaotic symphony of destruction. They didn't need a sensor to guide them. The pillar of smoke and dust rising from the financial district was beacon enough.
As they drew closer, the scene of horror unfolded. It wasn't a creature of misaligned parts this time. It was a monolithic horror, a walking engine of ruin that stood three stories tall. Its body was a shifting amalgamation of dark, volcanic rock and pulsating, raw muscle, with four trunk-like legs that pulverized asphalt with every step. It had no discernible head, only a massive, gaping maw in its torso, lined with crystalline teeth that glowed with the same sickly green energy as the first creature. It swung limbs that were half-living stone, half-crackling energy, shearing the corner off a skyscraper as if it were paper.
Panic was a living thing in the streets. People fled in all directions, their screams swallowed by the monster's earth-shaking bellows.
And there, on the periphery, Jack saw them. Figures in ash-grey environmental suits, moving with calm, methodical purpose amidst the chaos. They weren't fighting the monster. They were documenting it. One held a large device that scanned the behemoth, while others placed small, disc-like objects on the ground, creating a wide perimeter. They were corralling it, herding its rampage away from certain buildings and toward others.
This was no containment operation. It was a field test.
Elsa raised her rifle, her face a mask of fury. "They're using the city as their goddamn laboratory!"
Before she could fire, a new sound cut through the din—a high-pitched whine that made Jack's teeth ache. One of the grey-suited figures had raised a device, smaller and more refined than the one in the Silent Market. It was aimed not at the colossal monster, but directly at them.
A sphere of that familiar, soul-crushing silence erupted around them. The suppressor. They had been waiting.
Jack's knees buckled. The connection to the beast vanished, leaving him feeling frail, human, and utterly vulnerable. He saw Elsa stagger, her rifle suddenly feeling like a ton of lead in her hands. Morbius let out a pained hiss, his vampiric speed and strength faltering.
The man in the impeccably tailored grey suit stepped from behind an armored van, a different, more powerful suppressor in his hand. His expression was the same frozen mask.
"Subject Zero," he said, his voice carrying perfectly in the dead air. "The Aegis Consortium thanks you for your participation in this live-fire exercise. The data on your physiological response to the MK-II Suppressor is invaluable."
He gestured toward the rampaging behemoth, which was now turning its crystalline maw in their direction, sensing a concentration of unique energy—the suppressed supernatural signatures of a werewolf, a vampire, and a monster hunter.
"Now," the man said, his lips curving into that cold, surgical smile. "Let us observe predator-prey dynamics under controlled conditions."
The suppressor field held them fast. The monster took a ground-shaking step toward them. The Consortium observers stood back, data slates in hand.
The hunt was over. They were the prey.
To Be Continue...