The descent was faster this time. The darkness didn't wait for him to explore—it rushed upward to meet him like a predator sensing wounded prey.
Noir didn't resist.
He opened himself to it, invited it, welcomed it into every corner of his being.
The response was instantaneous and catastrophic.
A crimson aura erupted from his body—not gradual, not controlled—violent and chaotic. The color was wrong, fundamentally wrong. It wasn't the soft red of normal spiritual energy. It was the deep, bleeding red of fresh blood. Of violence. Of something that had no right to exist in the physical world.
The aura radiated outward in violent waves, each pulse distorting the air itself, bending light into strange geometries.
The wards on the walls cracked. Not gradually. All at once, as if reality itself was rejecting Noir's presence.
"Noir!" Shin Jin shouted, raising his hands to establish a containment field.
But the crimson aura shattered it like it was made of paper.
Shin Jin staggered backward, blood trickling from his nose from the spiritual backlash.
The stone beneath Noir began to crumble.
The crimson aura… wasn't energy. It was absence pretending to be presence. A void wearing the costume of power. The stone didn't crumble from force—it un-existed in layers, replaced by that bleeding, impossible red.
"I can't control it!" Noir screamed, but his voice was distorted, barely human. The darkness was speaking through him now, using his vocal cords as an instrument.
The chamber walls shuddered. Dust rained from the ceiling.
Shin Jin tried again, this time channeling raw spiritual power to create a barrier, but it was like trying to hold back an ocean with his bare hands.
The crimson light burned brighter. Hotter.
And then—
The door exploded inward.
Mr. Ace entered with shocking speed, his bandaged form moving with precise, calculated grace. His white combat suit seemed immune to the chaos, the crimson energy parting around him like water around a stone.
"Containment protocol seven," he said calmly, as though someone wasn't literally losing control in front of them.
He extended his bandaged hands, and dark threads emerged—not shadow, not spiritual energy. Something that seemed to exist in opposition to existence itself.
The threads wove through the air, not containing the crimson aura so much as stitching reality back together where Noir's presence was tearing it apart.
The crimson aura pushed against the threads, violent and desperate, attempting to break free.
But the dark filaments held firm.
Mr. Ace's entire body trembled from the strain, the bandages across his form growing taut as if every muscle beneath fought against impossible force. But his voice remained steady, unwavering.
"Shin Jin. The fabric. Use it now."
Shin Jin moved immediately, his movements precise despite the chaos. He grabbed Noir's wrist—ignoring the way the crimson aura burned his palm—and unwrapped the crimson fabric completely from Noir's skin.
The moment bare fabric touched bare flesh, something shifted fundamentally.
The darkness didn't stop. But it changed.
The feral, consuming nature of it smoothed out. The violent waves became rhythmic, controlled. The crimson light began to pulse instead of explode.
Noir's screaming faded into ragged, agonized breathing.
Within seconds, the aura collapsed back into his body like a tide receding. The threads containing him dissipated. The light faded.
Noir's consciousness fractured.
He slipped into darkness.
When the chamber settled into silence, both seers remained standing in the ruins.
Shin Jin gently laid Noir's unconscious form on the least-damaged section of the stone platform, the crimson fabric secured firmly around his wrist once more.
Mr. Ace slowly began unwrapping the dark threads from around the chamber's walls, gathering them back into his bandages with careful, precise movements. His arms were blistered and burned in several places where the contact with Noir's power had been too direct.
"That," Mr. Ace said quietly, his voice carrying no judgment, only clinical observation, "was unlike anything I've ever encountered."
Shin Jin was breathing hard, blood still dripping from his nose.
"How long have you been listening?" Shin Jin asked.
"Long enough," Mr. Ace replied, beginning to wrap fresh bandages around his injured arms with practiced efficiency. "I sensed a disturbance in the Order's primary spiritual network. Came to investigate."
He looked down at Noir's unconscious form with something that might have been fascination.
"Lucky for both of you I did."
Shin Jin's jaw was tight.
"You can't tell Yuusha about this."
Mr. Ace paused, his bandaged head tilting slightly toward Shin Jin.
"I'm not planning to," he said. "Yuusha already knows."
Shin Jin's head snapped up.
"What?"
Mr. Ace finished wrapping his arms and turned to face the other seer directly.
"Yuusha knows exactly what the boy is," Mr. Ace said flatly. "He's known since the moment Noir chose the Crimson Seer position. Possibly before."
He moved to one of the broken walls, examining the spiritual scars left by Noir's aura. Where the crimson energy had touched stone, it had fused and transformed it into something crystalline, something that shouldn't exist.
"What just happened here is a manifestation of something exceedingly rare," Mr. Ace continued, his tone analytical and cold. "A seer capable of generating spiritual power without accessing their spiritual being through conventional means. Spontaneous manifestation. Uncontrolled. Potentially catastrophic."
"He needs containment—"
"He needs training," Mr. Ace interrupted. "And Yuusha has already decided to provide it. The question is whether you're going to inform him of what you just witnessed, or whether you're going to bury it and let him discover it in some far more destructive way."
Shin Jin was silent, processing.
"Inform the head priest," Mr. Ace said, moving toward the exit. "Tell him that Noir can generate a crimson aura of significant destructive power but cannot control it. Tell him that integrating this ability will require specialized, dangerous methods. Tell him that without proper guidance and containment, Noir will become a liability to the entire Order."
He paused at the damaged doorway.
"But understand this," Mr. Ace said, turning back to face Shin Jin one final time. "Yuusha didn't bring Noir here to train him into a functional seer. He brought him here to study him. To understand what Noir is. To understand what he could become."
His bandaged head tilted slightly.
"And depending on what Noir becomes, depending on whether he can master that power or whether it masters him... Yuusha might have plans for him that go far beyond the Ise Order's traditional mission of protecting humanity."
The implication hung in the air like a blade.
"Yuusha doesn't collect broken things," Mr. Ace said quietly. "He collects weapons."
Then he was gone, leaving Shin Jin alone in the ruins of the chamber with an unconscious Noir and the terrible knowledge that everything had just become infinitely more complicated.
...
By evening, Piers returned to find Noir still unconscious, his skin pale, his breathing shallow.
Piers entered the room quietly and took in Noir's state with a single glance. He didn't ask questions. He simply moved to Noir's side and checked his pulse—a trained, practiced motion—then sat on the adjacent bed and opened a book.
Something about philosophy, from what minimal attention it received.
He didn't engage Noir in conversation. He simply existed there, present but not intrusive. A quiet acknowledgment that something had happened, and that Noir would explain when—or if—he was ready.
Hours passed. The sun set. The room darkened.
Noir didn't wake.
When he finally did, just before midnight, his entire body was drenched in sweat. His hands shook violently. His eyes snapped open with the look of someone emerging from drowning.
For a moment, he couldn't remember where he was.
Piers didn't ask what happened. He simply set a glass of water on Noir's bedside table and returned to his book, his silent presence a form of acceptance that required no explanation.
Noir drank the water with shaking hands.
He looked at his wrists—the crimson fabric was still there, wrapped firmly, its silver threads pulsing softly in the darkness.
As fragmented memories began to surface—crimson light, the sound of stone breaking, Mr. Ace's calm voice speaking about Yuusha's plans—one thought dominated:
Whatever was happening to him was accelerating beyond his control.
And the Ise Order was watching.
Studying.
Planning.