Inside the Hiyori Nightclub’s upper floors, a room had gone entirely still.

High-end automatic rifles, anti-materiel sniper hardware, a rotary grenade launcher, staves engraved with operational glyphs, all of it on the floor.

This equipment, combined with the Demon the scarred man had contracted, had been the foundation of the squad’s confidence.

With this loadout and practiced coordination, they’d killed more than one Lv4 transcendent. They’d done it cleanly, efficiently, without any of the people involved getting particularly hurt.

The room didn’t care.

Armor and ballistic vests had been shed across the floor in the way soldiers shed weight when a battle becomes a rout. Magazines were still full. The weapons had done nothing.

The enemy was not a person, not a grouped target, not anything they could orient against. The enemy was the room itself, every wall, every surface, every ordinary object in it, all of them participants.

You couldn’t set fire to a wall that was made of something fire didn’t mean anything to. You couldn’t shoot a floor.

A grenade in a sealed room was as likely to damage the person throwing it as whatever it was thrown at, and in the case of this room, the floor and walls wouldn’t register damage regardless.

The scarred man had started with twelve. He’d watched them go one by one, walls closing around someone and not letting them back out, floors opening and swallowing people whole, a curtain coming alive and taking a fully equipped elite operative by the throat, effortlessly, as though the weight and the combat training and the weapons were irrelevant categories.

He was the only one left.

"Damn it all, what is that archbishop’s ability? Nothing like any ecclesiastical magic I’ve ever heard of. That man is a devil!"

A decorative blade mounted on the wall pulled free and flew at his knee.

He grabbed it mid-flight with his ability, the electromagnetic control that let him command small unpowered metal objects, the skill that had made him a one-man weapons platform. The blade shuddered in the air, caught, stopped.

His other hand reached for a grenade on the floor. The pin extracted itself and the weapon rose into the air, guided by the same ability, launched at the incoming blade.

Boom.

The low-yield fragmentation round tore the blade into pieces. The shards hit the floor and went still, like something that had been briefly animated and was now simply metal again.

He didn’t get a breath. The curtain on the far window peeled itself from its rod and came for his throat, the same method that had taken the other operative, aiming to lift him off the ground.

He swept the assault rifle up from the floor with his ability, held it in the air, and put a burst into the curtain at close range.

The fabric was not the same as the walls, the heavy-caliber rounds went through it immediately, shredding it into sections that fell to the floor like ordinary cloth.

Crash.

The floorboards under him collapsed without warning. His knees dropped into the gap and lodged there, half his body stuck.

The sofa across the room lurched from its position and accelerated toward him like a thrown vehicle.

He got the rotary grenade launcher up.

Three rounds into the sofa at point-blank range. The fire came immediately and the impact blew the furniture apart, real leather burning well, the wreckage scattered across a wide area in pieces that kept burning.

"How do I get out of here?"

His ability was the whole of his combat capacity, the capacity to take every piece of modern weaponry in a room and operate it simultaneously, a multiplier that had made him genuinely dangerous in every engagement he’d previously been in.

Here it was just enough to keep him alive for one more threat before the next one arrived. The room was patient and it had more resources than he did.

Every piece of furniture that had survived the fight was watching him. He could feel it. None of them were moving yet, but none of them were done.

He opened his mouth to call toward the entrance, to try to get the archbishop’s attention, to make some offer, to find any angle that might get him out of the room intact.

A wet cloth hit his face.

The table beside him had organized itself without his noticing, a dry cloth, water from somewhere, the two combined and applied to his face in a single motion.

The wet fabric pressed flat against his skin, molded to his features, blocking both nostrils and his mouth simultaneously.

He reached for it with both hands.

The ceiling fan came down, not falling, dropped precisely, and both blades hit the floor on either side of his left elbow, the geometry trapping his arm between them as effectively as a pair of handcuffs embedded in the wood.

His right hand pulled the cloth free.

The cloth wrapped around his fingers before he could drop it and torqued, sharp and deliberate.

Every finger on his right hand snapped out of alignment at once and hung there, unresponsive.

"I surrender! I’ll leave! I’m leaving right now! Please!"

The decorative chandelier above him made a small precise sound as its mounting screws rotated themselves out of their housing. The solid glass fixture inverted toward him, its lower surface catching the light on the way down, reflecting his face back at him as it came.

Crash.

Glass everywhere. Components across the floor. The scarred man went down under the impact, blood running freely, and didn’t get up.

The room shuddered once, every surface, every object, all at once, and then the quality of the air changed.

The sense of being watched from the furniture, the specific menace of things that should have been inanimate, all of it released. The room became a room again.

"The difficulty was never in the trouble," the Archbishop said from the doorway, entering at his own pace. "Only in the choosing to cause it."

He looked around at the state of things, folded his hands together, and clapped once.

Every surface that had absorbed someone opened. The wall gave back its person. The floor gave back its person. The other places gave back their people.

All of them alive, all of them unconscious, all of them distributed across the room in the posture they’d been in when they were taken.

The Archbishop moved among them without hurry, pressing a long parchment to each forehead in turn.

"I’m a softhearted man. I find it difficult to watch people die. So you’ll all live, thank you very much, and when my student needs witnesses you’ll be available for that purpose. Perhaps that can serve as some small accounting for what you’ve done."

His manner was entirely unlike what people expected from the title. The voice was easy, touched with irony, familiar in the way that belonged to someone who had long since stopped finding his own authority intimidating and had started finding it somewhat amusing.

He crouched beside the scarred man and examined him with an interested expression.

"Unusual Demon. I don’t recognize the type. IFSA will have questions, I expect. Something to bring to the table."

He heard footsteps on the stairs, quick, purposeful, and looked up.

Miguel came in at speed, registered the scene around him, the unconscious bodies, the destroyed fixtures, the general evidence of something having very thoroughly happened, and looked toward the source, and stopped.

"Archbishop? You, you came yourself?"

His composure had left him entirely. The Archbishop waved the expression off with a fond, slightly exasperated gesture.

"I’m old, not dead. The occasional outing does the joints good. And I hadn’t seen you in some time, this seemed as reasonable an occasion as any. Look at you. You’ve grown."

His voice had something genuinely warm in it, underneath the lightness. Miguel heard it.

He also heard the real purpose underneath, this man had come personally because if the situation turned out to have been misjudged, he intended to be the one standing in front of the consequence. The responsibility would be his to carry, not his student’s.

"Archbishop."

"Not now," Miguel said to himself before he could continue. There were too many things to say, accumulated over too many years of separation, and none of them belonged in this moment.

He steadied himself.

"There’s something urgent that needs your help."

The warmth in the Archbishop’s expression shifted to attention. He followed Miguel’s lead down to the underground level and stopped when he saw what was there.

The captives were on their knees. Every collar was lit from within, red light pulsing with a rhythm that had nothing to do with anything in this building, filaments of energy extending outward along the skin.

"This is..." The Archbishop looked at it carefully. His years of experience sorted it before he had to ask the question. "A vampire’s investiture ritual?"

He observed for a moment, then spoke with the directness of someone who understood the problem and had dealt with similar ones before.

"Two things matter. First: delay. The vampire’s advancement takes time, the ritual requires the moon’s blessing accumulated across an entire night, from now until sunrise, and the pace cannot be forced. Every interruption is time bought. Second: kill. To recover these people, the ritual’s center has to be destroyed. Which means the vampire."