It became an almost hypnotic process, a grimly perfected ritual of efficiency. I moved from room to room, a tiny angel of death navigating a den of sleeping sinners. The world was a series of overwhelming landscapes. Plush carpets became overgrown fields I had to painstakingly navigate, their fibers rising like giant blades of grass. Spilled drinks transformed into treacherous lakes. A discarded high-heel shoe was an abandoned sculpture.
For each target, the method was a silent perfected ritual:
Identify. Approach. Climb. Kill.
I entered a room that reeked of stale sweat, a cloying scent that permeated the very air. He was a Supe whose name was Slipstream. His power? Hyper-secretion. Yes, he lived up to the name in the worst possible way, now passed out in a literal puddle of his own greasy perspiration. The climb up his bedsheet was a disgusting affair, each tiny movement a struggle against the slick fabric. The final strike felt less like an execution and more like a small act of sanitation.
The next room was a stark contrast lit by a flickering light from a bedside lamp. A woman lay on the floor, her skin shifting through a nauseating rainbow of colors even in her unconscious state. It was a pathetic power, designed for nothing more than being a living disco ball, a fleeting visual distraction. Her death was less an execution and more like switching off a faulty lamp, its garish glow finally extinguished.
I moved on. A man I recognized from the files as "Arm-Fall-Off-Boy." The sheer absurdity of his Supe name was the only thing that threatened to break my unyielding focus. He was asleep on the floor, one of his arms detached and lying beside him like a discarded toy. The bizarre sight almost made me pause. I dispatched him with the same silent brutality and moved to the next room, leaving his severed limb where it lay, a morbid testament to his ridiculous ability.
Each life ended with the same quiet finality. There were no epic battles, no dramatic last words, no sudden cries for help. Just the almost imperceptible sound of a tiny blade finding its mark in the most vulnerable part of the human brain. I was an exterminator moving through an infested house, a surgeon exercising cancer, cell by cell, with chilling precision.
The work continued, a silent ballet of death performed on a miniature scale. The woman who could talk to insects, now voiceless. The man who could perfectly peel a banana with his mind, his unique talent now irrelevant. The twin brothers whose only power was to know what the other was thinking, their shared consciousness extinguished simultaneously. They all died the same way, their last moments peaceful and unaware.
The harvest was complete, achieved in absolute silence.
I retreated to the main lounge, the scene of the initial gassing, and retrieved the now empty CX-9 canister from the vent opening, tucking it away. The air was still heavy with the sickly-sweet scent of the anesthetic, but my own head remained perfectly clear, shielded by the compact filter mask sealed over my nose and mouth.
Remaining the size of a mouse, I navigated the vast landscape of the carpet, a tiny shadow in a room filled with motionless giants. The journey to the suite's main door was an expedition across a textile desert, each fiber a formidable obstacle. I reached the door and slipped through the infinitesimal gap underneath, emerging into the empty hallway.
A few minutes later, the elevator doors down the hall opened with a soft chime, and a pair of hotel staffers stepped out, their voices hushed in the quiet hours. As the doors began to slide shut, I scurried across the floor and slipped through the closing gap, my tiny form going completely unnoticed.
In the opulent lobby, a lone cleaner was methodically polishing the marble floors, and a night clerk dozed, behind the front desk. Crossing the wide expanse of polished marble was the most dangerous part of my exit. I stayed close to the shadowed wall, a darting speck of darkness against the reflective surface, before finally slipping under the main revolving door and out into the pre-dawn chill of the New York City air.
The sky was beginning to fade from the inky black of night to a deep and the city's perpetual hum was slowly starting to rise in volume, a low thrum that promised a new day. The four-block journey to the car was a high-stakes obstacle course for my shrunken form. Cracks in the pavement became treacherous canyons I had to navigate. A discarded plastic bag was a rustling monster, threatening to engulf me. I was an unseen observer, a ghost in the truest sense, traversing a world that was utterly oblivious to my existence.
I finally reached the parking garage, its concrete structure a looming cavern. The car was exactly where I had left it, a dark mountain of steel. I crawled up the rough texture of the tire, found the minute seal at the bottom of the driver's side door, and squeezed my tiny body through the rubber gasket into the car's interior.
Inside the leather-scented sanctuary of the sedan, I finally allowed myself to return to my proper size. With a silent shimmer my body filling the driver's seat as the world contracted around me. I pulled off the filter mask and gloves, storing them away in my inventory, their work done. I finally allowed myself a moment to process the weight of the night, an unfeeling tally of sixteen kills.
The drive back to the penthouse was quiet, the only sound was the hum of the engine. The skyline of Manhattan grew closer, a forest of glittering steel and glass that represented the pinnacle of human achievement and human arrogance. My building stood among them, my own personal fortress in the sky.
The private garage opened silently for my car. The security systems recognized me without an alert. I took the private elevator directly to the penthouse, a silent transition from the chaos of the outside world to the absolute control and solitude of my domain. The soft hiss of the penthouse door closing behind me was a sound of ultimate security.
I walked straight to my office and sank into the cool leather of the chair behind the obsidian desk. The multiple monitors awoke at my presence, bathing the room in a ethereal light, bringing the digital world to life.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, the Hacking Mastery turning complex code into an intuitive language, a natural extension of my will. I had a precise log of my route to and from the hotel. I accessed the archives for a dozen different cameras along the way. With surgical precision, I carefully edited my untraceable sedan out of existence. For a few imperceptible frames in each video, my car was simply not there, the algorithm seamlessly blending the background to fill the empty space, leaving no trace.
I slipped back into the hotel security system through the digital backdoor I had left open. Finding the footage from the lobby, the service corridors, and the elevator was simple. I painstakingly scanned the videos from the time of my arrival. My tiny form was almost impossible to see, a mere flicker in the shadows. But 'almost' wasn't good enough. I scrubbed my presence from every single frame.
The camera in the main hallway was still running its five-minute loop, a repeating segment. That would be my alibi for the entire floor. I downloaded that repeating segment of footage. Then, I accessed the server's core logs. I found the exact moment my gas canister was set to go off. I overwrote the next several hours of footage from the hallway camera with the clean loop. From the moment the gas was released until well after I had left, the official record would show an empty hallway. The massacre in the rooms next door had never officially occurred.
I closed the backdoor I had created, deleted the access logs that recorded my intrusion, and even wiped the router's short-term memory, leaving no digital breadcrumbs. As far as the hotel's IT department would ever know, their system had experienced a minor glitch for a few hours.
Only when every digital trace had been swept away did I lean back, the tension finally leaving my shoulders.