The thing that had been the researcher moved with a lurching, uncoordinated speed. It wasn't the fluid motion of a fighter, but the desperate, jerky spasms of a broken machine. The scalpel in its hand sliced through the air in a wild arc towards Otto.
The big enforcer didn't flinch. He met the charge not with his crowbar, but with a meaty shoulder, crashing into the puppeteered man and sending him stumbling back against the workbench. Glassware shattered, spraying chemical-smelling liquid across the floor.
"Just break its legs!" Otto barked, but the advice felt useless. How did you break the legs of a thing that was inside the man?
Lutz circled, knife held tight, his heart hammering against his ribs. This wasn't like the Gray Sharks. That had been messy, brutal, human. This was something else. A profound desecration. The horror wasn't just in the threat, but in the very existence of the thing in front of him. The man's face was a slack mask, but his body fought on, a vessel for an alien will.
The researcher's body righted itself with a series of sickening clicks from its spine. It ignored Otto and lunged for Lutz, the scalpel aimed with surprising precision at his throat. Lutz barely dodged, feeling the wind of the blade pass his cheek. He retaliated with a slash of his own knife, opening a deep gash across the man's forearm.
There was no cry of pain. No flinch. Only a dark, viscous fluid that oozed out, smelling of rot and ammonia. The centipede's antennae twitched faster, and the man's head tilted at an impossible angle, the milky eyes seeming to fix on Lutz.
Otto seized the opportunity, bringing his crowbar down in a crushing blow on the man's shoulder. The sound was a wet crack of bone. The arm holding the scalpel went limp, the weapon clattering to the floor. Yet the man did not fall. He simply turned his head, the centipede now staring directly at Otto, and with his good hand, he grabbed a shard of broken glass from the bench and swung it wildly.
"His head!" Lutz shouted, the realization dawning through his revulsion. "The thing in his head is controlling him!"
The puppeteer, not the puppet.
Otto grunted in acknowledgment, ducking under the glass shard. He was stronger, a professional brawler, but this… this unnatural resilience was getting to him. His attacks were meant to disable men, to break ribs and shatter kneecaps. This thing didn't seem to feel pain.
Lutz darted in again, this time aiming higher. His knife sliced across the man's chest, but it was like cutting tough leather. The centipede, as if sensing the shift in target, made the man's body stumble backward, putting the workbench between them.
A stalemate. They were fighting a corpse animated by a parasite.
Otto's patience snapped. With a roar of pure, unadulterated disgust, he charged, no longer trying to disable. He plowed into the researcher, sending them both crashing to the floor amidst the shattered glass and chemical puddles. The man's good hand clawed at Otto's face, but the enforcer was a whirlwind of brutal efficiency. He pinned the writhing body with a knee to its chest, ignoring the flailing limbs.
He raised his crowbar high, both hands on the grip.
"No— wait!" Lutz started, but the words died in his throat. What was there to wait for? This was mercy. This was necessity.
The crowbar came down.
It wasn't a clean strike. It was a butcher's blow. The first impact was a sickening, wet thud that cratered the man's forehead. The centipede writhed, its front segments lifting from the shattered bone, legs scrabbling frantically. The body beneath Otto bucked violently.
Otto swore and brought the crowbar down again. And again.
The sounds that followed were ones Lutz knew would haunt him forever. The crack of skull giving way. The wet, pulpy squelch of brain matter being crushed. The final, sharp pop and crunch of the centipede's chitinous body being pulverized into a smear of black goo and white fragments.
Finally, it stopped. The body lay still. Utterly, completely still.
Otto stood up, his chest heaving, his clothes and face spattered with blood and worse. The crowbar dripped onto the floor. The only sound was their ragged breathing and the slow drip of something from the bench.
Lutz stared at the ruin of the head. The man's face was now unrecognizable, a concave mess of blood, bone, and tissue, with the destroyed remains of the centipede embedded within it like some grotesque fossil. The horror was so absolute, so visceral, that he felt numb. This was beyond the Baron's calculated corruption. This was raw, biological blasphemy.
"Fuck," Otto panted, wiping his face with a bloody sleeve, only making it worse. "The hell was that?"
Lutz couldn't answer. He could only shake his head, his eyes glued to the carnage. The quest for power led to places like this. To men who would do this to other men. Was this the kind of knowledge he was seeking?
The initial shock began to recede, replaced by a cold, trembling urgency. They had to finish this. They had to be sure.
While Otto stood guard, breathing heavily, Lutz forced himself to search the rest of the laboratory, his eyes skipping over the horrific specimens in jars. He checked cabinets, pulled out drawers filled with more frantic notes and diagrams. His mind was still reeling, the image of the smashed head overlaying everything he saw.
And then, as his gaze swept over a secondary table cluttered with glassware, it finally registered.
There, under a pristine glass bell jar, isolated from the rest of the chaos, was a large, dormant mosquito. Its body was a deep, glossy black, and its abdomen was speckled with what looked like minute droplets of dried blood, as if it had fed on something… other than blood.
The Blood-Speckled Black Mosquito.
He had found it. In the heart of this nightmare, he had found the key to his next step. The horror of the last few minutes didn't vanish, but it was suddenly pushed aside by a fierce, burning triumph. The path forward, though paved with grotesque stones, was still open.
He reached out, his hand steady as he lifted the bell jar. The prize was his.
The triumph of finding the Mosquito was a cold, sharp shard in Lutz's chest, barely cutting through the numb horror that enveloped him. He stared at the insect, its blood-speckled abdomen a stark contrast to the pristine glass. It was a thing of nightmares, yet it represented salvation. The contradiction was dizzying.
"We need to be quick," Otto's voice was a gravelly rasp, cutting through the silence. He was already moving, his eyes, hard and practical, scanning the room not for its horrors, but for its value. The enforcer's mindset had reasserted itself; the shock of the fight was being metabolized into action. "Check his pockets. Then we clean this place of anything that's worth a damn."
Lutz nodded, the motion feeling jerky. He carefully lifted the bell jar, his fingers closing around the cool glass. The Mosquito didn't stir. He slipped it into a padded inner pocket of his coat, the weight of it feeling immense, a tangible piece of his future now secured. The act was grounding.
He then turned to the grisly task Otto had assigned. Approaching the corpse felt like walking towards a toxic spill. The smell of blood, brain matter, and the peculiar, acidic scent of the crushed centipede was overpowering. Swallowing the bile rising in his throat, Lutz knelt, avoiding the pool of dark fluids slowly spreading across the floorboards. He patted down the man's lab coat. The pockets yielded a small, folded leather wallet. Inside were a few Shields and an identification card naming the man as Dr. Albin Metzger. There was no strange key, no mysterious insignia. Just the mundane belongings of a man who had chosen to delve into the abyss alone.
"Metzger," Lutz murmured, giving the dead man a name. It made the scene feel more tragic, and in some ways, more terrifying. This wasn't the work of a vast organization; it was the product of a single, unhinged mind.
"Anything good?" Otto asked, already stuffing a handful of relatively clean-looking surgical steel tools into a burlap sack he'd found.
"Just some coin. Nothing else." Lutz pocketed the wallet.
Otto grunted. "Check the desk. The mad ones always keep their secrets close."
While Otto continued his methodical ransacking of the lab, pulling drawers open and upending their contents into his sack, Lutz went to the main desk. The journal that had spoken of "neural integration" and "parasitic synergy" was his primary target. He flipped through it quickly. The earlier entries were those of a brilliant, if eccentric, biologist, discussing insectoid neurology with sharp insight. But the script devolved over the pages, becoming a frantic, self-justifying scrawl.
...they don't understand. The university called my work 'a perversion of natural law.' Fools! Nature is the greatest pervert of all! I will show them. I will create a new symbiosis, a perfect union of will and flesh...
The subject's consciousness fights the merger. The pain is... immense. But is transcendence not worth any price?
It speaks to me now. The Centicorpus. It whispers of a world without the frailties of bone and sinew. A world of perfect, chitinous order. I must obey. I must perfect the union...
Lutz shuddered, closing the journal. This wasn't a man following a "Master's" directive. This was a man who had started an experiment and ended up a slave to the very abomination he was trying to create. The "Directive" came from the parasite itself. He tucked the journal inside his coat. It was a chilling case study of a mind's unraveling, and perhaps contained clues about the other ingredients he'd found.
He pulled open the desk drawers. They were filled with more notes, complex anatomical diagrams that grew increasingly surreal, and, in one drawer, a locked metal box. A few sharp blows with a heavy scalpel handle broke the cheap lock. Inside, nestled on velvet, was a modest stash of Gold Hammers and Silver Shields—the doctor's life savings, likely funding his descent into madness. Otto, peering over, gave a nod of approval as Lutz divided the coin evenly, the clink of metal a jarringly normal sound in the horrific room.
In a cabinet, they found vials of shimmering, iridescent liquids and powders that hummed with a faint, supernatural energy. Beyonder ingredients. Lutz's heart leapt. He didn't know what they were for, but their value was self-evident. He took them all, stuffing them into his pockets.
After an hour, the house was picked clean of anything immediately valuable. They stood once more in the ruined laboratory, the corpse of Dr. Metzger a silent testament to a madness that had consumed its creator.
"We need to burn it," Otto stated, his eyes on the body. "The whole thing. Can't leave this… mess. It's a poison. Better to scour it clean."
Lutz knew he was right. A fire would erase the evidence of their burglary and murder, but more than that, it felt like a necessary purification. Some knowledge was a cancer, and this house was its tumor.
They worked quickly, using the doctor's own chemical stores as accelerant. Otto, with a Pyromaniac's grim understanding of combustion, created a delayed fuse. They scattered papers, overturned furniture, and doused the ground floor in the foul-smelling liquids.
As they prepared to leave through the back door, Lutz took one last look at the hellish laboratory. The horror was no less, but its nature had changed. It was no longer a doorway to a larger conspiracy, but a sealed tomb of one man's personal hell. He had walked into a self-contained nightmare and emerged with the tools for his survival.
They slipped out into the alley just as the first tendrils of smoke began to curl from the shuttered windows. They didn't run. They walked, separating a few streets later with a curt nod, two shadows disappearing into the pre-dawn fog.
Back in the relative safety of his warehouse bunk, the adrenaline finally receded, leaving a bone-deep exhaustion. He carefully hid his haul: the Mosquito, the journal of a madman, the unknown Beyonder ingredients, and his share of the coin. The small fortune felt tainted, every Hammer stained with the image of Metzger's shattered skull and the echo of his final, whispered obedience to the thing in his head.
He lay in the darkness. The path to power was not paved with grand conspiracies, but with isolated, screaming tragedies. He had sought power, and the path had led him to a quiet street where a brilliant man had willingly offered his mind to a insect, all in the name of a transcendence that looked an awful lot like damnation.
He thought of Roselle's diary. To become something other than oneself... can one ever truly find the way back?
Lutz closed his eyes, the phantom scent of ozone and blood in his nostrils. He was stealing from the dead and the damned. And as he felt the weight of the Mosquito in his coat, hanging on the bedpost beside him, he knew the price for this theft would be paid in the currency of his own sanity. The fire on Eisner Lane had not erased the horror; it had merely baked it into his memory, a permanent fixture in the gallery of his mind.