The bullpen of the Crestwood PD had become a theatre of silent, shared psychosis. The air was thick with the smell of burnt coffee and despair. Detective Nia Holloway sat cross-legged on her chair, a study in elegant ruin. Her nice skirt was wrinkled, her usually sharp posture slumped. She watched the broadcast not with a detective's eye, but with a human being's profound disgust. The chat scroll was a live feed of a soul's corruption. "It's like watching a wound get infected in real time," she murmured, her voice hollow.
The techs, Stacy and her team, were ghosts at their stations. Their earlier defeat had calcified into a numb, hopeless inertia. The revelation about the bots and the pre-recorded host had severed the last tether to a rational world.
Lieutenant Caleb Thorne stood apart, a statue of paternal anguish carved from pure tension. Every muscle in his back and shoulders was corded tight. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets to hide their trembling. His eyes, red-rimmed and burning, were locked on the large central screen. He wasn't seeing the chat, or the Favor meter. He was seeing only his son. Marcus's face, caught in a moment of confused anger as he stared at the catatonic Elijah. My boy. My smart, arrogant, terrified boy. The deletion poll for Richie was a horror, but the sight of Marcus trapped in that sterile hell was a personal icepick to the heart.
Then the floor of the control room on-screen vanished. The colossal form began to rise.
Caleb's breath hitched.
He watched, along with everyone in the bullpen, as the mountainous humanoid figure—Cael—assembled itself from the earth. The scale of it was incomprehensible, beamed into their safe, fluorescent-lit room. He saw Chloe's tremor, saw Vivian's collapse, saw Richie's numb indifference.
Then he saw Elijah freeze.
He saw the blood drain from the young man's face, saw the utter, foundational terror that locked his joints. He heard the sadistic old man's chuckle: "Oho… looks like someone recognizes the old stories."
And something… itched in the back of Caleb's own mind.
It was a scent. Not a smell, but a memory-scent. Old paper. Polished wood. A specific, dusty, sun-warmed stillness. It was the feeling of a large, quiet house in the afternoon. The image of the colossal figure, serene and mighty, its chest emblem glowing, tugged at a thread in a part of his memory he never visited.
On screen, Marcus slapped Elijah. The crack of it seemed to echo in the silent bullpen. Elijah snapped back, his expression shifting to a furious, dread-tainted glare directed at the masked Witnessing Hollow.
The little girl's voice announced the next game, teasing about surprises.
The giant's leg opened.
But Caleb was no longer fully processing the narrative. The colossal figure… Cael. The name meant nothing to him. Yet the image… it swam in the murk of his subconscious, connected to that feeling of the quiet house, the old paper. It was a forgotten toy from a forgotten room. A picture in a book he'd long ago thrown away.
His detective's mind, trained to spot patterns in chaos, made a connection it couldn't yet understand. Elijah's reaction wasn't just fear of a giant monster. It was recognition. A personal, traumatic recognition. And if this entire spectacle was, as they were beginning to suspect, a targeted purge of Halvern-connected sins… what was Elijah Carter's connection? And why did the symbol of that purge stir a ghost in his own attic?
His thoughts were a chaotic whirl. He saw Nia's look of dread. He saw Owen Kessler staring not at the screen, but at him, with an unreadable, intense glance that felt less like concern and more like suspicion. Does he think I know something? The paranoia was a vine, tightening.
On screen, the captives began to drop, one by one, into the leg of the giant. The feed switched to a shaky, internal green-tinged camera view. They were inside. The game was beginning.
A young cop at a nearby desk, voice shaky, broke the silence. "What is this guy's deal? The mask, the games, this… this giant robot thing? Is he just a psychopath who likes to build sets?"
Caleb didn't turn. His eyes were glued to the glowing emblem on the giant's chest, now filling the screen as the internal camera looked up. Gears and wings. Judgment and escape.
"No," Caleb said, the word coming out rough and certain. "It's not about pleasure. Not just that." He finally tore his gaze from the screen, looking at the board with the Halvern victims. Freeman. Shaw. Damien Halvern. Mehra. A clean-up crew for a powerful family. "From the Ever Thorne murders five years ago to now… the through-line isn't the method. It's the targets. They're all stones in a wall protecting the Halvern castle." He gestured weakly at the screen, where the giant's internal gears were now beginning to grind. "And this… this is the siege engine. But it's not just breaking the wall. It's broadcasting the break. It's humiliating the architects. It's making a myth out of their destruction."
Nia shook her head, her beautiful features drawn with exhaustion. "Even if every victim was a Halvern ghost, Caleb, it's still just… gnats buzzing a tank. The Halverns are untouchable. Federal ties, private armies of lawyers, friends in shadows so deep they never see light. Locking them up? It's a fantasy. So what's the endgame? An elaborate, live-streamed suicide note?"
Caleb had no answer. The frustration was a physical pressure in his skull. He looked at the screen, at the green-tinted view of his son now edging across a narrow platform inside the giant's leg, a torrent of unnatural water churning below. His fear for Marcus was a white-hot star. His confusion was a dark tide.
And from the core of that conflict, from the centre of his own helpless rage and paternal terror, something strange leaked into his perception. It wasn't a thought. It was a sight, but not with his eyes.
Around his own clenched fists, resting on the desk, the air shimmered. A faint, pulsing aura of deep, angry amber, the colour of a warning light, flickered into being. It was semi-transparent, like heat haze over a summer road. He blinked, and it faded. From Nia, he caught a wisp of steely grey frustration, evaporating as soon as he focused on it. From the defeated Stacy, a dull, hopeless ochre mist drifted from her shoulders toward the ceiling vent.
He was hallucinating. Stress. Exhaustion. Grief.
But it felt… directed. Siphoned.
The giant on screen, Cael, took a step in its vast chamber. The ground in the bullpen didn't shake, but Caleb's soul did. That forgotten-memory scent—old paper, quiet house—flooded back, stronger now, mixed with a new, acrid tang: ozone and blood.
The endgame wasn't imprisonment. It wasn't even justice.
As he watched his son struggle inside the god-machine, Caleb Thorne felt a dreadful, formless understanding dawn. This was alchemy. They were not just targets or contestants.
They were ingredients.
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