"Where am I? You are... you're Bella? My head..." The female lawyer regained consciousness quickly. She tried hard to recall what happened, but her memory stopped at coming to West Virginia to take on a defense case; everything after that was a blank.
"My God!" Bella sighed, hands on her hips, looking thoroughly annoyed.
Her team was a mess: the injured were injured, the weak were weak, the old were old, and the young were young.
Saving the lawyer, Jeri Hogarth, was certainly a good thing. They weren't exactly friends, but they were acquaintances, so saving her was the right thing to do.
But saving her meant Bella was burdened with yet another dead weight! The US Constitution didn't apply in Silent Hill, and no prosecutor was going to file a public indictment on Alessa's behalf.
006 was covered in blood, sporting countless wounds large and small—all inflicted by Jeri Hogarth while she was hunting him down earlier. The lawyer had been possessed by a demon and had also taken two bullets from 006. While the enhanced physique granted by the demon possession had squeezed the bullets out, the wounds remained, and the mental trauma caused by the possession was severe. She could barely walk.
Dragging this group of wounded soldiers to rescue someone else? Bella felt the difficulty level was genuinely off the charts.
Seeing her hesitation, 006 was decisive. He immediately tossed her a palm-sized metal seal. She examined it closely; she couldn't tell what it was made of, but the front featured a large triangle, and the back bore an abstract pattern known as Metatron's Cube, famous in occult circles.
"This might solve all the puzzles! I saw that 'she' valued this thing highly earlier, so I snatched it!" 006 said, pointing at the dazed Jeri Hogarth.
Bella looked speechless. Even if this Seal of Metatron had powerful uses, throwing it to her in such a rush was useless! Aside from potentially teleporting people out of Silent Hill, she didn't know its specific functions in the short term.
However, she understood 006's meaning: Where friendship falls short, profit fills the gap. The core message was still a plea for her to rescue Rose.
"Bella... that voice has been talking to Mom..." The little girl, Sharon, face full of tears, tightly gripped the corner of Bella's shirt and spoke hesitantly.
Rose was with Alessa?
That woman really ran too far! Why didn't she just run all the way to the M78 Nebula while she was at it!
Bella frowned and asked again, "Where is that voice coming from?"
The little girl pointed toward the depths of the hospital, though she couldn't pinpoint the exact location.
"Alessa, can you hear my voice? Your revenge is complete, right? Give Rose to me; it's time for us to leave." Bella compressed her voice into a thin psychic thread and sent it across the hospital to the largest spiritual entity she could sense. Without a doubt, that was Alessa's main body.
Alessa drew power from hatred; strictly speaking, she was a pure Caster-type being.
Creating a separate dimension, manifesting so many monsters, not eating or drinking for thirty years without dying—she was already incredibly tough. However, Bella wasn't afraid of her. What was there to fear from an immobile vegetable?
"Daughter... I want to see my daughter..." Alessa's voice, extremely hoarse and raw, rang in her ear.
"I'll say it one more time. Let Rose out. Rose will take good care of Sharon. With your abilities, you can sense the deep bond between that mother and daughter. So, let go."
"Daughter... I want to see my daughter... Please let me see her, just once..." Alessa was exceptionally stubborn, almost mechanical, repeating those same two sentences back and forth.
Bella sensed no malice; it seemed like this was simply a meet-and-greet between the main body and the avatar, the mother and the daughter.
She hesitated, then turned to consult 006, the only other involved party present. "Alessa wants to see Sharon. What's your opinion?"
Little Sharon also cast her gaze toward her father.
006 naturally didn't want his daughter meeting any demons or monsters. If it were up to him, they would hide as far away as possible. But facing his daughter's gaze, he found himself unable to voice a refusal.
Two minutes later, Bella handed her pistol and ammunition to 006, telling him to take the lawyer to the pickup truck to rest. She then took Sharon by the hand and headed deep into the hospital to find Alessa.
Room B151. That was Alessa's ward. Relying on her psionic senses, Bella quickly determined the location.
As they passed a corner, a wave of inexplicable hostility surfaced in her mind. Bella cautiously crouched at the corner and peeked inside.
One look made her feel nauseous. She saw a sea of white—nurses.
Long legs, slender waists, curvaceous bodies... except for the faces. No features, no organs that could be associated with a human face. The skin was wrinkled and covered in gore; the faces were deformed to the extreme.
Sharon was terrified, and Bella felt like she was taking massive psychic damage from the sight. These things were just too ugly!
There were quite a few of these deformed nurses, densely packed on the only path leading to B151.
They seemed to hear a noise. Each stiffly turned its head, 'looking' with those hideous faces toward the direction of the sound.
"Close your eyes," she whispered. Little Sharon hurriedly covered her eyes with her hands.
Bella had given her gun and bullets to 006, so now she could only rely on psionics.
She cupped her right hand in her left, and a massive amount of frost began to gather in her palm.
The deformed nurses were very sensitive to energy. They immediately sensed the anomaly and shambled forward, brandishing various sharp blades, seemingly ready to hack the intruder into pieces.
Chi!
A silver thread shot out from Bella's palm. The deformed nurse at the front was sliced in half at the waist by the ray, the cross-section covered in a thick layer of frost.
The original Ice Ray wasn't particularly powerful, but now Bella changed the single-shot spell into a continuous beam. She increased the psionic output while sweeping the ray across the nurses like a machine gun!
This attack pattern naturally led to uneven damage. Some enemies were frozen into blocks of ice, some were sliced into several pieces, and others just had a few fingers frozen off.
Bella noticed the flaw in this move, but after expending nearly a tenth of her psionic energy and sweeping the ray back and forth three times in the narrow corridor, she finally eliminated all the deformed nurses.
Seeing that the nurses were all frozen solid and posed no further threat, she lifted her chin and said triumphantly, "Keep up!"
"Big Sister Bella, you're so amazing!!"
With little Sharon's worldview, she couldn't yet distinguish the difference between ordinary people and superhumans. She could only offer her pure, unadulterated praise.
This was exactly what Bella needed right now. She happily rubbed the little girl's hair.
"What did you say? I didn't hear you clearly."
"Big Sister Bella, you're so amazing!"
"Actually, saying that in French would be even more elegant. I happen to know French; let me teach you."
"..."
After Bella taught the little girl to praise her in English, French, Spanish, and Russian respectively, they finally arrived at the door of Room B151.