Curze's figure dissolved like a wisp of smoke into the darkness outside the mansion, thicker than ink.
The clamor of the Hive City below, and the chaotic beams increasingly converging around the building that had become a blood-soaked slaughterhouse, became the backdrop to his departure.
He glided along the outer edges of towering buildings, threading through a maze of pipes and steel frameworks, every movement precisely exploiting blind spots in light and sound.
His pursuers' searchlights swept fruitlessly over the places he had occupied moments before, catching nothing but empty, rusted metal and clouds of chemical dust drifting on the wind.
He had no intention of lingering.
For Curze, killing had never been the end, but the brush; flesh and blood were not trophies, but paint.
The destruction of the Max Family, together with its patriarch's final fate of unimaginable agony, would become a vivid portrait of terror.
He did not need to display this painting himself. Through survivors' trembling whispers, the horrified faces of enforcers entering the scene, and the increasingly frenzied suspicions of high society behind locked doors and windows, it would spread like the deadliest spores through every level and every dark vein of Nostramo, that diseased beast, silently taking root and sprouting.
Fear was the seed he sowed, the invisible blade suspended above every exploiter and thug, more enduring than any direct threat, more capable of warping hearts.
He swept like a ghost along the edge of a lower-level passage. Occasionally, the hushed conversations of civilians rose from below, discussing the latest legends of "Dark Night Judgment."
A ripple so cold it bordered on nothingness passed through the depths of his consciousness. The gears of his plan were meshing.
He was about to leave the shadows of a ventilation shaft for another abandoned conveyor corridor when,