Leo's footsteps were the only sound in the ancient stone corridor. The echo of the grinding jaws of the Grave Snapper faded behind him, but the memory of its treachery was branded onto his mind. A hundred yards further on, another identical archway appeared in the wall, and Sarah's voice, a perfect, desperate mimicry, once again bled into the air.
"Leo… I'm hurt… please, I can hear you…"
This time, he didn't even slow down. He didn't look. He just walked past, his eyes fixed forward, his hand tightening on the cool steel of his baton. The voice faltered, then faded as he passed, like a sensor that had lost its target. The coldness in his heart was a new kind of armor.
The corridor finally ended, opening into a vast, cylindrical chamber that dwarfed any of the junctions he had seen. This was the nexus. It was a massive cistern, at least a hundred feet across, its stone walls soaring up into darkness. The air was cool and smelled faintly of bleach and rubbing alcohol, a sterile scent that had trickled down from the world above. In the very center of the chamber, a heavy-duty steel ladder was bolted to the floor, ascending into a circular opening in the ceiling—the maintenance hatch to the hospital's sub-basement.
Hope, sharp and painful, lanced through his new armor. He was here. He was directly beneath her.
He began walking towards the ladder, his boots making soft, sliding sounds on the clean stone floor. And then he saw her.
A figure stood at the base of the ladder, blocking his path. She wore a torn and dirtied doctor's coat. Her dark hair was matted with grime, her face pale and smudged. Her eyes, wide and filled with a terrifying, vacant fear, were fixed on him.
It was Sarah.
His heart stopped. For one, gut-wrenching second, every defense he had built, all his hardened resolve, shattered. His sister was here. Trapped. Waiting for him.
She took a clumsy, shuffling step towards him. Her arms rose, her hands outstretched in a pleading gesture.
"Leo," she breathed, and the voice was perfect. It was not a recording from a fleshy polyp; it was her voice, filled with pain and relief. "You came. I knew you would. I tried to get out… I fell… It's… it's been so long. Help me up. Take my hand."
He started to move, a puppet pulled by the strings of his own heart. But then he stopped. His enhanced Wisdom, a cold, unfeeling sentinel in his mind, screamed at him.
Something was wrong.
Her movements were stiff, her joints bending at slightly the wrong angles, like a marionette with tangled strings. Her expression was one of terror, but it was frozen, a mask that didn't shift or react. It was the uncanny valley, a perfect copy with a fatal flaw in its soul.
He forced himself to analyze, to observe. And then he saw them.
Faint, shimmering threads, almost invisible in the gloom, connected her to the darkness near the ceiling. They were woven from pure shadow and malice, leading from her back, her arms, her head, up to a cluster of deep shadows clinging to the high walls of the cistern.
This wasn't his sister. This was a doll. A puppet made to look like her.
[Threat Detected: Lvl 9 Puppeteer (Controlling)]
[Sub-Unit Detected: Re-animated Human Corpse (Marionette)]
The words confirmed his horrifying suspicion. This thing hadn't just copied her voice; it had found a body, a poor woman who had likely fallen down here, and sculpted it into a mockery of his sister. The rage that filled him was a clean, purifying fire.
"Take my hand, Leo," the puppet repeated, its voice cracking with false emotion. "We can get out of here. Together."
"Where did you get it?" Leo asked, his own voice low and lethally calm.
The puppet's head tilted. "What? What are you talking about? It's me, Sarah!"
"The body," Leo clarified, taking a slow, deliberate step forward. "The woman you're wearing. Where did you find her?"
The puppet's placid mask of fear finally broke. Its face twisted into a snarl of inhuman rage. The shimmering threads pulled taut, and it lunged at him, no longer shuffling, but moving with a horrifying, unnatural speed, its fingers hooked into claws.
Leo didn't raise his baton. He didn't draw his pistol. Fighting the puppet was useless; it would just be repaired and sent at him again. He had to deal with the source of the problem. He had to sever the connection. He had to clean the stain.
As the Sarah-marionette flew at him, Leo raised his empty hand, palm forward. The words of the skill felt more powerful, more meaningful than they ever had before.
[Scrub Clean]!
He didn't target the puppet. He targeted the influence, the filthy, parasitic control that animated it.
A wave of brilliant, cleansing blue light erupted from his palm. It wasn't the small shimmer he used to remove a bloodstain. This was a focused, powerful beam of pure, conceptual order. It struck the puppet mid-lunge.
The effect was not violent, but it was absolute. The shimmering, shadowy threads connected to the puppet crisped and vanished like cobwebs in a fire. The borrowed life in the puppet's eyes blinked out. Its limbs went limp, its forward momentum collapsed, and it fell to the stone floor in a boneless heap, no longer a monster, just a tragic, discarded corpse.
From the shadows high above, a piercing, psychic shriek of pain and fury echoed in Leo's mind. The Puppeteer, its prize possession taken from it, was revealed.
It dropped from the ceiling, a creature of spindly limbs and distilled spite. It was no bigger than a man, with a hunched, wizened body and a head dominated by a single, milky-white eye. Its fingers, long and thin like a surgeon's, crackled with shadowy energy. It had expected its psychological weapon to win. It had no defense against a direct assault.
It hit the ground and scrambled away, its cowardice overriding its rage, trying to melt back into the shadows of a far wall.
It wasn't fast enough.
Leo raised his other hand, the 9mm pistol feeling like a natural extension of his will. The sound of the gunshot was a deafening, final roar in the vast chamber, an alien noise of steel and fire in a world of stone and flesh.
The bullet struck the Puppeteer center mass. The creature stumbled, its single white eye wide with shock, then collapsed, the shadowy energy around it dissipating into nothing.
[You have killed Lvl 9 Puppeteer. +850 XP.]
[Quest Updated: The Path is Clear.]
Silence.
Leo stood over the two fallen forms—the puppet and its master. He felt no triumph. He felt no relief. He simply felt… empty. The trials of the sewer had systematically stripped him of his fear, his doubt, and his emotional vulnerabilities. What was left was a grim, determined core of purpose.
He walked over to the puppet. With a gentleness that surprised even himself, he reached down and closed the corpse's staring eyes, giving this unknown woman the peace in death she'd been denied. Then, using his [Mop Up] skill on a metaphysical level, he reabsorbed the slime from his boot soles, the frictionless coating no longer needed. He needed traction for the climb.
He turned and faced the ladder. His goal. It was fifty feet of steel rungs, leading up into the light. Each rung was a step away from this nightmare world of filth and darkness. Each rung was a step closer to the real Sarah.
He holstered his pistol, secured his baton, and placed his hand on the first, cold rung of the ladder. His long journey through the guts of the city was over. Now, it was time to ascend.