With no phone signal and every attempt to walk more than a hundred meters from the house looping them right back to it, Mark Russell sighed. He truly couldn't explain any of this through science anymore. All he could do was go support his wife.
Emma Russell's Spirit Vision was like Kakashi's Sharingan—she had no idea how to shut it off. It ran twenty-four hours a day, showing her an endless parade of specters and phantoms wherever she looked. The sustained strain on her brain and psyche was enormous. Her Spirit Vision was genuinely on the verge of burning out.
Seeing her husband's spirits sink, she mustered the warmth to encourage him.
"Remember that fireplace ghost we took care of last month? Looking back, it's actually kind of funny. You held up the crucifix, and—boom—you got it in one shot."
Hearing his wife try to comfort him, Mark Russell felt a pang of grief he couldn't put into words. Those fireplace ghosts and doll ghosts had all been staged—pre-screened by Bella, obviously the lowest-tier spirits imaginable. They bore no comparison to what they faced now.
He was about to crack a self-deprecating joke when he felt Emma suddenly seize his hand, her grip crushing.
Emma Russell stared at the far corner in panic. "The corner—that... can you see it?"
Mark Russell looked up, and the sight struck him dumb.
A tall figure in a nun's habit stood in the corner's shadow. Without careful scrutiny, no one would have noticed a "person" standing there. The holy vestments should have been sacred, but paired with that ghastly, vengeful face, they produced an effect of horrifying wrongness. The Russells felt as though they'd been plunged into an ice bath.
As if sensing their gaze, the Demon Nun turned her head slightly and fixed them with a sinister stare. Then she made an expression that was impossible to classify as either a smile or a grimace.
She seemed to want them to get a good look at her. Her face emerged from the shadow, and in a gesture of open menace, she bared a mouthful of razor-sharp fangs at the couple—as if she might devour them whole.
Mark Russell scrambled to wave his crucifix, simultaneously reciting every prayer he knew at the top of his lungs—over and over, stumbling through them out of order.
The Demon Nun smiled silently. *The Bible?* If not for Bella's instructions, she'd have walked right over and recited alongside him. *That would really give you something to scream about.* But she had a job to do.
Her feet never touching the ground, she drifted from the front door toward the ground-floor interior hallway. As she turned the corner, she vanished from the Russells' sight.
The Demon Nun's appearance seemed to herald a shift. The changes that followed left the group unsure whether things had improved or worsened.
The ball's earlier *thud, thud, thud* against the floor had become *thud, thud, ahhh*.
The doors and windows that had been slamming with percussive *bang, bang* sounds now carried something else woven through them—a faint melody, barely audible.
They strained to listen. Funeral music. The longer they listened, the worse they felt.
*We're done for, aren't we? This music is playing at our funeral.*
The house had already been cold as an ice cellar, and now it grew colder still. Forget the Perron children, who'd spent two full weeks under the house's corrosive influence—even Dr. Serizawa, a man who frequently trekked to the Arctic and Antarctic on a whim, found the cold unbearable. Tiny icicles hung from every breath they exhaled.
Then came an even greater disturbance.
A *crack, crack, crack* that left them bewildered. What was that noise? It sounded as though someone were dismantling the building.
"I think... we might be saved? That feeling of extreme danger from before—it's gone?" Emma Russell still had some residual sensitivity. Her words came haltingly, uncertain.
A flicker of hope stirred in the group. Had someone come to rescue them?
But they waited and waited, and the rescue they imagined never materialized.
"Don't worry. Perhaps it just needs a little more time. We'll be out soon." The Russells rallied the group, urging everyone to hold on a bit longer.
Bella wasn't ignoring them. She simply had a small complication to deal with outside the pocket dimension.
The Vengeful Ghost Alliance's operation had gone smoothly. Without much trouble, she'd captured the witch ghost that served as the house's core.
She encased the deranged witch's spirit in solid ice. This entity wasn't quite the same as ghosts like Shaw or Miss Harmon—she was more like a wraith that had voluntarily shed its physical form, leaving behind a lingering spiritual remnant.
Bella assessed the ghost's condition. The witch had been insane in life: she'd slaughtered Black slaves, murdered her neighbors, killed her own husband, and ultimately sacrificed her child. There was zero value in recruiting her.
Bella decided to destroy the witch's spirit outright and close the case for good.
She compressed her ice inward from all sides, preparing to crush the ghost out of existence.
But as the psionic energy converged at the center, it met nothing. The ghost had been teleported away an instant before annihilation—snatched by some unknown force.
"Hm?" Bella looked across the room. There, in the far corner, stood the witch ghost that should have been obliterated. The spirit was dazed and witless, utterly unaware of its narrow escape, still shuffling in aimless circles on the spot.
A white-haired old woman watched the ghost—ancient face severe and deeply lined, draped in a tattered silk robe. She seemed to be remembering something from the distant past.
Bella felt mildly affronted. The technique the old woman had used to rescue the ghost bore a striking resemblance to the spatial displacement Bella herself had employed to save that Kamar-Taj grand-disciple from Victor not long ago.
A black cat squirmed out from the crook of the old woman's arm and hissed at Bella, baring its teeth. The old woman stroked the cat's head in a soothing gesture.
Bella's attention shifted from the ghost to the old woman, studying the technique she'd just employed. "Impressive teleportation. That's a bloodline-driven spell, isn't it? Let me guess—you didn't just happen to wander by. You're personally involved. One of the witches who survived the Salem trials? Remarkable. You've sustained yourself on magic all the way to the present day?"
Bella was genuinely taken aback. Her earlier dismissal might have been too hasty. These witches schooled in African sorcery couldn't all be written off as amateurs—the old woman before her was someone whose true power she couldn't easily gauge.
The old woman wasn't transparent the way Victor had been, nor fathomless the way the Ancient One was. To Bella, she represented the unknown—the kind of opponent you couldn't properly measure without actually fighting.
The old woman's voice was thin, almost spectral: "My name is Agatha Harkness. A pleasure to meet you, young one."
Bella smiled without sound, gesturing toward the ghost still spinning in place. "Mrs. Harkness, are you here to help an old companion? I see no remaining sanity in this one. She's been dead for over three hundred years. Keeping her on the Material Plane will only lead to more people getting killed."