Erika froze. A cold sweat instantly soaked through his undershirt. He stared at the man's impassive eyes behind the haze of smoke, then at the towering, impossible architecture vanishing into darkness around them, and finally at Loren—pale as death beside him, barely clinging to consciousness.
A reason? What reason could convince this man—who had erased a squad of Golden Guards with a gesture, who harbored a hatred for the Creed that felt carved into his bones, who wielded power Erika couldn't begin to fathom—to spare two strangers clearly entangled with the very order he despised?
Begging? Promises? What did they have to trade? They didn't even know where here was…
Despair coiled around him again, cold and suffocating, but this time mixed with a sharper, hollow terror—the blankness before a final verdict.
Erika's mouth opened. His dry throat produced no sound. Loren didn't even lift his head, just clutched Erika's arm, nails digging deep enough to pierce skin.
Time seemed to congeal in the cold glow of old pages and the drifting cigarette smoke.
The man waited in silence. A dust-covered magistrate holding court in a ruin of knowledge. He didn't hurry them. His eyes—sharp despite the grime and exhaustion—simply watched Erika and Loren. There was no expectation in that gaze, no curiosity. Only a cold assessment, as if weighing whether two stray objects were worth keeping.
The seconds stretched, thick and slow. Erika heard the pulse hammering in his own temples, felt Loren's grip spasm uncontrollably. The pain of those biting nails was sharp, clear—a strange anchor to a slipping reality.
His mind churned with fragments: Anna's pure, sorrowful eyes; Hong Bo's final, murderous glare; Wolfgang's grave shake of the head; the vanished Moanweed; the indifferent shimmer of starlight… None of it formed a "reason." None of it could possibly matter to this man.
They were too small. Knew too little. Two motes of dust swept into a storm, unable to explain why they spun.
The man didn't seem surprised by their silence. If anything, he looked bored.
He flicked the ash from his cigarette. A grey-white fragment drifted down, tracing a brief path in the cold light before dissolving into the dust on the floor.
Then, the fingers holding the cigarette began to tap against the tabletop.
Tap.
Not loud, but in the absolute quiet, it was piercingly clear.
Erika's heart clenched in time with the sound.
Tap.
Another. The interval shorter this time.
Erika's throat tightened. His breaths came short and shallow. The tapping seemed to resonate inside his ribcage, scattering his thoughts. He tried to form words, but his mind was locked, his mouth uselessly open.
Tap-tap.
The rhythm quickened. The sound seemed louder now, drawing faint echoes from the book-lined walls—a drumbeat, hastening, growing heavier.
"My patience…" the man spoke again, his voice lower, colder, merging with the percussion, "…is finite."
Tap-tap-tap-tap—!
The beats became a rapid, nerve-shredding staccato! Erika's heart raced wildly, a frantic bird against its cage. Cold sweat traced icy paths down his spine. Loren let out a choked whimper, trembling violently.
Just as the rhythm reached its breaking point—
Fwap.
A different sound. Not a tap. Something falling.
The cigarette.
In the midst of his furious tapping, the half-smoked stub slipped from the man's fingers and landed on the table.
It didn't stay put. Slowly, with a dreadful inevitability, it began to roll across the scarred, stained wood. The glowing ember carved a faint orange arc through the gloom, past the edges of scattered papers, past an empty metal cup, rolling straight for the table's edge.
Erika's eyes were helplessly drawn to it. His heart lodged in his throat. He watched its unwavering path as if watching their own fate—teetering, about to fall, to shatter.
The cigarette reached the edge. It paused, wobbled for a heartbeat.
Then it fell.
Silently, toward the dusty floor.
The man's gaze followed it down. His expression didn't change, but the last vestige of waiting vanished from his eyes, replaced by utter impatience and a deeper, gathered gloom.
Just as the cigarette was about to hit the ground—
The man lifted his foot.
Not in haste. With a precise, cold anticipation. His boot hovered inches above the spot where the ember would land.
"A waste of time!" he spat, the words thick with irritation and a stung, gathering fury.
He wasn't looking at Erika or Loren anymore. They had ceased to exist. His gaze seemed to pierce through the towering well of books, fixing on some absent, hated figure. The next words were ground out between his teeth, a blood-oath whispered to the air:
"Morrison… I will make them pay for you."
As the final syllable fell, the hovering foot slammed down.
Aimed not just at the falling spark, but with all the force of his frustration, his hatred, and his ruthless decision to be done with this nuisance—all concentrated in one, crushing stamp.
The man's foot descended with crushing finality, its shadow swallowing the faint orange ember—and with it, all of Erika's and Loren's dwindling hope.
Time stretched and twisted in Erika's perception. Sound vanished. He only saw the boot falling, the cold light around them seeming to dim under the weight of that motion. Pure terror seized his heart—a cold hand clenching—then burst into a raw, survivalist surge that shattered his paralysis.
He didn't think. Didn't even feel fear. His body moved before his mind could—
It was not an attack, not a defense. It was the primal flinch before annihilation. He wrenched himself backward, his spine slamming into a cold bookshelf. Old volumes showered down in a cloud of dust. At the same time, driven by pure instinct, he yanked the petrified Loren sideways. They tumbled together in a tangle of limbs, hitting the grimy floor.
And in that same moment of desperate, graceless evasion—
As Loren was dragged down, the vertigo, the choking pressure at his throat, and the sight of that descending boot broke something inside him. Some deeply ingrained noble instinct—to clutch at any straw when drowning—or a shard of half-remembered information flashing through the chaos, made him gasp out the words with the last air in his lungs. His voice was warped by terror and impact:
"He's alive! Still alive! The Morrison you mentioned—he's alive!"
The final word was a scream.
Time seemed to jam on the sound.
The boot—now less than an inch from both floor and ember—froze.
Not a gradual stop. It halted as if it had struck an invisible, immovable wall, arresting with unnatural suddenness. Even the dust stirred by its motion hung suspended in the air.
The man turned his head. Slowly. Deliberately.
The mingled irritation, hatred, and lethal chill on his face fractured at the words "Morrison" and "alive." A savage tremor passed through his expression—a raw, convulsive mix of disbelief, agonized hope, and something almost like joy, all twisting together. The corner of his eye twitched. His lips pressed into a bloodless line. The eyes that had been dead or cold now burned with a frightening light, locked onto Loren's terrified face on the floor.
But that flash of raw feeling lasted only a heartbeat.
A deeper, heavier darkness smoothed it over. The emotion was forcibly suppressed, crushed, replaced by a suspicion colder and sharper than before. The light in his eyes dimmed, turning them into two black voids—watchful and dangerous.
His foot remained suspended. Not raised, not lowered. Poised to end everything.
"Oh?" A short, icy sound escaped his throat. His gaze scraped over Loren like a blade honed on frost, tracing the ruined embroidery on his fine clothes, then his pale face.
"Why," he said slowly, each word a chip of ice dropped to the floor, "should I believe you?"
His eyes flicked to Erika, who had just struggled to sit up, face slack with shock, then back to Loren. The man's mouth curved into a cruel, mocking line.
"You little creature of the Creed."
"With your power, finding Morrison for yourself should hardly be an issue." Loren's voice still trembled, but he forced into it a shred of his habitual, now utterly misplaced, tone of judgment. "I've certainly never heard my master mention a man like you…" He paused, meeting the man's suddenly lethal gaze, and delivered the words that truly lit the fuse, enunciating each one with strained clarity: "So it seems… you held little weight in his regard."
Erika's heart stalled at "my master" and that provocatively aristocratic lilt. He knew this reflex—the sharp, haughty defiance that surfaced in some nobles when terror peaked. But using it now was like juggling live coals. He wanted to clamp a hand over Loren's mouth, but it was too late.
The man's reaction was faster than thought.
The final syllable of "regard" hadn't fully faded—
No roar. No grand gesture.
Only this: from the still-smoldering cigarette stub near his suspended foot, a single, denser, fiercer crimson spark shot forth. It was like an angered hornet—a sharp hiss tearing the air—streaking straight for Loren's face.
Erika saw only a red flash. No time to react.
Loren's pupils shrank to pinpricks. His defiance shattered into pure, staring horror.
It was so close Erika caught the scent of singed hair, felt his own skin prickle and recoil from the searing energy as it passed.
Thup.
A soft, wet sound. Like a pebble dropped into deep water.