The hospital stood before us and it looked more than just an abandoned building, everything around it was creeping me out.
We stood at the entrance and Takeo handed out earpiece communicators to each of us. "Keep these on. If we lose visual, we'll be able to stay in touch."
I slipped mine in and adjusted it, glancing at the entrance. We shared a final glance and stepped inside. I exhaled slowly, my hand instinctively twitching toward my pocket. I expected the world to warp the moment I crossed the threshold but everything remained eerily normal.
"Whew… I thought I was going to get thrown somewhere else the moment we stepped in."
Suzuki shot me a look. "Don't joke."
I wasn't joking, though.
We reached a junction where the hallway split into two distinct routes and started feeling the faint presence of demonic energy.
"We should split up."
Takeo said. And Suzuki stepped into his personal space, her eyes flashing with a protective fire. "No. We stay together."
Takeo shook his head. "No. I'm going with Miyu. We can cover more ground this way."
Suzuki frowned. "Miyu won't be able to use her cannon properly in a tight space like this, she won't be much help. Let me–"
"And you think you will? I don't need a babysitter, Suzuki. You and Kenichi weren't even supposed to be here on the first place. So, take the left route together."
Suzuki opened her mouth to argue, the desperate urge to protect him practically radiating off her but I grabbed her hand and dragged her toward the left hallway, even as she tried to dig her heels in.
"Let go, Kenichi!" she yelled, struggling against my grip.
"Takeo is a grown man, he doesn't need you hovering over him. And honestly? With that desperate urge to protect him, you'll only be the reason he gets distracted and killed." I said.
Suzuki stopped resisting and looked down at the floor, her shoulders slumping. "Maybe... maybe you're right."
We walked in silence for what felt like miles and the deeper we went the more the demonic energy seemed to fade, which made no sense – it should have been getting stronger.
I stopped and looked around. What really caught my eyes was a wall clock that hung crooked above a nursing station door. The hands were frozen, the glass cracked.
"Should we go deeper?" Suzuki asked.
"Am I the only one who feels like something is off here?" I asked, still looking at the wall clock.
"Everything about this place is off, Kenichi."
Suddenly, the comms crackled and Miyu's voice came through, high-pitched. "–need backup! We need–"
"What?" I pressed the earpiece harder into my ear but then only static came. "Miyu?"
Takeo's voice cut through. "The two of you... shouldn't come here. Go out and get—"
The signal cut dead.
"Takeo! Miyu!" Suzuki yelled into her earpiece, her face turning pale.
"Let's go!" I didn't wait for her, I started sprinting back the way we came and Suzuki was right behind me. We ran for minutes, pushing through swinging doors and past empty gurneys but we weren't getting anywhere. I skidded to a stop and Suzuki nearly ran into my back.
"How deep were we?" she asked.
I looked at Suzuki, she was breathing heavily and seemed confused. That completely made sense, I was confused too because somehow our spiritual energy was being siphoned away. My eyes scanned the room, looking for maybe relic or something that could be causing this but they landed on the very same broken wall clock I had seen ten minutes ago.
"Do you see this?" I pointed. "We've ran past this clock twice now and we haven't made any turn. We've been running in a straight line."
"How is that possible?" Suzuki whispered, looking around at the identical hallways.
"I don't know but I think we're trapped in some sort of—"
"Reality Distortion. We are trapped in a demon's Reality Distortion." she said.
"What is that?"
"I don't really know how to explain this but it's an advanced technique where the caster overlays a fragment of their personal reality onto the existing world within a defined radius and in that space their technique becomes absolute. I know what you are thinking but it's not a prison meaning anyone can flee from it unless if it was cast the same way this demon did, in an enclosed space where it's reality wrapped every dimension." she said.
"And how do we get out?"
"We find the caster and exorcise it. Or disrupt its focus." she said.
I looked down the endless hallway. "I'm pretty sure we need to get out of this loop to find the demon."
"No, the caster cannot be outside its own distortion. So it's in here, somewhere."
We walked again, more cautiously this time and passed the same clock five more times. Each loop, felt like it was draining more of our energy.
"The longer this goes on, the less likely we make it out here alive. Isn't there any other way out of this?" I said, leaning against a wall.
My earpiece static suddenly cleared but the voice that came out wasn't Takeo or Miyu.
"Hello, Detective."
I froze in place – the voice was of that man who bumped into me. "Who are you and what do you want from me?"
"Why don't you come and find out? And you better be fast... I'm getting bored of watching your friends breath the same air as me."
The comms went dead. I turned to Suzuki and she was shaking, her eyes wide with terror as she stared at me. She seem to have heard it too.
"Kenichi... there is another way to get out of this but it's too risky." she whispered, looking down at her shaking hands.
I went to her and grabbed her shoulders, forcing her to look at me. "It doesn't matter! We have to get out now, that voice... that's the man who killed Takeo in my vision."
Suzuki's breathing was uneven now and she looked utterly exhausted but she pulled free from my grip, her hands shaking as she whispered something under her breath.
Suddenly, an oppressive fog began to pool around our feet and suddenly a giant wooden coffin wrapped in massive rusted chains, materialized next to her. The demonic energy coming off the object was immense, maybe an A-ranked at the very least.
Suzuki looked at me, blood beginning to trickle from her nose and made a hand sign.
"Syrren: Graveyard of Final Judgment."
The chains on the coffin shattered and fell, the lid opened to reveal a humanoid demon with grey skin, its hands wrapped in chains and crossed over its chest in a grim x-shape.
The endless hallway around us suddenly shattered like glass and the ground began to crack and dissolve into a void of deep purple. In the center of the hallway, a dense dark sphere of compressed space began to form, swallowing everything in its path.
The coffin vanished and Suzuki collapsed to her knees, blood leaking from her nose.
"What is happening?" I yelled over the sound of reality tearing apart.
"This is what happens when we use the other option you asked about, using Reality Distortion against another. We forced two incompatible realities to coexist, creating a Dead Zone and a Collapse Core. And If neither I nor the demon dies before the sphere expands… it'll swallow this entire building and everything in it." she said.
The enemy caster finally revealed itself. It was a humanoid thing, skinny and pale – scuttling on all fours like an insect. Its neck was twisted upward at an unnatural angle and matted black hair covered its face completely.
Shit. I don't have any weapon on me, guess I have to punch it until it stops moving.
The demon launched itself at Suzuki. I moved faster than I thought possible, grabbing her by the waist and leaping backward. The demon's claws tore through the floor where she'd been a second ago and as we were mid-air it lunged at us, its hand flashing in a deadly slash. I kicked off its shoulder, using the impact to propel us away, landing on a fragment of stable floor. I set Suzuki down behind a pillar of broken reality. "Stay here."
I turned toward the demon, stretching my arms. The demon whipped its hair toward me – stretching across the hall. I sprinted forward and slid across the tilting floor, the hair whistling over my head. It whipped again, forcing me to jump toward a jagged fragment of floor hanging over the purple void. – One mistake and I'm falling into complete nothingness.
The hair lunge followed me and I had to jump from one broken floor to the next until I found solid footing. I looked up just as the hair wrapped around my throat and wrists. It slammed me into the standing wall, then threw me across the hallway toward Suzuki.
I stood up slowly, spitting blood and Suzuki stared at me.
"Don't worry, I got this." I said – reaching into my pocket I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Yeah, stupid timing but I needed a second remember how to use spiritual energy to enhance my physical abilities. I had always been too lazy or too distracted to practice but now with the world around me literally falling apart, it clicked. – I remembered the sensation from the temple, how the spiritual energy felt when it flowed around my body.
I focused on my spiritual core and let my energy flow outward, spreading through my body. Afterwards it felt light and my senses sharpened to edge. –
I'm so stupid for not doing this earlier.
The demon launched again, hair raining down from above. I just tilted my head, letting the hair pass inches from my ear and I reached out, grabbed a handful of the matted locks and yanked. The demon was pulled toward me and I met it halfway with a punch reinforced by every ounce of energy I had left, sending it crashing through a wall.
"Kenichi!" Suzuki yelled. I turned and she threw a small silver blade at me. I caught it by the hilt. – She seriously decided to give me this now?
"Look out!" Suzuki screamed.
The demon was dropping from the ceiling. I backflipped, throwing the blade mid-air and stabbed through the demon's hidden face making it let out a piercing scream.
And the moment my feet hit the floor, I sprinted towards it. I then kicked the demon on the neck, followed up with a barrage of punches and grabbed the blade back. I stabbed it through the skull then yanked it out again, slashing across its jaw and lastly delivered a spinning kick that took its head off. The body instantly dissolved into grey ash.
The dark sphere vanished and the world snapped back to its original form but the hallway was too damaged to hold.
"Kenichi!"
I heard Suzuki scream before the hallway collapsed. I blacked out for some seconds and woke up buried under a pile of drywall and wood. My leg had some sudden pains and I looked down to find that a jagged table leg had pierced through my thigh. I gritted my teeth and yanked it free, the pain nearly making me black out again.
"Suzuki!" I shouted, staggering to my feet. "Suzuki!"
A muffled groan came from beneath a pile of rubble nearby. I stumbled toward it, digging through rubble with shaking hands until I found her buried beneath. She was barely conscious and bleeding somewhere on her head.
"Can you stand?" I asked, helping her up. She nodded but her legs gave out instantly and I caught her, balancing her weight against my shoulder.
"We have to find the others." she rasped, looking toward the right wing of the building.
We started walking, limping through the dust toward the direction of the two distinct route junction where we last saw Takeo and Miyu.