Empire Building With Infinite Warehouse-Chapter 48: I Summon Legendary Beasts[2]

Click.

Clang.

The heavy doors kicked open, groaning on their hinges through the rust.

The bald enforcer stepped into the room, holding a heavy round of reinforced cable, ready to drag the merchant down to the holding cells.

But as he crossed the threshold, he stopped dead in his tracks.

He blinked, his thick brow furrowing in deep confusion.

The factory floor was huge, and while the apocalyptic sky outside was dim, the shattered skylights always let in a dull, bloody haze inside to see.

But right now, the room was pitch dark.

It wasn’t just an absence of light but felt like the shadows themselves had gained physical mass.

The darkness was thick, practically suffocating, swallowing the hallway light the second it spilled through the open door.

"Huh?" the enforcer grunted, his voice sounding weirdly low in the heavy air.

"What the fuck happened in here?"

He reached blindly to his left, his thick fingers tracing the concrete wall until he found the old industrial breaker box.

He grabbed the heavy plastic lever and shoved it upward.

CLACK.

The emergency overhead halogens sparked and buzzed to life.

But the room remained dark.

The lights were on, cracking loudly against the ceiling, but their beams simply could not penetrate the centre of the factory.

It was as if a massive, physical dome of pure black ink had been formed right in the middle of the floor, perfectly absorbing every single photon of light.

The enforcer’s heart skipped a beat.

His combat instincts, honed through months of syndicate street wars, screamed at him to run.

He dropped the coil of cable and instantly raised his forearm, his crossbow locking into place with a sharp shing.

"Hey!" the enforcer barked, his voice trembling slightly despite his massive size.

"Kid! What did you do?!"

There was no answer from the bound merchant.

Instead, from the absolute epicentre of the unnatural darkness, a low growl vibrated through the concrete floor.

It was a sound that did not resemble any animal from earth, a clicking snarl that sounded like bones grinding together nonstop.

The enforcer took a step back, his finger moving over the crossbow trigger, sweat suddenly beading on his bald scalp.

Then, the darkness changed.

About eight feet off the ground, towering over where the wooden chair should be, two massive, piercing yellow eyes snapped open in the dark.

They possessed no pupils. They were just twin pools of radiating malice, locking directly onto the enforcer’s soul.

Directly inside Julien’s completely sightless mind, a final, golden notification chimed with terrifying finality.

[Mythical Shadow Beast has been summoned.]

The bald enforcer stood frozen in absolute shock, his breath catching in his throat like shards of glass.

"Fuck," he whispered, the single word barely escaping his lips as his mind struggled to process the sheer impossibility of the entity standing before him.

Then, the yellow eyes shifted, rising another foot into the air as the massive entity uncoiled itself from the shadows, its true size becoming terrifyingly apparent.

"Fuck! Fuck!" the enforcer screamed, raw panic finally shattering his battle-hardened syndicate composure.

"Did a beast already escape a Red Gate?!"

He didn’t wait for an answer. His survival instincts hijacked his brain as he raised his heavy, mechanically augmented forearm, aiming the highly customised crossbow directly between those towering, pupil-less eyes.

THWACK.

A heavy steel bolt, designed specifically to punch straight through reinforced engine blocks and thick monster hides, tore through the air at terrifying speed.

It struck the direct centre of the darkness.

But there was no impact.

No sound of tearing flesh, no shattering of bone, and no cry of pain.

The steel bolt simply passed straight through the entity as if it were nothing more than immaterial smoke, embedding itself harmlessly into the concrete wall somewhere deep in the factory with a dull, echoing clink.

The enforcer’s eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated disbelief.

"No way..."

THWACK. THWACK. THWACK.

He fired blindly, his finger aggressively pulling the trigger as fast as the bow allowed.

He emptied his entire remaining quiver, six heavy, armour-piercing steel bolts, directly into the massive, shadowy silhouette, desperate to find a solid target.

Every single one of them vanished into the void.

They passed right through the Shadow Beast without even slowing it down, rendering his most lethal weapon utterly and completely useless.

The beast merely let out another deep, vibrating, bone-grinding snarl that seemed to rattle the very foundations of the abandoned building, sending a wave of primal fear straight down the enforcer’s spine.

And then, the darkness began to move.

The pitch-black ink began to spread, slithering aggressively across the cracked concrete floor like spilled oil.

It climbed the walls, destroying the buzzing emergency halogens one by one, eating the remaining light and plunging the cavernous space into an absolute, inescapable abyss.

The temperature plummeted instantly, bringing a freezing, unnatural cold that gnawed at the enforcer’s bones and turned his breath into white mist.

Click-clack.

His crossbow fired dry.

The empty magazine warning clicked uselessly.

The yellow eyes drifted closer, completely unaffected by the physical world, swimming through the freezing air with the terrifying grace of a deep-sea predator.

"Boss! Boss, it’s a-!"

The enforcer spun on his heel, abandoning all thoughts of fighting. He just needed to reach the heavy iron doors.

His heavy boots pounded against the concrete as he sprinted for the exit, the doorway just ten feet away.

Eight feet.

Five feet.

Safety was right there.

He opened his mouth wide to scream a final, desperate warning down the hallway.

But the sound never left his throat.

Suddenly, a sickening shhhhccckk echoed loudly through the room.

The enforcer stopped dead.

His forward momentum was halted so violently that his heavy boots slid against the dust, nearly throwing him off balance.

He looked down, his eyes bulging from their sockets in unadulterated horror.

Bursting straight through the centre of his chest, tearing violently through his chest and ripping through his thick tactical vest was a spike of pure, solidified darkness.

It wasn’t a physical claw but a tentacle-like structure made of the same light-devouring shadow that filled the room, which had pierced him perfectly through the back, plunging straight through his beating heart, and erupting out the other side.

"Guh..."

He couldn’t breathe. The dark tentacle was still lodged firmly inside his chest cavity, pulsating with a vile energy that seemed to drain the very life force from his veins while keeping him painfully conscious of his own destruction.

Slowly, effortlessly, the shadow lifted him upward.

He kicked his legs weakly, coughing up horrific mouthfuls of blood as he was hoisted five, then eight feet into the air like a broken doll caught on a butcher’s meat hook.

His fingers passed right through the tentacle, even as its grip on his internal organs remained absolutely unbreakable whenever he tried to break free.

The beast didn’t throw him away. Instead, the shadow tentacle violently retracted, pulling the impaled, bleeding enforcer straight into the centre of its own black mass.

The darkness swallowed him whole.

Then, a horrific, wet CRUNCH echoed through the dark.

The beast ate him in a single, devastating motion, leaving absolutely nothing behind, and the darkness spread throughout the entire factory floor, settling into absolute, pitch-black silence.

Ten yards away, Julien sat perfectly still in the heavy wooden chair.

He couldn’t see a single thing, but he didn’t need his eyes to know what had just happened.

[Dimensional Contract: Active]

[Entity: Mythical Shadow Beast]

[Time Remaining: 04:00]