Life went back to normal.
A terrifying kind of normal, made of neon highlighters, caffeine straight to the veins, and case law so unreadable it should come with a warning label.
I'm in Master 1 now. The Holy Grail for some, purgatory for me. I spend my days with my nose buried in the Criminal Code, studying the subtle nuances between "intentional homicide" and "involuntary homicide," while trying very hard not to think about the fact that I have, technically, become a serial killer.
Well... almost.
For Kevin—the lightning-struck harasser—my conscience managed to plead dismissal. That one was the weather. An angry cumulonimbus. Not my fault if the guy decided to wave a metal bar under a storm like he was trying to catch divine 5G. That's natural selection, not murder.
Still.
Every lecture is refined psychological torture. This morning, when the professor started on mens rea—the moral element of the offense, the awareness of committing the act—I had to cough loudly just to drown out the sound of my own conscience creaking like an attic door from 1890.
"So, Mister Future Attorney General," Thomas said, flopping onto a plastic cafeteria chair, "ready to enforce order and morality?"
He had that relaxed expression of someone who doesn't have corpses (even accidental ones) in his closet.
"I'm mostly ready to enforce caffeine into my bloodstream," I said, twisting my paper cup. "By the way—where's Sarah? She's skipped tutorials for two days."
An awkward silence fell over the table. Thomas and Lucas exchanged that worried look people usually reserve for serious illnesses... or repeating a year.
"She's... weird lately," Lucas finally admitted, lowering his voice.
"Weird how? Like 'I changed my haircut' weird, or like 'I talk to pigeons' weird?"
"Like she's on her phone 24/7. And she won't shut up about 'vibrations.' Look—she just reposted another story from that guy... Pierre."
Before I could ask who Pierre was, a familiar silhouette appeared at the cafeteria entrance.
It was Sarah.
But not the Sarah who laughed at my awful jokes and panicked over exams. This one was... different. Thinner. Floating inside clothes that hung off her. Waxy complexion.
But the scariest part was the smile.
A fixed, mechanical smile—stuck on her lips like a sticker you can't peel off.
She drifted over to us, absent-eyed.
"Hi, beings of light!" she said, in a voice meant to sound soothing—except it just sounded hollow.
Thomas nearly choked on his sandwich.
"'Beings of light'?" he wheezed. "Sarah, did you smoke the campus lawn or what? And have you eaten today? You're pale as a sheet."
She waved him off with a slow, airy gesture.
"Physical food is secondary, Thomas. I feed on prana and positivity. My body is purifying. That's all."
She pulled out her phone like it was a sacred relic. Her eyes shone with fanatic fever.
"You don't understand because you're still stuck in the Ego Matrix. But look—did you see the latest notification? Pierre is doing an exclusive live tonight about 'letting go of material ego.' It's so powerful. He changes lives. You should follow him. It'll open your chakras."
She shoved the screen in our faces.
On the video: a man in his thirties taking up the whole frame. Perfect UV tan, teeth so blindingly white they challenged the laws of optics, and a white linen shirt unbuttoned down to the navel over oiled pecs. The background screamed Dubai or "rented villa in Bali."
He spoke to camera with a hypnotic tone—soft, syrupy—like he wanted you to fall asleep...
...or take out your credit card.
"Don't listen to people who drag you down," he was saying, staring into the lens. "Your parents, your friends, your teachers... they're anchors to your past. They want you to stay mediocre like them. Cut the ties. Fly. Give yourself to Ascension. Join us."
Sarah drank it in, nodding along.
Me?
I froze.
A drop of cold sweat slid down my spine. It wasn't admiration. It was that familiar, unpleasant prickling at the base of my neck.
My radar had switched on—flashing bright red.
This guy wasn't a life coach.
He was a predator with an Instagram account.
That evening, alone in my twenty-square-meter apartment that smelled like stale air and loneliness, I did what any conscientious law student would do in the face of a potential threat:
I revised my criminal procedure notes.
No.
I'm kidding.
I cooked cheap pesto pasta and investigated—which means I doom-scrolled Instagram until my thumbs hurt.
My trash radar, that little invisible antenna that's been buzzing at my neck since J-P died, was on high alert. And trust me: when you have a talent for attracting disasters, you learn to listen to your instincts.
I typed Pierre_Ascension into the search bar.
Pierre. Real name: Pierre Brasseur. (I found that in three clicks on an old high-school forum where he was already trying to sell "methods" for picking up girls.) The guy was a marketing case study.
On the surface, his profile was Gen Z's wet dream. Photos saturated in pool-blue and sun-yellow. Pierre in Dubai in front of a rented Lamborghini. Pierre doing yoga on a Bali beach at sunset. Pierre posting "funny" videos mocking "wage slaves" who wake up at 6 a.m.
He was handsome, athletic, rich—plus that predatory smile that says: I'm better than you, but I can help you become like me... for only €99 a month.
It was smooth.
It was shiny.
It was empty.
But the algorithm is a curious beast. When you start looking for filth, it serves it to you on a silver platter. Hashtag after obscure hashtag, disabled comments after disabled comments—I found the underside of the iceberg.
There was a recurring link in his bio to a private Telegram group:
"The Circle of Awakening."
"Access to truth has a price," the landing page said.
And the price was €500 a month.
Pocket change for a student living on pasta, right?
Obviously, I didn't pull out my credit card. I did better: I hacked his database, bypassed the firewall using a Tunisian VPN and three lines of Python—
...No. Kidding again.
I found leaked screenshots on Twitter, and a Reddit thread titled: "Pierre Brasseur is a public danger."
What I read turned my blood to ice.
The Circle had nothing to do with coaching. It was a manual for psychological demolition. Pierre explained, with ruthless rhetoric, that family, friends, and education were "toxic mental constructs" designed to enslave the "Awakened."
"If your parents don't understand your Light, they belong to the Shadow. Cut the ties. Isolate yourself to shine brighter."
Now I understood why Sarah spoke to us like strangers.
Worse: there were testimonies. Broken parents describing how their child emptied their savings account to invest in Pierre's "divine" cryptocurrency—a spiritual Ponzi scheme, crude but effective. He also sold "extreme water fasting" cleanses to purify the soul.
Then I found an archived blog post from a mother. Her daughter had killed herself two years earlier after being excluded from the Circle for failing to reach "Ascension." Pierre had told her she had "karma too heavy."
I set my phone down on my mattress.
The pesto pasta suddenly tasted like ash.
This wasn't just a stupid influencer.
He was a guru. A real one—modern, digital, untouchable because he operated in the gray zone between legality and "consent." He used lost kids' distress as fuel for his Ferrari.
And Sarah—Sarah, with her fragility and hunger for absolute meaning—was falling straight into his open jaws.
My radar hadn't lied. Pierre Brasseur was championship-grade trash.
Two weeks.
That's how long it took for Sarah to vanish completely from the surface of reality.
At first, she still came to class, but she sat at the back of the lecture hall, eyes glued to her screen, murmuring incomprehensible mantras while the professor explained the finer points of probation. Then the messages in our WhatsApp group stopped. No jokes. No cat memes. No "Can you send me your notes?"
Just a terrifying radio silence.
That morning, her empty chair felt heavier than usual.
"We're going," I said after class, packing my bag with a sharp, decisive motion.
Thomas and Lucas didn't ask questions. We went straight to her apartment—a slightly grim student shared flat near campus.
Her roommate, a psychology student with red-rimmed eyes, opened the door. The place was a mess.
"She's gone," she whispered, voice trembling. "This morning. At dawn. She packed in five minutes."
"Gone where?" Thomas demanded, fists clenched.
"To the 'Renaissance Seminar.' It's organized by that guy... Pierre. It's on a private estate, about an hour from here. She said she had to 'cut off low energies' to reach the next level."
She swallowed a sob.
"She emptied her Livret A—her savings. Everything. Three thousand euros for entry. When I tried to stop her, she looked at me like I was a stranger. She told me I was a 'toxic entity' and that I wanted to keep her from shining."
Thomas punched the hallway wall so hard a frame fell.
"Fuck! We can't leave her there! That guy's insane. Have you seen the rumors on the forums? A girl died of dehydration during his last 'light retreat' in Spain last summer. They buried it, said it was a cardiac accident—but everyone knows he deprives them of water so they hallucinate!"
My trash radar started screaming.
It wasn't a prickling anymore.
It was a burn.
My neck felt like someone had pressed a hot iron against it—the same sensation I'd had with Jean-Pierre, the same I'd had with Dolores's Nazi gold.
I could feel danger. Physical. Immediate.
Sarah was walking into the wolf's mouth.
"We're going," I said, voice flat. "I'll drive."
My keys jingled. My old Twingo—loyal warhorse of my misery—was about to be called back into service.
Lucas, always the pragmatic one (and also, coincidentally, the most cowardly), stared at me.
"Hold on, Eliot. What exactly are we going to do? It's private property. You want us to storm in and drag her out by force? You know the Criminal Code better than I do: trespassing, unlawful confinement if we force her... We'll end up in custody before we even see her guru!"
I turned to him. My look must've been ugly, because he took a step back.
"Forget the Criminal Code, Lucas. That guy is killing our friend slowly. We're not using the law."
"Oh yeah? And what are we using? Your muscles?" He glanced skeptically at my arms.
"No," I said with a sigh, resigned to my fate. "We're using my special ability."
"Which one?" Thomas asked, lost.
I exhaled.
"Catastrophic improvisation. And believe me—when it comes to that, I'm a black belt."
"The Renaissance Estate" wasn't on Waze. We had to rely on vague directions from a cult-debunking forum.
After an hour on forest tracks that made the Twingo's suspension cry real tears, we found a three-meter wall topped with state-of-the-art surveillance cameras. The main wrought-iron gate was guarded by two men who looked like they considered smiling a human weakness.
"Plan A: we ram it?" Thomas suggested—his strategy often boiled down to brute force.
"Plan B: we use our brains," Lucas snapped, already pale. "We're never getting in through there."
"Plan C: catastrophic improvisation," I said.
We parked far from prying eyes and followed the wall. Luck—or my bizarre karma—had us stumble onto a service entrance at the back. A refrigerated catering van had just pulled out.
The contrast was beautiful: while Pierre preached "purifying fasting," he clearly wasn't depriving himself of canapés and champagne.
The door stayed ajar while the delivery guy climbed back into his vehicle. We slipped inside like three sewer rats entering a palace.
Past the gleaming kitchen, the atmosphere was... chilling. Not because of temperature—no. The heat was crushing.
We emerged into a massive landscaped garden worthy of a Pablo Escobar villa. But instead of decadent parties, the spectacle was morbid.
Dozens of young people—Sarah among them—sat cross-legged on cropped grass under full sun. No water. No hats. They were thin, lips cracked, eyes glazed, staring at a raised platform on the far end of the lawn. Total silence—broken only by insects buzzing and a voice blasting from giant speakers.
Pierre.
He was there, immaculate in a white linen suit that seemed to repel sweat and dirt. Microphone in one hand, the other raised to the sky in a theatrical gesture.
"Do you feel that burning?" he cried. "That isn't the sun. It's your soul being cleansed! It's the toxicity of the modern world evaporating!"
His voice was hypnotic—a mix of syrupy softness and unbreakable authority.
"Hunger is just an illusion of your material ego. Your body doesn't need earthly food. It needs Light! Suffer, my children! Suffering is the price of Truth! Embrace pain to be reborn!"
We spotted Sarah near the platform. She looked on the edge of collapse, swaying slightly, skin blazing red under the pounding sun.
"Sarah!"
Thomas couldn't help himself. He whispered her name too loudly as he crouched behind a perfectly manicured decorative hedge.
She turned her head slowly, like an automaton. It took her a moment to recognize us. There was no joy. No relief.
Just terrifying emptiness.
"You..." she murmured, thick-tongued. "You shouldn't be here."
"Sarah, we came to get you!" Thomas insisted. "This is insane—look at you, you're going to pass out!"
"No... You're disrupting the waves. Pierre said low entities would try to hold me back. Leave. Let me do my Ascension."
"Fuck the waves! Come with us!"
The exchange drew attention. The guru's stream of words died off. The silence grew even heavier. Pierre lowered his mic, squinting toward our hiding place. An amused smile stretched his perfect lips.
"Well, well... looks like we have visitors."
His voice echoed across the garden. Every follower turned toward us at the same time—one coordinated, horrifying wave.
"Intruders," Pierre continued, stepping down the platform slowly. "Black souls come to soil our sanctuary with their negativity. Do not fear, my children. Light always drives out darkness."
He snapped his fingers.
The two gorillas from the entrance emerged from the villa's sides, marching toward us.
The crowd rose, menacing—ready to defend their messiah. We were three law students facing an army of hungry zombies and two mountains of muscle.
Plan C was going very badly.
The situation reeked. Truly. I was a law student, not James Bond. I didn't have a Plan B (well—I did, but it was awful), no explosive gadgets, and my only weapon was an in-depth knowledge of the Criminal Procedure Code—which, against two steroid mountains, was about as useful as a comb for a bald man.
The guards advanced. The crowd grumbled. Sarah looked like a zombie on tranquilizers. We needed a shock.
"Sarah, please—look at him!" I shouted, pointing an accusing finger at the spotless guru. "He preaches detachment from material things, but look at his wrist! That's a rose-gold Rolex Daytona! Thirty grand! He's wearing the GDP of a small country while you're starving!"
Silence—just for a second. A few heads turned toward Pierre's wrist.
But the guru didn't flinch. He burst out laughing—a loud laugh amplified by the speakers, ringing across the garden like a divine verdict.
"Materialism has no hold on me!" he boomed. "That watch is only an object! I am beyond possession! I am Light! I am Pure Energy! I am GOD!"
He spread his arms, ecstatic.
"Bring me that blasphemer. Let him see up close what true power is."
The gorillas didn't ask my opinion. They lifted me under the arms like I weighed as much as a grocery bag and dragged me to the platform. Thomas and Lucas tried to intervene, but one look from the guards pinned them in place.
So there I was on stage, feet off the ground, face-to-face with Pierre Brasseur.
Up close he was even worse. His eyes shone with pure madness—fueled by cocaine and adoration.
"You see, my boy?" he murmured, leaning close, minty breath barely masking a chemical scent. "You are small. You are empty. You try to soil what you cannot understand."
"I mostly understand you're killing these kids," I shot back, my voice barely trembling. "Abuse of weakness, illegal medical practice, endangering others... You're going to get life, Pierre."
He smiled—a shark's smile.
"Human law does not apply to gods."
At that exact moment, a metallic creak sounded above our heads.
Creeeak.
Everyone looked up. One of the massive stage spotlights—hung from a shaky temporary rig—was swinging dangerously.
"Watch out!" I yelled on reflex.
BOOM.
The spotlight slammed onto the platform less than a meter from us, exploding in sparks and dust. The impact blew the fuses. The sound system died in a dying feedback squeal. The garden lights went out.
Dead silence.
I coughed in the smoke, pushing myself up.
I was alive.
Pierre too.
But instead of being terrified, the guru saw a sign. He straightened, brushing his linen shirt with regal disdain.
"You see?" he howled at the crowd without a mic, voice carrying anyway. "Even metal cannot touch me! I am protected! I am INVINCIBLE!"
The crowd didn't panic.
They applauded—frantically.
Collective delirium. He'd just turned a workplace accident into a miracle.
"Get him out of here," he ordered the guards, gesturing toward me with contempt. "And throw his friends out too. The show is over."
The gorillas grabbed me again, shoving me toward the stage steps. Pierre turned to climb back to his throne, his long white robe trailing behind him across the wooden boards.
That's when my innate talent kicked in.
As the guard jostled me, I stumbled. Not much. Just a tiny sideways step to recover my catastrophic balance.
My right foot—inside a worn-out sneaker—landed firmly on the hem of Pierre's linen train.
Pierre took a step forward.
The fabric, pinned under my seventy-five kilos, tightened.
Pierre stopped dead mid-stride. His torso kept moving forward, but his feet stayed behind. He toppled backward, arms windmilling like a broken puppet, eyes wide with shock.
He fell off the platform.
A ridiculous fall—slow, almost comedic. He tumbled down three wooden steps, hit the stage edge with his back, and his head cracked against the raw concrete below.
CRACK.
That sound.
Dry. Final.
The same sound as Jean-Pierre.
The sound of a twig snapping.
Or a cervical vertebra giving up under the weight of ego.
Pierre lay there on his back, eyes wide open, staring at the sky he claimed to command. Blood trickled from his ear.
He didn't move.
He didn't breathe.
The crowd fell silent. The guards froze, unable to process how their god had lost his duel against... a hem.
I gently lifted my foot off his robe.
"Oops."
In the stunned paralysis that gripped everyone, I flashed a frantic signal to Thomas and Lucas.
"SARAH! NOW!"
We ran. We grabbed Sarah by the arm, using the rising panic, and sprinted for the service exit like the devil himself was on our heels.
Later, we got the rest of the story.
Pierre didn't die instantly.
At least, that's what the media said.
Officially, the great "Guide of Light" fell into a coma after an "accidental fall during a transcendent performance." His followers, in one last Telegram-orchestrated frenzy, called it a miracle: Pierre had chosen to leave his flesh to guide humanity from beyond before the Apocalypse. A voluntary sacrifice.
Reality was less mystical.
He had fractures of the C2 and C3 vertebrae, caused by three badly negotiated wooden steps... and a linen robe hem caught under a size-43 sneaker.
He died three days later in the hospital, never regaining consciousness.
The investigation that followed was a massacre. During the raid on the villa, police found enough to send him to prison for three lifetimes. Behind the postcard set: an entire factory of illegality—money laundering through shady crypto, illegal practice of medicine, abuse of weakness on minors, and above all a cocaine stash big enough to kill a herd of cardiac elephants.
So that was his secret for endless energy and dilated pupils.
Not prana.
Powder.
Sarah took time to recover. Withdrawal was brutal—psychological and physical. But the switch finally flipped the day we told her the truth about the fall. It's hard to keep worshipping a superior being, a near-god, when you learn his final battle was lost to gravity and an awkward student.
She cried. A lot. She was ashamed.
But she came back to class. She gained weight. And most importantly, she stopped calling us "beings of light" and went back to calling us idiots—which was the most reassuring sign of all.
As for me...
Nothing.
Legal nothingness.
Even though two hundred people witnessed the scene, nobody said a word. The followers were too busy crying or deleting their internet history. My friends were too busy hauling Sarah out and panicking to have seen anything clearly in the darkness and smoke from the crushed spotlight.
To them, I tripped.
Like always.
It was just Eliot doing Eliot.
Nobody reported me. I wasn't even a suspect. I was just a blurry witness in a chaotic night.
However, in a dark office at central headquarters, Inspector Lemoine read a report with a worried crease carving his forehead.
He'd received vague statements describing "a dark-haired young man present at the scene."
"Again?" he muttered, lighting a cold cigarette. "The serial killer's would-be son-in-law. The Nazi's neighbor. The lightning victim's witness. And now the cult intruder?"
He tapped the file with his pen.
"Either this kid is the biggest black cat in French history, or he's messing with me."
He didn't know yet how right he was on both counts.
That night I got home exhausted. I tossed my dirty sneakers into a corner.
I looked at myself in the mirror of my tiny bathroom. Dark circles under my eyes, a grease stain on my sweatshirt, and the face of a man who wouldn't hurt a fly.
And yet.
Jean-Pierre. Dolores. Kevin. Pierre.
Four pieces of trash. Four "accidents." Four deaths.
I started wondering if I'd become a delayed mass-destruction weapon. A kind of military drone guided by clumsiness.
I smiled at my reflection. A little sad. A little cynical.
"I'm free. Again."
I turned off the light.
Tomorrow, I had constitutional law.
I needed to revise.
After all—you have to know the law to keep slipping through it.
Cause of death: Cervical fractures (technical fall—an involuntary ippon).
Verdict: divine elevation?
Red Flag for a Guru: If you claim you're "God" and float above the laws of physics, avoid long robes. Gravity is the only universal law you can't scam—and it hates dragging hems.
End of Chapter 4.