Deep night. Quiet.
Soren lay on the bed, letting his consciousness slip into Silent Hill.
BOOM! BOOM!
The moment he arrived, explosions echoed from distant streets. Firelight painted half the sky blood-red.
"Looks like she's having a blast."
Soren shook his head with a wry smile.
Ever since he'd unlocked Madison's memories, the woman had found a perfect outlet. Every single day she was either torching monsters with pyrokinesis or getting chased through the streets like a goddamn action movie.
Soren didn't bother checking on her. He blurred forward and materialized in front of the church.
This visit was about one thing: checking on the three Deadlights he and Alessa had forcibly dragged into Silent Hill. Things from beyond the universe. He needed to see what they'd become.
Alessa appeared beside him without a word.
"How are the Deadlights?" Soren asked.
The world around them shifted instantly. They stood inside the church.
The strange plant was still only half a meter tall, its gray trunk bare and unchanged from the last time he'd left.
A thin wisp of gray power drifted down from the sky. Soren looked up on instinct.
Above the plant, three faintly glowing spheres hung in mid-air, spinning slowly like miniature stars. The Deadlights kept pulling energy from the void, feeding it downward into the plant below in a steady stream.
"This is—"
Soren started.
"The consciousness inside the Deadlights has been wiped out with dark power," Alessa said, tilting her head back to look at the three spheres. "I control them now."
She paused, then glanced at him. "Do you want to take them with you?"
Soren studied the spinning lights. "What can they actually do now?"
"They can autonomously absorb stray emotions from the outside world and convert them into energy to sustain the plant," Alessa explained. "But without a host deliberately manufacturing terror and pressure, the absorption rate is slower than before."
Soren nodded. The Deadlights had basically become the plant's photosynthesis system. Slower, sure, but constant and self-sustaining. Most importantly, he wouldn't have to keep hunting down emotional fuel anymore.
"Then leave them here," he said. "No need to hand them over."
Alessa could study them. He'd just steal the answers later. Emotions were one thing this world would never run out of. As long as he stayed in crowded cities instead of hiding in the wilderness, the plant would grow just fine.
He was curious to see what kind of nightmare finally sprouted from absorbing that much raw feeling.
"For Madison," Soren added after a moment, "you can start turning up the pressure."
Up until now he'd kept Alessa from interfering, worried she might go too far and break the woman completely. But Madison had already mastered three of the Seven Wonders. She should be able to handle herself against Alessa now… probably.
When he'd first entered Silent Hill, her happy laughter had told him she'd adapted to the current difficulty. Time to raise the stakes.
Alessa's normally blank face cracked into a small, genuine smile.
She'd been forced to watch that woman tear through her world every day while Soren refused to let her fight back. She'd been sitting on a mountain of pent-up frustration. Now she finally had permission to make Madison suffer for real.
The next morning.
Soren and Luca left Derry at dawn and headed into the mountains toward the mental hospital.
Luca drove with one hand and talked nonstop with the other, like he hadn't spoken to another human being in a hundred years. He kept reliving every second of his last infiltration.
"You have no idea," he said, gesturing wildly. "That psycho with the giant scissors was less than a meter away from me! If I hadn't had the grappling hook and jumped into the ventilation shaft, you'd never be seeing me again!"
Soren leaned back in the passenger seat, eyes half-closed, listening without comment.
Luca's stories weren't that dangerous by Soren's standards. Still, he wasn't relaxing. He knew this trip wouldn't be as simple as the reporter made it sound.
From the footage, Luca had only reached the abandoned surface facilities last time. The scissors guy and the fat man were probably just defective test subjects left upstairs to clean up stray trespassers and act as cheap security.
If the place had monsters guarding the perimeter, there were almost certainly hidden underground sections. That was where the real nightmare would be waiting.
After several hours of driving, Luca suddenly yanked the wheel and turned onto a narrow, potholed mountain road. He followed the rough dirt track until the trees grew too thick, then stopped in front of a dense stretch of forest.
Soren stepped out and looked around. Tall pines, birdsong, cool clean air. Add a tent and a grill and this would be prime camping real estate.
He couldn't connect this peaceful spot at all with the blood-soaked, twisted hospital from the videotape.
"Can't drive any farther," Luca said, pulling a backpack from the trunk and slinging his camera around his neck. "Someone's watching the main road up ahead."
He pointed into the trees. "We hike through here and sneak in. Don't worry—I already mapped the outer perimeter last time."
Soren nodded and followed him into the forest.
At the same time, on the opposite side of the mountain from Soren and Luca's route, another freelance reporter named Miles Upsher had quietly arrived at the same remote, mountain-ringed location.
A few days earlier, Upsher had received an anonymous email. It came with blurry photos and vague text claiming illegal human experiments were happening here—experiments tied to official channels and some shadowy organization trading favors.
To land the kind of exclusive that could blow up across the entire country, he'd driven straight here without a second thought.
His car never made it to the hospital. Armed men had stopped him on the outer road and forced him to turn around.
That kind of heavy-handed response didn't scare Upsher. It only convinced him there was a massive story buried here.
Right now the returning reporter was crouched in thick brush, watching the mental hospital through a pair of binoculars.
What surprised him was how sloppy the security was once you got past the outer checkpoints. The uniformed patrols were clustered in small groups, smoking and chatting like they were positive no one would ever come this deep into the mountains.
"Idiots," Upsher muttered.
He waited for a gap in their attention, then slipped through a collapsed section of the outer wall with practiced ease.
"Exclusive news," he whispered to himself, a hungry grin spreading across his face. "Here I come."