Chapter 5:
Magnus walked through the empty lobby, every step echoing softly beneath the chandeliers now dimmed to a cold, eerie glow. The dead lay behind him, but ahead lay something worse. He could feel it in his bones, the way a wolf feels a storm before the first drop falls.
"Hmm..." he muttered, glancing around. His hand held a dagger slick with blood, the other gripped his travel bag. The silence was deafening. It pressed against his ears, thick and wrong, the kind of silence that came before a scream.
"I thought I'd be having a harder time here..." he said with mild amusement, glancing toward the main exit of the hotel. But his eyes were sharp, scanning, always scanning. A man who survived this long did not trust easy victories.
He strolled toward the door, calm as ever. Too calm. The kind of calm that wore a mask over panic.
Just then...
"NOT THAT WAY!"
A voice cracked through the silence like a whip, raw and desperate.
Magnus froze. Not because of the words, but because of the fear in them. Real fear. The kind that could not be faked. He turned his head slowly, his masked gaze settling on the source.
A young woman stood trembling by a column, dressed in hotel staff attire. Her hands shook so hard she had to press them against her sides to stop them. Her light-blue eyes shimmered, caught between fear and desperation, like someone standing on the edge of a cliff who had just seen the ground crumble. Her lips were bare, hair long, curly, and black as ink. She looked too young to be here. Too soft. Too alive.
"And why not?" Magnus asked, tilting his head with playful mockery. But beneath the mask, his jaw tightened. He already knew the answer would not be good.
"T-The door..." she stammered. "It's rigged... If you open it, the whole building will explode."
Magnus narrowed his eyes. He looked toward the door. From a glance alone, he saw the setup: motion sensors, pressure plates, carefully disguised wiring. Enough to collapse the hotel into rubble and ash. Enough to turn him into a memory.
She wasn't lying.
He felt a flicker of something cold in his chest. Not fear. Recognition. Someone had wanted him dead so badly they had turned an entire hotel into a coffin. The scale of the hatred impressed him, in a dark, distant way.
"What's your name, woman?" he asked.
"Jessica. Jessica Brown."
He stepped closer, studying her as she instinctively backed up. Every movement, every twitch of her eyes... he read it all. No lies. No mask. She was genuine. A real person in a house of fakes. The last thing he had expected to find here.
"Alright then, Miss Jessica Brown," he said softly, now inches from her face. "How do we get out of here?"
Jessica froze. Not from fear but something else. His presence overwhelmed her. The subtle scent of cologne beneath the iron of blood, the gleam in his eyes through the mask, the calm and danger he carried in equal measure. He smelled like smoke and death and something almost sweet underneath, like rain on hot pavement. She could barely breathe. Her heart hammered against her ribs, and for a moment she forgot she was standing in a hotel full of corpses.
"There's... there's a back exit in the underground parking," she said weakly.
Magnus leaned closer. "But...?"
Her voice cracked. "There are two hundred of them waiting down there."
He exhaled through his nose and stepped back. Two hundred. The number sat in his gut like a stone. Not impossible. But close. Close enough that he could taste the edge of his own mortality, metallic and bitter.
Then he casually walked over to the reception desk and sat on the counter, one leg crossed over the other, mask still on, posture relaxed. He looked like a man waiting for a taxi, not a man surrounded by death.
He began to think.
Two hundred enemies. One exit. One ally.
Jessica watched, confused. How could he be so calm? She had just told him two hundred people wanted to kill him, and he sat down like he was ordering coffee.
He glanced at her.
"You saved me. Now I'll return the favor."
Then, without ceremony, he tossed her a burner phone. She caught it clumsily, her fingers still numb from shock.
"Work for me."
"W-What?" she blinked. The last thing she expected was a job offer. The last thing she expected was anything but a bullet.
"I'm giving you a choice, Jessica," he said as he rose from the counter. "You've got two tasks. First, tell me: were there any other guests today?"
She hesitated. "No. Only you. Everyone else was... planted here to kill you."
He nodded. "Thought so."
All of them were pawns. And whoever had set the trap had planned every detail except for the storm they unleashed when they targeted a Reinhart. Someone had spent months, maybe years, building this web. And Magnus had walked through it like it was made of thread. He felt a strange pride, mixed with the hollow ache of knowing this was only the beginning.
"Your second task," he said, stepping closer and whispering into her ear.
Her eyes widened. Whatever he had said, it was not what she expected. It was not violence. It was not cruelty. It was something else, something that made her breath catch in a different way.
"That's it?" she asked in disbelief.
"That's all," he replied with a smirk beneath the mask. "Let's move."
"But sir...!"
"That's all, Miss Brown," he said, already walking away. He did not look back. He never looked back.
Parking Lot, Underground
Two hundred men and women lounged like jackals around the parked cars, weapons gleaming under harsh fluorescent lights. Laughter echoed, ugly and loud. Weapons were checked with the casual boredom of people who had done this a hundred times before. The scent of engine oil hung heavy in the air, mixing with sweat and anticipation.
"You sure he's still alive?" a bald, muscular man asked, swinging a metal bat lazily. "I mean, c'mon. First wave was twenty elite killers. And the second fifty... He has to be a demon to survive."
"Then you might as well call him that, because I know he is alive," said another calmly. The same man who had picked Magnus up from the airport. His expression was tense, his fingers drumming against his thigh. He had seen something in Magnus's eyes at the airport, something that had made him want to run. And now that thing was loose in the building, and he was waiting for it to find him.
"If he's alive, where the hell are our men? Why haven't they reported in?" the bald man growled.
The man didn't answer.
Because deep down, he already knew. He knew the silence was not a good sign. He knew that when Magnus Reinhart walked into a room, the only thing that walked out was smoke and silence. He knew, and the knowing made his hands sweat.
Just then...
A shadow appeared in the smoke-filled entrance.
Footsteps echoed. Slow. Deliberate. Unhurried. The footsteps of a man who had already won.
A voice followed.
"That would be because... they're all dead. I mean, isn't that obvious? Ones unable to report back, it means you are dead."
The men turned.
Magnus Reinhart stepped from the darkness, two pistols at his side, his blood-stained tuxedo still crisp, mask gleaming under the parking lot lights like a devil from an opera stage. The joy side smiled at them. The sorrow side wept for them. He looked like judgment itself, walking on two legs.
The third wave hadn't begun.
But the massacre had already started.