The staff corridor was narrow and dark and smelled like disinfectant that had long since stopped doing anything useful and Maya moved through it like she had been here before which she hadn’t but she read buildings the way other people read faces and the layout was talking to her in a language she understood.

Michael kept the pulse running and reported position updates to the squad tracking their surroundings in real time.

The three lobby signatures were behind them now, still in the main space, undisturbed. The building beyond the corridor was a different story.

The pulse painted a picture he wasn’t entirely comfortable with, signatures on multiple floors, some stationary, some moving in the slow directionless patterns he knew and some moving in ways he didn’t recognise yet which was the part that sat uneasily in the back of his mind.

"Left here," Maya said quietly at a junction, not hesitating.

He followed her left.

The corridor opened into a wider service passage with trolley tracks worn into the floor and a row of supply room doors running along the right side.

Emergency lighting ran along the ceiling in a thin red line that was just enough to move by without flashlights, which was good because flashlights through windows would have been visible from the street.

"A supply elevator should be at the end," Maya said.

"Should be," Sera said behind him.

"Is," Maya said, pointing.

The elevator bank was at the end of the passage, three sets of wide service doors designed for equipment trolleys, and beside them a stairwell door with a small wire mesh window.

Michael checked the pulse before anyone touched anything. The stairwell showed clear for the first two floors. Floor three had two signatures on them and foor four had more than two.

He looked at Dr. Kang’s list in his jacket pocket without taking it out. He had it memorised by now.

The pharmacy storage was on the second floor while the surgical supplies were on the third. The main medical stockpile that Dr. Kang had been most specific about was in the basement level dispensary which was either very convenient or very much the opposite depending on what the basement pulse showed.

He pushed the pulse down.

The basement had seven signatures and they were not moving the way standard Rotters were supposed to move.

He kept that to himself for now.

"Let’s head to the second floor first," he said. "The pharmacy storage. We clear what we can carry and come back for the rest."

"The dispensary—" Maya started.

"After the second floor."

She looked at him and read something in his face that made her not push it and he appreciated that about her, the way she picked her moments.

The stairwell door opened quietly and they went up.

---

The second floor was a ward.

A long corridor with beds visible through open doorways on both sides, most of them were empty and some of them not and those ones they didn’t look at directly.

The emergency lighting was stronger up here, the red tint giving everything the particular quality of a place that was trying very hard to look like something from a nightmare and mostly succeeding.

Michael ran the pulse. One signature at the far end of the corridor, stationary, hadn’t moved since he’d been tracking the floor. The pharmacy storage was halfway down on the left, door closed, the little sign beside it still lit by a battery backup that had somehow survived a month.

They moved down the corridor in single file, slow and deliberate, stepping around the things on the floor that were better stepped around without looking at them. Maya was behind him and he could hear her breathing stay controlled with the specific effort of someone managing themselves carefully and doing a good job of it.

He stopped outside the pharmacy storage door. The pulse showed nothing inside.

He tried the handle but it was locked.

He looked at the lock and opened the shop in his vision.

[Lock Override Tool — 60 SP.]

He bought it and it appeared in his hand and thirty seconds later the door swung open and the smell of a properly sealed pharmaceutical storage room came out and it was one of the better smells he’d encountered in thirty days which was a low bar but he’d take it.

The room was largely untouched.

Shelves floor to ceiling on three walls, organised and labelled with the obsessive precision of hospital pharmacy staff, and most of it still there because nobody had made it this far in the first chaotic days and nobody had made it this far since.

Maya made a sound behind him that was very small and very genuine. "Dr. Kang is going to lose her mind."

"Quietly," Shin said, but she was almost smiling.

They started loading. Michael had bought four large duffel bags from the shop before they left and they worked through Dr. Kang’s priority list systematically, Sera reading items, Shin locating them on the shelves, Maya passing them back and Michael packing with the focused efficiency of someone who had been doing inventory management for two years and finally found a use for it.

The top section of the list was done in twelve minutes.

He was halfway through the secondary section when the pulse caught the stationary signature at the end of the corridor move.

He stopped packing.

"Michael," Sera said, reading his stillness.

"The end of the corridor," he said quietly. "It’s moving."

Everyone went still and listened and in the quiet of the storage room they could all hear it, the slow drag shuffle of something that had been stationary for a long time and had found a reason to stop being stationary, moving down the corridor toward the pharmacy storage room with the particular unhurried patience of something that had nowhere else to be.

Maya looked at the open storage room door.

Michael looked at it too and did a quick calculation. Closing it meant making noise. Leaving it open meant whatever was in the corridor would see it when it passed and the room had no other exit.

He handed his axe to Sera and stepped to the side of the open doorway and pressed against the wall and held up one finger.

One. He’d take it in the doorway before it got past.

Sera positioned herself on the other side. Shin moved Maya back behind the shelves without a word and Maya went without arguing which told him she was very scared.

The shuffle got closer.

Michael watched the pulse signature move down the corridor with the slow steady progress of something following a scent and he breathed in and out once and got ready and the shape appeared in the doorway.

It wasn’t a standard Rotter.

It had been a hospital worker once, the scrubs were still recognisable, but the mutation had done something to the upper body that made it wider than the doorframe and it turned sideways to come through and that half second of it being sideways in the doorframe was the window Michael had and he took it, two handed grip, full swing, and the axe connected and the thing went down hard and loud and lay still.

Too loud.

The corridor above them was quiet for exactly three seconds and then the two signatures on floor three started moving and from somewhere deeper in the building something that had been still began to move as well.

Michael looked at the four full duffel bags on the floor. Looked at the remaining secondary items on the list. Looked at the stairwell door at the end of the corridor.

"We need to go," Sera said.

"Dispensary," he said, because seven signatures in the basement doing things he hadn’t identified yet or two signatures coming down from the third floor and whatever had just woken up deeper in the building were two different problems and one of them was closer.

"Michael," Sera said.

"Thirty seconds." He crossed to the shelves and grabbed the remaining priority items off Dr. Kang’s list with both hands, the things she’d written in capitals and underlined, and shoved them into the last bag and zipped it and picked it up.

"Now," he said and they moved.

---

The stairwell going down was faster than going up had been because the two floor three signatures were in the main corridor stairwell and not the service stairwell and Michael had the service route memorised from the pulse mapping he’d done before they entered. They went down fast and quiet and hit the ground floor service passage and kept moving toward the lobby entrance.

The Crawler was still outside the front entrance. He could feel it on the pulse, still circling with the frustrated patience it had maintained since they came in.

"Back way," Sera said, already angling toward the far end of the service passage where a fire exit door sat at the end of a short corridor.

He checked the pulse outside the fire exit. The alley beyond was clear. The Crawler was on the other side of the building. The street signatures from the third block were still doing their usual patterns undisturbed.

He got the fire exit open and the grey morning light came in and they went through one by one and he pulled it shut behind them and stood in the alley with four duffel bags between them and his pulse running clean in every direction.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Maya looked at the bags and then at Michael with an expression that was still working through the last twenty minutes and processing them into something manageable.

"You got everything on the priority list," she said.

"Most of the secondary too."

She stared at him. "In there."

"We had twelve minutes before it got complicated."

She kept staring.

"Maya," he said.

"I’m fine," she said. "I’m completely fine. Let’s go home."

They went home. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

[Ding! Raid Complete — General Hospital.]

[SP earned: 890.]

[Quest Bonus — Full Priority List Retrieved: +200 SP.]

[Total SP: 2,340.]

Michael looked at the SP total and then at the route south back to the building and then at the four bags of medical supplies and thought about Dr. Kang’s face when she saw them.

That part he was actually looking forward to.

---

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