Axel stands with twenty of his comrades in the warehouse, all held fast by the Specter. He is trying to make sense of what has just happened. The man came in while they were loading food supplies for the orphanage — walked in, assessed the room, and had every one of them bound before a coordinated response was possible. Axel had tried to push his Semblance. Nothing came. No negative emotion from the attacker to draw from. Nothing at all.
"Listen carefully." Lleuad's voice carries urgency without aggression. "My business is only with you. Have your people leave, and I give you my word — no harm will come to them."
Axel hesitates. He has no reason to trust this man. And yet the absence of malice is not something he can argue away — his Semblance has never lied to him about that. His father had taught him enough about fighting to understand what he is looking at: a person who could end this room without effort. Which makes the offer real.
He nods quietly. Then, to his comrades: "Go check on the others." A gentle smile, for their benefit. "I'll be alright."
The last of them pulls the door closed behind him.
Lleuad speaks the moment they are alone. "As I speak, your friends are being hunted. Gunnar, Stellan, Henrik, Nils, Viggo…"
With every name that leaves Lleuad's lips, Axel's heart sinks further into his chest.
Lleuad pauses, letting the weight of the revelation settle before continuing. "Three have already been eliminated. The other two cannot be reached in time. All six of you accepted something you should not have."
"And you're one of the people hunting them?" Axel asks. He locks his gaze directly onto Lleuad's eyes, his hands clenching into white-knuckled fists as he barely restrains the explosive rage boiling within his chest.
"Yes," Lleuad replies simply, offering no defense, as if openly adopting the guilt of the executioner.
"Then why am I still alive?" Axel demands, his voice trembling as his anger threatens to boil over.
"Because you did this out of necessity. Not greed." Lleuad's voice is quiet and direct. "You have your parents' instinct for the weak and the innocent. Torsten and Sigrid would have been proud of you."
The names stop Axel cold. The rage drains out of his expression, replaced by something rawer — fear, and a sudden, sharpened attention. He does not look away, but the quality of his gaze changes entirely. He is listening now.
"In four weeks you have made this city safer than it has been in years," Lleuad continues. "But the power you are using will eventually consume everything you have built. And I think you already know that. You have felt it by now — that hunger that keeps demanding more."
Axel's expression darkens. The confirmation is written in it plainly.
"I believe I can help you." The words settle into the silence carefully. "I have the ability to destroy the Grimm inside you — it may be possible to save you in the process. I cannot promise success. But outside this warehouse, there is nothing waiting for you except death. If I succeed, you can remain what this community needs you to be, even from the shadows. That is more than what the alternative offers."
"Really!?"
The voice comes from behind a stack of crates. A boy emerges — fourteen, ash-blonde, pale, clear blue eyes wide open. He has been there the whole time.
Lleuad looks at him and offers a smile that does its best to conceal the uncertainty underneath. "I will do everything I can."
"Finn." Axel's voice carries a fear that has nothing to do with himself. "I told you to go with the others."
"And who's going to help you!?" Finn steps forward, his voice breaking. "I saw you yesterday. You were in pain. You've been hiding it but it's getting worse."
He turns to Lleuad. "Please. Without Axel I wouldn't have survived last winter. The orphanage needs him. We all do."
Lleuad looks to Axel.
"Why me?" Axel asks, after a silence.
"Because you're the leader."
Another silence. Axel's mind is visibly at war with itself — the distrust of a young man who has survived by being careful, pressed against the evidence of what he has just witnessed and what he knows, deep down, is happening to him. The hunger has been growing. He has been telling himself he can manage it for weeks. He is less certain of that now.
A full minute passes.
Axel looks up, his eyes having made their choice. But before he can speak, he finds himself airborne — the ground rushing up to meet him, the world tilted wrong, with no understanding of how he got here.
"Huh!?"
The breathless gasp is the only sound that manages to escape the boy's lips before his head strikes the ground, completely severed from his body.
Baojun lands heavily upon a stack of wooden cargo crates on the far side of the room, his blade coated in a fresh streak of blood.
Finn does not scream. His mind has not yet delivered what his eyes are showing it.
Lleuad moves in the same moment — the Specter sweeping over Finn, enclosing him, while his sidesword clears its sheath. He saw the dash — saw Baojun cross the room and execute the cut in a single motion, too fast to intercept. Now Baojun drops from the crate and moves toward Axel's body, blade aimed at the Grimm heart.
Before the steel can connect, his strike is intercepted by Lleuad's Specter, which begins to gradually cover the boy's body to shield it from further harm.
At the same time, Grimm matter pours from the severed neck, reaching — trying to find the head, to reconnect.
Baojun's left hand moves while his right is still pressing against the Specter's resistance — a vial of Lightning Dust hits the ground at Lleuad's feet as he is mid-movement, the crack of the discharge filling the warehouse in an instant.
Lleuad takes it full on. His Aura shield holds, but the stun reaches through — a moment of seized muscle, broken concentration. The Specter stops before it can completely encase Axel's remains.
It is enough. Baojun drives his blade through an opening.
The Grimm matter dissolves. Axel is gone.
Baojun turns immediately toward Lleuad. The Specter catches his leg — slows him, holds him — but does not stop him.
Lleuad steps backward, narrowly evading a sweeping arc from Baojun's lightning-coated sword. He keeps Finn sealed inside the Specter where nothing from outside can reach him.
Baojun presses the offensive. Despite the anchoring weight of the Specter dragging at his leg, he forces his way into striking distance, unleashing a series of powerful strikes.
Lleuad gives ground steadily, parrying each devastating blow with precise, calculated deflections while simultaneously directing the Specter, which works at Baojun from the leg upward, winding, finding purchase — immobilizing the left hand, then driving a tendril into the floor to anchor itself, halting his advance entirely.
Just before the bindings can completely encase his shoulders, Baojun hurls his sword at Lleuad.
A shield appears from the side and deflects it cleanly.
"What is happening here?"
Colette's voice carries from the far end of the building, her footsteps already closing the distance. As she comes into view, her expression carries equal parts authority and fury.
"Ask the traitor." Baojun's rage is cold and absolute. "He wasn't killing his target."
Colette's eyes move to Lleuad, and the authority in them sharpens. "Is that true?"
"Yes."
An oppressive, suffocating silence blankets the warehouse. Colette stands in it, working through something.
"If you come with us without resistance," she says at last, "Baojun and I will hear you out. In private."
"You can't trust him!" Baojun objects fiercely, straining against the Specter's bindings.
"That is an order!" Colette snaps. "We're withdrawing."
Lleuad releases the Specter and falls in with Colette. Baojun follows a step behind Lleuad, close enough to make his intention clear.
Finn, freed from the Specter's covering, looks around the warehouse with the slow, disoriented movements of someone whose mind is still refusing what their eyes already know.
He finds Axel's head.
He stumbles toward it — once, twice — drops to his knees and picks it up. The boy calls Axel's name, and the sound that comes out of him fills the entire warehouse and has no other word for it but wailing.
The trio reach the door.
The crying stops.
The silence that replaces it is absolute.
"LIAR! YOU LIAR! CURSE YOU! CURSE ALL OF YOU!"
The words tear through the warehouse, carrying with them the particular ferocity of a child's hatred — pure, undiluted, and aimed with the precision of someone who knows exactly where to put it.
Lleuad freezes in his tracks, forcing both Baojun and Colette to halt as well.
Colette turns. She finds Lleuad looking back across the warehouse at the boy, his face open in a way she has not seen from him before — grief without defense, without the composure that has been present in every other moment she has witnessed. He does not look away from Finn's hatred. He receives it.
Visibly ticked off by Lleuad's display of remorse, Baojun shoves him from behind. Lleuad's feet move.
Colette watches Lleuad's hand as he turns away. It trembles — briefly, almost imperceptibly — before he draws a slow breath and follows them out into the street.
— — —
An Investigator stands outside the warehouse, some distance away. When she sees the trio emerge she moves quickly toward them.
"There is a witness inside," Colette says.
The Investigator nods, reading nothing unusual in the three faces before her. "Good work out there." She turns and heads inside.
The three of them walk. The streets are quiet. No one speaks.