HELL'S ARCHITECT

Chapter 09. Ghost Facility

The light was painful. White, sterile, and cold.

Not a light that gave life, but one that stripped everything bare without empathy.

Elios squinted as he stepped across the steel threshold. His pupils contracted fiercely, forced to adapt from the absolute darkness of the sewer to the nerve-piercing clinical brightness. For a moment, the world felt flat, like a black-and-white photo dragged into overexposure.

His Shotgun lowered half an inch. His finger remained on the trigger guard.

Reflexes didn't die just because a room looked clean.

Behind him, Vera stopped moving.

Not because she feared dirt. The smell of sewage was gone, replaced by the scent of old antiseptic and cold metal. A smell belonging only to hospitals and morgues.

“This…” she whispered.

Her voice was small, almost lost in the vastness of the room.

They stood in a giant hall, three stories high, as wide as an aircraft hangar. The glossy white ceramic floor reflected their shadows cruelly. Two figures, dirty, bloody, and ragged, were clearly imprinted on the nearly perfect surface.

Vera’s tactical suit was torn on the side of her thigh. There was a small rip on her left arm, blood dried into a dark line against the white armor. Elios was no better. His leather jacket was covered in shrapnel marks and pale yellow stains from preservative fluid.

Along the curved walls, five-meter-tall cylindrical glass vats were lined up. Dozens. Perhaps hundreds. Each vat was filled with a pale yellow preservative fluid, still without a ripple.

And the contents…

Not animals.

Not dead artifacts.

Elios walked to the nearest vat. Every step echoed, feeling inappropriate in a place too clean for the truth it held. He pressed his palm against the glass. Cold. It made his skin crawl.

Inside, an arm floated.

The arm of a Behemoth demon. The muscles were still clearly defined, the fibers intact, as if it could clench into a fist at any moment. Its black claws were still sharp, the nails gleaming in the fluid.

But the cut was too clean.

This wasn't a battle wound.

This was a surgical incision.

The edges of the flesh were smooth, the bone precisely cut. Thin cables pierced the muscle tissue, connected to a small module at the shoulder that kept the cells alive.

Elios moved to the next vat.

A large, complex compound eye of an insect demon. The surface still shimmered faintly when hit by the light. Biological sensors that might still be active.

Then the venom sac of a Winged-Nightmare. Still pulsing slowly.

Elios took a deep breath, then exhaled with a low, shaky sound.

“This isn’t a laboratory,” he finally said. His voice was flat, but there was rage tightly locked in every syllable. “This is a workshop.”

He turned to Vera.

“They aren’t just killing demons. They’re harvesting them.”

Vera walked to a long workbench on the side of the room. Data tablets and paper files were scattered, covered in a thin layer of dust that failed to conceal the intense activity of the past. She picked up a folder, opening it.

Her hand trembled.

“Subject: Alpha-9,” Vera read softly. “Extraction date…”

She stopped.

Her face was pale.

“Five years ago,” she said slowly, as if afraid her words might wake something up. “The date… is exactly the same as the day of The Great Collapse.”

Elios clenched his fist. The glass of the vat vibrated subtly under the pressure of his fingers.

“So while we were busy burying bodies up there,” he said, “they were busy collecting spare parts down here.”

Vera flipped the next page, her breath growing short. “This document is signed by Chief Researcher Draven. Sanctum Veritatis Research Division.”

Elios gave a short, humorless laugh, then spat onto the white floor. A small stain ruined the room’s sterile perfection.

“I don’t need a stamp to know whose work this is.”

A mechanical whirring sound suddenly cut the air.

WHIRRR—CLICK.

Elios’s instinct screamed.

Panels in the ceiling opened simultaneously. Six Gatling turret units slowly descended, their twin barrels beginning to spin, searching for targets. Red lasers swept the room like hungry eyes.

“MOTION SENSORS!” Elios yelled.

One laser dot stopped precisely on Vera’s forehead.

“RUN!”

Elios tackled her without thinking, shoving Vera behind a heavy metal table as hell was unleashed.

BRRRRRRRRTTTTT!

The sound of the Gatling was not gunfire. It was the sound of tearing. Thousands of 7.62 mm rounds slammed into the room, shredding the air, the floor, and every illusion of safety.

The glass vats exploded one by one. Preservative fluid spilled out like a yellow flood. Pieces of demon bodies fell apart, hitting the floor with wet, heavy thuds.

The table they were hiding behind shook violently. The metal dented, shrapnel flying everywhere.

“I can’t shoot back!” Elios yelled amid the chaos. “My Shotgun won’t reach the ceiling!”

“The system is isolated!” Vera shouted back, typing frantically on her cracked tablet. “I need physical access to the main terminal!”

The terminal stood in the middle of the room. Ten meters of open space. Ten meters of death.

“Ten meters,” Elios measured quickly. “Can you run?”

Vera gave a bitter laugh. “With these legs? I’d be dead before I got there.”

Elios looked into Vera’s eyes. “Okay. I’ll run. I’ll draw the sensors. When the turrets focus on me, you run to the terminal and shut down these damn toys.”

“That’s suicide, Elios! The firing pattern is random!”

“I like random. More fun than Friday night bingo.”

Without waiting for approval, Elios took a deep breath, then leaped out from behind the table.

“HEY! RUST BUCKETS! OVER HERE!”

He didn't run straight. Elios slid low across the floor, slick with preservative fluid, his body moving in a zig-zag. All turrets rotated simultaneously.

Bullets chased him like a storm.

“NOW!”

Vera ran, wasting no opportunity. She ignored the pain in her legs, ignoring the whine of bullets ricocheting around her.

Elios shot the sensor camera of one turret. One unit was blinded, firing wildly. A stray bullet grazed Elios’s shoulder, tearing his leather jacket and scoring his flesh.

“Argh! Bastard!” Elios snarled but kept moving, throwing a smoke grenade to the center of the room.

Thick smoke billowed, disrupting the visual sensors. But one turret still locked onto Vera’s body heat.

“Access denied… come on…” her fingers trembled. One turret successfully locked onto her heat signature.

“Vera! Duck!” Elios saw it. He couldn’t reach Vera in time.

Elios did the insane thing. He threw his empty Shotgun with all his strength. The heavy weapon managed to hit the turret barrel just before the bullets fired.

*Klang.*

The aim shifted a fraction of a second. Enough.

“GOT IT!” Vera yelled. She successfully pressed the ENTER key.

The Gatling Gun rotation slowed. The red sensor lights on the ceiling went out. The hot barrels drooped limply, smoking.

Silence reigned for a moment, then broken by Elios’s tired laugh. His body slumped, clutching his bleeding shoulder.

“Damn it… my jacket.” he winced.

Vera leaned against the terminal, her legs weak. She looked at Elios from a distance. “A highly unorthodox tactical maneuver. Throwing your primary weapon? Foolish!”

“But it worked, didn’t it?” Elios slowly stood up, retrieving his slightly dented Shotgun.

Vera smoothed her hair, then her gaze shifted to the terminal screen. “Security system offline. The door to the Inner Sector is open.”

At the end of the room, the automatic double doors opened silently. Behind them was only thick darkness, no neon lights, no reflected light. A darkness that felt heavy.

“Come on,” Elios said, reloading his shotgun. “Let’s see what they’re protecting so fiercely.”

They stepped inside.

The flashlight on Elios’s shoulder illuminated a room that sharply contrasted with the previous lab. This wasn't a harvesting site. This was an experimentation chamber.

The room was circular, resembling a small arena. The walls were lined with thick lead, as if designed to contain radiation or screams. The floor was covered in old, dark brown stains that had dried over years.

In the center of the room, there was only one object.

An iron surgical chair.

The chair was equipped with large metal restraints for the neck, hands, waist, and legs. Infusion tubes with large needles at the ends dangled from the ceiling. An altar of suffering.

But what transfixed Elios was not the equipment.

The right wrist restraint of the chair was bent. Solid iron five centimeters thick was curved outward, twisted as if bent by something inhuman. Deep claw marks were etched into the armrest. Nails that pierced metal.

“Whoever sat there… they fought back,” Elios whispered, approaching it like a coffin.

Vera scanned. “There is high-level Demon Essence residue. Very high. Equivalent to a High-Demon.”

Elios touched the bent iron. Cold. Then his gaze fell to the floor beside the chair.

On the dirty concrete, there was writing. Made with a finger dipped in thick blood that had now blackened. The handwriting was messy, slanted, trembling, as if written in the midst of unimaginable pain.

E L I O S

Elios’s world collapsed.

His knees hit the floor. His Shotgun clattered away. He stared at the name. His name. Written five years ago in this cursed place.

He recognized the curve of the letter ‘S’.

Lyra’s handwriting.

“No way…” his voice broke, choked by heat in his throat.

All this time he had believed Lyra died instantly, buried under the building. Without prolonged pain.

But this chair… this writing…

Lyra was brought here. Still alive. Tied down. Tortured. Used as an experiment. And in the last moments of her consciousness, amidst pain enough to bend iron, she wrote her husband’s name.

Calling for Elios.

And Elios did not come.

“Elios?” Vera’s voice sounded distant. The cold agent’s face cracked when she saw the writing. “That… that is human handwriting.”

Elios’s hand trembled as he touched the letter ‘E’ made of dried blood. “I’m sorry…” his sob broke. His first tears in five years fell, staining the blood without being able to erase anything. “Forgive me, Lyra… My God, what did they do to you?”

Silence pressed down on the room, nearly crushing their chests.

Then from the darkest corner of the room, behind the shadow of a dead machine, a sound was heard.

Hhhhggggrrrr…

A low, wet, hungry growl. The vibration didn't come from the air, but directly inside their heads.

Elios’s instinct snapped awake. It wasn't a machine. It was the vibration of the Shadow Realm.

Vera took half a step back, her pistol raised. “Heat sensors are negative. But audio sensors are picking up breathing.”

Elios stood up. The sadness in his eyes vanished, replaced by black emptiness. He grabbed his shotgun.

“Vera,” he said flatly. “Get a flare ready.”

“What?”

“Something’s been tailing us. And it just made its biggest mistake.” The sound of the weapon cocking sounded like a death sentence. “It interrupted me while I was missing my wife.”

From the darkness, a pair of yellow eyes glowed without a body, then vanished.

Hunter-Demon.

“Come out,” Elios whispered. “Let me send you to hell. And deliver a message to the other demons while I’m at it.”

His tone was deadly cold.

“I’m coming.”