Back at the Hiyori Nightclub, the situation had already co apart.
Outside, IFSA helicopters in red and blue swept across the city in a wide-area search pattern, responding to reports of a high-profile vampire sighting.
The city had barely recovered from one ergency before finding itself inside a second, and the mood on the ground reflected that, the kind of disoriented unease that sets in when official channels stop being reassuring and start adding to the noise.
Nightless Street, which had been packed with people an hour ago, had emptied out with remarkable speed. Vendors stood in front of shuttered displays and asked each other what was happening.
Roughly ten minutes after the initial disturbance, a line of black sedans pulled up outside the Hiyori. Armored personnel climbed out and began establishing a periter, the logo of a private security company on their shoulders.
Leading them was a broad-shouldered man with a scar running down one side of his face, the kind of face that had been in enough situations to stop finding them interesting.
He assessed the nightclub’s entrance, assigned the standard units to hold the periter, and gathered his better people for the interior push.
He loaded a magazine into his assault rifle without rushing, was speaking sothing into his earpiece, when a disturbance from below shook the entire building. The floor moved visibly. He accelerated his pace.
Then a figure appeared at the entrance.
The figure’s back was to them. An old man, slightly stooped, white-haired and balding at the crown, a plain chain around his neck, dark unremarkable clothes. He turned when he heard them approach, and the scarred man stopped moving.
He had seen this face before, in photographs, in briefings, in the kind of institutional records that accumulated around people who had existed long enough to matter to many different parties.
Never in person. The discontinuity between the ordinary-looking elderly man and the weight of the na was its own kind of shock.
One of his elite personnel lost composure first.
"You, you’re Archbishop Michelle? One of the Church’s thirty-nine archbishops?"
The old man’s eyes moved to the man who had spoken. They were the kind of eyes that had been accumulating experience for a long ti, clear in the way that clarity requires great depth rather than absence of depth.
The elite operative looked at them for a mont and then found sothing very interesting on the ground.
"Yes."
The scarred man ran through his options. An archbishop’s rank implied nothing about fighting ability specifically, but it implied a great deal about everything surrounding fighting ability, authority, institutional consequence, the kind of weight that made problems larger after the fact.
At the sa ti, the money his employer was offering for the contents of this building was the kind of number that made retirent a real possibility.
He made his decision and stepped forward, keeping his voice level and reasonable.
"Archbishop Michelle, sir, I have no wish for conflict with you. I’m only asking you to step aside. The matter here doesn’t involve you, and I’d be sorry to see soone of your standing and history drawn into sothing that might not reflect well in the press.
Modern dia can be creative about the stories they choose to tell, and about how they choose to tell them. I say this with respect, not as a threat. I say it as a fellow believer, offering a word of caution about appearances."
He had assessed the man in the first few seconds and gone imdiately for the leverage that worked on public figures: reputation, the fragility of a carefully built image, the fear of late-career embarrassnt.
"What you do in public reflects on the Church in this city. I hope you understand that."
The archbishop looked at him without any particular shift in expression. He shook his head once, very slightly.
"I’m simply standing here. Whatever you choose to do is your own business."
The scarred man had prepared for several responses. That particular one wasn’t among them. He considered it, found no obvious counter, and walked past the old man into the nightclub, his elite team following.
The archbishop watched them go. He made a quiet sound, not quite a word, and shook his head again with the mild sorrow of soone watching a predictable mistake unfold.
---
Inside, they hadn’t taken three steps before it started.
The walls were watching them.
Not taphorically. The scarred man registered the sensation imdiately, every surface in the room, every piece of furniture, every object, directing attention toward them in a way that had nothing to do with having eyes but communicated the sa information. The feeling of being observed by twelve different things at once, none of them blinking.
"Hold your formation. It’s a psychological effect. We have twelve people and mutual cover, follow to the underground, keep moving."
He said it as much for himself as for the others and kept walking.
The scream ca from behind him.
One of his elite personnel had stopped moving. The wall behind him had changed, the white surface had developed a texture like sothing saturated with adhesive, fine filants extending from it and wrapping around the man’s shoulders, his arms, pulling inward.
"Get out—!"
The man’s weapon opened up on full auto. Large-caliber rounds at close range against the white wall, and the wall absorbed them completely.
The ammunition disappeared into the surface the way a stone disappears into standing water, a brief disturbance in the texture and then nothing. Not even a mark.
Sixty-round drum magazine, and then the man was down to his elbows, striking backward into the wall, and the resistance his body gave to the pull seed to work against him, every struggle pulling him faster, deeper.
The team watched in disbelief as the white surface took him in entirely, the outline of his shape visible against it for a mont, both fists pushing outward from inside, then gradually losing relief, losing definition, drawn back into sothing behind the surface.
Movent. Still alive. Then not moving.
"Stop firing, it’s not working, N3, you’re up!"
The scarred man redirected to the one team mber carrying a staff rather than a weapon, a hexagonal-cut stone at the tip, the material carrying a faint internal warmth.
The mage raised it, murmured sothing with focus in it, and an array of red light took shape in the air in front of him.
Fire ca through the array in a sustained stream.
The white wall caught it differently than it had caught the bullets. Fla worked, the fine filants charred and fell, the sll of burning organic material sharp in the closed space, layers of scorched surface peeling back in flakes.
Then the floor directly beneath the mage opened.
Not explosively. It simply gave way at the edges, a small pit forming around one foot, locking it in place. The staff fell. The array collapsed. A second aperture opened beside the first, clamping the other ankle.
Sothing below was pulling him down with substantially more force than one person could oppose.
A second team mber grabbed his arm and leaned back with everything he had, and the split edges of the wood, which were jagged rather than clean, dug into the mage’s ankles with each centiter of downward movent, slicing into the tissue, the blood coming quickly.
Another scream, from a different direction.
At the corner of the room, another team mber was going backward into the dark, sothing around his throat, moving him fast, the sound cut off after a few seconds.
The scarred man’s face was slick with sweat. The rate of attrition was impossible. In minutes, in an enclosed civilian venue, his team had been reduced by three with no effective response identified.
None of this could be the building itself. The building couldn’t do this.
He looked back at the entrance.
The old man was still standing outside. He hadn’t moved.
The realization settled over the scarred man with the specific quality of understanding sothing you can’t un-understand.
The archbishop had said: I’m simply standing here. Whatever you choose to do is your own business.
He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t followed them. He was just standing at the entrance, and the entire nightclub was eating his team from the inside.
The title of archbishop, what it implied about rank, about capability, about the category of things a person at that level could do, reorganized itself in his mind into sothing that made more sense now than it had at the door.
Thirty-nine archbishops in the entire Church.
Each one represents an extraordinary individual who has reached the pinnacle in a certain aspect; each one is a powerful being with a level starting in the double digits.
The gap between superhumans is even more exaggerated than the gap between a human and a dog. A hundred Lv1 superhumans cannot defeat a single Lv10 superhuman. The difference in level is as insurmountable as an insurmountable chasm. Moreover, the person in front of us is clearly more than Lv10.
He finally, fully, understood what that ant.
The nightclub continued its work around him, patient and unhurried.
Like a patient beast, it slowly and thodically devours each of its prey.
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