Chapter 198: 199 | Thirteen Signatures In A Single Container
I saw it through the stairwell window for maybe two seconds as we passed the fourth floor landing. Two seconds was enough. Two seconds was too many.
It was shaped like a person in the way a mannequin is shaped like a person. Roughly human proportions. Two arms, two legs, a head, a torso. That was where the resemblance stopped and the nightmare started. The skin was translucent. Not pale, not see-through, but the wrong opacity, like wax paper stretched over something dark and pulsing underneath. No face. The space where features should have been was smooth and blank, a flesh-colored oval with no eyes, no mouth, no nose, no indication that this thing had ever needed to perceive or communicate with anything in the conventional sense.
It was big. Seven feet minimum. Shoulders wider than the doorframe it had just walked through. Its hands hung below its knees, each finger too long by exactly the margin that made you understand this body was not grown but assembled by something that understood human anatomy the way a textbook understands a country it has never visited.
And the hum was coming from inside it.
Every cell in my body told me to run.
My drain, which had spent the last three weeks opening wider and wider with every woman I touched, every ability I copied, every connection I forged, was now a solid wall of NO. Whatever Essentia this thing operated on, my ability wanted nothing to do with it. That had never happened before. Not with Mera. Not with Cheon. Not with Nolan’s awakened form punching a hole through my ribcage. My drain had always been hungry. Always reaching. Always wanting more.
Right now my drain was playing dead and hoping the thing in the hallway didn’t notice it existed.
"Don’t stop." I hauled Noel down the stairs. Third floor. Second floor. We hit the ground floor lobby just as the front entrance doors blew open from the outside and Mera stepped through a portal that crackled with amber light, her eyes wild and her horns catching the glow of her own ability.
"What the fuck is THAT." Mera looked up at the ceiling. She could feel it too. I watched her tail go rigid and the color drain from her red skin, which I hadn’t known was possible. "Rome. What the FUCK is that."
"Where’s Cheon."
"Outside. She wouldn’t come in. Said the readings didn’t make sense."
"Smart girl. We need to—"
The ceiling above us cracked. A fault line of broken concrete raced across the lobby ceiling from one wall to the other, raining dust and chunks of plaster into the dark space. The thing on the fourth floor was moving. Each step sent another tremor through the building’s bones. It wasn’t searching. It wasn’t hunting. It was walking forward with the patient inevitability of a glacier.
Students who had evacuated before us were already spilling into the courtyard outside. I could hear their voices through the busted front doors, the panic, the confusion, someone shouting for campus security. Sirens in the distance. Good. Let the professionals handle this. I had zero desire to fight something that made my drain want to file a restraining order.
"Portal. Now. Outside. As far as you can manage."
Mera didn’t argue. She ripped a gate open in the lobby floor, amber light bleeding upward from the dark interior of the In-Between, and I grabbed Noel’s waist and jumped. Noel yelped. We dropped through three feet of cold nothing and emerged on the courtyard grass fifty meters from the building’s entrance, the portal snapping shut above us like a camera shutter.
I landed on my feet. Noel did not. She hit the grass on her side and rolled once, her glasses flying off her face and her portfolio case scattering papers across the damp lawn. I scooped her up before she could start yelling at me and set her on her feet facing away from Building F.
"My glasses."
"Noel."
"Those were prescription, you barbarian."
"Noel. Look at me."
She looked at me. Her grey eyes were wide and her violet hair was a complete disaster and she had grass stains on the Stark Industries shirt and one untied sneaker had come off entirely during the portal transit. She looked furious and terrified and small.
"Stay here. Do not move. Do not go back in. If that thing comes out of the building and moves toward you, you run. Not your astral form. YOUR LEGS. You run until you are somewhere else. Do you understand me."
"What are you going to do."
I didn’t answer because Cheon’s hand closed around my forearm from behind. She’d found us in the dark courtyard by tracking my Essentia the way she always tracked my Essentia, that background process in her ability that never stopped monitoring me no matter how far apart we stood.
"Rome. The readings." Her voice was tight. Not scared. Cheon didn’t get scared. Cheon got analytical at volumes the rest of the world would call terrified. "Whatever is in that building is not a person. It’s not a villain. It’s not anything I have in my database. The Essentia signature is... it’s multiple signatures. Layered on top of each other. Like someone took a dozen different people’s abilities and smashed them into one body."
The hum inside Building F increased in pitch. A window on the third floor shattered outward. Then the second floor. Glass rained down across the front steps.
"How many signatures."
"Thirteen. I count thirteen distinct Essentia patterns operating simultaneously within a single biological container. That is not possible. The human body cannot conduct more than three or four ability channels without catastrophic rejection. Whatever that thing is, it should not exist."
It shouldn’t exist. But it did. And it was walking down through the floors like it had nowhere in particular to be and all night to get there.
My system hadn’t stopped scrolling.
[ENTITY CLASSIFICATION: UNKNOWN]
[ESSENTIA COMPOSITION: COMPOUND / ARTIFICIAL]
[COMBAT RATING: INCALCULABLE]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY]
[NOTE: USER’S CURRENT ABILITY SET IS INSUFFICIENT FOR DIRECT ENGAGEMENT]
[NOTE: SERIOUSLY. RUN.]
