The silence of his room was suddenly deafening. The neatly organized gear on the table—Creed, the revolver, the brutal new shotgun—was no longer just a collection of tools. It was a list of potential responses to an existential threat. A direct confrontation wasn't a battle; it was suicide.
'Calm down, its danger, it doesn't mean I'll die, it'll just be a dangerous situation...'
His first instinct was to fortify. Wait it out in the warehouse, surrounded by the Vipers, with Karl and the baron as human shields. He dismissed it just as quickly. Stupid. They wouldn't launch a frontal assault. If it was someone from the Demoness Sect, they'd turn the Vipers against each other, the warehouse would become a slaughterhouse, and I'd be trapped inside. And if it was the Aurora order… they might be able to kill me throughout the walls with some weird ritual...
The other option was just as bad: go about his business and hope to spot the hunter before they struck. That was a gambler's move, relying on luck and Umbra's whispers. One moment of inattention, one missed detail, and it would be over. His body would never be found.
He paced the length of the small room, the floorboards creaking under his weight. He needed to flip the board. He couldn't fight this enemy, so he had to make someone else fight for him.
His eyes landed on the set of "Henrik Moss" clothes draped over his chair. The Church. Captain Signeil Krieg.
It was a risk. A huge one. Krieg was dangerously perceptive. Walking into his orbit was like a mouse tempting a cat. But Krieg was also a man of order, of procedure. He operated within a system. A rogue, high-sequence Beyonder from a forbidden sect operating in his city? That was a direct threat to that order. It was a bigger problem than a local gang war.
The plan crystallized, not as a grand philosophical masterstroke, but as a series of practical, dangerous steps.
Step One: The Bait. He needed to give Krieg a reason to care, to invest his considerable resources. And he needed to make himself look like a victim, not a perpetrator.
Step Two: The Frame. He had to link this new, terrifying danger to the "Indaw Harbor Butcher" in Krieg's mind. Two problems, one solution.
Lutz stopped pacing. A cold, sharp smile touched his lips. It was audacious. It was reckless. It was the only move he had.
He changed quickly, shedding the persona of Lutz Fischer and wrapping himself in the scholarly armor of Henrik Moss. He checked his reflection in the window glass—a concerned, slightly anxious academic looked back. Perfect.
He didn't go to the Church offices. That was too formal, too easily recorded. He needed a chance encounter, a moment of seemingly spontaneous revelation. He knew Brenner often worked late at the library on trade compliance reports. Krieg sometimes checked in on him.
Lutz took up his usual position at a library table, a stack of linguistic texts and customs manifests open before him. He forced his hands to be still, his breathing even. He practiced looking unsettled. For an hour, he waited, the silence of the vast room pressing in on him. Every footstep in the corridor outside made his heart jump.
Finally, the door opened. It wasn't Brenner. Captain Signeil Krieg walked in, his dark beige greatcoat sweeping around his boots, his sharp green eyes scanning the room with languid intensity. They landed on Lutz immediately.
Lutz made a show of looking up, a flicker of recognition and then unease crossing his features. He gave a small, hesitant nod.
Krieg altered his course, moving toward Lutz's table with the quiet grace of a shark gliding through deep water. "Mr. Moss. Burning the midnight oil again?"
"Captain Krieg," Lutz said, his voice slightly tighter than usual. He gestured to the manifests. "Trying to make sense of the Intisian tariff codes. It's… dry work. Helps to focus the mind." He let a pause hang in the air, then looked down at his papers, as if wrestling with a thought.
"Is something troubling you, Mr. Moss?" Krieg asked, his tone deceptively casual. He pulled out a chair and sat, not waiting for an invitation. The move was a subtle power play, claiming territory.
Lutz swallowed, a genuine nervous reaction he didn't have to fake. "It's… probably nothing. A scholar's overactive imagination."
"I find that 'nothing' often has interesting seeds," Krieg replied, his gaze fixed on Lutz. "Indulge me."
"Alright," Lutz said, leaning forward slightly, lowering his voice. "You recall our last conversation? About the… violence in the city? The so-called 'Harbor Butcher'?"
Krieg's expression didn't change, but his attention sharpened. "I do."
"After that, I suppose I became… hyper-aware. I started paying more attention to the people around me, the rumors in the taverns. Foolish, I know." He gave a self-deprecating shrug. "But two days ago, I was at The Gilded Quill, cross-referencing a shipping ledger. A man came in. I've never seen anyone like him."
He described the hitman. He didn't embellish. He used precise, academic language. "Early twenties, but his demeanor was ageless. Features so symmetrical they were unsettling. Dark curls. And his eyes, Captain… they were warm, liquid brown, but they had a flat, observational quality. Like a painter assessing a subject, not a man looking at other people."
Krieg said nothing, but his stillness was confirmation. The description meant something to him.
"He didn't order a drink," Lutz continued. "He just… watched. And he asked the bartender a question. I was close enough to hear it." He paused for effect, meeting Krieg's gaze. "He asked if there had been any recent murders where the victims' eyes had been… 'pulverized.'"
He let the word hang in the quiet library. The connection was now explicit.
All this time, Lutz was grabbing onto Creed like dear life.
Krieg's fingers tapped once, softly, on the table. "Did he now."
"That's not all," Lutz said, pressing his advantage. He allowed a genuine tremor of fear into his voice. "Last night, I was walking back to my lodgings. A fog had rolled in. I had the distinct, chilling feeling I was being followed. I saw a shadow that moved too smoothly. I ducked into an alley and waited, my heart pounding. I saw him pass by the mouth of the alley. The same man. He was… smiling. As if he knew I was there and was enjoying the game."
He looked down at his hands, which he had clenched into fists on the table. "Captain, I am a translator. A scholar. I help with paperwork. This… this is beyond my world. I think… I think this man might be the Butcher. And after I tried to help you, I fear he now sees me as a loose end."
The lie was perfect because it was woven from truth. He had been followed—by Hass's first assassins. He was being hunted. He was just merging the timelines and identities to create a single, monstrous threat for Krieg to target.
Krieg was silent for a long moment, his green eyes dissecting Lutz's story, searching for flaws. "A compelling narrative, Mr. Moss," he said finally, his voice low. "You have a gift for observation."
"It's not a narrative, Captain, it's my life," Lutz replied, the fear in his voice now edged with a scholar's frustration. "I came to you because you represent order. If this man is the butcher, you must stop him. And if he's now targeting me because of my association with your investigation…" He left the implication hanging: Your actions have put me in danger.
It was a masterstroke. He was now a protected witness, a citizen the Church had a duty to shield. Any move against "Henrik Moss" would be a direct challenge to Krieg's authority.
Krieg leaned back, a calculating look in his eyes. "The man you describe… he does not match the spiritual profile I have of the Butcher. The Butcher's residue is acquisitive, a thief. This man you describe sounds… older. More established in his power."
Lutz's blood ran cold. He knows. Krieg had already spiritually profiled the crimes and knew the Butcher was a Marauder. His gambit had just gotten more dangerous.
"Then who is he?" Lutz asked, his voice barely a whisper, the fear now completely real.
"That," Krieg said, standing up, "is what I will now determine. Thank you for your vigilance, Mr. Moss. It seems you have stumbled into deeper waters than any of us anticipated." He looked down at Lutz, and for a split second, Lutz saw the hunter beneath the bureaucrat's coat. "I would advise you to be exceptionally careful. Go directly home. Vary your routes. This individual, if he is who I suspect, is far more dangerous than a simple serial killer. He is a symptom of a much older sickness."
With that, Krieg turned and walked away, his footsteps echoing in the silent library.
Lutz sat there, his heart hammering against his ribs. He had done it. He had thrown a rock at the hornet's nest. Krieg was now actively hunting the hitman. His gamble had succeeded, the confirmed the danger does not come from the church, and for it to pose a danger to him, it was definitely a beyonder, it had to be a beyonder sent by the Demoness Sect or Aurora Order. The Church's immense resources were now aligned, temporarily, with Lutz's survival.
But the cost was terrifyingly high. Krieg was too smart. He knew the Butcher was a Marauder, and he now knew a high-level outsider was in his city. It was only a matter of time before he started connecting the threads that led directly back to Lutz Fischer.
He had bought himself time, not safety. He had traded one relentless hunter for another, more powerful one, and in the process, he had painted a target on the back of his most valuable identity.
The moment Lutz stepped from the library's hushed sanctuary into the evening fog, the world sharpened into a razor's edge. He didn't just put on Umbra; he slid it onto his finger like a soldier arming a primer charge. The psychic whispers flooded in immediately, a chaotic susurrus of distant anxieties, hidden lusts, and the general miasma of a city's subconscious. He forced it all into the background with a brutal act of Cogitation, visualizing the simple, solid lines of a lockpick. He wasn't listening for secrets; he was using the ring as an early-warning radar.
He began his predetermined route, a meandering path through the quieter streets bordering the commercial district, feigning the nervous journey of a scholar heading home to the slums. His senses were hyper-attuned. The scrape of a boot heel on cobblestone three streets over. The flicker of a gas lamp as something passed too quickly beneath it. The prickle on the back of his neck that had nothing to do with the cold.
Then Umbra screamed, this was only possible because the one sensed, was one of its own kind.
It wasn't a sound, but a spiritual ice-pick driven directly into his mind. The general whispers vanished, replaced by a single, overwhelming signal of predatory intent. It was cold, ancient, and laced with a degenerate corruption that made his stomach lurch. The signal emanated from a narrow alley mouth to his left, a crevice of pure darkness between two tall brick buildings, so deep it seemed to swallow the lamplight.
There.
Every instinct told him to fight, to draw Creed and face the threat. Every scrap of sense screamed run. He chose sense.
He spun on his heel and broke into a sprint, not toward the safety of the Viper's territory, but deeper into the maze of alleys, aiming to loop back toward the busier thoroughfares. But the shadows themselves seemed to come alive. The pool of darkness at his feet stretched, elongating like taffy, and the one ahead of him thickened, congealing into a tangible wall of gloom. The temperature plummeted. He was being corralled.
He skidded to a halt, Creed appearing in his hand as if by magic. The shadows from the alley he'd fled from were flowing out into the street, not as an absence of light, but as a physical, viscous substance. Within that advancing darkness, a figure began to coalesce—a man in dark, elegant robes, his features obscured by the unnatural gloom, but his presence was a weight on Lutz's soul. This was a Rose Bishop.
As the tendril of living shadow lunged for his throat, a voice cut through the tension, calm and absolute, speaking in the language of nature, Hermes.
"Shadows are prohibited here."
The effect was instantaneous and absolute. Captain Signeil Krieg stood at the mouth of a intersecting alley, his ginger hair tied back, his sharp green eyes fixed on the attacker. In his hand, he held a small, perfectly balanced brass scale. It glowed with a soft, unwavering light. This was the Judge's Scale.
The law was layed down. The world obeyed.
The crawling, sentient shadows dissolved. Not like mist dispersing, but like a sentence being erased from reality. One moment they were a physical threat, the next, they were simple, inert darkness cast by stationary objects. The oppressive weight vanished. The attacker, a man with sharp, androgynous features and eyes the color of dried blood, was suddenly exposed in the middle of the street, his expression one of pain and mild, annoyed surprise.