This time, when he snapped back into existence, he wasn't knee-deep in the shit.

Jack stepped off the red pad, shotgun in hand, but saw that Green had already secured the area. They had appeared in an octagonal stonework chamber. There was evidence that the UAC had been here at one point. He spied a few foldout tables and chairs, a shredded and sparking workstation, and a lotta blood. There was just one door in the room, a wooden door with metal bars built into it. It looked weirdly medieval.

"This place is utterly insane," Green said as he moved to join her. She was poking through the remains of the workstation. "I mean...it's all so inconsistent. Some sections are…I guess you could call them 'natural'. The stone, mostly. But then there's like...the weird green brick, the iron bars, the strange wood. Sometimes it seems like they built it. And then there's the UAC crap. And then there's stuff that I don't even...I don't get it at all. Like those rocks with the glowing red or blue veins. The coral formations. Those vines. Shit, I don't know. I hate thinking about it. It feels like..." She hesitated, seemed to gather her thoughts.

"Like what?" he asked. The others had teleported in.

"There's this thing in video games I used to play when I was a kid. They all had different names, but basically it boiled down to an insanity meter. I always thought that was bullshit, but...I don't know, I feel like I'm slowly losing my mind. It's harder to focus and keep my thoughts, and sometimes there's weird thoughts in my head, almost like they aren't my thoughts..." She realized that they were all focused on her now.

She sighed and shook her head. "Just ignore me."

"No, I know what you mean," Jennifer said and Stratton nodded.

"Well, that's good to know at least."

Jack felt like he was close to cracking, but he wasn't sure if he was actually going crazy. Well, beyond the parts where he raged out and saw red. He was glad he hadn't been experiencing that recently.

"We all ready? I'd like to get through this miserable fucking shitpile of a place as fast as humanly possible," Green said.

They all nodded. Jack found himself getting a little worried. Green seemed to be letting herself go more now, when before she'd been pretty good at keeping everything about herself in check. Was she cracking up? Honestly, he'd be surprised if she wasn't. He was actually impressed that they were all doing as well as they were. But it didn't matter. Circumstances didn't really matter. What mattered was how well they held up, despite all the odds. Even if they were doing pretty well, all things considered, this place didn't care.

The demons wouldn't stop just because they were impressed with their resolve of perseverance or bravery. They'd keep coming whether or not they were at the top of their game or coming apart at the seams. So they had to just keep going regardless. The four of them gathered at the only exit in the room and tried to prepare themselves for whatever lay beyond. And it didn't sound good. He could hear moaning, and not the kind that came from zombies, but rather the kind that came from someone in pain. Bad pain.

Jack took point, moving up a broad stairwell of ugly red brickwork. As he crested the top, he hesitated, really not wanting to go into the next section of this hellish structure. For a number of reasons it made his stomach churn. Although he'd grown used to the awful scents in this wretched place, the reek of blood and slowly rotting meat and exposed guts suddenly became overwhelming. The walls were still made of that same bland gray stonework, but the floor and the ceiling was constructed of hard-packed intestines.

And hanging from the ceiling, from rusty chains and hooks, were several more UAC personnel. And they weren't strung up by their arms this time. Because they didn't have arms. Or legs. They were just heads and limbless torsos. The hooks had been jammed through their skulls. Each of the bodies swayed slowly back and forth, dripping blood, as if caught in a light breeze. Jagged points had burst from foreheads or noses or eyes, wherever the hook had been jabbed in. Some of them had foamy red-and-purple entrails hanging from their torsos.

Jack felt his stomach twitch, but somehow managed to keep it, and himself, under control. Instead, he just focused on the door at the other end of the chamber and began crossing, unconsciously keeping a distance from the hanging remains. There was nothing they could do for these people now. He managed to make it to the other doorway without looking up. Honestly, it wasn't a whole lot better. Leading away from the doorway was what appeared to be an asphalt pathway. To either side of it were pools of blood.

There were crude demonic faces craved into the stone walls and out of their mouths poured more blood, feeding into the pools. Still no enemies, but they were closer to the sounds of suffering. And now he could hear growls and that strange gurgle-clicking noise. Imps. Great. He fucking hated Imps. Holding his shotgun tightly, he hurried across the asphalt pathway. The others followed silently behind him, keeping pace.

The other end led to a stairway going up. Jack moved quickly up it, wanting to get out of here. On the other hand, he really didn't want to see what was up ahead, because it was starting to sound really bad. What was worse, his shoulder was really aching. Gritting his teeth, trying to tell himself just to suck it up and get over it, Jack came to the top of the next stairwell and found himself at the end of a broad stone room.

Immediately, he could see several tall, long corridors snaking away in several directions and, unfortunately, a lot of Imps, Demons, and Z-Secs around. Funneling his anger and pain and fear into a focus on keeping himself alive, he shouldered the SMG and sprayed out a slew of bullets, shredding away most of the head of an Imp in a dark plume of pulpy red gore. That got things started off. The others hurried up the stairs to join him as a general din of roaring, screaming fury went up, the collection of two dozen or so hostiles noticing them.

Gunshots rang out as the battle got underway. At this point, it was really just a series of actions to Jack. He imagined the others felt mostly the same. It got that way in sustained combat, although because this was so freaking unreal maybe it felt even more like that. Almost like a damned video game. Aim the SMG, squeeze the trigger, throw three or four rounds into the big, dark screaming maw of an Imp and watch the back of its head blow out in a spray of gore. Switch targets, put down another Imp with a shot to the right eye that turned it into a cratered bloody socket. Switch again, shatter the black visor of a Z-Sec, killing it.

They were getting good at this.

They cleaned up the main room and the stragglers that came in from the corridors inside of two minutes and as the last body fell, a bullet-riddled Demon, the sound of reloading filled the air. Jack waited until he was sure it was clear, at least for now, and set to work replenishing his stocks from the Z-Secs he'd put down.

The sound of the suffering was closer now.

"We're going to have to check that out, aren't we?" he asked, staring down the left-most corridor. That seemed to be where the moans and screams were coming from.

"We have to," Green replied. "If someone's alive..."

"Yeah, we can't let them just suffer," Jack muttered. It wouldn't be right. He wasn't going to let someone suffer like that because he wasn't sure he could stomach seeing another mutilated human corpse. Part of him was becoming desensitized to the blood and the corpses and the spilled guts and exposed bones.

He'd seen more gore and dead bodies here than during his entire career, his entire life up to this point, three times over.

And Jack Ward had seen a lot of combat.

But there was another part of him that felt like every fresh body he saw was another small stone placed on a wooden board that was balanced on two cinderblocks. Eventually, there was going to be so much weight that the board would snap in half, and...he wasn't sure what would happen then. Maybe his sanity would slide slowly into the yawning black abyss of madness that every human held tucked into the darker recesses of their minds. Or maybe he'd just shut down, go catatonic. He'd seen it before. Or maybe he'd kill himself, or laugh and scream himself, his very mind, away. He didn't want to think about that, but...well, it seemed dangerous not to.

He had to armor himself against these possibilities as much as possible, and admitting them, admitting that they were possibilities, was the foundation of that armor. Jack roused himself from thought as they headed down the left corridor. It was the first of five. One of them had to lead to the way out. Well...hopefully.

A dead-end was always a possibility.

He wasn't sure what they would do then.

As they traversed the long corridor, which was just a broad, tall, straight path of stonework, appealing in its own way, he began to see something at its end. It was not at all appealing. It seemed to be a rectangular section of the wall that was simply cut out, a window without glass that gave a view into a room beyond.

And things were moving in that room, in plain view of the window.

But there was something wrong with the movements. Except he couldn't tell what was wrong. But as he drew closer, he became more and more disturbed, his stomach twisting itself into acid-drenched knots, a feeling of cold dread worming its way through his whole body. He saw that there were two more windows, one to either side in the left and right walls near the end of the stone tunnel. The screams were very clear now.

And then, all at once, he saw.

It was like the end of the tunnel slid into focus, or maybe his mind abruptly gave up any attempts to protect him from the horrors he was seeing.

They were people.

They were human beings, chained up to the walls.

Some of them had been skinned alive. Others had been impaled. Some had had their eyes cut out. Some had no legs, others had their stomach slit open, their intestines hanging out like bundles of thick, ropy cables of meat. There was blood everywhere. There were a good twenty or so of them, to the left, to the right, dead ahead. They were chained by their wrists to the stonework walls. Beneath them were pools of blood and near the center of the room, about halfway between the window and the walls where the damned hung, was a tarnished, bronze alter, one for each section. On top of each: a still-beating human heart.

The worst part of all of this was that some of them were still alive, alive and screaming, twisting, writhing, their wrists bloody from the rusty chains that bound them. Jack didn't hesitate as he shouldered his SMG, aimed and fired at a naked man who had no legs, his guts strung out beneath him, swaying as he twitched and shuddered and moaned. He put one round into his forehead. The man shuddered once more and was still.

Behind him, he heard the others taking care of business in grim silence.

He mercy-killed three more people and then, after a seconds' thought, put a round through the still-beating heart.

After that, after making sure they were dead, and the hearts were destroyed, it was kind of a forgetful haze of sick anger. They made their way down each of the stone tunnels. Three of them dead-ended in a similar fashion. They killed monsters where they found them, battling an uncertain cavalcade of Imps, Demons, zombies and, a few times, Cacodemons. They killed tortured survivors wherever they found them, as they didn't find a single person who they could conceivably rescue. In fact, most of the people they found, Jack had no idea how they were even still alive. He now knew why it was called the House of Pain.

After clearing out that level, they found another stairwell that led up yet again. This time they emerged in another UAC section. This one had a more coherent feeling, not that totally random abstraction that other areas in this nightmare had. He got the impression that the UAC personnel had been attempting to make this section of Hell more inhabitable. Most of the walls were covered in big plates of gray metal stamped with the UAC logo, the floor covered in thin blue carpet, though it was mostly red now.

Studying these details brought Jack back to reality, helped nail him to the here and now. He didn't appreciate it, because now he was thinking about all those tortured people, the pain and torment they must have endured, and how there were likely other people who were in the same situation that would remain there because Jack and his team couldn't find them. But it was for the best, because he'd been going through this place on autopilot, and while he was a good enough Marine to get by on that, continuing to do it was just asking for trouble.

They spread out and searched the area in silence, moving among wrecked workstations, stacks of generic silver crates and dead bodies. Jack had emptied both of his primary weapons during the battle below, and had been reduced to his pistol at this point. He honestly couldn't remember a time before now when he'd been so strapped for bullets. And it wasn't looking like it was going to get better anytime soon, since the place had been stripped for ammo and supplies. They kept hunting and found nothing but the way out.

A teleport pad in the middle of a large stonework room. A lot of stonework lately. Jack was getting sick of the bland, slate gray, gritty stone bricks. But he supposed it was better than a lot of the other crap he'd been seeing lately.

This time, Jack went first.

He stepped onto the pad and disappeared in a green flash.