Chapter Text
Crimson Silence
Night in the city possessed a strange illusion of quiet. To ordinary people, the hours after midnight seemed peaceful, as though the world had folded itself into rest beneath the cover of darkness. Lights dimmed in high-rise apartments, traffic thinned to occasional streaks of headlights along distant roads, and conversations faded into muffled murmurs behind closed doors. But the silence that humans believed in did not truly exist. It was only a softness layered over countless subtle sounds—sounds too faint for human senses to notice. In the heart of the city, life never truly paused. It simply lowered its voice.
Levi Ackerman stood at the towering glass window of the penthouse and listened to every one of those hidden sounds.
The building beneath him stretched twenty-three floors downward like a vertical hive of human existence, each apartment filled with its own rhythms of life. To Levi, those rhythms were not vague impressions but precise details that formed a living map inside his mind. He could hear the dull hum of electrical wires behind the walls, the quiet vibration of elevators gliding through their shafts, and the distant echo of a television left playing in some sleepless apartment far below. Even the faintest heartbeat carried upward through the stillness of the night, a soft rhythmic pulse that most creatures would never detect. Levi heard them all.
His reflection lingered faintly against the dark glass before him, a pale silhouette illuminated by the dim interior lighting of the penthouse. His posture was perfectly still, the kind of stillness that belonged less to a resting human body and more to a predator conserving energy. The sharp lines of his face rarely revealed emotion, and the cool grey of his eyes remained fixed on the glowing cityscape beyond the window. In his hand, he held a glass of deep red wine, though the liquid had remained untouched for nearly an hour. The color caught fragments of light from the city outside, resembling diluted blood swirling quietly against the glass.
For Levi, this nightly observation had become routine. Decades—perhaps longer than he cared to count—had passed in much the same way. Time blurred together when one lived beyond the fragile limits of human life. The world changed, buildings rose and fell, and generations of people came and disappeared with astonishing speed. Yet Levi remained the same silent witness, detached from the fragile lives unfolding around him.
Most nights, the building beneath him offered nothing new.
Humans followed patterns. Their routines were predictable. The young couple on the seventeenth floor argued every Thursday before eventually reconciling in exhausted whispers. A man on the fifteenth floor coughed constantly from years of smoking. The elderly woman in apartment 9C watched the same late-night television programs until she drifted into sleep with the screen still glowing beside her chair. After enough years, their habits became familiar background noise—unimportant details that Levi no longer bothered to notice.
Which was why the disturbance reached him instantly.
It happened shortly after two in the morning.
The elevator stopped at the twelfth floor with a quiet mechanical sigh, and a new sound entered the building’s delicate rhythm. Levi’s attention sharpened almost unconsciously as the faint jingle of keys echoed through the hallway below. The sound was followed by hurried footsteps and the rustling of bags being shifted from one arm to the other. There was exhaustion in the movement, but also a restless kind of energy, as though the person arriving had not yet allowed themselves to relax.
A door opened.
Then closed.
Inside the apartment, the unfamiliar presence continued moving, filling the silence with a clutter of small sounds. Papers slid across a surface. Glass clinked together softly. A cabinet door opened with a quiet creak before shutting again.
Levi tilted his head slightly.
Then the scent reached him.
It traveled slowly through the building’s ventilation system, faint but unmistakable. At first it carried the sterile sharpness of chemical compounds—antiseptic fluids, laboratory preservatives, metallic elements that prickled against Levi’s heightened senses. But beneath that sterile layer lingered something far more intriguing.
Blood.
Or something very close to it.
Levi inhaled again, narrowing his eyes as he analyzed the scent more carefully. The metallic undertone was undeniable. It stirred the deep instincts of his nature, the same instinct that had driven vampires to hunt for centuries. Yet the smell lacked the warmth and living pulse of human blood. There was no heartbeat attached to it, no organic vitality. Instead, the scent felt strangely hollow, as though someone had recreated the chemical structure of blood but failed to capture its life.
Curiosity, rare and unwelcome, stirred quietly in Levi’s mind.
Twelve floors below him, the woman inside the apartment sighed heavily. Her voice carried upward through the still building with surprising clarity.
“Finally…”
The single word sounded tired, breathless, and faintly relieved. Levi could hear the subtle quickness of her heartbeat beneath the sound, the rhythm steady but energized by fatigue and lingering concentration. She moved through the apartment with a restless pace, setting objects down, shifting equipment, opening containers that clinked softly against one another.
Then came the sound of a refrigerator door opening.
Glass vials moved inside.
Levi’s attention sharpened further.
The scent of the strange artificial blood intensified for a moment before the door closed again.
Below him, the woman spoke again—this time not to another person, but to herself.
“Let’s see if Sample Three finally behaves tonight.”
Her tone carried an odd mixture of frustration and excitement, the voice of someone who lived constantly inside the world of ideas and experiments. Levi listened as she muttered softly about protein structures, oxygen carriers, and molecular stability, her words drifting upward like fragments of a conversation that no one else could hear.
After several minutes, she laughed quietly.
The sound was unexpected—bright and genuine despite her exhaustion.
Levi’s fingers tightened slightly around the stem of his wine glass.
For a long moment, he remained perfectly still.
Then, slowly, his gaze shifted toward the darkness of the room behind him.
Across the penthouse, Petra Ral lounged on the wide leather couch as though she had been watching him the entire time. The soft glow of the city lights illuminated her blonde hair and the faint crimson glimmer hidden within her eyes. She had a glass of wine in one hand, though like Levi she had barely touched it.
Petra was smiling.
“You’re doing it again,” she said lazily.
Levi did not immediately respond.
Her smile widened as she studied his expression.
“That thing where you pretend you’re not listening to something interesting.”
Levi’s gaze returned briefly to the window before answering.
“Twelve floors down,” he said quietly.
Petra tilted her head.
“A human?”
“Yes.”
She shrugged lightly. “There are hundreds of those in this building.”
Levi remained silent for a moment.
Then he spoke again.
“She smells like blood.”
Petra’s expression sharpened instantly.
“Human blood?”
“No.”
Levi turned slightly, his grey eyes reflecting the faint glow of the city lights.
“Synthetic.”
For a moment Petra simply stared at him.
Then she laughed—a soft, intrigued sound that carried a hint of predatory amusement.
“Well,” she said, leaning back against the couch, “that is interesting.”
But Levi had already turned his attention back to the building beneath them.
Far below, in apartment 12B, the scientist named Hange Zoe continued working late into the night, completely unaware that something ancient and dangerous had just begun paying attention to her existence.
And for Levi Ackerman, who had spent decades drifting through the world untouched by curiosity, that single unfamiliar scent had quietly disturbed the stillness of his long, unchanging nights.
Something new had entered his territory.
And Levi intended to find out exactly what it was.