They called themselves Null and wore that name like a threat. No crest, no banners, no public face—only quiet strikes in the dark and the kind of professional cruelty that left no story to tell. A throat cut in a merchant stall, a nobleman's carriage found overturned with its driver gone and the lords silent about what had happened, priests who preached too loudly discovered with their mouths full of river water: Null left ghosts behind them. Everyone whispered about them, and everyone agreed on one thing — you didn't invite Null into your life.
Drake remembered them in a way that tasted of iron: far too intimately. They had ended his life once before. Not as a rumor, not as a rumor attached to some battlefield heroics, but bluntly, deliberately. The pain from that second death still folded under his chest like a hot coal. If he wanted to know who had signed his death warrant, if he wanted to rip the heart out of the organization that had killed him, he had to force them out of the dark. Chaos bait. Fire. Blood. The sort of crimes only someone with a flare for spectacle could commit. The Crimson Flowers had been that bait. Hermia had burned; a city had become a crater; heads had rolled in the night like trophies.
Then Null noticed.
For a week after the crater, investigations crawled like vermin through the capital. Men in plain coats trailed strangers. Agents chased rumors down alleys. Even the Academy got letters — sealed, official, the kind that made heads of houses gather in curt, hushed meetings. When Null turned its gaze in your direction, you didn't keep making noise. You paused. You hid under smallness and waited.
Drake paused. He let Crimson Flowers quiet down into rumor and myth while he watched and listened. The pause wasn't cowardice; it was calculation. Casting too many stones will bring the hammer down faster than you can dodge.
Everything smelled like a trap or like patience. It was on one of those quiet afternoons, when the Academy fell into its uneven rhythm of classes and sparring, that he saw her.
Sirria. White hair, blue eyes like pale glass, and a softness about her that made her an easy mark. She was pretty in an unconventional way — not the kind people wrote songs about, but the kind that slipped into your head with a little ache. That day she knelt on the stone floor, books scattered around her, knees skinned, while three boys rounded on her like wolves on a rabbit. One of them shoved a palm full of grit into her face and grinned.
"Hey Sirria," he jeered. "Your family's tied to demons, right? You shouldn't be here. Why don't you just save everyone the trouble and die now?"
That line landed like a thrown stone. She didn't speak. She looked up, eyes steady but small, and folded her hands tighter around a ruined page.
Drake had been passing. He paused, watched, and then the air changed. Not much — a tilt to the wind, a small tautness in the courtyard — but when he stepped forward his voice cut like a blade.
"What about you?" he said, voice flat, casual. "The weakling trash. Shouldn't you die?"
The boys blinked. It's curious how one man's calm cruelty can be more terrifying than a pack's bravado. They scattered, snarling, leaving footprints of fear in their wake.
Drake crouched in front of Sirria. He had the lazy smile of someone who never needed to pretend. "You okay?" he asked.
"Fine," she said, voice small and nervous. "I— I'm not a bully unless someone does something to me I don't like. It's alright. I have research to do."
She was brittle. Timid. There was a tremor in the way she forced cheer into her shoulders as she collected her pages and hurried away. Drake watched her go and felt the strange prick at the back of his neck — an echo, a small memory of another life where that same face had been closer to the protagonist, clinging and loyal and foolishly brave. Back then, she had been his protagonist's biggest fan; here, she was on the edge of something else.
She was back the next day. The same place, the same boys. But the air around her was sharpened, like a chord plucked too hard. When the oldest bully leaned in, smirking, Sirria straightened. The blue of her eyes flared. "If only the Crimson King would come," she muttered under her breath.
Drake stopped, surprise cutting a line across his face. He liked surprise. "Oh? Really?" he said, and his voice was a different thing now — amused, curious, not the lazy threat that had scared the boys off before.
The bullies scattered again. Drake waited until their footsteps faded and asked her what she meant. She flushed and stammered: "I want to… I want to work with him. Clean the world of people like those bullies. They make life small and cruel."
He laughed; it was a quick bark of disbelief. "You're weak-minded. How do you think you'd clean anything if you can't even handle this corner?" He gestured at the dusty floor and her scraped knees.
She didn't argue. She only said, with a steadiness that surprised him, "Meet me at the Hero Fountain at six. We'll talk."
The Hero Fountain was old and a little cracked — a statue of a knight frozen mid-stab, sword driven into the belly of a stone demon. Spray from the fountain whispered into the night. Sirria waited, hands folded, eyes on the statue like she expected it to stand and speak. The night let her sit there for minutes that felt like stones.
Drake arrived not walking but dropping, from the roof-edge down to the square with the effortless grace of someone who had practiced theatrical entrances. The coat flared, the hood shadowed his eyes, and the moon cut a pale line across his jaw. He smiled at her, and for a moment the night brightened. "Hey Sirria," he called, the voice softer than the one that killed, warmer than the one that joked.
She stared at him. "Drake? Is that you? You… you look cool." The words tumbled out with a little laugh she couldn't help.
There was an odd hush to the street, a silence that felt too absolute. Drake noticed it, the way the air stopped moving. He looked up and down the silent street, feeling the prick of something watching, but only for a beat. He turned back to Sirria. "I'll offer you a position in the Crimson Flowers," he said. "Total loyalty from you. No half-measures."
Sirria's face brightened and then went red. She laughed, an embarrassed little sound. "Why rush? Let's take it slow," she said, blushing as if the heat of the proposition had warmed her too fast.
Drake's smile softened for a second. Then the old, colder calculus slipped into his eyes. He drew a small dagger out, the blade catching the moon. Without melodrama, he slit his finger and held it out. "Drink," he said. "My blood carries things now. It will harden you. It will take off the shy parts." He made it sound like medicine. It smelled like iron. It tasted of danger.
Sirria didn't hesitate. She took the blade to her lips, let a drop land on her tongue, and then leaned forward to drink. The wet shine on her lips looked like surrender and promise and something in between.
"From this moment," Drake said as the blood pulsed in her veins, "you are Petunia."
Light flushed through her hair in the streetlight, like dye spreading through white fabric. The color shifted: a pale apricot bloom, then a deeper, decided pink. Petunia — both name and color — settled over her like a chosen identity. Her shoulders straightened in a way Drake liked; the timid tilt was gone, replaced with a small hard line of resolve.
For a moment, they simply stood. The fountain babbled. The statue glinted in the lamplight. Then — boom.
Four figures stepped from the darkness like cuts in the night. They were silhouettes first, then the edges sharpened: sleek, professional, no wasted movement. Their appearance was almost theatrical — they moved with that precise economy that screamed training. One carried a pair of sins in the way he held a blade; another's coat was buttoned to the throat like he expected to walk in rain.
They spoke as they stepped into the circle of light, voices smooth and chilling. "We found you, Crimson King."
Drake's breath showed in the cool air. His coat fluttered. He looked at them with the slow amusement of a man who had expected bigger fireworks. "Sorry," he said to the street, the moon, the statue, even to Petunia — "but you interrupted me, so I'll kill you painfully."
There was a sharp silence, the kind that made a person's skin feel thin. The four moved all at once. The first flicked forward so fast the brain rounded his movement into a blur; two more split off to circle wide; the last one hung back like a predator savoring the options.
Petunia took a step back. The blood on her lips betrayed the fresh promise that still heated her blood. She had just been christened; now she stood at the edge of an open, terrible thing. Her hands curled, not in fear but in readiness. Drake didn't expect her to be useful yet; he expected to act and for her to be a witness. He'd misjudged before; there were things people surprised you with.
The first of the four blurred.
Drake moved like a shadow. He didn't waste a cinematic entrance; he simply sliced the air with a flick designed to register in the killer's ribs. The assassin didn't fall; he tilted, redirected, and Drake felt the soft give of cloth. A laugh came out of him, too bright in the night. He had not expected Null to be so bold, not so visible. They were usually whisper-silent predators.
The second struck from the side — a strike designed to take the breath out of the gut. Drake stepped forward and took it, feeling the cool flash of steel and a small sting against his side, a note of reality. The assassin's blade dragged across the coat. Drake's hand found the attacker's wrist, and with a movement that was part contempt and part grace he broke the arm. Bone snapped like brittle reeds. The man howled.
It was close. The third moved, blade a silver stitch toward Drake's throat. Petunia stepped in with something raw and terrible — a sudden, unexpected shove that cracked a chest and sent an assassin stumbling. The fourth reacted to her — eyes narrowing, moving like a man suddenly serious.
Drake's laugh shifted into a low thing that vibrated the cobbles. "Fine," he said. "Let's make this painful."
He let the killing intent leak out like steam. Not an all-consuming wave, but a carefully aimed pressure. The air around the four tasted sharp. One of them coughed, the blood bright as rubies in his mouth. The second found himself on the ground, grasping for breath that would not come. Petunia's eyes were wider now — no longer the wavering pupil but steady, a little hungry.
None of them were Null's lowest scum. These were professionals, and they didn't die instantly. They were good. Too good. The fight blurred, blades ringing, movement folding into movement. Drake took them apart in a way that was efficient and theatrical: a wrist severed, a throat nicked, a shoulder cleaved clean off so the man's greatsword dropped with a metallic thud that sounded too loud in a street that had been waiting for noise.
Petunia moved like a different creature. The blood in her veins tasted like heat. She reached out with a hand and touched the wall; a tiny flare of mana answered her, and the nearest assassin fell like a puppet with his strings cut. It was sloppy, raw, dangerous — but it worked.
The fourth assassin staggered back, clutching at a wound, and the four began to dissolve into panic. They had expected to find prey, not a scene of barely controlled chaos where the prey smiled.
Drake finished the night with a single, terrible motion — not a slaughter, at least not yet — a demonstration. He didn't kill them all. He left marks, trophies: one man's ear sliced off and thrown into the fountain, a cufflink broken and impaled on a bench. They ran. The ones still standing fled into alleys, and the four that had confronted them crawled away like beaten dogs to a shadowed safehouse.
Drake turned to Petunia, cloak settling around him like a curtain. "Tonight was an audition," he said, voice soft. "You survived. You drank, and you did not flinch. You can be useful."
She looked at him, breath still shallow, hair catching moonlight. Petunia's face had lost the old softness and taken on a small, hard grin. "What now?" she asked.
"Now," Drake said, and his smile was a promise and a threat wrapped together, "we find who sent Null after me. We make them pay. You'll learn to bite without fear."
The night answered with wind that lifted the papers in the fountain, a small rustle like applause. Far off, in the city, men who chased whispers tightened their coats. But for the Crimson King and his newest blossom, the world bent in a way that felt deliciously theirs.
They had made noise, and Null had heard it. Null had shown a face, and that face would be tracked.
Drake liked the sound of that.