The monsters and mutants came charging again like a pack of rabid dogs, howling as they closed in.
Soren sucked in a deep breath and reversed his grip on the twin blades of wind and fire.
Every drop of demonic power in his body flooded into the swords without holding anything back.
"Oooooohhhhhh!!!"
The twin brothers who had been mocking him for running just a second ago both screamed in pure excitement the moment that pure, concentrated power poured into them.
"It's been forever since we tasted magic this pure! Master, don't tell me you're some bastard kid that old bastard Sparda left running around on Earth?!"
Fierce flames and razor-sharp wind blades erupted across both swords. Then the demonic power dyed them completely, and both blades burst into purple demonic fire at the same time.
"Enough, enough! We're full! Time to get to work!"
A moment later the two blades belched in perfect unison and roared.
Soren ignored every word they said.
While dodging the monsters' attacks, he kept compressing more and more power into the blades.
"Enough! I said enough! No more power! The blades are going to burst!!!"
"Oh my god! I'm going to explode! Brother, I'm splitting open!"
As the power kept climbing, the twin brothers lost every last bit of interest in trash-talking. All that came out of them now were raw screams of agony.
Their voices even cracked into something that sounded like crying, like Soren was genuinely about to break them for good.
Cracks spiderwebbed across the surface of both blades. Blinding purple light blasted out through the gaps. Soren's eyes sharpened. He launched himself into the air and started spinning at high speed.
With the twin brothers' final, ear-splitting screams, a massive tornado over ten meters tall—formed from purple-black flames and wind blades—took shape inside the corridor and completely filled the hallway.
"RUMBLE—"
The fire-and-wind tornado tore through the entire corridor like a force of nature. Walls and pipes were ripped apart, exposing the bare concrete underneath.
The mutants and demons at the front of the pack got sucked into the tornado and didn't last even half a second. The wind shredded them into ground meat while the flames burned what was left to ash.
When the storm finally died and the air settled, the corridor was a complete wreck.
Walls were shredded. Overhead pipes and cables hung in broken tangles, occasionally spitting sparks. The air reeked of something sharp and chemical.
"Experience cards really are the best."
Soren glanced at his empty hands and muttered to himself. "No worry about damaging them. Use them up and swap for new ones. Saves all the maintenance hassle."
The twin blades had shattered and vanished the second the tornado finished.
He swept his eyes over the floor covered in charred corpses and let out a quiet sigh.
These mutated monsters might have come in huge numbers, but killing them gave nothing. No points. No drops. Nothing.
He casually finished off a few that were still twitching, kicked a few severed limbs out of the way, and kept walking down the corridor.
At the far end was a heavy iron door. The indicator light above it flickered.
"Hiss—"
The moment he pushed it open, thick chemical fog blasted out of nozzles in the walls. Ultraviolet lights swept over him from above, scrubbing away every last trace of blood and gore.
Once the decontamination finished, the main door ahead slowly slid open.
Looks like this was the absolute bottom floor of the entire research base.
The space below wasn't huge—just a single wide circular chamber.
Right in the center stood a massive mechanical device roughly two stories tall. A glass dome covered the whole thing. Countless cables of every thickness stretched from every corner of the room and plugged into the machine.
Inside the glass dome sat a core that looked exactly like a giant human brain. The cables wrapped around its surface like blood vessels.
Six smaller incubation pods were arranged in a circle around the central machine.
Soren walked closer.
Each glass pod held a human body.
Their skin had been sliced open. Holes of every size covered their bodies, and red and blue tubes were jammed into every one of them.
The thickest tube of all stuck out of the top of each person's head and ran straight into the giant mechanical brain in the center.
In five of the pods the liquid had already turned murky. The bodies inside were heavily mutated and rotting. Long dead.
Only the last pod still held relatively clear fluid. Inside floated a stick-thin man whose chest was still rising and falling, barely.
Near the edge of the room, several human corpses lay sprawled in front of the control consoles.
Their limbs had been snapped in half, bones punching through skin. Every single head had been twisted a full one-eighty so their faces stared at their own backs.
And right there on the floor next to them lay Ada.
Sleep quality: excellent.
"So this is where they made Valried."
Everything outside had only ever existed to serve this place.
Soren stepped forward, planning to check on Ada first.
The woman still had plenty of secrets left. Letting her die here would be a waste.
"Clatter—"
In that exact moment several iron chains shot out of empty air from every direction.
Soren's body stopped cold. He drew and slashed in one motion.
"Clang!"
The chains were cut clean. They whipped back into the void a second later.
Pinhead stepped out of the shadows, the puzzle box turning slowly in his hands.
Beside him, several of the cenobites Soren had just finished killing earlier walked out one after another as if nothing had happened.
"They rebuild that fast?"
Soren raised an eyebrow as he looked them over.
Only Leviathan could create these things.
And Leviathan wasn't some deep-sea monster out of myths.
In the older doctrines, it was a Hell lord who ruled an entire domain—the embodiment of envy.
It envied the freedom and infinite possibilities of the living. It envied that humans could feel warmth, experience emotion, and reproduce.
So it wanted to crush everything in the world, strip away free will, and reshape all flesh into something permanent and unchanging.
Pinhead and these cenobites were the preachers it had created to spread that gospel.
"To some, we are demons. To others, we are angels."
Pinhead's face stayed completely blank.
"Spare me the philosophy lecture."
Soren had zero interest in listening to a sermon. His body exploded forward, blade already drawn as he charged straight at Pinhead.
The instant his long blade was about to leave the sheath—
A pitch-black shadow streaked through the air above him.
Soren's reaction was instant. Both hands locked on the blade and brought it up across his chest to block.
"CLANG!"
A massive force slammed down through the steel.
The black shadow hit the edge of the blade, bounced off immediately, and vanished into thin air the second it created distance.
Soren stood his ground and looked at the empty space where the shadow had disappeared. One eyebrow lifted slightly.
"So that's Valried?"
He locked eyes with Pinhead and asked coldly.
Pinhead's face lit up with something almost like religious rapture.
It raised its head, arms spread wide, and declared in a booming voice, "This is the purest pain this world has ever known. Human flesh is far too fragile… but this ultimate incarnation born from agony can carry the greatest of blessings."
Pinhead gently stroked the puzzle box in its hands and returned to that same flat calm. "I am addicted to this pain—"
Soren watched the pure enjoyment on the thing's face and asked again, "How the hell did you make this thing?"
"A human… one of the apostles found us."
Pinhead didn't seem to mind sharing the secret at all.
Or maybe it was simply proud—proud beyond measure—to have taken part in creating something this pure.