Demon Contract

They spilled back into the corridor, the steel door sealing behind them with a hollow clang that seemed too final. The air out here was no cleaner. It pressed close, wet with steam and copper tang, carrying the low hum of the Mirror chamber through the walls.

No one spoke at first. The silence weighed heavier than the heat.

Victor finally broke it, his voice pitched too high to sound casual. "So… anybody else feel like we just peeped through the devil's keyhole? Because I vote we weld it shut and never speak of it again."

The attempt at humour rang thin in the damp air. Alyssa shot him a look sharp enough to cut. Dan's head snapped up, eyes burning.

"This isn't the time for jokes," Dan said. His voice was tight, clipped, like a man clenching fists in prayer. "Not after what we just saw."

Victor opened his mouth, closed it again. Max stepped in, laying a steady hand on Victor's shoulder.
"We're all a bit shaken up," he said quietly. "No one expected… that."

Alyssa's jaw flexed. She shifted her rifle against her chest, scanning the corridor like the walls themselves might lunge at them. "What the hell was that thing?"

Chloe answered before Ferron could. Her voice was thin, brittle. "That wasn't anything like the monster that killed Jack. That thing… it didn't even move. It just—looked. And I swear it wasn't just looking at us. It was looking through us."

Her words scraped raw. The mention of Jack's name left the group hollow for a moment, as though grief had opened the floor beneath them again.

Ferron leaned against a pipe, letting the silence stretch before he spoke. His usual grin was gone, replaced by something harder. "You think it's cruel, what the Institute did — chaining it up like that. But you don't understand what a demon is."

Alyssa turned to him sharply. "We saw it, Ferron. Bound, screaming through glass. How is that not cruelty?"

He shook his head, eyes on the sweat-slick floor plates. "That's not cruelty. That's survival."

Victor tried again, voice strained. "Sounds like something my ex used to say." No one laughed. He rubbed the back of his neck, muttering, "Tough crowd."

Ferron didn't bite. His gaze stayed on the floor. "When my clan first tracked mine, it wasn't a monster. It was a man. A farmer, lantern in hand, walking home. Except the way he walked was wrong. His shadow didn't match his steps."

Chloe's arms wrapped around herself. "What happened to him?"

Ferron's tone stayed even, but the words cut. "The man was dead before anyone saw him. The demon tore him open, carved the body hollow, and wore it to pass through. Flesh is just a door to them. A door that screams when it opens."

Dan flinched, knuckles whitening around his rosary. Alyssa's eyes narrowed, her shoulders tight.

Ferron went on, quieter now, as though reciting something burned into memory. "After that it slaughtered villages. Ate priests alive. Desecrated shrines. For centuries it wore faces, took names, committed every atrocity you can imagine. And the worst part?" He lifted his eyes to them, flat and cold. "It never hated them. Never loved them. It didn't even see them. We were cattle. Fuel. Firewood to be burned."

The words landed heavy. Chloe swallowed, whispering, "And the Mirror's the same?"

Ferron jerked his chin back toward the sealed chamber. "That thing you pity? To you it's a prisoner. To it, you're a pantry. You'd call it a crime. It would call it a meal."

The corridor sank into silence again. Pipes creaked overhead, dripping like slow tears.

Dan stopped walking. He fixed Ferron with a steady, burning stare. "Isn't that exactly what you're doing too?"

Ferron blinked.

Dan stepped forward, voice low but edged with iron. "You bind your demon. You draw its power. You bleed it so you can fight. So tell me, Ferron—" his voice cracked, but he pressed on—"who's the real monster here?"

The question hung like smoke in the corridor, pressing down heavier than the heat.

No one answered.

***

The corridor narrowed as they moved on, ceiling pressing lower, pipes hissing like serpents in the half-light. Every step stirred heat up from the grates beneath their boots, the kind of furnace-warmth that belonged in a smithy, not buried under earth. The Forge was alive down here. Breathing.

No one spoke for several minutes after Dan's accusation. The silence was raw, skinless. Victor filled it first, because he couldn't help himself.

"Alright," he muttered, "I think we all need to admit Father Dan's got a point. Guy binds a demon, sucks out its juice, and—presto—you've got fireworks on command. You dress it up in holy robes or fancy sigils, it's still the same dirty trick."

Chloe rounded on him, eyes wet with fury. "You think this is a joke? Jack's gone because of this filth. Because people thought they could bargain with monsters and win."

Victor opened his mouth, but the words dried on his tongue. He looked away instead, jaw tight.

Max cut across them both, his voice sharp enough to silence the air. "Enough. We don't fracture here. Not when we're standing on top of whatever the hell this is." He gestured at the walls, at the dripping pipes and faintly glowing seams in the steel. "We need answers. We need evidence. Then we drag it into the light."

Ferron gave a short, humourless laugh. "Light won't help you here. Places like this don't wither under truth. They thrive in shadows."

Dan's voice rose, harsher now. "You knew, didn't you? You knew what the Institute was doing down here. How many demons have they chained? How many centuries have they fed on them like cattle?"

Ferron finally turned, meeting his stare. "Enough to build your weapons. Enough to make sure you can walk into a fight and not end up like Jack."

The words were ice.

Chloe's hands trembled at her sides. "So we're no better than them. Than it. We use their power, and it poisons everything. That's all this Forge is—poison, wrapped in walls."

"Don't twist it," Victor snapped, though the anger seemed aimed more at himself than her. "We're not demons. We're not monsters. We fight so people get to wake up tomorrow without their kids screaming in the night. That's the only line that matters."

Dan's reply was instant, bitter. "Then what's Grimm? A saviour? Or just another butcher carving the world into pieces so he can play king?"

Alyssa's voice cut clean through the argument. "Grimm's ruthless. He always has been. But he's not stupid. He believes the end justifies the means—and if that means bleeding demons dry until nothing's left, he'll do it. He'll do worse."

The admission settled over them like ash. None of them liked it, but none of them could deny it.

Ferron exhaled through his nose, slow and deliberate, then shook his head. "You're wasting your breath. Don't you feel it? The anger? The bite in your words? That's not just grief talking." His gaze moved across them, eyes narrowing. "The Mirror feeds on this. Conflict. Rage. That's its nature. It doesn't just sit in a cage — it seeps out. It makes you fight."

The thought cut through the air sharper than any blade.

Max's stomach turned sour, bile rising unbidden. His pulse pounded in his ears, too loud, too fast, like a war drum he couldn't silence. The anger wasn't just thought — it was in his blood now, a fever carried by every breath.

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He realised it at once — the way his skin had burned with Soulfire the moment Dan raised his voice, the way Victor's jokes had curdled into cruelty, Chloe's grief into fury. They weren't just angry; they were being stoked, like kindling set to burn hotter. A haze pressing on them, invisible but heavy, worming into thought.

He clenched his jaw, fighting the pulse in his chest. "Ferron's right. We're breathing it in. The Mirror wants us broken. It feeds on the worst in us."

A deep shudder rolled through the corridor, vibrating under their feet. Dust rained down from overhead, fine and black, carrying the stink of scorched metal. The pipes rattled.

Chloe pressed herself against the wall, wide-eyed. "That wasn't us."

Ferron's gaze tracked the ceiling as the vibration faded. His voice was grim. "The heart beats. That's all it takes. Our presence is enough to wake it."

Victor let out a breath through his teeth. "So we can all agree on one thing—demons are bad, and Grimm's an even bigger bastard for thinking he can leash them."

Dan gave a curt nod. Chloe, after a moment, nodded too. Alyssa said nothing, but the hardness in her eyes was answer enough.

The silence that followed was colder than any prayer.

From somewhere deeper in the Forge, a low pulse of violet light rippled along the walls — faint at first, then steady, like a signal flare in the dark.

***

The corridor bent sharply and opened into a chamber that reeked of old fire.

Heat pressed down like a hand. Blackened chains sagged from the ceiling in twisted loops, fused into stone as if they'd grown there. The floor bore layers of scorch marks, ash crunching under their boots. At the centre, four restraints jutted from the ground, their metal warped as though something had strained against them long enough to bend steel.

Chloe froze on the threshold. "This isn't a prison cell," she whispered. "This is—"

"A slaughterhouse," Ferron finished for her. His eyes were on the walls, at the half-faded runes etched in overlapping layers. Institute glyphs crossed with older, rougher cuts — not written so much as carved in fury. "My people called these famine-houses. You bleed a demon until it withers. Then you bring another. And another. The Institute didn't invent this. They only perfected it."

Dan's rosary rattled in his hand as he gripped it tighter. "Monstrous. You don't bind evil, you become it."

Victor let out a jagged laugh that didn't reach his eyes. "And here I thought the Church specialised in bleeding things dry. Guess everyone's got a hobby."

Dan spun on him, face twisted with fury. "Don't you dare—"

"Enough," Max snapped, louder than he meant. The word cracked through the chamber like a whip. He took a breath, steadying himself. "Ferron said it before. This is the Mirror. It wants us angry. Can't you feel it?"

Chloe hugged her arms tight. "I do. It's like… everything feels sharper. My grief, my fear. I can't breathe past it."

Alyssa scanned the restraints, jaw tight. "That's its power. It doesn't just sit behind glass. It seeps. Turns every thought against you."

Ferron didn't look up from the wall. "Demons don't need claws to cut. They'll make you do it yourself."

Victor shifted uncomfortably, his usual smirk gone. "So what, we're just puppets now? A little push and suddenly we're all at each other's throats?"

"You already were," Ferron said flatly. "The Mirror just gives the knife an edge."

The silence that followed was worse than shouting.

Max moved toward a console in the corner, its screen cracked but faintly humming. He brushed the dust away and the display flared alive with static. Images flickered into shape.

Not diagrams. Not readings. Faces.

Their own faces.

Alyssa with eyes black as coal. Victor's grin warped into a predator's snarl. Chloe weeping blood. Dan's lips moving in a prayer that turned to smoke. Ferron's mouth whispering words no one understood.

Chloe gasped. "That's us… but wrong."

Max leaned closer. The reflections shifted again, jittering. One by one, they vanished, until only his own face remained — hollow-eyed, flames crawling up his skin in colours he had never summoned before.

The console sparked violently. The screens went black. Burnt plastic stung the air.

Victor swore under his breath. "Well that's comforting. We're not just angry — we're on the menu."

Chloe's voice shook. "Max… what did you see?"

Max clenched his fists, Soulfire whispering at his knuckles. He forced it down. "Nothing real." He glanced at the others, voice harder. "That's what it wants. To make us doubt. To turn us on each other."

Ferron finally turned from the wall, his face pale under the heat. "Then we'd better stop feeding it."

The chamber pulsed faintly with violet light, the chains humming as though they were strings on a bow pulled taut.

***

Dr. Helmut Grimm did not believe in chance.

Chance was the excuse of the lazy, the shield of the blind. To him, there was only design — the world an endless clockwork of cause and consequence. And when one part of the machine broke, he did not mourn. He simply replaced it.

From his private observation deck, he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, the glass before him dimly reflecting his long face and pale eyes. Below, the Forge stretched in coils of steel and stone, its arteries glowing with the faint pulse of the Mirror's heartbeat.

Five figures moved through its veins: Max Jaeger and his misfit companions.

They looked small from here, but Grimm knew better than to dismiss them. Small things could kill — a spark, a pathogen, a single word spoken at the wrong time.

The console at his side hummed softly. He allowed his gaze to drift across the feeds. Max's group wavered in and out of frame, violet static bleeding at the edges of the image. Sensors recorded stress levels spiking, adrenaline climbing, emotional volatility peaking far above baseline.

The Mirror was working.

"Interesting," Grimm murmured. He adjusted the filters, bringing Max into sharper focus.

The boy carried himself like a soldier who hadn't yet learned discipline — all fury, no control. Already the Hellfire whispered around his skin, invisible to his allies but glaring on Grimm's monitors. That made him dangerous. And valuable.

Alpha's voice crackled softly over the intercom. "Your orders, Doctor?"

He did not answer at once. His eyes lingered on the screen where Chloe recoiled from a burnt console, where Dan clutched his rosary hard enough to bleed, where Victor's bravado cracked in the heat.

They were being unmade. Not by battle, but by proximity. By the simplest test of all: exposure.

"None," Grimm said at last. "Let it play out."

Silence on the line, then a clipped reply. "Understood."

He allowed himself a small exhale. These were not soldiers, not really. They were variables. Experiments in progress. Each carried a fracture that could be widened. Chloe with her grief. Dan with his faith. Victor with his vanity. Alyssa with her cold precision. Max with his fire.

He was not curious about whether they would break. Of course they would.

He was curious about how.

His eyes dropped to a secondary feed — Liz Jaeger, floating in her pod, her soulwave signature still impossibly stable. A variable of a different kind. If Max was the fuse, she was the bomb.

And between them, Grimm would have his detonation.

He leaned closer to the glass, the Mirror's pulse faintly vibrating the steel beneath his feet. He had given his life to understanding demons. Their hunger, their power, their inevitability. And yet this boy had stepped into a ritual meant to consume him and come out carrying a Lord inside his flesh.

Grimm's reflection in the glass blurred, doubled, a trick of the Forge's light. For a heartbeat, he thought he saw teeth where his mouth should be, the echo of his own ancient pact. He steadied his breath and looked away.

"They call demons evil," he said softly to no one. "But evil is just appetite without restraint. Tell me, Max Jaeger—" his voice curled into a whisper, almost reverent— "which are you becoming?"

***

The control deck's air was cold despite the Forge's furnace heat rising from below. Screens flickered in pale green and violet, streams of data scrolling like scripture only Grimm could read. Alpha and Omega stood before him, two shadows at attention, their presence steady as the walls themselves.

Grimm did not turn from the glass as he spoke. "Surveillance on Jaeger's team must be doubled. Every corridor, every chamber. I want Kane in position immediately — he will provide the shield."

Alpha's tone was clinical, clipped. "You expect an attack?"

Omega frowned, his massive arms folding across his chest. "What's going on?"

Grimm's reflection on the glass smiled faintly. "Yes. There will be trouble. Soon. And when it comes, your top priority is keeping me alive." He let the weight of the words hang before adding, "If containment falters, if the Forge collapses… we prepare Site B."

Both bodyguards stiffened.

Omega shifted, uneasy. "Why the Fortress? Why not Eidolon Station in the Andes? Or Tearstone Vault in Norway? They're—"

Alpha cut him off, her voice sharp. "Are things that bad?"

Grimm turned at last, pale eyes fixed on them both. "Mr. Jaeger has started something none of you understand. His power is extraordinary — impossible. He will draw attention. And when a Lord notices, when even one of them moves, the countdown begins. The end of days will not be a parable. It will be a timetable."

The room went still, only the hum of the Mirror below filling the silence.

At length, Grimm dismissed them with a curt gesture. Alpha inclined her head, but her eyes lingered on him a heartbeat too long. Omega followed, shifting uneasily, his bulk almost shrinking in the doorway. They had fought for Grimm, bled for him — but in that moment both of them understood their survival was secondary.

Alone, Grimm descended to the observation chamber where the Mirror pulsed against its bindings. The reinforced glass shivered faintly under each heartbeat, violet light crawling through the sigils like veins filling with blood.

He stood before it, watching the demon's featureless face strain against its prison. Its presence gnawed at the edges of his mind, but he welcomed the pressure. It reminded him of what was at stake.

Slowly, deliberately, Grimm keyed in a sequence on the console. One of the shackles along the Mirror's cage released with a hiss, loosening by the barest fraction. Not enough for escape — not yet. Just enough for pressure to build, enough for hunger to seep deeper into the Forge.

The demon's pulse quickened, as though it recognised the indulgence.

Grimm's hand lingered on the control panel. His voice dropped to a whisper, a confession only the Mirror could hear. "He must be ready. Max Jaeger cannot stay what he is. The fire in him must be stoked, even if it burns the world around him. Whatever shortcut is necessary will be taken. No matter the cost."

He allowed himself a thin smile, cold and patient.

"No matter how dangerous."

The chamber lights flickered, then stabilised. Grimm straightened his coat, turned, and walked away, leaving the Mirror's cage thrumming like a drumbeat that would not stop.