Chapter 41: Hellgate Uprising

"Didn’t see that coming the org’s director and their golden boy, tangled up together this whole time."

"Explains a lot, actually. Bet the two of them cooked up the whole scheme to push Kael Mercer out."

"And then turned around and trashed his name online afterward. Cowards, the both of them."

Behind the closed door of Cynthia’s private office, a forensics team worked in careful, practiced silence, bagging evidence, dusting for prints, cataloging every inch of the scene around two bodies that had gone cold hours ago.

The office itself felt wrong somehow too neat, too undisturbed, like the room hadn’t fully registered that something violent had happened inside it.

A few of them kept their voices low, trading commentary that had nothing to do with procedure.

"Enough." The reprimand cracked across the room, sharp and immediate. "Keep your opinions to yourselves and focus on the job."

The team snapped upright at the sound of Captain Daniel Reyes’s voice, murmurs dying instantly. He surveyed the room with open disapproval before addressing them properly.

"Report. What have we got?"

"Nothing, Captain. No forced entry, no struggle, no prints, no footprints that don’t already belong here."

One officer read off her notes, frustration plain in her voice. "A handful of hair samples, still processing. But honestly? I don’t think they’re connected to whoever did this."

Reyes’s jaw tightened. In twenty years on the force, he’d never once walked into a scene this clean nothing, not one thread out of place, like the killer had simply stepped through the walls and out again without ever setting foot on solid ground.

A ghost, maybe.

The thought unsettled him more than he cared to admit.

"Captain!" Another voice cut through the room, urgent. "Hidden cameras. Well concealed looks like the victims didn’t even know they were there. If they were running last night, we might actually have footage."

Reyes’s mood lifted instantly. Whatever tricks this killer had pulled, a lens didn’t lie cameras caught what eyes missed, every time, no exceptions he’d ever encountered in a career built on exactly that principle.

He wanted answers, and he wanted them now.

"Pull it up. Immediately. Every second we wait, whatever’s on there gets colder."

The tech team dug the footage out fast, cuing it to the start of the previous evening.

The opening minutes made most of the room shift uncomfortably in place clearly something private, something that had nothing to do with the investigation and everything to do with why this office had a hidden camera in the first place.

A junior officer cleared her throat.

"Can we... skip ahead? Past whatever this is?"

"No." Reyes’s answer came flat, immovable. "Every frame gets watched. We don’t get to pick and choose what might matter."

He didn’t have to wait long.

Onscreen, Cynthia’s expression shifted first confusion, then horror, then a scream that cut off almost as fast as it started.

A wound bloomed across her chest, blooming from nothing, no visible cause at all, no weapon, no attacker, nothing the human eye could trace.

A heartbeat later, Ryan’s body jerked, something invisible punching clean through his skull with the same terrible, silent precision.

The room went dead silent.

"Did anyone actually see what did that?"

"I don’t I was watching, and there’s just... nothing. Nothing there, and then they’re gone."

"That’s not possible. That can’t be possible."

Every face in the room had gone the same shade of pale.

Reyes felt his own pulse pick up, jaw clenched tight, forcing his voice level through sheer discipline.

"Rewind. Frame by frame this time. Somebody catches something, they say it out loud immediately."

The footage looped back to the start and crawled forward one frame at a time high-resolution, expensive equipment that had apparently been purchased for reasons entirely unrelated to home security.

Whatever else could be said about the setup, the picture quality was flawless, sharp enough to count individual threads on the bedsheets.

Even at that pace, frame after frame, pass after pass, the room found nothing. No shape.

No shadow. No disturbance in the air to explain either death. One moment the wound simply existed; the frame before it, nothing at all.

If anything, each replay left the room colder than the last, dread pooling instead of answers.

A few officers had stopped taking notes entirely, just staring at the screen like it might finally give something up if they watched long enough.

"Has to be something supernatural. What else explains a camera catching nothing?"

"Cut that out."

Reyes’s glare could have stripped paint. "This is a police investigation, not a ghost story. Whatever we’re dealing with, it’s a person, not a phantom."

Privately, though, even he wasn’t entirely sure he believed his own reprimand. No ordinary killer left a room this spotless.

A young officer with her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail spoke up from the back, half to herself.

"The Captain’s right, obviously no such thing as ghosts." She frowned at the screen, turning something over.

"But this reminds me of an Assassin build. Stealth-based skill activation, no aggro trigger.

The only thing that’s weird is the stealth holding through an actual attack that shouldn’t be possible outside of one very specific class interaction."

Reyes rapped her sharply on the back of the head. "Doyle. I’ve told you to cut back on the game time. You’re diagnosing a murder with build theory now?"

"That’s a stupider theory than the ghost one."

"Copy that, Captain. My bad." Officer Casey Doyle rubbed the sore spot, forcing the thought back down.

It’s just because Ascension is so ridiculously immersive, she told herself. I’ve barely logged off in two days, that’s all this is. No way a real person’s running actual game mechanics in the real world.

Still, some small, stubborn part of her mind refused to fully let the idea go, filing it away for later even as she nodded along with the Captain’s correction.

Reyes exhaled, rubbing his temples, clearly out of patience for supernatural theories or otherwise.

"We’ve got nothing usable from the scene itself. Bring in every member of this club for questioning. Someone knows something."

"Yes, Captain."

Within the hour, Ironclad’s remaining staff were being escorted out in a slow, uneasy line, headed downtown for statements nobody expected to actually produce a lead.

A few of them cast nervous glances back at the sealed office as they went, as if whatever had happened inside might still be watching.

Back inside Ascension, the sky itself seemed to split open with the force of the announcement that followed a deep, resonant chime that rolled across every zone on the server simultaneously, impossible to miss no matter where a player happened to be standing.

"Server Announcement: The Scourge Legion’s plot has been exposed. At 12:00 PM, the seals over Silvermoon Fortress will break, unleashing an army of the undead upon the city. The [Hellgate Uprising] world event has begun."

"The Kingdom of Winterhold has issued an emergency mobilization order. All adventurers level 17 and above are called to the city’s defense."

"Rewards will be distributed by final ranking once the event concludes. All eligible players are welcome to participate."