CHAPTER 283: PAINTER.

Having just learned about the Red Rage gang and how they operated, Dante found it surprising that they hadn’t organized an underground fighting ring as soon as they moved to Hollowgrid. As it turned out, that was exactly what they did.

The basement floor was one large hall with a pretty high ceiling, a result of building it inside a parking lot. The darkness shrouding it was made worse by the overhead lights at the center, which illuminate one thing and one thing only: a large fighting ring.

It was hexagonal in shape, slightly elevated and surrounded from all sides by a metallic cage. Two, in fact, with the first one made from alloy bars, while the other is the typical welded wire. One look at the safety guards and one could tell that the place was meant to keep those outside from coming in, and those trapped from escaping. It was made to house unchecked violence, and unlike the floors above, it seemed to have served its purpose already.

From the looks of it, the floor inside the cage was white at some point, an empty canvas for a painter to use. That painter chose the color red to be the only color for his newest work, but instead of tracing lines with his brush, he simply waved it around, randomly splashing the crimson color to create a messy sight.

The painter was still at work, having focused all his efforts on a single spot. He raised the brush high, then brought it down, slamming a single point and causing the metallic cage surrounding him to rattle from the impact.

The painter himself seemed to be a part of the work. A hulking figure with skin tightly wrapped around his body, accentuating the forms of each and every one of his muscles. His shoulders were as broad as most people were tall, and the arms connected to them as thick as people were wide.

He was on his knees, hunched over one part of the canvas. His brush slowly rose then dropped like a falling meteor, and the moment it struck the canvas, another tremor spread through the floor. His immediate surrounding was entirely covered in red, but he still seemed adamant on leaving his mark on that one spot.

BAM... BAM... BAM...

"Hugh... bluaaaagh..."

Dante took his focus off the video feed and checked on his companion. The boy had just emptied the contents of his stomach, falling into a coughing fit right after, his grimacing face was as pale as the cloudy sky above.

"Maybe you should take a break," Dante said. "I will handle the rest."

With tears in his eyes -from the intense coughing and not pain of sadness- Finn looked up at Dante and was immediately struck with confusion. The scene captured by the bots might have been the boy’s first encounter with gore of that level. After a moment of thought, he gritted his teeth and pushed himself up, picked the ice box and found a different spot to sit in, away from the mess he had created.

"I... I can do it." He said. "It took me off guard, that’s all."

Watching him for a moment, Dante pulled back the screen projected on his OAM and once again studied the feed.

’One, two, three...’

Seven. It was a little difficult to see with nearly everything being covered in red, but the shadows gave form to the source of the color. The arms were intact, and so were the legs. Everything between them seemed like a messy paste—a mass of sludge no different from the vomit left on the floor a short distance from where he stood.

Throwing up was the correct reaction to witnessing such a scene, even more so when the one who caused it was still there. His right arm continued to rise, blood dripping from his fist like a freshly soaked brush. When it reached a certain height, he would bring it down on whoever was beneath him, the loud impact swallowing the faint squashing sounds from flesh being crushed.

That man was Tyler Moreno, also known as Riot, the leader of the Red Rage gang. Though his face couldn’t be seen from a high angle, that muscular body of his convinced Dante of his identity.

’This thing was lurking around here all this time?’ He pressed his mouth to a line. ’Damn...’

It felt like he had just discovered the lair of a monster while it was in the middle of its meal. Though he was glad to have checked instead of going in blind, he also regretted not using 8-3’s Spatial Awareness instead of having to witness that sickening scene with his own eyes.

"No wonder the security cams were off," Finn said.

"Let’s get a better visual of this." Dante followed. "Jonah can probably use it to get the new recruits he has been asking for."

"Yeah..."

The drones began to move, aiming to capture the crime scene from a different angle. As they did, Dante noticed several bodies lying outside the cage. Though unmoving, they appeared to be in a far better condition than those inside the cage. He guessed that the four idiots he tracked were among them, but before he could confirm, his attention was drawn back to the bloody mess.

Riot had stopped pounding the floor. Whoever was his latest victim, they were rendered to the same unrecognizable state as the other six, making it so the giant saw no need to continue beating them as he was doing for who knows how long. After sitting still for a while, he reached down and grabbed one of his arms then pushed himself up, dragging it away as he walked toward the cage’s door.

Dante guessed it was time for the monster to rest, though he didn’t understand why it would bother taking a bloodied body part with it. For a moment there, he entertained the idea of it wanting a snack before going to bed. He was even curious to know the real reason, that’s why he kept patiently observing the monster, but even then, he couldn’t have predicted what was about to happen.

Getting out of its cage, the monster walked a few steps then came to a halt. It stood there in silence, completely still, but then its body snapped and it turned around swinging its arm like a whip.

Startled, Dante jerked his head backward. His heart had almost come to a stop, a reaction to taking a projectile to the face. Nothing was flung at him, however, and he realized that his body had reacted reflexively to what he saw in the projected screen. That screen had turned completely dark, signaling that the feed it had displayed once was now cut.