After thinking of a solution, Jake shot the nearest figure. The shot stopped it, which was enough for now.
He shot two more figures while the rest in the hallway kept advancing calmly.
"Move."
He told Noah as he pushed him toward the hallway.
Noah followed close behind his back as they fought their way through with gunfire, moving toward the stairs and dodging the extensions the figures threw at them.
In the middle of the escape, his gun ran out of ammo, so Jake holstered it without pausing, drew the two knives from his belt sheath, and kept moving.
The first knife found the neck of a figure approaching from the left, while the second went into the torso of another that was blocking access to the stairs.
Neither of them fell, but both staggered back enough to leave the space open for two seconds, which both of them took advantage of to reach the stairs.
Noah set his foot on the first step downward and stopped when he saw Jake going up.
"The exit is downstairs!"
Noah said, thinking his partner was confused.
"I know."
"Then why…?"
"Because something is controlling these things."
Jake didn't slow his pace.
"And whatever is controlling these things is upstairs. If we don't take it out, this won't end and they're not going to pay us."
Noah looked downstairs, where two figures had appeared on the lower section of the stairs, so he chose to go up with Jake instead.
When they reached the fifth floor, it was darker than the previous ones. It felt as if the walls were pulsing with greater intensity, with a faster heartbeat.
Jake advanced down the hallway with a knife in each hand.
Suddenly, a massive thing slammed into them from a side door.
It wasn't like the figures from the lower floor. This one had several bodies fused into a single entity, creating an amalgam of arms and legs with boundaries between them now unrecognizable, moving with a coordination that none of the individual bodies could have achieved alone.
It struck Jake with an extension the size of a tree trunk and sent him straight into the hallway wall.
The wall didn't hold.
Jake crashed through the plaster and brick, ending up on the floor of an apartment, amid rubble and dust.
Noah stayed in the hallway staring at the hole.
"Use the katana!"
Noah shouted.
"I've got everything under control!"
Jake's voice said from inside.
The massive thing entered through the hole behind him.
Noah heard the sound of knives as Jake spoke.
"Come on if you've got the balls! What are you gonna do, scare me with your insulin resistance!?"
Right away he heard the sound of something heavy hitting the floor and then the sound of the floor giving way under a weight it wasn't designed to support.
"Jake…?"
No one answered.
"Jake!?"
Noah took a step toward the hole, but something grabbed him by the ankle.
It was an arm coming out of the ceiling, with a length that didn't belong to any normal human body, with a firm and cold grip.
Noah didn't get a chance to react before it lifted him off the ground and carried him upward through an opening in the ceiling that formed the moment it grabbed him.
Meanwhile, downstairs on the second floor, beside a mass of flesh that had stopped moving, Jake was getting up from the fight he'd had.
'Now that I think about it, didn't this building only have four floors?'
He looked up, seeing the hole he had fallen through.
'So there you were.'
He looked around, seeing the curtained windows, the kitchen, and a crooked painting on the wall.
'Well… it was nice knowing you, Noah.'
He looked down, sighed, brushed the dust off his shoulder, and grabbed the katana.
"Seven Divine Swords Technique: First…"
When he was about to draw it, his phone rang.
'Why do they always interrupt me at the key moments?'
He looked at it, realizing it was his boss, so he answered.
"Case status?"
Evelyn said.
"I was just about to finish it."
"Why are you saying 'was'?"
"Because you called me, duh."
A brief silence was enough to raise suspicion.
"How's Noah?"
Jake looked up at the ceiling.
"A group of creatures separated us and unfortunately I lost contact with him."
The silence that followed was more terrifying than the previous one.
"Jake."
"I'm going to find him."
"If that kid dies—"
"He's not going to die, you have my word. Though if something does happen that's out of my control…"
"Jake."
"He'll come back in one piece, I promise."
"You'd better."
She hung up, leaving Jake with a serious dilemma.
He looked at the hole in the ceiling and calculated the most direct path to wherever Noah was.
The room Noah had been taken to was different from all the others in the building.
The walls pulsed like a heart and the floor was clean.
On an improvised surface made from a table and dark fabric there was an arrangement of scattered rose petals, neatly folded clean sheets, and white candles that hadn't been lit yet.
The beings left him in the center, tied at the hands and feet with something that wasn't rope but worked the same. They leaned over him for a moment and then busied themselves with the candles, lighting them one by one.
Suddenly music began to play.
It was a slow song with string instruments, a melody used for romantic moments.
The beings bowed in a semicircle around the altar and began to emit sounds in a language Noah didn't recognize, with a regular and repetitive cadence.
Noah looked at the ceiling and realized the entity was there.
It was a cluster of eyeballs of different sizes, grouped and hanging from the ceiling like a formation that moved slowly, rotating on itself, with all the eyes oriented toward him.
Two limbs emerged from the mass, thin and long, descending to the level of Noah's face. They moved slowly and carefully, and touched him on the cheek.
Noah couldn't move.
"What do you want with me?"
Noah said in a trembling voice.
The entity withdrew one of the limbs, forming a circle with the fingers of one hand and then extending the index finger of the other and proceeding to insert it into the circle several times.
Noah stared at it.
"No."
Noah said in terror.
"No… I don't want that! Not again!"
The entity's limbs drew closer while the eyes on the ceiling turned toward him with unified attention.
The background music grew louder until the door of the room burst off its hinges with a single blow.
Jake entered, looking at the altar, the candles, the music, the entity on the ceiling, and Noah tied in the center of it all.
"Am I interrupting something?"
"Get me out of here!"
Noah shouted in panic.
The beings controlled by the cluster of eyes were busy setting up tripods with cameras on them, aimed at the altar. Others were adjusting portable reflectors, the kind used in low-budget productions, and one of them was checking the lighting angle.
Jake took in the whole scene.
"Don't worry about it."
He said.
"Go ahead and act like I'm not here… just make sure you give me my partner back afterward."
The beings turned threateningly toward him.
"Well, looks like there's no deal."
Jake drew his knives to begin the fight.