Chapter 5: The Ghost

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Chapter 5: The Ghost

My footfalls echoed with muted determination down the sterile hallway stretching ahead, each measured stride propelling the sergeant's avatar onwards through Central's bustling artery. But within the depths of my fragmented psyche, the Redeemer stirred with unbridled purpose once more. 

Like some insatiable primordial beast scenting the first tantalizing traces of its newest prey upon karmic winds, eagerly roused from hibernation to actualize another savage reckoning. The self-appointed Judicator's spirit hungered for its next sacrosanct crusade to smite depravity where it festers most virulently against divine order.

Even with the Hayler Lewis persona firmly compartmentalized at the forefront, that insidious compulsion radiated as a festering undertow of implacable zeal. The blazing conviction that I alone embodied conduit for enforcing the justice this world so desperately required...through permanent extremities of ultimate absolution.

It gnawed at the very fabric of my conscious duality, vocalized through assertive apparitions lurking at the fringes of focused thought. Ghostly whispers cajoling that true penance still remained unfinished business until the wicked were fully purged by severe prejudice.

Ammunition to feed the Redeemer's righteous cause already assembled through every depraved data matrix absorbed during Kane's briefing. Each morbid death portrait and forensic clue seared directly into the cortices of perfect recall, waiting to be scrutinized in eventual hunt sequences for their defilers.

The pair of them were little more than radioactive isotopes scattered across this city's landscape at present - their identities unknown, but ionized signatures of degeneracy detectable by the Redeemer's heightened senses if allowed sufficient pursuit parameters.  Horrors perpetuated against those poor broken souls transcending mortal classifications of mere 'murder' or 'sexual assault.'

Oh no, these sins spoke to something far more theologically profane than could ever be adequately accounted for on some police blotter or court docket. Their victims were practically burned at the pyre of humanity itself, ritually eviscerated of identity and spirit until just empty human chalices remained by kill's end.

Desecrating ruined vessels from which they quaffed rapacious gulps of transcendent hubris for personal indulgences no lucid principles could empathize with. These warped transgressors didn't simply disrupt the fragile continuum woven between life and death – they invalidated its sanctity entirely through willful depravities.

The more Hayler attempted rebuking these pernicious trains of thought, the louder they echoed through subliminal synaptic chambers. Begging the Redeemer's full awakening to rain righteous fury upon the forces violating sacred cosmological tenets...before paradise was permanently soiled through such incalculable profanities.

These ruminations simmered in a steadily-mounting fever pitch as I navigated the forensics wing's bustle. Staves of lab technicians shuffling between computer stations or clustered around analysis terminals scrutinizing new case data and grisly photographic records.

All prosecuting their daily liturgies in fealty to formatting provable materials for legal proceedings. To stand as principled opposition against perceived misconduct...even if their comprehension of what comprised true 'evil' remained woefully stunted. Mainly blind conductors laboring within the facade of lauded system processs. Complacent appendages within the same antiquated machine so desperately requiring Redeemer dogma's merciless interventions.

A contemptuous zephyr of disgust flickered across my consciousness while passing by their self-important stations. The way they parsed through detritus of human obscenity with all the intellectual fire applied to differential equations or mechanical designs. So removed from the actual ethological consequences of their coddled stances regarding societal viruses and degeneracies.

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