The air in the Crimson Altar was a toxic cocktail. It stank of old, cold stone, of the beast's unnatural, ozone-like foulness, and of the sharp, acrid scent of cheap lamp oil. For the men behind him, it was the smell of a monster's lair. For Captain Tarsus, it was the smell of a heretic's workshop.
He stood on the threshold of the chamber, a rock of grim certainty in a tide of his men's barely suppressed panic. He saw their fear. He saw their wide, terrified eyes fixed on the thrashing, oily-black creature in the center of the room. They saw a demon, a creature from the darkest pits of the Abyss.
Tarsus saw a weapon. A guard dog. A brutish, summoned thing, chained and waiting for its master's command.
His gaze was not on the beast. That was the distraction, the theatrical centerpiece designed to awe and terrify. His gaze was on the stage itself. And it was a stage he understood with a profound, almost academic clarity.
His mind, the mind of a detective who had spent thirty years deconstructing the logic of crime, began to dismantle the scene before him. He did not see chaos. He saw purpose. He saw design.
The chains. His men saw a cage. Tarsus saw a binding circle. The pure-grade iron, the triangular formation—it was a classic, if brutal, method for anchoring an extra-planar entity to a specific physical coordinate. It was a technique he had only read about in the confiscated, forbidden texts in the Watch's own archives, a chapter on the illegal summoning rituals of the old Magocracy.
The dust. His men saw filth. Tarsus knelt, his finger brushing against one of the faint, dark lines on the floor. He brought it to his nose. The sharp, metallic tang of iron filings. Not a random mess. A ritual circle. Wards of containment, designed to weaken the summoned entity, to make it more pliable, more controllable for its master.
The oil. His men smelled a fire hazard. Tarsus saw an alchemical reagent. A catalyst, perhaps, or a component for a final, spectacular banishment or detonation spell.
Every single piece of evidence, every detail of the "chaos," was a perfect, damning confirmation of the theory he had so meticulously constructed. This was not a monster hunt. This was an interrupted summoning.
And every summoning had a summoner.
His gaze lifted from the damning tableau on the floor and swept the high, dark places of the chamber. The rafters. The crumbling balconies. The shadowed alcoves. He was looking for the priest of this profane ceremony. The ghost. The student.
"Hold the line!" he boomed, his voice a hammer blow of authority that momentarily steadied his men's fraying nerves. "Archers, mark the target! But do not fire without my command!"
He needed the beast alive, for now. It was his single greatest piece of evidence. And it was the perfect bait to draw out the true quarry.
He took a slow, deliberate step into the chamber, his heavy crossbow held at a ready position. The weapon felt like a natural extension of his own will, a tool of pure, uncompromising order. He was the city's immune system, and he had just found a festering, heretical infection.
His eyes, accustomed to the deep gloom of the undercity, began to adjust. He saw the intricate network of traps and environmental hazards. The collapsed catwalk. The wall of rubble. To his men, it was the result of a chaotic battle. To Tarsus, it was the work of a brilliant, ruthless, and dangerously powerful individual. This was not the work of a monster thrashing in a rage. This was the work of a mind. A cold, calculating, and deeply human mind.
His quarry was not just a powerful sorcerer. He was a brilliant tactician. The realization did not bring fear. It brought a surge of cold, professional respect, the kind a master hunter feels when he finally comes face to face with a truly worthy wolf.
He scanned the rafters again, his gaze lingering on the deep, absolute darkness of a high alcove on the far side of the chamber. There was nothing there. Just a patch of shadow. But it was a patch of shadow that felt… wrong. It was too still. Too perfect. It was the kind of shadow a hunter would choose to hide in.
He had him.
Tarsus's internal monologue was a final, triumphant closing of the case file. The suspect, an academy student codenamed 'The Ghost,' has been using the undercity as a laboratory for his forbidden magic. He escalated from simple assaults to the ritualistic murders of local criminals, using this summoned entity as his weapon. We have cornered him in his primary ritual site, in the final phases of his profane work. He is intelligent, powerful, and a master of the terrain. He is the single greatest heretical threat this city has seen in a generation.
The conclusion was so clean, so logical, so perfectly supported by every single piece of the evidence before him, that it never occurred to him that it could be wrong. He had taken a series of impossible, chaotic events and had woven them into a single, coherent, and utterly damning narrative. It was the greatest act of detective work he had ever performed. And it was a masterpiece of flawed genius.
He saw a flicker of movement in the alcove. A slight, almost imperceptible shift in the quality of the darkness.
"There," he breathed, the word a soft puff of smoke in the cold air.
He raised his crossbow, the heavy weapon feeling as light as a feather in his hands. He sighted down the length of the iron bolt, aiming not at a visible target, but at the heart of the shadow itself. He was not just aiming a weapon. He was aiming the full, uncompromising weight of the city's law at a single point of heretical darkness.
"By order of the City Watch," his voice boomed, a final, absolute judgment that echoed through the vast, stone chamber, a sound far more powerful than the shrieking of the beast. "Drop the flame and surrender, sorcerer! You are under arrest!"
He saw the shadow flinch. He saw the flicker of fire he had glimpsed a moment before being hastily extinguished. He had him. The ghost was cornered. The student was caught. The killer was at his mercy.
He held his aim, his finger resting on the trigger, a patient hunter waiting for his prey to make its final, fatal mistake. The silence that followed his command was a tense, vibrating thing, a held breath between two worlds: his world of cold, hard, and mistaken logic, and the boy's world of desperate, horrifying, and misunderstood truth. And in the middle, a monster in a cage of iron shrieked, a forgotten player in a game that was no longer about it.