"You… how could a demon like you know Heaven's secrets?!"
But Soren had no interest in wasting any more words on him. He knew all too well the classic rule: villains die from talking too much.
The ground beneath the angel's severed body suddenly collapsed. Hellfire roared upward.
Several rusted iron wires shot out from the flames and wrapped tightly around the angel's torso.
Feeling the terrifying dark power contained within those wires, genuine, uncontrollable terror finally appeared on the angel's face.
He twisted desperately in the filthy water, struggling with all his might. "Kill me! Demon! I order you—kill me now!"
Soren watched the angel's horrified expression and spoke indifferently, "Since I can't kill you, just enjoy yourself inside my world."
This idea had only just occurred to him.
After absorbing Yutun's essence, Silent Hill had grown far stronger. Using it merely as a storage space for loot would be a massive waste.
Trapping the angel inside the Otherworld would prevent him from reporting back to Heaven while allowing Alessa to continuously extract angelic essence from his body to nourish and upgrade the domain.
As for why he hadn't done the same with the demon earlier—
The current Silent Hill was still too fragile. Helping him fight a high-tier demon and being able to imprison one alone were two completely different things.
Throwing a high-tier demon inside would be like dropping a white-hot iron ball into butter—it would very likely burn straight through the domain.
But an angel whose strength wasn't overwhelming yet still contained pure angelic essence? That was the perfect rechargeable battery for an experiment.
"You cannot do this! This is blasphemy against the divine! You demon!!"
The angel's miserable screams echoed through the Otherworld. Defeat was far harder for him to accept than falling into Hell.
But Soren had already severed the mental link between reality and the domain, leaving Alessa to "entertain" their new guest.
After dealing with everything, Soren searched the entire basement once more.
Once he confirmed there were no new discoveries, he climbed back up the passage to the surface.
Outside, Andrei and Clancy stood on the road, staring at the old house in terror.
Both men were deathly pale, bodies trembling uncontrollably.
When they saw Soren walk out of the building, they flinched like startled birds and craned their necks to look behind him, terrified that the masked horror would reappear and repeat Peter's tragedy on Soren.
Clancy swallowed hard, voice shaking. "Soren… what about… what about Peter? Is he…?"
Soren shook his head, expression calm. "Dead. Thoroughly."
Even if he hadn't been, the body had first been deeply polluted by demonic power and then baptized by angelic aura. If anything had survived, it would have become nothing more than a walking corpse.
Besides, Soren had made sure to add a few extra slashes before leaving—just to eliminate any loose ends.
Hearing the answer, Andrei covered his face in anguish and slowly sank to the ground.
Regret and fear twisted together in his heart.
If he hadn't been so obsessed with chasing ratings and insisted on bringing the team to explore this cursed house, Peter would still be alive and they wouldn't have been dragged into this nightmare.
Soren looked at the two shell-shocked men and asked, "So? You two still planning to keep exploring here?"
"If you want to leave, how about giving me a ride back to Los Santos on the way?"
"..."
In the end, the three of them checked into a motel in town and rested for the night.
Mainly because Soren couldn't stand the stench on himself any longer.
Although most of the sewage splashed during the fight had been blocked by his demonic power,
the fermented rot that had built up in that enclosed space for decades—then stirred up by combat—
felt exactly like spending a night in a hot-pot restaurant. The smell clung to him, nauseating with every breath.
After a long, satisfying shower, Soren lay on the bed and opened the system panel in his mind.
Killing the high-tier demon had awarded him 1,500 points.
He had spent all his previous points on Alastor, so he was back to exactly 1,500.
Soren suppressed the urge to spend them. Better to save up for now and decide later when something useful came along.
What truly set his blood on fire was the other system notification.
[Bloodline Awakening +1%]
Excitement flashed in his eyes. So the way to raise his bloodline awakening was this simple and brutal—
Combat.
The Sparda clan had been born for battle.
All the opponents he had faced before had been too weak to create any real sense of crisis.
The only one who had ever truly threatened him was Maria—and at that time he hadn't even awakened his bloodline yet.
Only in fights like today, facing demons strong enough to make him feel danger, could the blood inside him truly boil and push the Sparda bloodline higher.
Looked like he would need to get out and wander more often.
...
Early the next morning, after resting and recovering, the three of them left Haddonfield and began the long drive back to Los Santos.
The atmosphere inside the van was oppressively heavy.
Andrei behind the wheel looked far more exhausted, eyes bloodshot—he clearly hadn't slept a wink.
Clancy in the passenger seat was slightly better. After a night to process everything, his emotions had stabilized, though he still spaced out from time to time.
Soren leaned back in his seat, watching the scenery fly by, mind racing.
He kept thinking about the demon that had crawled out of Michael's brain yesterday—and the red glow that had first appeared on its body.
Clearly, some group had mastered a special sealing technique.
They could forcibly seal a demon's core essence, preventing any demonic scent or power from leaking out.
Then they implanted those sealed cores into human brains, using human bodies as vessels.
Most demons had no real intelligence of their own, so when they controlled a human body they were heavily influenced by the host's original thoughts and residual habits.
That was how monsters like Michael Myers—seemingly deranged serial killers—were created.
And as long as the demonic core deep in the brain remained intact, even if the physical body was crushed to paste, it could slowly regenerate using demonic power.
The cost was probably nothing more than eating fresh flesh.
A so-called "demonic core" was simply a highly condensed product of a demon's power.
"So all those infamous serial killers are actually vessels parasitized by demons?"
Reaching this conclusion, Soren felt a trace of disappointment.
This trip to Haddonfield had successfully revealed how these demons were slipping past angelic detection,
but he still had zero clues about who was orchestrating everything behind the scenes.
The people hiding in the shadows were even more cautious and cunning than he had imagined.
Right now he needed to get back to Los Santos as quickly as possible, hand the corpse samples over to Constantine and Papa Midnight, and see if the two of them could dig up any new leads.