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For as long as Levi Ackerman could remember, home had always been a temporary concept. It was a revolving door of cramped, rented spaces where his mother, Kuchel, barely scraped by to keep a roof over their heads.
But things changed. Years of relentless grit finally paid off when Kuchel’s tea business took off. By the time Levi turned twenty-three, she had saved enough to do the unthinkable during her own youth which was to secure a house of their own. Thanks to her sharp tongue and fierce determination, she managed to negotiate an already ridiculously low price down to an absolute steal.
The spacious suburban house was perfect. It sat a convenient thirty-minute drive from the bustling center of Mitras, where Kuchel’s shop was located, making it an ideal commute for her and a straightforward trip for Levi to attend college.
Because they had spent years sharing a suffocating one-room apartment and later, Levi claiming the living room sofa bed just to have a shred of privacy, Kuchel insisted he get first pick of the bedrooms. She was a single mother who had survived the worst, and even though Levi was an adult now, she was determined to finally give him the best whenever she could.
The house was massive compared to their past. It had enough space for a dedicated room for his uncle, Kenny, to crash whenever he rolled into town. Kuchel even planned to rent out the remaining empty rooms to students from Levi’s college for an affordable price, wanting to pay forward the kindness she’d rarely received in her younger years.
Levi chose the largest bedroom upstairs. It was quiet, isolated, and most importantly, it was his.
But the house wasn't perfect, and they had no idea what would come next.
***
The first week in the new house didn't feel like a homecoming, instead it was a battle against cleaning off decades worth of filth. Levi and Kuchel worked themselves to the bone, the air thick with the sharp, chemical sting of bleach and the lemon-scented musk of wood polish. Armed with a seemingly infinite supply of microfiber cloths and heavy-duty scrub brushes, Levi led the charge as it was in his zone. He was unyielding, scrubbing every baseboard, corner, and windowsill until the spacious new property finally met his near-pathological standards of cleanliness.
When the dust finally settled, Levi retreated upstairs to assemble his sanctuary. His new bedroom was the largest in the house, a quiet, isolated space at the end of the hall. He spent hours meticulously unboxing his clothes, folding each shirt with geometric precision, and arranging his books by height and genre. He liked to be precise.
It was only when he reached the absolute back of his walk-in closet to hang his coats that he noticed it.
Hidden behind a row of shelves was a weird, narrow door. It was heavily painted over, not just once or twice, but with layers of thick, stark-white paint so dense the seams were practically glued shut, sealing the door into the frame like a tomb. Levi ran a finger over the rough, uneven ridges of the dried latex. He knocked on the wood; it sounded dense, dead, and entirely hollow on the other side. But with no strange noises emanating from it and no immediate structural issue, Levi let his hand fall. He didn't have time to pry open sealed doors. He had more pressing matters to attend to. But his knock had caused a slight crack through the seams where a slight rattle echoed throughout the house.
With the house entirely clean and far too empty, Kuchel set her sights on filling the remaining space. To help offset the steep utility bills of such a massive property, she took charge of the logistics. She spent an evening designing flyers, printing them out, and posting them all around Levi’s college campus, pinning them to crowded student union boards and lampposts. She mirrored the effort online, listing the two available upstairs rooms on local rental forums. Because she wanted to pay forward the kind of grace she had rarely received in her younger years, she advertised them at an incredibly cheap price which was an absolute steal for any struggling student.
That was when the cold shoulder became apparent.
It started subtly, a creeping friction that Levi first noticed during his early morning jogs. As he rounded the corner of their street, pacing his breathing, he began to observe an unsettling, synchronized pattern among the locals. Neighbors walking their dogs or power-walking down the sidewalk would actively look away the moment the Ackerman house came into view. People would fixate on their shoes, pull out their phones, or abruptly cross the street to the opposite sidewalk entirely, just to avoid walking directly past their manicured front lawn. It was as if the property possessed a physical repellant, forcing a wide, deliberate berth from anyone who lived in the area.
Inside the house, the atmosphere grew increasingly bizarre. The online listings gathered hundreds of views, and initially, the phone rang off the hook. Prospective renters would call in, their voices bright, eager, and desperate for cheap housing in a brutal market.
But the warmth always evaporated in a single, predictable instant.
"The place sounds amazing, Ms. Ackerman!" a young woman chirped over the line one Tuesday afternoon, her voice echoing faintly through the quiet kitchen where Levi was making tea. "Where exactly is it located?"
Kuchel smiled, leaning against the counter. "It's a wonderful neighborhood. The address is 845 Shiganshina Lane."
Silence slammed down over the line, sudden and suffocating. The girl's cheerful demeanor vanished, replaced by a tense, heavy hesitation.
"Oh..." the voice dropped to a nervous whisper. "Shiganshina Lane? Is the house the old one?"
Kuchel’s smile faded. She swapped a brief, uneasy glance with Levi, who had paused mid-pour, his dark eyes tracking his mother’s expression.
"It's an older property, yes, but we've completely renovated—" Kuchel began, trying to downplay the sudden shift. She cleared her throat, forced a warm tone back into her voice, and extended an invitation. "We're actually holding an open house this Thursday evening if you'd care to look around?"
The line went dead. No goodbye, no polite decline but just the hollow click of a severed connection.
By Wednesday night, the pattern had hardened into an absolute certainty. Every single inquiry followed the exact same script. Eagerness, the exchange of the address, a sharp intake of breath, and then utter silence. They ghosted her completely. Every single one of them left the Ackermans standing in a meticulously cleaned, beautifully prepared, and deeply avoided house.
“They make it sound like this house is haunted.” Kuchel murmured.
***
On a quiet Sunday afternoon, the heavy, stagnant silence that had settled over the avoided house was violently shattered. Levi was in the kitchen, carefully measuring out loose-leaf tea, when a sudden, aggressive assault on the front door resonated through the walls. Someone wasn't just ringing the doorbell; they were relentlessly hammering on it, planting a finger firmly on the button and holding it down until the high-pitched chime rolled through the hallways like a continuous, deafening air-raid siren.
Levi’s grip tightened around his teacup. A dangerous vein throbbed near his temple. Marching out of the kitchen, his footsteps heavy and radiating sheer irritation, he strode down the long hallway. He didn't just open the door; he ripped it inward with enough force to rattle the hinges, fully prepared to verbally dismantle whoever was causing the absurd racket.
Instead, his wrath met a deeply bewildering sight.
He was greeted by a thoroughly disheveled mop of chocolate-brown hair. A girl was bent completely double on their front porch, completely ignoring him as she furiously tugged and yanked at the frayed laces of a heavy leather combat boot.
Before Levi could even draw breath to demand what the hell she was doing, she finished her knot and snapped upright with a burst of pure, explosive energy. She rose so fast that her forehead collided violently with the underside of Levi’s chin.
Crack.
Levi stumbled back a step into the foyer, his teeth clicking together painfully. Grunting, he rubbed his chin with the back of his hand, his dark eyes narrowing into razor-sharp slits as he glared at the intruder. "What the hell do you want, shitty glasses?"
The girl blinked, her hazel eyes widening to the size of saucers behind thick, slightly smudged lenses. (For a while her eyes had him hypnotised before he snapped himself out of it. If only she cleaned her glasses he could see those coffee brown eyes clearly.) She froze for a fraction of a second, processing the insult, and then she let out a loud, unhinged cackle that echoed off the front porch.
"Haha! Wow, shitty glasses! That’s a new one!" she shouted cheerfully, rubbing her own forehead without a shred of embarrassment. "Usually, people just go with Four-Eyes! Points for creativity!" she winked at him.
She didn't wait for an invitation. She practically vibrated on the spot, her hands gesturing wildly as she introduced herself as Hange Zoe. Words spilled out of her mouth at a mile a minute, a chaotic torrent of explanation. She had just got back to the city from summer break, she explained, only to find herself abruptly homeless because her parents had planned to kick her out in two weeks. Apparently, her brother, his wife, and their kids had completely overtaken the family home during a sudden, massive house renovation, leaving no room for her or her mountains of gear.
She had been wandering campus in a panic when she spotted Kuchel’s flyer, and the moment she read the address, her despair turned into pure euphoria.
"I mean, I seriously cannot believe it!" Hange beamed, her glasses catching the afternoon sun as she shamelessly craned her neck to peer past Levi’s shoulder into the pristine foyer. "Finally! Someone actually bought this notorious house! Everyone at school talks about it, but nobody has the guts to come near it. I've always wanted to know what it was like inside, if the air feels heavy, if there are—"
Before she could finish her sentence, Levi’s patience evaporated entirely. He reached out, grabbed the edge of the heavy oak door, and slammed it shut right in her face.
Click.
The lock turned with a definitive snap. Levi let out a long, slow breath, turning on his heel to face the hallway. It felt wrong to shut the door in her face but her rambling nonsense was not something he had wanted to hear especially about the house when it was clear that it was why people were avoiding his mother. Still, he did not want to admit it.
Almost instantly, the doorbell started ringing off the hook again in a frantic, rhythmic ding-dong-ding-dong that vibrated through the floorboards. Hange was treating the button like a Morse code machine and that made his eyebrow twitch.
Levi sighed deeply, rubbing his temples as his mother, Kuchel, wiped her hands on a dish towel and walked into the hallway.
"Who is that, Levi?" she asked, looking toward the trembling front door.
"It's just some lunatic talking bullshit," Levi muttered, crossing his arms. "Ignore it. She'll get tired and leave."
But Kuchel stood her ground. Having overheard Hange’s desperate, unvarnished, and delightfully chaotic energy vibrating through the thick wood of the door, she gave her son a pointed, stern look. "Don't be rude, Levi. We need a tenant, and she clearly needs a room. Let her in."
Levi groaned internally but knew better than to argue with his mother. He unlocked the door and pulled it open a second time.
The moment the gap was wide enough, Hange burst through the threshold like a category-five hurricane. Kuchel’s eyes lit up immediately. Where Levi saw a walking migraine, Kuchel saw a breath of fresh air. She instantly fell in love with Hange’s vibrant, unpredictable spirit, amusedly noting aloud that her own son and her brother Kenny were "absolutely no fun" and that this gloomy, avoided house desperately needed some real life injected into it.
Despite Levi standing in the corner, radiating pure, silent disapproval with his arms locked tightly across his chest, Kuchel smiled warmly and extended her hand. Hange was hired as their brand-new tenant on the spot.
***
Because Hange’s brother hadn't fully arrived with his truck to help her haul her bedframe and heavy dressers, she wasn't officially scheduled to sleep at the house for another two weeks or less. However, that logistical detail did absolutely nothing to prevent her from invading the property on a daily basis.
Levi’s endurance was tested to its absolute limits. Every single afternoon, right around the time he was trying to study or ensure the kitchen counters remained pristine, the front door would fly open with a familiar, obnoxious bang. Hange would stagger through the threshold, breathless and grinning, lugging in plastic crates and taped-up cardboard boxes. But she wasn't bringing in normal college student essentials like bedding or kitchenware. Instead, she filled the front hallway with bizarre electronic gear—bulky handheld meters with erratic needles, digital thermal sensors, rows of glass vials filled with unidentified liquids, and massive, decaying stacks of dusty, ancient-looking books that smelled heavily of mold and old paper.
"Just dropping off a few more research materials!" she’d yell cheerfully before dragging the heavy crates up the stairs, leaving a trail of dust that drove Levi to the brink of insanity.
Meanwhile, the house remained an isolated island in the middle of the suburbs. To Kuchel's mounting disappointment, the phone completely stopped ringing. No other offers, applications, or even casual inquiries came in for the second empty room. The neighborhood continued to treat the Ackerman house like an active plague zone, with the locals stubbornly maintaining their unspoken rule of total avoidance.
During these two grueling weeks, the internal atmosphere of the house began a subtle, insidious shift.
At first, it was so faint that Levi easily brushed it off. But as the days bled together, the anomalies grew harder to ignore. While studying late at night in the absolute silence of his room, the ambient quiet would suddenly give way to faint, inexplicable whispers. The sound didn't come from outside or through the walls; it distinctly echoed from the very back of his walk-in closet, right from the edges of that heavily painted-over door. Whenever he walked down the upstairs corridor after midnight, his heart would catch as dark, human-shaped shadows seemed to dart across the peripheral view of his vision, vanishing into the darkness the moment he turned his head to look directly at them.
Refusing to even entertain the ridiculous notion of the supernatural, Levi sat at his desk at 3:00 AM, the glow of his laptop illuminating his hardened features. He aggressively typed into a search engine, secretly Googling the physiological symptoms of severe sleep deprivation, stress-induced auditory hallucinations, and ocular migraines. It's just exhaustion, he told himself, rubbing his tired eyes. I've been working too hard.
A few days later, that rigid denial was put to the test. One afternoon, Levi found himself standing in the hallway, staring blankly up the staircase where a sudden, icy draft had just brushed past his face. He was so deeply lost in thought, trying to rationalize the sudden drop in temperature, that he didn't hear Hange approach.
Suddenly, a face popped directly into his field of vision. Hange leaned in close, a knowing, highly amused smirk playing on her lips as she adjusted her thick frames.
"Sooo, Ackerman..." she purred, her voice dripping with playful suspicion. "Felt anything weird around here lately? A sudden drop in temperature? A phantom chill down your spine?" She proudly tapped the side of her glasses, her eyes gleaming with eccentric excitement. "Come on, you can tell me. I’m a self-proclaimed ghost buster, you know. I specialize in the unexplainable as a side hustle."
Levi didn't blink. He simply stared at her, his expression hardening into stone as he forced his beating heart to steady.
"Shut up, shitty glasses," Levi snapped, his voice cutting through her energetic teasing like a blade. "Put your garbage away in your room and leave me the hell alone. And one more thing; there’s no such thing as ghosts. Or even demons as a matter of fact."
Without waiting for her reply, he turned on his heel and marched away, shutting her down instantly although his fist remained clenched tightly in his pocket. She was close… too close that he feared she could hear his heart race.
***
The first official night Hange spent under their roof began with an oppressive, unnatural stillness. The entire house was bathed in pitch blackness, the ambient noise of the suburbs fading into a heavy silence. Upstairs, Levi was deep asleep, his breathing steady, completely unaware of the shifting air around him.
Then, in the dead of night, the silence was violently obliterated.
A series of massive, crashing thuds rattled the frame of the house, followed closely by a loud, grating, dragging sound that vibrated right through the floorboards. The noise was so intense it felt as if someone were violently hauling iron safes across the ceiling.
Levi jolted awake, his heart hammering against his ribs. He threw off his blankets, his initial shock instantly hardening into pure, unadulterated fury. He glared toward his digital clock: 3:14 AM.
I knew she’d be an absolute nightmare, he thought, his jaw clenching as he grabbed a dark shirt from the foot of his bed. He was entirely convinced that his clumsy, chaotic new roommate was throwing a midnight tantrum, stubbornly rearranging her heavy plastic crates and stacks of textbooks in the middle of the night.
Wasting no time, Levi marched out into the hallway, his bare feet making no sound against the wood. He strode down the corridor, reached Hange’s bedroom door, and stormed inside without knocking, the reprimand already forming on his lips.
Instead, the words caught squarely in his throat.
The room wasn't messy from moving; it looked like a high-tech laboratory crossed with a medieval archive. Hange wasn't asleep, nor was she moving furniture. She was sitting dead-center on the floor, cross-legged, bathed in the erratic, multicolored glow of an electronic circus. Scattered all around her were flashing EMF meters emitting low, rhythmic clicks, active digital voice recorders with soundwaves bouncing across tiny screens, tripod-mounted video cameras humming quietly, and a chaotic perimeter of thick, leather-bound occult literature.
Levi stared at the surreal scene, his fury temporarily hijacked by sheer bewilderment. "What the hell is all this garbage?"
Hange didn't flinch at his tone. She slowly looked up, the usual manic gleam in her eyes replaced by an expression that was unusually, unsettlingly grave. The shadows cast by the blinking green and red lights danced across her face.
"Levi..." she spoke softly, her voice carrying a weight that made the hairs on his arms stand up. "You have an idea, don’t you? That this place has history. You are just in denial. Unexplainable things happened, didn’t it."
Levi crossed his arms, leaning defensively against the doorframe. "History? It's a house. It has walls and plumbing. What else is there to know?"
Hange patted the hardwood floorboards beside her, gesturing for him to sit. When he didn't move an inch, she sighed, leaning over a spread-open book filled with faded newspaper clippings.
"The neighbors aren't avoiding you because they're rude, Levi," she whispered, her eyes reflecting the dim display of a thermal sensor. "They’re terrified. Let me tell you what actually happened within these walls."
She pointed to an old, yellowed article.
"First, there were the immigrants. The house was originally built by an intensely private, foreign family who completely refused to socialize or integrate with the town. They kept the shutters closed day and night. Then, one morning, the neighbors noticed a smell. The entire family was found dead inside, sitting perfectly upright at the dining table. The police officially ruled it a mass family suicide to close the case quickly, but the rumors around Shiganshina says otherwise. You know something like they brought with them something malevolent."
Hange flipped the page, her finger landing on a black-and-white mugshot.
"Years later, a young couple bought it, thinking they got a bargain. The wife turned out to be a notorious, highly calculated serial killer. She used to lure the men she cheated with back to this house, poison them, and then systematically murder them. Do you know where the police found the bodies? They were buried deep in the dirt floor of the cellar, right beneath the kitchen."
Levi’s face remained a mask of stony indifference, though his fingers subtly tightened against his forearms.
"And then, the last one," Hange continued, her voice dropping an octave. "About thirty-five years ago, it was bought by a woman the town called a witch. She didn't just brew herbs, Levi; she practiced dark, localized rituals right up here in the upstairs rooms, specifically trying to open a gateway to something ancient and malevolent. It led to more inexplicable, gruesome deaths like heart attacks in young people, sudden madness. After that she went mad and from what rumours say she was committed to an asylum, the house sat entirely abandoned for over thirty years. Until your mom bought it."
Hange looked up, her gaze boring into his. "The neighbors think that you guys are just the next cycle. They think that you guys might be the same bunch who would end this tragedy because not any good comes from living here."
The air in the room felt distinctly heavier, a cold draft tracing its way around Levi's ankles. Yet, his rigid rationalism won out. He let out a sharp, dismissive scoff and turned back toward the hallway.
"It’s a bunch of urban legends made up by local idiots who have nothing better to do than scare kids and tank property values," Levi said flatly, refusing to give her theories an ounce of validation. “If everyone is avoiding this house. Why are you here?"
“Now you are asking the real questions, Levi.” she pointed at her gadgets. “Make a guess.”
Levi scoffed in response.
“Like I said, shitty glasses. Urban legends. Ghosts and demons don’t exist.” and Hange rolled her eyes in response knowing that he would come around. Eventually.
***
Restlessness clung to Levi like a second skin for the remainder of the night. He lay perfectly flat on his back, staring unblinkingly at the dark ceiling, his mind refusing to settle. No matter how aggressively he tried to rationalize it, Hange’s words echoed relentlessly in his head: the immigrants, the cellar, the witch. The house around him felt different now, no longer just an old building, but an entity with mass, breathing a cold, heavy weight into the room.
As the digital clock crept toward 4:00 AM, a strange, suffocating sensation began to settle over his chest.
Levi tried to shift his position, but his limbs wouldn’t cooperate. A sudden, icy dread spiked through his veins as he realized his body was entirely locked down. He couldn't move a single finger. He couldn't even blink. He was completely conscious, trapped in the terrifying, rigid grip of sleep paralysis.
From the corner of his eye, the shadows near his walk-in closet began to detach themselves from the wall, pooling toward the foot of his bed like thick, living oil. The air grew so cold it burned his throat, and a crushing pressure descended upon his chest, making it impossible to breathe. He wanted to scream, to force his muscles to shatter the invisible bonds pinning him to the mattress, but his voice was trapped in his throat.
Then, a real sound shattered the nightmare.
A sharp, blood-curdling scream tore through the quiet house. It was Hange, and the sheer terror in her voice acted like a physical jolt, snapping the paralysis and freeing Levi instantly.
He vaulted out of bed before his brain could even process the transition. Driven by pure adrenaline, he burst out of his room and was inside hers in a fraction of a second, his knuckles white and his posture coiled to strike.
"Hange!" he barked.
She was standing in the very center of her room, illuminated only by the erratic, flashing red lights of her disrupted EMF meters. Her back was facing him, and she was trembling so violently her knees looked ready to buckle. She was breathing in ragged, panicked gasps, her shoulders heaving. But what made Levi’s chest tighten was the dark, glistening wetness rapidly spreading across the fabric of her shirt. It was soaked through with fresh, hot blood.
"Who the hell did this to you?!" Levi demanded, his voice dropping into a lethal, dangerous register.
His eyes darted wildly around the space, tracking the windows, checking the shadows behind the curtains, looking for an intruder who might have broken through the glass. Finding no one, he rushed to her side, his hands steady despite the chaos. "Don't move."
With careful precision, he reached out and gently lifted the shredded, bloody hem of her ruined blouse.
Levi’s breath hitched completely.
Carved deep into her pale skin, stretching diagonally across her back, were four angry, jagged, and bleeding claw marks. The flesh was torn open in deep, clean ribbons, weeping crimson down her skin with the wounds so wide, brutal, and unnaturally deep that no human hand could ever make them. There was no weapon in the world that left a pattern like that.
Hange slowly turned her head to look at him over her shoulder. She was deathly pale, a cold sweat dampening her hairline, and tears of sheer pain pricked the corners of her eyes behind her crooked glasses. Yet, her gaze was entirely serious, stripped of all her usual eccentric humor.
"Now..." she whispered, her voice cracking as she shivered against the cold. "Now do you believe the stories, Levi?"
Before he could answer, the frantic commotion and the echo of the scream finally woke the rest of the household. Heavy, hurried footsteps thudded down the hallway, and Kuchel burst into the room, her face pale with worry. Right behind her was Kenny, looking groggy, disheveled, and uncharacteristically alert, his hand instinctively reaching toward his waist where he usually kept a weapon.
"What is going on? Levi, we heard—" Kuchel stopped dead in her tracks, her hand flying to her mouth as she saw the blood smeared across Levi's hands and the horrific state of Hange's back. "Oh my god."
"Sit down," Levi ordered Hange softly, guiding her to the edge of the mattress.
He moved with automated efficiency, grabbing a clean towel and a first-aid kit from her bathroom. As he began carefully cleaning the deep lacerations and wrapping her back in tight, sterile bandages, the absolute truth finally spilled out of him. Levi didn't hold back. In a quiet, hardened voice, he explained the grim history Hange had uncovered hours earlier. He told his mother about the mass suicide, the bodies in the cellar, the witch's rituals, the strange whispers echoing from his own closet, and the terrifying weight that had held him down just moments before Hange’s scream shattered it.
He pointed directly to the angry, bound wounds on Hange's back. "And this is the proof. Something is in this house with us."
Kenny leaned against the doorframe, chewing on a tooth-pick, his eyes narrowed as he stared at the flashing electronic meters on the floor. For once, the older man had nothing cynical to say.
Kuchel slowly sat down heavily on the edge of the mattress beside Hange, her hands trembling slightly as she looked around the room. The oppressive, cold air of the house suddenly made complete, horrifying sense. The pieces of the puzzle finally clicked together in her mind, turning her hard-earned victory into a nightmare.
"Oh my god! The low price... the lack of other buyers... the way the real estate agent practically begged me to sign," Kuchel whispered, her voice hollow as she realized the truth. "No wonder this house was dirt cheap and so easy to negotiate… and it comes as no surprise that no one wants to live here… and why everyone was avoiding us like a plague…"
***
The next morning, the bright, golden sunlight filtering through the kitchen windows did absolutely nothing to dispel the lingering chill of the night before. Levi stood by the counter, his knuckles white around a mug of coffee he hadn't touched. Hange sat at the table, her movements stiff and cautious to avoid pulling the fresh, tight bandages wrapping her back.
Despite the throbbing pain, she was already hunched over her laptop, her fingers flying across the keyboard.
"I told you to stay in bed, shitty glasses," Levi growled, walking over and placing a hand firmly on the top of her laptop screen, forcing it halfway closed. "You lost blood. Your back is torn up. Rest. I should have taken you to the hospital"
Hange looked up at him waving him off, her hazel eyes wide and absolutely manic with a mix of exhaustion and high-octane euphoria. "Rest? Are you kidding me, Levi? I was practically born for this! I’m living in an actual, real-life horror movie right now! Do you know how many researchers would die to be in my position? Well, hopefully not literally die, but you get the point!" She pushed his hand away, reopening the screen. "We have to find the seller and not rot in the hospital for something as trivial as a ghost scratch, which honestly is the best thing that happened to me in my life. You know the first ghost attack and what not."
Recognizing the futility of arguing with a stubborn lunatic, Levi relented, joining her in a grueling, hours-long digital manhunt. Together, they tracked the digital paper trail of the real estate transaction. After digging through obscure public property registries and cross-referencing old death certificates, they finally found a match. The individual who had practically thrown the deed at Kuchel wasn't an independent agent; she was the estranged daughter of the "witch" who had died in the house decades prior.
By noon, they had tracked her down to a cramped, dimly lit apartment on the edge of Mitras. When Levi and Hange confronted her on her doorstep, the woman took one look at Hange’s pale complexion and Levi’s murderous glare, and she completely broke down.
She wept openly, burying her face in her hands as she confessed everything. After her mother passed, she had inherited the suburban property and tried to live in it. Within a month, she had experienced terrifying, violent phenomena—objects flying across rooms, phantom screams, and an oppressive, suffocating entity that held her down in her sleep. She became so consumed by terror, so desperate to rid herself of the generational curse, that when Kuchel approached her with an incredibly low, borderline offensive low-ball offer, she had gladly accepted it without a single negotiation. She just wanted to wash her hands of the blood on the floors and pass the cursed house to another.
When Levi returned home and reported these findings, the reality of the situation hit the household like a physical blow. Kuchel sat on the living room sofa, staring blankly at the floorboards. She was utterly devastated. Years of relentless grit, of pouring every ounce of her tea business profits into this house, had culminated in buying a haunted tomb. She was left completely at a loss, her hard-earned life savings locked inside a curse.
"We need an exorcism," Hange declared firmly later that afternoon, sitting back at the kitchen table while nursing a cup of chamomile tea.
Levi pinched the bridge of his nose, the sheer absurdity of the words making his headache flare. Even after everything, his rigid, logical mind resisted. "An exorcism? Are you completely insane? Real life isn't a Hollywood script, Hange."
"Do you have a better idea, Levi?!" Hange insisted, her playful tone vanishing as she gestured toward her tightly bound shoulders. "Look at my back! Whatever is up there isn't just making noises anymore—it’s escalating. It wants us out, or it wants us dead. Look, I know a professional. A real one. Not a fraud from the internet."
With no other options left on the table, and the safety of his mother and his chaotic roommate hanging in the balance, Levi’s defenses finally crumbled. He let out a harsh breath. "Fine. Call him."
A few hours later, the front door opened, and Hange escorted the expert into their living room.
Father Erwin Smith
He was far from the image of a typical, frail priest Levi had envisioned. Erwin was a tall, imposing man with exceptionally broad shoulders, an impeccably tailored black cassock, and a commanding, magnetic presence that instantly shifted the energy in the room. His icy blue eyes carried an air of absolute solemnity and profound intelligence.
Erwin stepped into the center of the foyer, his gaze sweeping over the high ceilings and the grand staircase of the Ackerman house. He didn't look afraid; he looked resolved.
"I didn't just take this case by chance, Hange," Erwin revealed calmly, his deep, resonant voice echoing through the quiet house. "It has been my lifelong dream to cleanse this specific property. In fact, its dark, malevolent reputation is the entire reason I joined the priesthood in the first place. I have been studying its history for over a decade."
Levi stood by the doorway, rubbing his temples in slow, circular motions. He looked back and forth between his eccentric, bandaged roommate who was practically vibrating with excitement, and the intensely serious, towering priest who talked about demons like a military general planning a siege.
"Unbelievable," Levi muttered under his breath, his signature deadpan expression firmly locked in place. "This part of the suburb is full of absolute weirdos."
Hange just grinned through her lingering fear, ignoring the pain in her back as she playfully nudged his shoulder. "Welcome to the club, Levi!"
***
The atmosphere in the upstairs hallway was no longer just cold, it felt thick, viscous, and profoundly suffocating, as if the air itself were resisting their presence. Inside the primary bedroom, Father Erwin moved with practiced and meticulous precision assessing his surroundings. He worked in absolute silence, kneeling to draw flawless, unbroken lines of coarse ritual salt along the thresholds and window sills. The sharp, earthy aroma of burning sage and heavy frankincense soon billowed from a brass thurible, casting long, twisting ribbons of smoke toward the high ceiling. On the nightstand sat a silver chalice, the holy water inside perfectly still.
Levi leaned heavily against the doorframe, his arms tightly crossed over his chest and his jaw set in a rigid, stubborn line. Every logical fiber of his being was screaming at him to call this a farce, yet the oppressive weight settling over his chest kept his cynicism at bay. (Thankfully, he had his mother and uncle gone because even if his mother was sweet, guess from whom he inherited his cynicism.) Beside him, Hange stood uncharacteristically quiet. Her eyes darted rapidly from the silver chalice to the leather-bound missal in Erwin’s hands, her breath shallow. For all her talk of being born for a horror movie, her frame was wound like a piano wire, trembling with an underlying, primal tension.
"We begin," Erwin announced. His deep, resonant voice cut through the stillness of the room, carrying a gravity that made the hairs on Levi's arms stand on end.
Erwin stepped to the center of the room, raised a heavy silver crucifix high into the air, and closed his eyes. The moment the first sharp, rhythmic syllables of the Latin prayers left his lips, the ambient temperature did not just drop, it plummeted.
The transition was violent. Within seconds, a freezing, arctic chill gripped the bedroom. Levi’s next breath caught in his throat, pluming into a thick, white cloud of mist before his face. The smoke from the sage froze in place, hanging like gray cobwebs in the sudden, dead air.
Then, the house fought back.
A violent, invisible force gripped the four corners of the bedroom. The heavy oak floorboards beneath their feet groaned and flexed, shrieking under a sudden, massive downward pressure. The meticulously laid salt lines along the doorframe didn't just drift; they exploded outward, scattering like white buckshot against the baseboards.
Before Levi could even draw a breath to yell, a localized, localized gale-force wind erupted from the center of the room. It slammed into them with the force of a physical wall. The wind caught Hange entirely off guard, ripping her away from Levi’s side, lifting her frail, bandaged body completely off her feet, and hurling her hard against the far wall.
"Hange!" Levi yelled, his stoic facade instantly shattering as he lunged forward, his boots skidding across the hardwood.
But she didn't hit the floor.
Instead of collapsing from the impact, Hange remained pinned against the wall, suspended for a horrific heartbeat before sliding down to stand perfectly straight. Her spine snapped rigid, warping and flexing backward into an unnatural, sickeningly contorted posture that no human skeleton should have been able to tolerate without snapping.
Levi froze in his tracks, his hand outstretched, his heart slamming against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Hange slowly tilted her head upward. Her glasses were crooked, clinging to one ear, revealing her face entirely. Levi's stomach dropped. Her eyes had rolled back completely into her head—not just the pupils, but the whites too, replaced entirely by an abyss of solid, midnight black that seemed to absorb the dim light of the room. Her jaw unhinged slightly, and her limbs fell into a brief, violent cycle of convulsions, her fingers clawing frantically at the empty air.
Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the shaking stopped. She settled into a terrifying, rigid stillness, standing like a marionette suspended by invisible, taut strings.
When she spoke, the sound that tore from her throat ripped away any remaining doubt Levi possessed. It wasn't Hange. Her voice had shifted into a distorted, dual-toned sneer—a horrifying harmony of a high, mocking hiss and a deep, guttural growl that vibrated through the floorboards and rattled the very walls of the house. The entity had stopped hiding. It had taken full, absolute control of her body.
The demon wasted no time testing the limits of its new vessel. Grinning a horrific, impossibly wide smirk that stretched Hange’s lips to the point of cracking, it forced her own hands upward. Her fingers curled into rigid, claw-like hooks, clamping down violently around her own throat. The entity began to squeeze, choking the air from her lungs while her fingernails dug deep, scratching and clawing at her smooth skin, drawing thin lines of crimson.
"Pin her down! Levi, now!" Father Erwin shouted over the rising, deafening din. The very foundations of the room shook, drywall dust raining down like snow as Erwin braced his boots against the floorboards, desperately trying to maintain his footing while holding his silver crucifix aloft.
Seeing Hange actively trying to mutilate herself shattered the very last remnants of Levi’s stubborn disbelief. There was no psychological explanation for this, no logic left to hide behind. Pure, unadulterated adrenaline took over. Levi lunged across the shaking room, tackling her straight to the floor.
The impact huffed the trapped air out of her chest as they hit the carpet, but the entity possessed an unnatural, terrifying strength. Hange's limbs thrashed violently beneath him, bucking with enough force to throw a grown man off. Levi threw his entire body weight into pinning her down, his muscles straining as he grabbed her wrists. With a sharp grunt, he forced her hands away from her bleeding throat, slamming her knuckles flat against the carpet and locking them there with a vice-like grip.
The demon didn't fight to break the hold. Instead, it threw its head back and laughed… a guttural, mocking sound that rattled Levi's teeth before snapping its gaze back up. It sneered directly into Levi's face from mere inches away, the putrid, freezing stench of decay washing over him.
"I can feel everything inside this sweet, fragile flesh," the entity hissed, its solid, midnight-black eyes burning directly into his. "The blood rushing, the panic... and I can feel everything inside your head too, Ackerman. Your deepest, darkest secrets are practically screaming."
Levi forced his facial muscles into a rigid, impenetrable mask, refusing to let the entity see a single flicker of the panic clawing at his chest. He tightened his grip on her wrists until his own knuckles turned white. "Are you the one who put those claw marks on her?" he demanded through gritted, bared teeth.
The demon cackled, the sound echoing maliciously off the shaking walls. "Of course I did! I peeled back her skin, and oh, she felt so exquisite breaking under my touch." The entity leaned its head forward, forcing Levi to stare into the abyss of its eyes as its voice dropped to a sickening, intimate whisper that seemed to echo directly inside his skull. "And I know you think so too. I can taste your sordid little fantasies about her, Ackerman. Every quiet, pathetic thought you've hid away during those late nights while she slept."
Levi froze inside, a sudden, violent jolt striking the center of his chest.
It was true. Over the weeks of shared chaos, constant bickering, and quiet, late-night tea over stacks of research books, a quiet warmth had sparkled to life within him. He had harbored secret, fierce feelings for his eccentric, brilliant roommate. He had kept them buried deep in the absolute darkest corners of his mind, utterly convinced that a cynical, damaged guy like him had no business wishing for a piece of someone so fundamentally bright and full of life. But he wasn't about to admit that to a literal piece of filth from hell.
"She belongs to the dark now," the entity suddenly bellowed, the deceptive whisper turning into a venomous roar as Hange's body strained upward, her back arching off the floor against Levi's grip. "I am going to drag her down to the pit to make her my queen!"
Hearing the creature speak of tearing her away, of ending the life of the one person who had managed to make this cold, avoided house feel like a home, caused Levi’s stoic facade to completely shatter. It was replaced by a raw, unbridled fury that burned hotter than any holy fire. His dark eyes flashed with an absolute, lethal intent, and his grip became an inescapable shackle.
He leaned down, his voice a low, terrifying promise. "Over my dead body."
Realizing that brute strength alone couldn't tear a human soul away from a demon, Levi snapped his head back toward the priest. His veins bulged against his neck from the sheer exertion of pinning Hange down. "Do the damn exorcism! Now, Father!"
Erwin didn't hesitate. Stepping forward over the buckling floorboards, he dipped his thumb into a small vial of blessed oil and slammed his palm directly onto Hange's sweat-slicked forehead. The contact caused the flesh beneath his hand to hiss, and the entity inside her screeched, a sound that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly into the marrow of their bones.
"Levi! Hold her steady and pray with me!" Erwin’s voice boomed, a steady anchor amid the chaotic storm tearing the bedroom apart. "We need to anchor her soul to this world, or she will be dragged into the abyss! Frame her mind with yours!"
"I don't know any prayers, old man!" Levi shouted back, his teeth grinding as Hange’s body violently convulsed beneath him. The demon’s unnatural strength surged, nearly throwing his weight off her as she tried to raise her clawed hands to her face again.
"Then speak from your will! Command it to leave!" Erwin roared back. He raised his silver crucifix high, his eyes blazing with a fierce, absolute conviction as he launched into a booming, powerful Latin incantation. “Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii...”
For the first time in his twenty-three years of life, Levi Ackerman found himself entirely out of practical options. He didn't have a broom to clean up this mess, a blade to cut his way out, or fists that could strike a non-physical entity. He was entirely stripped of his armor.
With no other choice, he squeezed his eyes shut, locked his fingers like iron cuffs around her wrists, and genuinely prayed.
He didn't know the traditional verses, so he forged his own from pure, stubborn, unyielding will. He poured every ounce of his energy into the mental bridge connecting him to the girl trapped beneath the darkness.
Get out of her, he demanded in the silent, roaring space of his mind. He channeled all his unvoiced affection, every quiet moment they had shared over lukewarm tea, and the desperate, territorial need to keep her safe into the void. You don't get to take her away. She belongs here. You don't get to touch her. Get the hell out!
Together with Erwin’s booming prayers, the house shook violently to its very foundations. The windowpanes cracked, spiderwebs of fractured glass mirroring the strain in the room. The entity within Hange arched her spine so high her boots left the floor entirely, and a sound like tearing metal and shattering glass echoed from her throat.
The scattered shadows in the corners of the room converged, swirling into a dense, thrashing vortex of dark energy right above them. The air grew so pressurized Levi’s ears popped, the demonic presence raging against the combined assault of the priest's faith and the boy’s unyielding devotion.
Then came the breaking point.
With one final, cataclysmic purge, Hange’s mouth flew wide open. A thick, ink-black mist was forcefully cast out of her body, violently ejected upward into the air. It writhed like a dying serpent, shrieking a final, hollow curse before dissolving completely into the ceiling plaster.
Instantly, the suffocating, oppressive weight in the air vanished. The freezing arctic draft evaporated, replaced by the mundane, quiet warmth of a suburban night.
Hange’s pitch-black eyes snapped shut, her features softening as the rigid tension melted out of her muscles. Her body went entirely limp, collapsing softly and heavily into Levi’s chest.
Levi caught her, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling her close against him. He rested his chin against her messy hair, his chest heaving as he listened closely. Beneath his cheek, her heart was beating a steady, rhythmic cadence. Her breathing was slow and peaceful.
The house was completely still and she was safe in his embrace.
***
Two months passed, and the Ackerman house had finally become what it was always meant to be: a home. The heavy, suffocating atmosphere that had once kept the neighborhood at bay was entirely gone, completely replaced by the comforting, earthy scent of Kuchel's brewing black tea and the peaceful, mundane quiet of a cleansed property. Neighbors no longer crossed the street when walking past the front lawn; some even waved when Kuchel tended to the garden.
But "quiet" was always a relative term when Hange Zoe was involved.
Capitalizing on the sheer terror of her experience rather than being traumatized by it, Hange had fully recovered. Thanks to an aggressive regimen of medical ointments and Levi’s strict, daily insistence on checking her bandages, the jagged claw marks on her back had faded into neat, silver scars. If anything, the brush with the paranormal had only amplified her chaotic energy. Turning her hyper-fixation into media, she had officially launched a spooky paranormal podcast, broadcasting live directly from her bedroom.
The space that had once played host to a demonic possession was now cluttered with soundproof foam panels, ring lights, and a high-end microphone setup.
"And then, guys, my eyes went completely black!" Hange enthusiastically recounted into the microphone, her voice rising to a dramatic, animated pitch. She gestured wildly with her hands, nearly knocking over a mug of lukewarm tea as she addressed the thousands of live listeners streaming the episode. "The readings on the EMF meters were entirely off the charts! It was a literal Class-V manifestation, right there in my bedroom! The air was freezing, the salt exploded—it was brilliant!"
She leaned in closer to the microphone, her glasses catching the bright glow of her ring light, her expression softening into a cheerful, triumphant grin.
"But hey, what's the absolute best part of getting targeted by a malevolent, hellish entity?" she asked her audience, her eyes gleaming with genuine affection. "In the process of breaking the curse and saving my life, I actually scored a boyfriend out of the deal!"
She shifted her weight, turning her head slightly toward the other side of the double-desk setup.
Sitting right next to her was Levi. He was dressed in a pristine, freshly ironed shirt, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. He was wearing his signature, fiercely deadpan expression, his mouth pulled into a thin, unimpressed line. As Hange proudly announced their relationship status to a live chat that was currently exploding with question marks and emojis, Levi let out a slow, long-suffering sigh and rolled his eyes so far into the back of his head it looked physically painful. He looked like a man who had agreed to participate under extreme duress, or perhaps just for a cup of high-quality tea.
Yet, despite his posture of absolute irritation, the truth of his feelings was hidden just out of sight. Beneath the edge of the wooden table, securely tucked away from the view of the webcam, his hand was wrapped firmly, tightly around hers, his thumb gently tracing soothing circles over the back of her knuckles where he was glad that she survived and he had not lost her.