A few days earlier, after the carnage between the Crimson Lotus and the Black Rose had scarred the Twin Cities, the Black Castle slumbered beneath a pall of darkness. The chambers within were hushed, the only light a thin silver blade of moonlight slicing through the narrow portholes. That cold radiance fell upon a single bloom upon the desk—a black rose—its petals glistening faintly as the willow-wind stirred it, a fragile thing trembling in the cavernous gloom.
Upon her throne sat Lady Sin, sovereign of shadow. Her slender fingers toyed languidly with the stem of the rose, caressing its barbed thorns as if drawing sustenance from its silent cruelty. Her face was veiled by shadow, the contours concealed, yet the faintest glimmer of crimson burned where her eyes would be, faintly luminous like embers banked in ash.
The stillness broke. The great door groaned upon its hinges, spilling a wedge of pale light into the darkness. Zoyah entered, her boots echoing across the stone until she sank to one knee, head bowed low in obeisance.
"My Lady," she intoned, her voice steady though her posture betrayed unease.
Lady Sin did not stir, only the faint tilt of her head betraying life. Her voice when it came was cold and crystalline, cutting the silence like a shard of ice.
"Did you fulfil the task I asked of you?"
Zoyah's throat tightened, but she answered, eyes lowered to the marble floor.
"My Lady, we pressed them to the very brink. Agent-90—the Guillotine—was nearly subdued, and his comrades pinned in their respective battles. We sought to apprehend him, but…"
She faltered. A pause stretched, taut as a garrotte.
Lady Sin's voice dropped an octave, quieter, more suffocating. "What happened then?"
Zoyah exhaled, shame thick upon her tongue.
"From nowhere, Chief Wen-Li of the SSCBF appeared. She invoked her ability—Crimson Shackle. The chains themselves felt as though they bled from the air. We were forced to retreat, My Lady."
The rose slipped from Lady Sin's fingers, falling silently onto the blackened marble. Slowly, she rose. The scrape of her throne against the stone reverberated like thunder in that chamber. Each step of her heels rang sharply, echoing louder, closer, heavier—as if the very walls recoiled at her approach. Her presence filled the hall with a dread so tangible it seemed to squeeze the breath from Zoyah's lungs.
"I commanded you," Lady Sin said, her words each deliberate as a blade being whetted, "to bring me that Guillotine—dead or alive. Yet you let him escape… all because of that woman who dared intrude upon our war. Why," and her voice sharpened, flaying the silence, "could you not kill her?"
"My… my Lady," Zoyah stammered, trembling under the crushing weight of her mistress's aura, crimson eyes pressing upon her like millstones. "Agent-90 fought with an unnatural ferocity. He injured most of us grievously. Wen-Li's intervention was decisive—without her, perhaps…" Her voice died under the glare of those eyes.
Lady Sin's lips curled, a whisper of disdain.
"And what of his comrades? And the two traitors who once served under my banner?"
Zoyah bowed her head deeper, her voice hushed.
"They fought savagely to buy their comrades time. Had we pressed further, we might not have returned alive. My Lady, we would have been decimated."
The chamber grew colder. Lady Sin's aura pressed upon her like an iron shroud. When she spoke again, it was with the slow cadence of doom itself.
"Zoyah… this time, I permit this failure. But mark me well—should you falter again, the price will be yours to pay in full."
Zoyah dared glance up. From the shadows, Lady Sin's face remained veiled, yet her eyes burned forth—murderous, incandescent, crimson like fresh blood spilt across snow.
"You are dismissed."
"Yes, My Lady." Zoyah's voice cracked as she scrambled to her feet, saluting before pivoting sharply. The echo of her boots retreated down the chamber, the great door creaking shut behind her, plunging the hall back into smothering shadow.
Lady Sin stood alone once more. She retrieved the black rose, brushing her lips across its velvet petals, before whispering into the silence, a murmur like poison seeping into water:
"Wen-Li… little dandelion of the SSCBF… I shall pluck you stem by stem, until nothing remains but dust."
Meanwhile, Zoyah drifted down the main hallway of the Black Castle, her footsteps muted upon the polished stone. The passage was a strange amalgamation of eras: Gothic arches soared overhead like the ribs of a cathedral, their shadows yawning across the floor, while the walls themselves bore sleek panels of obsidian glass that glimmered faintly under strips of cold white light. Iron sconces—ornamental relics of a bygone age—burned with modern blue flames, their glow catching upon the gilded mouldings, so that the entire corridor seemed caught between antiquity and futurity, a mausoleum draped in neon.
Her shoulders slumped ever so slightly, the fatigue of Lady Sin's reprimand pressing upon her like a leaden shroud. Yet before she could vanish into solitude, a familiar figure approached from the opposite end—Chelsea, her stride light, her dress a whirl of scarlet silk, as though she were perpetually rehearsing for some unseen masquerade.
Chelsea's lips curled into a mischievous smile.
"So, Zoyah," she chimed, voice lilting like a harp-string, "what did Lady say?"
Zoyah halted, her eyes half-lidded, her voice weary yet edged with resignation.
"She said I live to fight another day… but should I fail again, I shall pay with more than blood. I suspect she meant it."
Chelsea blinked, her brows shooting upwards, her expression caught halfway between disbelief and theatrical horror. "Oh, darling, that's… positively ghastly." She leaned closer, voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper. "You mustn't let her frighten you to bits. Everyone's in the ballroom, drinking, laughing, pirouetting about like drunken seraphs. Come! Let's have fun before she feeds us all to the abyss."
Zoyah waved her off with a dismissive flick of her wrist, a shadow crossing her face.
"Chelsea, spare me. I've no appetite for gaiety tonight. My bones feel weary, and my mind more so. I am tired."
"Oh. Well then." Chelsea's smile faltered, contorting into something awkwardly polite, like a court jester whose punchline has soured. Her hands fluttered in the air before finding refuge upon her hips. "Do as you will. We shall meet again tomorrow, I suppose. Try not to brood yourself into an early grave, hmm?"
Zoyah merely inclined her head, a perfunctory nod that dripped with finality. Without another word, she turned to her chamber door. Chelsea lingered, her eyes narrowing slightly as though plotting some frivolous mischief to cure Zoyah's melancholy. But before she could speak again, Zoyah's door shut—softly, yet decisively—just inches from her face, the wooden echo reverberating like the last word in an argument.
Chelsea stood there blinking, then chuckled to herself with a shrug.
"Well, that's gratitude for you," she muttered, before sauntering off toward the ballroom, her heels clicking like the faint laughter of devils down the corridor.
Zoyah's chamber exhaled an ambience both futuristic and funereal, a sanctum forged from steel and sorrow. Neon veins pulsed faintly across the walls like the circuitry of a living organism, bathing the room in alternating hues of indigo and vermilion. Transparent panels of glass revealed the skeletal sprawl of the city beyond—Nin-Ran-Gi's lower districts glittering with sickly neon, a metropolis both breathing and decaying in the same instant. The air hummed with the low thrum of generators, punctuated by the occasional hiss of steam venting from chrome ducts, as though the castle itself were alive and restless.
Her bed, stark and metallic, was softened only by a blanket of dark silken fabric that gleamed like oil under the shifting lights. She moved languidly towards it, her boots clicking against the steel flooring before she lowered herself with deliberate grace. As she lay back, her long, argent hair spilled across the bedding like a cascade of liquid moonlight, flowing outward in argent rivulets as though the night sky itself had unravelled into strands. Her eyes traced the ceiling, where cybernetic runes blinked intermittently, casting ghostly shadows across her face.
She lingered in that silence, staring upwards as though seeking some long-buried constellation. At last, her eyelids drew closed. Yet her sleep was no reprieve; it was a prison of memory.
The past bled into her mind with brutal clarity.
Chaongu Zoya had once been more than a weapon. She had been a daughter—bright-eyed, resolute, the child of a resistance leader who dared to defy the Dominion Accord. In the narrow alleys of the lower districts, she had run barefoot, laughing as the scent of spice and smoke filled the air, her parents' voices a tether to safety amidst the chaos. But that fragile world had been wrenched from her.
When the purge came, it arrived like a tidal wave of fire and iron. Her family was cut down before her eyes—her father's voice drowned beneath gunfire, her mother's final cry silenced by the Dominion's soldiers. She had been seized, shackled in steel, and dragged into the abyss.
There, the Dominion remade her. Biotech grafts coiled within her veins like parasitic vines, augmentations fusing with flesh until her humanity blurred into machinery. Psychic conditioning bent her mind into obedience, rewiring grief into aggression, sorrow into weaponised silence. Many broke under such cruelty, their spirits shattered beyond recognition. But Zoya—Zoyah as she was now called—did not fracture. She sharpened. She embraced the agony, transmuting her grief into cold precision, her heart a blade honed on loss.
The present reclaimed her in a sudden spasm. She stirred upon the bed, her brow furrowing, her lips trembling against the onslaught of memory. Sleep fled from her as swiftly as it had arrived. Tears gathered unbidden, tracing delicate lines down her pallid cheeks, catching the neon glow so that they glittered like molten silver.
Her lips parted in a fractured whisper, scarcely more than breath.
"Mum… Dad…"
Her voice cracked, fragile as porcelain. For the first time in years, her face—usually a mask of stoicism and unyielding steel—betrayed her vulnerability. Her fingers curled against the silken bedding, knuckles whitening, as if she were still reaching through time, clawing towards the figures who had been torn from her.
And in the silence of her cyberpunk sanctum, her sobs were swallowed by the endless hum of machinery—her grief drowned by the mechanical heartbeat of the Dominion's legacy, as if even her sorrow belonged not to herself, but to the empire that had forged her into a weapon.
Lady Sin's chambers were steeped in sepulchral grandeur, a sanctum where shadows moved like courtiers and silence was a loyal attendant. Tall windows, latticed with blackened iron, admitted only slivers of moonlight that fell like liquid silver across the polished obsidian floor. The air carried the faint fragrance of wilting roses, their petals scattered across marble steps like drops of spilt wine.
Lady Sin sat ensconced upon her throne—an iron monstrosity adorned with baroque carvings of serpents devouring their tails. Her figure was a silhouette etched against the pale glow, her face obscured by shadow save for her eyes—crimson orbs that burned like coals in an eternal hearth. In her gloved hand she turned a black rose slowly, petal by petal, as though dissecting its fragile anatomy.
Her lips parted, her voice low and deliberate, imbued with both frost and fire.
"So… Madam Di-Xian…" she murmured, as if invoking a name she despised yet could not dismiss. Her words unfurled like velvet soaked in venom. "The matron saint of order, the self-proclaimed arbiter of balance. And now her agents… gnats daring to sting the lioness."
She leaned forward slightly, her nails grazing the rose's stem until a thorn bit her glove. A faint smile curved her lips—not of pleasure, but of calculation.
"They call themselves guardians, but guardianship is a mask for tyranny. Di-Xian shelters herself behind her laws, her pristine agents with their polished visors, their noble oaths… Yet beneath their pageantry of virtue, I see the truth. They are executioners cloaked in ivory."
Her eyes flared crimson, the shadows seeming to lean closer to her, as though compelled by her wrath.
"Agents… Jun, Farhan, Masud, Roy, and the Guillotine they call Agent-90. Tools. Blades wielded by a hand too craven to sully itself in the blood it spills. And Wen-Li…" she hissed the name, her voice a silken rasp, "that insolent insect who dares bind me with her shackles. Her defiance will be the chain that drags her to her own grave."
She rose, the hem of her gown sweeping across the floor like a tide of black water. Her shadow elongated monstrously upon the wall, resembling not a woman but a wraith crowned in midnight.
"They believe themselves hunters," she whispered, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial purr. "Yet even the sharpest hunters may stumble into the maw of a beast they cannot fathom. And when they do… I shall not merely kill them. I shall unmake them, strip them of flesh and faith, until even their names are forgotten in the abyss."
Her fingers crushed the black rose at last, its petals crumpling into her palm. She opened her hand and let the fragments fall, scattering upon the floor like cinders from a pyre.
Her eyes narrowed into slits of scarlet fire, and she exhaled one final vow into the silence:
"Madam Di-Xian, your fortress of justice will crumble, stone by stone, agent by agent… until all that remains of you is dust and memory."
The castle trembled faintly, as though the stones themselves recoiled at her malediction.
Meanwhile, in the cavernous ballroom of the Black Castle, the air was heavy with smoke from braziers and the bitter tang of spilt wine. The chandeliers above swayed faintly, their crystals catching the moonlight as though the night itself peered in on the gathering of the weary. Velvet drapes the colour of dried blood sagged against the walls, muffling the laughter and murmurs of the Sinners gathered below.
Bai-Yu, Adela, Venom, Ravok, Joker, Deren, Bianca, and Cabernet sprawled across scattered lounges and carved chairs, their armour tarnished, their clothing stained, their bodies bruised by the recent skirmish in the Twin Cities. Some still bore bandages; others merely wore their exhaustion like a second skin.
Joker reclined lazily on a blackened chaise, a goblet of crimson wine in his hand. He swirled it languidly, staring into the liquid as though divining secrets. Each sip seemed less for indulgence than for anaesthesia, a method to drown the taste of defeat still lingering on his tongue.
Chelsea, bright-eyed despite the sombre atmosphere, swept in with trays of alcohol and plates piled high with roasted meats and sugared fruits. Her cheeriness was a strange ember flickering amidst the gloom.
"Come, come!" she said with a playful flourish, placing the trays before them. "If battle has worn you down, let feasting raise you up again."
Bai-Yu raised her head, her pale hair falling across her shoulders as she gave Chelsea a baffled look. "Chelsea," she murmured, her voice clipped yet tired, "we are exhausted."
"I know, I know," Chelsea said with a grin, dimples dancing across her cheeks. "But what's exhaustion if not an excuse for wine?"
The others exchanged faint smirks at her irrepressible spirit, though their eyes still carried the embers of weariness.
Deren, leaning against the arm of a chair with his arm bandaged, raised a brow. "And what of Zoyah?" he asked with curiosity, his voice edged with both concern and intrigue.
Bianca exhaled softly, brushing her dark hair from her eyes. "I think… she received a harsh reprimand from Lady Sin. The Lady was displeased."
Joker let out a sudden bark of laughter, rich and theatrical, his goblet sloshing dangerously as he raised it in mock salute. "Ha! Our poor Zoyah, the Lady's silver blade dulled for once! How grimly poetic."
Every head in the room turned sharply toward him, their eyes narrowing as though he had spoken profanity at a funeral. A silence hung for a moment, broken only by the crackle of the braziers.
Venom, his serpentine smile curling across his lips, muttered dryly, "Careful, clown. Mockery wears thin when spoken of those sharper than you." A few of the Sinners smothered their amusement behind gloved hands, their shoulders trembling with suppressed laughter.
Adela, perched elegantly upon the edge of a velvet seat, tilted her chin with regal disdain. "Let him jest, Venom. A fool's laughter echoes briefly but never reshapes the stone. Besides"—her eyes glimmered with cold wit—"mockery is the coin of those too afraid to spend their steel."
The conversation ebbed into murmurs again until Cabernet spoke, her tone low and deliberate. "Where is Zoyah?"
Chelsea set down a jug of brandy with a soft thud and sighed. "She said she won't come. She is tired. She wants to rest."
As though summoned by her name, the door at the far end of the ballroom creaked open, its iron hinges crying out into the dim hall. Zoyah entered, her silver-white hair gleaming in the low light, her expression guarded and weary. The chatter faltered into silence before a chorus of voices rose to greet her.
"Zoyah!" Bai-Yu's voice rang first, warm yet strained.
"You've returned," Ravok added, his tone brusque yet tinged with relief.
"You missed my toast!" Chelsea pouted, her eyes bright as she lifted a goblet toward her.
"You fight like the storm, Zoyah," murmured Adela, inclining her head with composed respect.
"Glad you're not broken, sister," Venom smirked, his serpentine charm coiling in his tone.
Their voices mingled into a strange tapestry of warmth, jest, and acknowledgment. For a moment, Zoyah's cold veneer cracked—her lips curved into the faintest of smiles, a fleeting crescent of humanity beneath the weight she bore. Her eyes softened, though the shadows of grief never quite loosened their grip.
And the hall, weary though it was, seemed a shade brighter for her presence.