Chapter 94: Saint Hilarius Hospital (26)
BBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
A cosmic explosion. Not just a boom; a true shockwave struck the entire B3 floor!
The concrete floor beneath them rippled as if it were a cloth carpet being violently shaken.
The solid laboratory walls, meters thick with titanium, began to groan and emit ear-splitting creaks.
Then... everything started collapsing.
Massive cracks, like earthquake trenches, split across the remaining ceiling above them.
The glowing golden letters engraved on the walls — the absolute protection spells placed personally by "Saint Hilarius" to prevent the hospital vaults from collapsing — began flickering hysterically, then... shattered like glass fragments!
"What is this earthquake?!" Kyle shouted, trying to keep his balance and keep Sia and Valisera away from the cracks swallowing the tiles.
"It’s not an earthquake!" Eva roared, her eyes fixed on the fractured ceiling as debris the size of cars rained down.
"It’s them! ’The Executioner’ and ’The Viscous Reaper’! The two S-rank monsters on the upper floor... their battle is destroying the hospital’s entire infrastructure! Saint Hilarius’s spells can’t withstand the clash of two zone kings!"
Eva was right.
Directly above them, on B2, the mutual annihilation battle between the nightmare of fire and the nightmare of acid was reaching its peak.
Heat that melted steel, and the hydraulic pressure of an ocean of blood, were grinding through the floors.
"We have to move! The ceiling will collapse on us completely!" Kyle shouted, pulling Valisera, placing her intact arm around his neck to support her, while Eva placed the collapsed Sia’s arm around her own neck.
The four ran — or rather stumbled and dragged themselves — through falling debris.
Every step was a struggle against gravity and pain.
The ceiling collapsed behind them like a rain of concrete meteors.
"Where do we go?!" Sia screamed.
"Anywhere that leads down!" Kyle replied, his eyes scanning the destruction.
He saw a massive fissure that had split the floor from the quake — a deep, wide gap sloping into absolute darkness toward B4.
"Jump!" Kyle shouted.
There was no time to think.
The four leapt into the dark gap at the same moment the Chimera Laboratory ceiling collapsed entirely, crushing everything they left behind — including Aiden’s hanging corpse — to be buried forever under thousands of tons of rubble.
This fall wasn’t long, but it was violent.
They slid down a shattered concrete slope and landed amid a pile of sticky, soft plastic tubes.
"Ugh..." Kyle groaned as he rose, wiping a jelly-like substance from his face.
The four stood with difficulty.
Valisera was breathing hard, Sia was nearly losing consciousness from Eitra exhaustion, and Eva guarded them with her secondary pistol.
When Eva raised her tactical pistol light to illuminate the area... terror froze their blood.
They had reached Basement Level Four — B4.
"The Cursed Nursery."
This was not a hospital floor. Not a laboratory. Not a farm.
It was... a gigantic "womb."
The walls weren’t concrete; they were completely covered in pink and red fleshy tissue, pulsing slowly in a disgusting, nauseating rhythm.
The floor was soft, spongy, and coated in a sticky yellowish amniotic fluid.
From the fleshy ceiling hung thousands — no, tens of thousands — of large transparent "sacs" or cocoons, connected to the walls by thick umbilical cords that pulsed and pumped unknown fluids.
Inside these cocoons... were beings.
They were deformed fetuses, infants — or what once had been infants.
Their bodies were fused with metallic parts, or had extra limbs, or entirely black eyes.
They floated in fluid inside the cocoons.
The sound on this floor was enough to drive the strongest minds insane.
It wasn’t silence.
It was "crying." Thousands of infants crying at the same time — but it wasn’t human crying; it blended with monstrous gurgling and muffled demonic growling, all emitted at the same frequency.
"What... is this hell..." Kyle whispered, his crimson eyes widening in indescribable horror.
"This... is the Folders’ nursery," Valisera said in a broken voice, leaning on Kyle’s shoulder.
"Here... they take children... merge them with pure aberration Eitra... to generate new entities... the army of the future."
Suddenly... the crying stopped.
Tens of thousands of deformed infants in the cocoons fell silent in a single second.
The silence that followed was more terrifying than the crying itself.
Then... from the depths of this gigantic nightmarish womb, from among forests of hanging cocoons, a heavy, sticky, trembling movement was heard.
"Slash... slash... slash..."
A colossal shadow began emerging from between the red tissues.
It wasn’t a small aberration.
It was a being twenty meters tall, wide enough to block the horizon!
"The Brood Mother"...
The monster ruling B4. A pure S-rank.
Her form defied every nightmarish description.
She had no defined body; she was a massive swollen sagging mass composed of thousands of naked female bodies fused together to form a mountain of pale flesh.
She had no legs — she crawled using hundreds of human arms dangling beneath her like a deformed centipede.
But the head... the head was the most horrifying.
It wasn’t a single face. The head was a giant open flower of flesh, and instead of petals, there were dozens of weeping female faces.
And in the center... a massive circular opening filled with earthworm-like teeth, pulsing and releasing black gas.
"We... woke the mother..." Sia whispered, trembling entirely.
The multiple female faces on the Brood Mother’s head opened their mouths together.
She didn’t roar.
She released a "scream."
A massive, ultra-high frequency — not fully audible to the human ear, yet striking the brain directly!
"AAAAAAAGH!"
Kyle, Eva, Sia, and Valisera collapsed at the same moment!
The frequency destroyed their inner balance.
Their eardrums burst and blood poured from them heavily.
Eva began vomiting blood, and Sia clutched her head screaming, trying to stop her eyes from bursting from the internal pressure.
The frequency was targeting the rupture of blood vessels in the brain!
They would die within seconds. Inevitably. An S-rank monster leaves no room for combat if the opponent is incapacitated.
The Brood Mother began crawling toward them, the many human arms beneath her dragging her enormous mass to swallow them in her circular mouth.
But...
In Elysium, when you think hell has reached its peak, it opens a deeper door.
Before the Brood Mother reached them by ten meters...
KRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH!
The massive concrete-and-flesh ceiling of B4... exploded completely!
It didn’t collapse gradually; it was erased from existence in a circle one hundred meters wide!
And from the dark sky above them, two catastrophes descended.
"The Executioner" and "The Viscous Reaper"!
The kings of B1 and B2 were still locked in a death battle!
They fell like two devastating meteors directly into the heart of B4!