The battlefield had gone quiet.

Not the kind of silence that came with peace, but the slack, breathless pause after something ugly had stopped moving. Steam still curled off ruptured flesh in slow, reluctant tendrils. Pools of black-red fluid shimmered in the uneven light, reflecting the jagged outlines of broken rooftops and the yawning wound of the Charles Bridge. The air was dense with the metallic tang of blood and the sweet, cloying reek of meat left too long in the sun.

At the centre of it all lay what was left of Belphegor.

The stump of his torso twitched once, convulsing like a severed worm, and a spray of pale fluid leaked from the sheared flesh where Chloe had cut him apart. There was no human shape left—just a glistening wreck of meat folds and trembling tendons, heaving in shallow, stubborn breaths. Every so often, one of the ragged holes in his bulk expelled a wet cough of air, as though the body was still trying to speak without a head.

Ying kept her distance. Not out of fear—Belphegor was finished—but because the sight of him stoked something dangerous in her. Not triumph. Not satisfaction. Something colder, sharper, that whispered there was still a use for this thing.

Steam rose from the collapsed Tomas puppets that littered the streets around them, their wooden masks cracked, limbs splayed at unnatural angles. The meat tide that had filled the bridge was gone, collapsed into piles of inert tissue that steamed and twitched in their death throes. The city's heartbeat—Belphegor's control—had stopped. And with it, the thin, ugly order he had imposed on Prague.

The others gathered slowly, drawn into the same grim orbit around the stump. Max stood with Liz beside him, his face pale but steady. Chloe's eyes flicked from Belphegor to the streets beyond, as if expecting something worse to come crawling out of the mist. Alyssa rested her weight on a make-shift spear, blood streaked down one arm from a shallow cut. Victor arrived last, his shoulders hunched, breathing hard. Even for him, there was no satisfaction in the kill.

No one spoke at first.

The only sounds were the crackle of distant fires and the occasional wet hitch from Belphegor's body. Ying watched the others' faces, reading the same question in each of them. Now what?

It was Alyssa who said it aloud.

"Now what?" Her voice was low, but it carried. "We've gutted him. The city's his no more. So, what the hell happens tomorrow? Or an hour from now?"

Ying didn't answer. She was already turning the problem over in her mind. Belphegor was a parasite, but he was also a wall. A rotting, corrupt wall—but one that had kept worse things from tearing Prague apart. The Tomas puppets had been his enforcers, the meat tide his barricade. Without him, the city's gates were open.

Victor's voice cut through her thoughts. "Without him? This place is done. Lilith's swarms will bleed in from the east. Or Agrath's drinkers from the north. Or something worse." He spat into the street, a dark fleck disappearing into the blood-slick cobbles. "We didn't free Prague. We just tore down the only thing keeping it breathing."

Max glanced at him, but didn't argue.

Ying crouched, eyes narrowing on the twitching mass of Belphegor's remains. She could feel the wrongness radiating from him, like heat from a furnace door. Every instinct told her to finish it, to burn the stump until nothing recognisable was left. But instincts didn't keep cities alive. Logic did. And logic was whispering that the best weapon you could ask for was the one your enemy had already sharpened for you.

She straightened. "Then we make him work for us."

The others turned to her. Chloe frowned. "You want to keep him alive?"

"I want to keep Prague alive," Ying said. Her gaze didn't leave Belphegor's stump. "If the Tomas puppets and his Enforcers are still tied to him, then we don't need to tear them down. We just need to… redirect them."

Dan's lip curled. "You're talking about replacing one butcher with another."

"Call it what you want," Ying replied. "But unless one of you has a better way to keep this city standing, this is the only option we have."

The words tasted like rot in her mouth, but she didn't flinch. Somewhere deep down, she knew she'd crossed a line the moment the thought had taken shape. But it was the right line to cross. Prague didn't need heroes right now—it needed something ruthless enough to survive. And that meant using the monster they'd just beaten… even if it meant letting him keep breathing.

***

Victor had thought killing Belphegor would be the hard part. Turns out, it wasn't.

The hard part was standing over what was left of him and realising he might have to keep it alive.

He folded his arms, eyes narrowing at the stump. The thing was still pulsing faintly, every sluggish contraction pumping heat and stink into the cold air. It looked like it was trying to grow something back—limbs, a head, a face—though the attempts kept collapsing into shapeless lumps. Even crippled, the bastard's body didn't know how to quit.

"The Tomas puppets," Victor said, voice flat. "And the Enforcers—they didn't move unless he willed it. Didn't breathe without his say-so." He nodded toward the bridge, where corpses in cracked masks lay strewn like discarded marionettes. "They were powered by the pit."

Alyssa tilted her head. "The meat monster."

Victor didn't look at her. He kept his eyes on Belphegor. "That wasn't just meat. It was… everyone. Dissidents, rebels, the unlucky ones who caught his attention. He stripped them down, boiled their souls together, and stitched them into a single mass tied directly to him. That's why the puppets never stopped. Why they were always… everywhere."

"An engine," Chloe said quietly.

Victor nodded once. "And we just ripped the engine out of the city."

Ying stepped closer to him. "Then we put it back."

Victor gave her a look. "With him in it?"

"Yes. We chain him to the pit. Let him be the new engine. Only this time, Liz tells him what to defend."

A silence stretched. Victor caught Max's expression—wary, but thinking. Alyssa shifted her weight, the heel of her boot scraping the stone. No one said no.

Liz finally broke it. "It's not that simple. His mind is… foul. It's not like planting an idea in a person. It's like carving words into rot. You can't tell if it's going to hold, or twist into something worse."

"Then carve it deep," Ying said. "Give him one command. Defend what's yours. Defend the city. Nothing else."

Victor let out a slow breath through his nose. The idea sat in his gut like cold iron. Every instinct screamed at him to finish Belphegor for good, to make sure the thing never drew another breath. But the image of Prague without walls came just as quickly—streets flooded with Lilith's spawn, or Agrath's blood-drinkers feasting on the survivors.

"Even if it works," he said, "we're putting a leash on a rabid dog. It'll bite the moment we look away."

"Then don't look away," Ying replied.

Victor glanced around. Still no one was offering anything better. Max's jaw was tight, but he didn't speak up. Alyssa was studying the ground. Chloe's eyes had drifted toward the rooftops, scanning the city like she already knew this was the only chance it had.

Victor spat again, more to clear the taste in his mouth than anything else. "Fine. But I'm the one putting the shackles on."

He stepped toward the stump, boots squelching in the damp filth that had seeped from it. Belphegor twitched as Victor drew closer, the sound it made somewhere between a sigh and a wet hiss.

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"You hear that?" Victor muttered, crouching to meet what was left of its ruined bulk.

"You're not done yet, freak. Not until we've squeezed every drop of use out of you."

If Belphegor understood, he didn't show it. His body just kept trying to grow, and kept failing.

Victor straightened, jerking his chin toward the prison pit in the distance. "Let's get him in the hole."

Max hadn't spoken since Ying laid out the plan. Now, his eyes flicked to Liz — not to Belphegor, not to anything else.

"You don't go too deep," he said quietly. "You touch what you need and get out."

Liz gave a small nod. She didn't promise.

Max stood a little apart from the group, watching the wreck of Belphegor's body steam in the cold air. His jaw tightened — not at the demon, but at the fact this was the best option they had. "We chain him," he said, low, almost to himself. "And hope we don't regret it."

***

The way down was always worse than the fight.

They dragged Belphegor's twitching stump through the streets like some obscene catch of the day. His upper half flopped and writhed, tendon strands dragging behind him, still trying to knit themselves back together. The sound was a wet rope twisting in a bucket of meat.

No one in the team spoke. Even Alyssa, who usually had something cutting to say, kept her eyes on the ground.

The gates to the prison pit yawned open at the far end of the old execution yard. The descent was nothing more than a spiral of rusted metal and broken stone, each level lined with gutted cells. Liz caught flashes as they passed: walls scratched to the bone by fingernails, graffiti carved with desperate messages, skeletons still chained to the bars.

By the third turn, the air grew heavy with the stench — a sour, coppery heat that coated the back of her throat. By the fifth, it felt alive.

They reached the feeding floor. The walls here glistened with a film of congealed fat, and the pit itself was a black, seething hole in the centre. Once, she'd been told, it had held the original "meat monster" — a coagulated fusion of Belphegor's victims, kept barely animate by his will. Now it was empty, its hunger waiting.

Victor shoved the stump toward the feeding rig — an iron frame of hooks and chains suspended over the deep pit. Belphegor thrashed once, then the shackles bit down with a metallic shriek. He hung there, twitching like a puppet with its strings cut wrong.

Liz stepped forward. Her halo flared red, bleeding into the walls until the entire chamber swam in crimson haze. Heat prickled against her scalp.

She reached out, pressing her palm against the clammy skin of what remained of his skull.

The world around her fell away.

She was walking a labyrinth. Corridors of rotting flesh stretched out in every direction, pulsing like breathing lungs. The floor squelched underfoot. Somewhere in the dark, voices whispered — gasps and sobs, a thousand of them, all trapped here. The echo of Belphegor's mind.

Liz ignored them. She had no room for their pain, not now.

She found the core of him — not a throne, not even a chamber, just a throbbing abscess of thought, swollen and ready to burst.

She knelt in the reek, placed the seed of her command into it:

Defend what's yours. Defend the city.

The abscess shuddered. The whispers turned to screams.

For a moment, she thought he might reject it, push back. His will surged — the oily presence of a mind that had ruled this place for decades — but then it buckled. Her seed took root, burrowing deep, twining through what was left of him until it became his truth.

In the psychic dark, she felt the thing's hunger coil around her touch, testing it. Obeying — for now. She pulled away before it could taste more.

Liz stepped back into her body with a snap. The red haze collapsed, leaving only the stink of the pit and the sound of Belphegor's chains creaking.

His eyes were glassy. His twitching slowed, as though he were listening to something far away.

"It's done," she said, her voice flat.

Victor glanced up at her. "You sure?"

Liz didn't look away from the stump. "He'll protect it like it's his own flesh. Nothing gets through."

Max shifted behind her, silent, but she felt his gaze.

***

It started with a sound — a low, mechanical grind, like a thousand old joints turning at once.

Chloe stepped up to the edge of the prison yard and looked toward the city.

In the streets below, bodies began to stir.

Tomas puppets, the ones she'd seen fall hours ago, rose from their sprawled positions in alleys and intersections. They straightened in jerks, heads rolling once before snapping forward. The ones that had collapsed in shopfronts pushed the glass aside and stepped into the daylight. Others simply stood from wherever they'd fallen — on rooftops, in doorways, in the middle of empty boulevards.

Their faces were the same waxen masks she'd always hated — Belphegor's preferred blank canvas. But now, behind each pair of glassy eyes, a faint ember glowed red.

A low, synchronized breath rippled through them — not a sound of life, but of machinery remembering how to run. Boots scraped in unison. Metal clasps and leather straps creaked as they rolled their shoulders, shedding the stiffness of hours in the cold.

The Enforcers followed, moving with the same slow, deliberate stride Chloe had seen on her first day in Prague. They weren't mindless like the puppets — these were Contractors, human once and still human enough to carry the weight of choice in their eyes. But every one of them glanced toward the city's walls, as if the new command Liz had planted was already reshaping their instincts.

They fell back into familiar patterns — squads peeling off toward their usual posts, captains calling out quiet orders. The difference was in the silences between. No more stopping civilians. No more sudden grabs off the street. The air felt… lighter for it.

Beside her, Ying's gaze tracked the nearest squad. "I'll update their orders," she said. "Mirko will help. They'll still be police — but their job now is to protect the people, not feed them to the pit."

Alyssa let out a sharp breath that was almost a laugh. "About time. Last time I saw one of them up close, I was in the back of a van headed for that pervert Tomas's bedroom." Her jaw tightened. "Guess we're rewriting the story."

Chloe's eyes stayed on the Enforcers as they disappeared into the mist, a flicker of something unreadable crossing her face. "They were the ones who dragged me too. Thought they owned the city." Her voice dipped. "Maybe now it can own itself."

Victor, standing apart from them, flexed his fingers once, claws catching the weak light. "I remember the feel of their cuffs." He didn't look at anyone as he spoke. "Feels better watching them take orders from us."

In eerie unison, the Tomas's began to march. Down the main avenues, over bridges, threading through side streets — each one moving to a point along the wall or a choke point in the old city's design. No shouts, no orders, no sound but the synchronized strike of boots and the occasional creak of synthetic sinew.

It was the kind of thing that might look like discipline to someone who didn't know better. To Chloe, it was a hive waking up.

Behind her, Liz kept her eyes on the pit. Victor's jaw was set, unreadable.

Chloe tore her gaze from the marching figures, swallowing the taste in her mouth. They'd bought Prague something rare — breathing space. But the cost was standing right in front of them, shackled in the dark.

She broke the silence. "It'll hold," she said. "For now."

No one disagreed.

And no one said what they were all thinking — that they might've just traded one kind of nightmare for another.

***

The wind at Prague's centre carried the stink of the pit. Even up here on the roof of the gutted municipal hall, it curled in faint, acidic threads. Ying crouched by a battered comm unit scavenged from the Enforcer precinct, its antenna a mangled, solder-patched mess. The thing crackled to life on the second try, spitting static and half a dozen failed connection codes before finally locking on.

"Grimm?" she said.

A pause, then his voice — clearer than she'd expected, tinged with something she hadn't heard in years. "Ying… tell me you got him."

Her mouth twitched. "We got him."

There was a short, sharp exhale — almost a laugh — and then silence, as if he didn't quite trust the sound. "Good. Good. For the first time in a very long time…" His voice softened in a way that felt alien. "We might have a small hope."

Ying didn't respond. She let him have that moment, listening to the faint smile in his tone, imagining him in the Institute's comms room, surrounded by blinking lights and war maps, feeling something like relief.

"Report," he said finally, voice regaining its usual precision.

"Prague is the first free city," she said. "Walls are secure. Puppets and Enforcers are on defense, operating under new orders. Civilians are safe for now."

"How?"

Ying glanced toward the pit in the square below, where faint red light pulsed like a diseased heartbeat. "A Demon Lord— Belphegor is chained to the feeding rig. Liz anchored a psychic directive — defend what's yours, defend the city. He'll obey. For now."

Silence. Then: "That's… inventive."

"It's ugly," Ying said flatly.

"It's survival," Grimm replied. "I would have done the same. I have done the same, though perhaps not on that scale."

Ying's gaze shifted to the jagged skyline. "It's not going to sit well with the people here, once they understand what's keeping them safe."

"Then don't tell them," Grimm said without hesitation. "They need a wall they can trust. They don't need to know the foundation is made of bones."

Ying felt the truth in it, and the coldness. Grimm's morality wasn't eroded — it had been stripped away long ago.

"You'll send someone to oversee the city?" she asked.

"Yes. A governor. And Mirko should take command of the city's defenders. Her loyalty is proven."

"That works."

"I'll also send Dr. Adisa," Grimm added. "We've never had the chance to study a living Demon Lord. The data could be… transformative."

Ying almost smiled at the clinical hunger in his tone

"You've done what most couldn't," Grimm said. "Secured a city without levelling it."

There was a pause — long enough for Ying to hear the hum of distant equipment on his end. "Still… the real victory is that you've given us a live subject. One we can cut apart without it dying."

"You don't even care what he's done."

"I care that he's still breathing," Grimm said. "And that you've given us a weapon no one else has. The rest is sentiment, and sentiment doesn't win wars."

There was a pause — long enough for her to hear the faint shift of paper, the scratch of a pen. She knew that sound. He was already making lists, not of defences, but of possibilities. Belphegor was no longer a threat in his mind. He was a resource. A test case. A tool.

The channel clicked dead.

Ying lowered the comm, watching as the Tomas puppets and Enforcers moved like a tide toward the outer walls. From this height they looked like parts of the same machine — silent, obedient, waiting for something to kill.

Beside her, Liz stood with her eyes fixed on the pit, the red shimmer of her halo dimming. "This is only safe while he obeys," she said quietly to Max.

Max didn't take his eyes off the darkness below. "Then we don't give him the choice."

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