Kaito didn't sleep that night, not because of fear, but because silence felt heavier than usual, the kind of silence that pressed into your bones and made the air taste like secrets, the Vault's safehouse was calm on the surface, the kids tucked into bunks, the papers filed, the charms sealed, but underneath that calm, there was a crack, invisible but deep, and he could feel it spreading every time he looked at the letter on the table.
Ten names.
Ten red Xs.
All of them real.
All of them his.
Not employees. Not assets.
Family.
Lilyeth sat beside him in the war room, her hands folded but her expression sharp, she hadn't said much since the list arrived, but she didn't need to, because Kaito knew what she was thinking—it didn't matter if the enemy knew where they were, it only mattered what they were willing to do about it.
Rook walked in with two cups of bad tea and no smile, which was rare.
He placed one in front of Kaito and didn't speak for a moment, then finally broke the silence.
"We traced the paper."
Kaito raised an eyebrow.
Rook shrugged.
"Imported from Bellvara, noble merchant stock, used only by two families for formal condemnation letters."
"Condemnation?" Lilyeth asked.
"Yeah. Like noble hit lists dressed as diplomacy."
Kaito leaned back in his chair.
"Which families?"
"House Vilhart and House Faerwynn," Rook answered, "Both backed the Church during the last inquisitor sweep. Both technically 'extinct' now."
"So we're dealing with ghosts," Lilyeth said.
"No," Kaito muttered, standing slowly and moving to the map wall, "We're dealing with people who want to stay ghosts."
He pointed at three spots on the board—each one tied to a previous relic rumor, each one seeded with false Gun Saint scripture from the Vault's controlled network.
"They're watching our strings. But not just from the outside."
Lilyeth's eyes narrowed.
"You think one of the ten on that list…"
Kaito didn't respond.
He didn't need to.
Because the room already felt colder.
Darius stepped in just then, silent as usual, a folded cloth in his hands, bloodstained at the edge.
"Found this at the back entrance," he said, placing it on the table.
Kaito unfolded it.
A charm.
One of their own.
Burnt black through the center.
"That's a Vault exit tag," Lilyeth said, her voice suddenly tight, "Only used when one of the kids retires."
Kaito stared at it.
"No one retired this week."
Rook shifted.
"You thinking what I'm thinking?"
Kaito nodded.
"We've got a traitor."
And before the weight of that could settle—
The entire safehouse shook.
Not from an explosion.
Not from impact.
From reverberation.
Every charm in the archive room activated at once—flickering, flaring, humming with ancient script as if touched by divine fire, the Vault kids screamed from the lower bunks, the sound of glass shattering echoed down the corridor as storage charms burst from overload.
Kaito ran to the archive door and kicked it open.
And what he saw made his stomach turn.
Every relic replica, every pamphlet, every forged prayer scroll—they were all glowing, their ink twisting, warping, words rearranging themselves into new phrases, ones that no one had written.
On the largest scroll, right in the center of the chaos, a sentence burned itself into the parchment.
> "The Gun Saint is dead. Long live the Flame."
Lilyeth stepped beside him, jaw clenched.
"They're hijacking the narrative."
"They're not hijacking it," Kaito whispered.
"They're rewriting it."
And deep beneath the city, in the frozen cellars of the abandoned cathedral, a voice whispered a prayer not meant for gods, but for something older—
And it answered.
No one spoke for the first ten minutes after the relic archive stabilized, the air still crackled with fading glyph light, some of the Vault kids were too shaken to return to their posts, two of the replica charm drawers had melted shut from internal rune burnout, and the scent of scorched ink clung to every wall like a warning written in smoke, Kaito stood over the center scroll for what felt like an hour, reading the sentence again and again, not because he didn't understand it—but because it was too perfect, too calculated, as if someone knew exactly how to strike at the center of everything he'd built.
Lilyeth knelt next to the scroll and touched the edge with a charm-checker talisman, her fingers moved slowly, carefully, tracing the newly formed runes, she didn't need to translate them out loud—Kaito could already read the pattern, the phrase "The Gun Saint is dead. Long live the Flame." was written in mirror-script, the kind only found in cursed sermons that predated the Church, magic from the days when faith was a currency and saints bled into reality with every prayer offered in desperation.
"It's a hijack," Lilyeth finally said, "Somebody built a relay net off our pamphlets. Every copy we distributed became a repeater. They linked it together through sub-encoded fire prayers. We accidentally built them a stage."
Kaito didn't flinch.
He'd already realized it.
Rook, arms crossed and eyes locked on the map, muttered, "And now they're preaching on it."
Darius stepped forward and dropped another folded cloth on the table—this one not stained in blood, but dusted in faint gold flakes, sacred wax, crushed and melted.
"Two more shrines activated tonight," Darius said, voice low, "Not ours. Not Church."
Kaito glanced at him.
"Syndicate?"
"No," Darius said, "Worse."
He pulled out a charm slip marked with a symbol no one had seen in years.
A flame wreathed in chains.
Rook sucked in a breath.
"...Is that who I think it is?"
Lilyeth nodded, eyes darkening.
"Cult of the Burned Tongue. They were wiped out ten years ago by the Inquisition. Every relic they had was destroyed, or so we thought."
Kaito stared at the charm in silence.
"They didn't get wiped out," he said quietly, "They went underground. And now they've hijacked our system to resurrect themselves."
Rook let out a laugh that wasn't really a laugh.
"So we're running an arms smuggling network for heretic death cultists. Great. Just great."
"No," Kaito said, walking to the map wall and stabbing his finger against a node near the Cathedral District, "We're not their smugglers. We're their cover. Every Vault relic sold, every rumor whispered, every fake pamphlet we dropped gave them camouflage."
"And now they're ready to go public," Lilyeth added grimly, "Because everyone thinks the Vault controls the myth. And if we stay silent, that myth becomes their weapon."
Kaito picked up one of the burnt replica charms and crushed it in his hand.
"No," he said flatly, "We end it. Tonight."
Darius raised an eyebrow.
"You want a purge?"
"I want a surgical incursion," Kaito replied, already pulling up old floor plans of the abandoned cathedral where the scrolls hinted the new cult activity began, "We're going in. We find the source. We kill the voice behind the rewrite. We take back the story."
Rook blinked.
"You sure it's that easy?"
"No," Kaito said, "Which is why I'm going in alone."
That stopped the room cold.
Lilyeth straightened, eyes wide.
"No. Absolutely not."
"It's not a vote," Kaito said, already packing a black case of Frostbite and Echo rounds, "If I take even one of you, they'll know the Vault's committing to a war. Right now, they still think we're just disoriented. Confused. I walk in like I'm buying faith, they won't suspect I came to burn it down."
Darius nodded slowly.
"You go quiet. You go fast. You don't improvise."
"I don't miss," Kaito said, locking the case shut.
Lilyeth grabbed his wrist before he could walk out.
"You're not doing this to save the myth," she said, voice firm, "You're doing this because if someone else takes it… then the Gun Saint becomes just another lie."
Kaito didn't argue.
Because she was right.
And a moment later, he was gone.
The underground path to the old cathedral was marked by forgotten symbols, half-eaten by time and moss, wards shattered long ago by holy fire or human greed, Kaito moved like a shadow, not because he wanted to—but because he had to, every step took him deeper into the bones of the city, where faith went to rot, and what emerged from that rot was always worse than silence.
He reached the outer crypt entrance just past the second bell.
A low chanting echoed from within.
Dozens of voices.
Too many.
But he kept walking.
And as he entered the main chamber, hidden in the darkness behind a broken altar, he saw them—figures in tattered robes, kneeling around a central glyph carved into the floor, glowing with corrupted scripture, and standing above them, leading the chant with hands raised in mockery of a priest—
Was a man in a Vault coat.
One of his own.
Kaito's stomach twisted.
And then the man spoke.
> "The Gun Saint is dead. And his fire belongs to us now."
Kaito raised his gun.
And pulled the trigger.
The shot didn't echo.
It whispered.
The Frostbite Round slipped through the dark like a blade of winter, slicing through incense smoke and hollow prayer, the cultist in the Vault coat barely had time to blink before the bullet pierced his chest just below the ribs, freezing blood mid-beat, locking his muscles in place, but it didn't kill him, no—Kaito had aimed low on purpose, because death was too clean for betrayal, he wanted the man to feel every second of his loyalty freezing inside him like a lie turned to ice.
The chanting stopped.
Every hooded head turned toward the altar, silence falling like a guillotine, and there stood Kaito, coat trailing soot from the crypt stairs, gun still smoking in his right hand, his left slipping another bullet into the chamber with a click loud enough to sound like judgment.
He stepped forward.
One step.
Then two.
And the cultists parted like fog around a flame, uncertain whether to run or kneel, because in their minds—what stood before them was the real Gun Saint, the one they'd heard rumors about, the one who vanished people with a whisper and branded heretics with thunder.
"Who told you to use my name?" Kaito said, voice cold.
No one answered.
The traitor on the ground wheezed, breath fogging from the frost creeping up his lungs, his eyes wide with pain and disbelief.
"You… weren't supposed to find us yet…"
"You talk too much," Kaito said, stepping over him, gun aimed down.
"Wait," the man choked, "It wasn't me. I didn't write the sermons—I just carried the fire—"
Kaito knelt, pressing the barrel gently against the man's temple.
"Then burn with it."
The trigger clicked—
And stopped.
Because every charm in Kaito's coat suddenly vibrated at once.
And that meant only one thing.
An override signal.
Someone had hijacked his personal charm channel.
No one could do that.
Not unless they were inside the original encryption net.
Not unless they'd been there from the start.
A glyph flared on the far wall of the cathedral crypt.
A sigil in crimson light.
A burning gun.
Pointed downward.
Kaito froze.
Lilyeth's voice crackled through his ear charm.
"Abort mission," she said, breath tight, "We just got hit at Node Three. They knew we'd strike tonight. Kaito—it's not just one traitor—it's a full split. Half the Vault's relic teams got wiped. They weren't sleepers. They were planted. Since week one."
Kaito's gun lowered a fraction.
Then the ground beneath the altar opened.
A trapdoor.
A tunnel.
No—a second crypt.
From the shadows within, footsteps rose like a heartbeat.
And then…
A figure stepped out.
Wearing a coat like his.
Same cut.
Same stitch.
But the face?
That face—
It was his.
Identical.
Down to the scar.
And the imposter smiled.
"I told them you'd come," the copy said, voice eerily calm, "Because no matter how far you run, the gun always finds its target."
Kaito raised his weapon.
And the imposter raised his.
Two barrels aimed.
Same stance.
Same breath.
Same eyes.
Only one shot would decide whose truth survived.