The Tank shook its massive arms, blood-red eyes sweeping the corridor before locking onto Soren standing dead center.
"ROAR!"
It bellowed and slammed both fists into the floor like some demented gorilla, pounding the concrete to build momentum as it charged straight at him.
Soren didn't move. He simply raised his right fist, drew it back, and let demonic power flood into his arm until the air around it warped.
The Tank barreled forward, close enough that Soren could smell the thick, coppery stench of old blood and rot rolling off its hide.
He threw the punch.
BOOM.
Fist met flesh. The Tank's thick arms exploded on impact. Soren's hand drove forward like a spear and punched straight through the creature's torso, bursting out the other side in a spray of gore.
The Tank froze, eyes going glassy. Its body shuddered once, then went limp.
Soren yanked his arm free. Thick ropes of blood and shredded meat clung to his forearm.
"Still worth keeping?" he muttered, shaking the mess off with a disgusted flick.
The sudden appearance of the escaped experiments was probably Pinhead's doing—either a side effect of spinning the Lament Configuration or a deliberate move to throw more bodies at him.
The corridor shuddered and began rotating again.
Through the shifting gaps, Soren caught flashes of other scenes: researchers being torn apart by mutated test subjects, a handful of surviving security troops holding a desperate last stand around some fortified point, and even Luca—still alive—crawling upward through a ventilation shaft like a rat.
When the rotation finally stopped, the world had flipped.
Soren now stood on what used to be the ceiling. The floor he had been standing on was now directly above his head. Gravity felt wrong, pulling everything in the opposite direction. His body instinctively leaned the wrong way, and the sudden inversion made his stomach lurch.
He forced himself to breathe and let his senses adjust. The disorientation faded fast.
"Goddamn it, not again!"
"This time we're not running into more monsters, right? I'm almost out of bullets."
"Shut up and save your breath."
Voices drifted from up ahead.
A six-man security team in full tactical gear moved cautiously down the inverted hallway, rifles up, red laser sights sweeping the walls. Two soldiers kept their weapons trained on a researcher they were escorting, barking at her to move faster.
None of them had adapted to the flipped gravity. They walked like drunks, boots slipping and scraping.
The team spotted Soren at the far end of the passage.
"Who the hell is that?!"
The squad leader snapped his rifle up. The others followed. Half a dozen red dots danced across Soren's chest, though the lasers wavered badly in the wrong gravity.
"Drop your weapon! Hands on your head! Back the fuck up!"
Soren ignored the orders. His gaze slid past the soldiers to the woman they were guarding.
She had messy black hair, sharp black-framed glasses, and wore a lab coat that didn't quite fit. Even in the disheveled state, the cold, striking East Asian features were unmistakable.
Ada.
Soren's eyes narrowed slightly. He recognized her instantly, but kept his expression neutral.
Ada Wong. Top-tier spy and mercenary. She'd been playing every side for years. These rent-a-cops couldn't hold her if she didn't want to be held. The fact that she was letting them escort her deeper into the facility told him everything—he was watching her run a con to gain legitimate access to the lower levels.
"Open fire!"
The squad leader's voice cracked. Gunfire erupted in a deafening roar.
Soren blurred into motion. A streak of purple demonic power left afterimages as he flickered forward through the hail of bullets. One second he was at the far end of the corridor. The next he was among them.
The squad never stood a chance.
Fists and elbows cracked bone. Bodies dropped in twitching heaps. In less than four seconds the entire team lay dead on the inverted floor, blood pooling in strange upward-dripping patterns.
Ada stood perfectly still amid the carnage, watching Soren with calm, appraising eyes. She adjusted her glasses with one finger, the only sign of tension a faint tightening at the corner of her mouth.
She looked at him and spoke in a low, measured voice that carried just the right amount of relief. "Thank you. That could have gotten messy."
"Small favor."
Soren crouched, rifled through one of the corpses, and tossed her a key. "Security's tighter the deeper you go. They wouldn't waste a whole squad on an ordinary researcher. So what are you really doing down here?"
Ada caught the key without looking away from him. She unlocked the cuffs around her wrists, let them clatter to the floor, and gave a small, self-deprecating smile.
"Senior data analyst. I found some… unauthorized experiments in the logs. When I tried to move the files, the system flagged me." She rubbed her reddened wrists and met his gaze. "You don't look like you belong here either."
Soren studied her for a second, then shrugged. "My client paid well for information. Figured I'd come take a look myself."
He didn't bother calling out the lie. She knew he knew. And right now he needed what she knew.
Ada tilted her head, reading him. "I can get you deeper. In exchange, you get me out of here alive."
Soren nodded once. "Deal. Start talking. What exactly are they growing in this place?"
She hesitated, biting her lower lip like she was weighing how much to give away. After a moment she exhaled.
"Valried. The mental hospital on the surface was just cover. Down here they've been running human modification experiments—pushing trauma patients past their breaking point to force… mutations. Emotional mutations."
She glanced at the corpses around them, then back at Soren.
"Whatever they're doing, it's tied to something big. And they're getting desperate."
Soren's eyes darkened. He remembered the Tank, the Scissors Man, the other horrors that had already escaped.
Desperate was an understatement.
And if Ada was telling even half the truth, the real nightmare was still waiting below.