「INTO THE MOUNTAINS OF ROCK VILLAGE」
7 HOURS LATER
Rock Village sat as the fourth settlement beyond the Capital—a tired cluster of stone houses near mountains that had once echoed with the rhythm of quarry and mine. But the work had halted years ago, the slopes deemed too unstable, the risk of landslide too great.
Now the village drowsed in the shadow of its own abandoned industry.
Zen led them high into those mountains, following paths that weren't paths, navigating terrain that shifted from memory alone. They arrived at a dead end: two massive boulders blocking further passage, a narrow crevice between them barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through.
Zen dismounted. From within his cloak, he produced a key—not of metal, but of intricate magitech construction, its surface etched with glowing circuits. He pressed it into a carved recess on the larger boulder.
The stone moved.
With a deep, grinding rumble, the boulder shifted aside, revealing a hidden path that wound deeper into the mountain's embrace. Beyond it, nestled in a secret hollow, sat a small villa surrounded by its own private forest—tended, deliberate, hidden from the world.
G6's lips curled. "Now that's something fun."
"Let's go," Zen said, already urging his horse forward.
They passed through the narrow throat of the passage. The moment they were clear, Zen retrieved the key from the inside recess—a matching mechanism, as if the stone itself remembered him—and the boulder ground back into place, sealing them in.
G6 swung down from Kira, leading her to the shade of an ancient oak and tying her rope securely. Edmund did the same, Coen still slumped like dead weight across his horse's back. Zen secured his own mount.
"Who would know you had a place like this hidden away, Zero?" G6 murmured, taking in the secret clearing.
"Found it while doing work for that woman," Zen replied, a note of pride in his voice. "Tracked the records, found it belonged to a fallen noble from a century ago. No one remembered it existed. I… appropriated it. Made some modifications."
"Guess being a geek in Omnia finally paid off." G6 straightened her hat. "Enough chatter. Let's move."
Zen nodded and led them toward the villa.
The door groaned open on rusted hinges, revealing a spacious interior shrouded in white dust cloths. Furniture lurked beneath the coverings like ghosts of a forgotten era. Dust motes swirled in the thin light.
"Did these come with the place?" G6 asked, gesturing at the shrouded shapes.
"No, Captain." Zen's smile turned sly. "These I stole from my father's house, piece by piece. You should have seen his face every time something vanished."
"I can imagine. Count Nocturne is a materialistic man," Edmund observed, shifting Coen's weight on his shoulder.
"Let me show you my favorite part."
Zen led them down a corridor that terminated in a single, unremarkable door. He opened it to reveal stairs leading down into darkness.
"Basement," he said simply, then glanced back with a glint in his eye. "I think this villa was once used for… interrogations."
He tapped a switch, and magitech lights flickered to life along the descending walls. He started down first, footsteps echoing in the confined space. Edmund followed, burdened but steady.
G6 placed her foot on the first step.
FLASH.
"GET UP."
A child's hands, too small for the knife they held. Blood—not hers—slick on her fingers.
"AGAIN. STAB IT AGAIN."
A figure loomed above her. A voice like grinding stone. The stench of fear and iron.
"ARE YOU CRYING? WHAT DID I SAY ABOUT—"
SNAP.
G6 stood frozen on the stair, one hand gripping the wall. Her breath had stopped. Her eyes, hidden behind her glasses, stared at nothing.
"Captain?" Edmund's voice floated up from three steps below, concern bleeding through his careful mask. He had turned, was looking up at her, confusion in his eyes.
She blinked. The basement stairs of the present swam back into focus—magitech lights, stone walls, Edmund's worried face.
"Continue," she said, her voice flat as a frozen lake. She forced her foot onto the next step. Then the next.
Behind her, unseen, her knuckles were white where she gripped the wall.
When they reached the bottom, the space opened into a cavernous room. Torture implements lined the walls—some laid across tables, others hanging from hooks like grotesque artwork. A heavy wooden chair dominated the center, leather restraints still attached to its arms and legs. In the corner, a rusted iron cage waited.
"Put him there, Ed," Zen said, gesturing to the cage.
Edmund deposited Coen's limp form inside. Zen secured the lock with a heavy clang that echoed through the chamber.
G6 walked slowly to the table where the tools lay. Her gloved fingers traced the edge of a rusted blade, then a set of iron pincers, then something spiked and incomprehensible. She said nothing.
"What time is it?" she asked without turning.
"Eight in the morning, Captain," Edmund replied.
"How long to reach the Capital from here?"
"Give the horses three hours to rest, and we can arrive by nightfall," Zen calculated.
"Is that so?" Her head turned toward them, the movement slow, deliberate. "Wake that one up while the horses rest."
"Very well. I'll tend to the horses first—water and feed. Then I'll return to assist." Edmund slipped back up the stairs, his footsteps fading.
Zen glanced at G6—still as stone, still cloaked in shadow—then at Coen's unconscious form in the cage. Phew, he thought, suppressing a shiver. I don't want to witness her interrogate someone.
-ˋˏ✄ - - - - - - - ♡
Consciousness returned to Coen on a wave of agony. His thigh screamed where the woman had stabbed him, the wound a burning reminder of his failure.
He opened his eyes. Slowly. Blurry at first.
Yellow magitech light. Stone walls. Old, stained implements hanging everywhere.
A torture chamber.
His vision cleared. Two cloaked figures stood nearby. He tried to move—couldn't. His wrists were strapped to the arms of a heavy wooden chair. His ankles bound to the legs. A gag pressed against his tongue, coarse fabric tasting of dust and rust.
One figure approached.
Delicate fingers. A woman's build beneath the cloak. She moved like nothing human—too fluid, too silent.
"You're finally awake," she said, her voice a low monotone that vibrated somewhere deep in his chest. "Time for questions and answers, don't you think?"
He looked up. Couldn't see her face—just the dark hollow of her hood, and beneath it, the glint of tinted glasses. But her mouth was visible. Curved into a smile.
She raised something in front of his eyes. A small vial filled with shimmering, silvery powder that caught the light like captured starlight.
"Guess what this is?" she asked, her tone almost playful. "I find it fascinating."
She tilted the vial. The powder inside shifted, glittering, beautiful.
"This is powdered glint dust," she said conversationally. "Made from pulverized enchanted mirrors. Do you know what it does?"
Coen's eyes widened. He knew. Everyone in the underworld knew the stories. His body began to shake against the restraints.
"My companion—right there—he told me about it," she continued, stepping closer. "Apparently, once inhaled, it transforms into tiny crystalline shards with every breath you take. They migrate. Through your lungs. Into your bloodstream. They grow in warm, wet places."
She leaned in, her face inches from his. He could smell something clean and cold—like winter air before snow.
"They lodge in your organs. Your eyes. Your brain. Every heartbeat pushes them deeper. It takes hours to die. Sometimes days." Her smile widened. "I've been dying to see it in action."
She unscrewed the vial. The shimmering powder's scent reached him—something sweet and wrong, like roses left too long in the sun.
"Should we try it?"
Coen thrashed. The chair creaked but held. Muffled screams tore at the gag, spit soaking the fabric. Tears streamed down his face—hot, desperate, humiliating.
The woman watched him struggle, her head tilted like a curious bird.
"No?" she said. "But you were so eager to follow us. To capture us. To drag us to your master." Her voice dropped, the playful tone evaporating like mist. "Now you don't want to play?"
She brought the vial closer. Coen squeezed his eyes shut, body rigid, awaiting the horror—
Click.
He opened his eyes.
She had recapped the vial. It dangled from her fingers, harmless for now.
"But I'm feeling generous today," she said, stepping back. "So let's try a different game. I'll ask questions. You'll answer honestly. And if you lie..." She held up the vial again. "We resume our experiment."
She removed his gag. He gasped, sucked air, coughed.
"First question." She crouched before him, elbows on her knees, suddenly casual. "What does Viscount Telesco want with us?"
"I—I don't—"
The vial appeared again, uncapped, inches from his nose.
"TRY AGAIN."
"He wants to use you!" The words exploded from Coen. "The blue flames! The crater! He thinks you're valuable—"
"Valuable?" The name landed like a stone in still water. She straightened slowly. "Care to elaborate?"
"Y-yes. He's furious. Looking for... for leverage. For power. V-Viscount T-Telesco thought—"
"I don't care what Telesco thought." She cut him off, her voice flat again. "Second question. My men told me your boss was quite displeased about us clearing Grain Town. Why is that?"
Coen looked away.
The movement was barely a twitch, but she caught it. In one fluid motion, she uncapped the vial and tipped it over his stabbed wound—just a pinch, just a taste of the shimmering powder.
The effect was instantaneous.
Coen's body went rigid. His mouth opened in a scream that started as a guttural choke and built into something animal and raw. The shards didn't just burn—they moved, tiny crystalline teeth burrowing into his flesh, tunneling through muscle, scraping against bone from the inside. His fingers clawed at the armrests, nails splintering, blood weeping from the torn cuticles. His eyes rolled back, then forward, then back again, tears and snot and saliva mixing into a mask of absolute agony.
"AHHH! P-PLEASE! F-FUCK!"
G6 watched.
Not with disgust. Not with pity. Not with the clinical detachment of a professional doing necessary work.
She watched like a child observing an anthill. Like a cat studying a dying mouse. Her head tilted slightly, following the convulsions of his body with genuine, almost innocent curiosity. A soft sound escaped her lips—not quite a hum, not quite a sigh.
It took him a moment to realize she was amused.
The thought shattered something in him. This wasn't an interrogator. This wasn't even a monster. Monsters had hunger, had rage, had reasons. This woman had nothing. Just the quiet pleasure of watching pain unfold, as natural and unfeeling as weather.
"Do not look away when I am talking to you," she said, her voice carrying no anger, no threat—just the mild correction of a teacher to an inattentive student.
She handed the vial to Zen, who stood silently behind her. His hand was steady, but Coen caught the faint tension in his jaw. Even he was disturbed. Even he.
Edmund arrived then, descending the stairs into the chamber. His eyes swept the scene—the writhing man, the spilled blood, the woman standing at the center of it all with that small, satisfied smile—and he said nothing. Just took his position.
Coen had been a veteran mercenary for years. He'd seen cruelty. He'd done cruelty. But these three cloaked figures, standing in a semicircle around his chair, radiating nothing but patience and menace—they were something else entirely. His gut, the same instinct that had kept him alive through a dozen near-death encounters, screamed at him with a clarity he couldn't ignore:
These people are higher than anyone who hired you. Higher than the Viscount. Higher than the Marquis. Higher than anything you've ever touched.
He couldn't see their faces. But he could feel their gazes. Three sets of eyes, boring into him from the shadows of their hoods, waiting for him to make another mistake so they could watch him break again.
"Hey," Zen said, holding up the vial. "The next pinch goes in your mouth if you keep shutting it. Then we find out if glint dust grows faster in eyeballs or intestines. I've always wondered."
"I only been working for Viscount Telesco for six months…" Coen's voice came out wrecked, half-strangled by the residual agony. "I don't know really much about him. He just—he just one day came to us with pouches of gold."
"In exchange for?" Zen pressed.
"He told us to catch a hobgoblin. We thought it was strange, but we did it. Then he told us to catch a small venomous spider."
The three exchanged glances. G6's expression didn't change, but something in the air shifted—a heightened attention, like a predator catching a scent.
"Interesting. Continue."
"We never knew where they went. The Viscount just told us to leave them at a safe house outside the city. Then, a month ago, the hobgoblin we'd caught—it came back. Different. Wrong. Bigger. Stronger. Eyes full of something that wasn't animal." Coen swallowed, the memory clearly terrifying him more than his current situation. "We released it into the first village outside the Capital. On his orders."
Zen and Edmund stiffened. "You—that was intentionally released? That new-type demon?" Edmund's voice was low, dangerous.
"We were only following orders! The same thing happened with the spider. We released it too. Into the Grain Town fields."
Coen bit his lip, hard enough to draw blood. "They're sick. All of them."
"'They'?" G6's voice cut through like a blade.
"Viscount Telesco. The people he works for. I only caught whispers, but... he answers to Marquis Sertiz."
Silence. Heavy and absolute.
"So you're telling me," G6 said slowly, each word precise and cold, "that Viscount Telesco is hoping we're one of the special cases. Bastards of nobles. Something he can use in whatever scheme he's cooking with his master?"
"That... that could be it. I don't know more. I swear. I only serve him for clean-up. For making problems disappear." Coen's breath was weakening, the poison and blood loss draining him. "I'm telling the truth."
"This is huge," Zen said, his professional calm cracking. "If the two abnormal events—the demon, the spider—were orchestrated by the Viscount and his accomplices, this is treason. Direct action against the Crown."
"Hmm. Politics." G6 sighed like someone discussing a mildly irritating chore. "I hate being tangled in it."
"If the man you freed reaches the Viscount with news of us—" Coen stopped mid-sentence.
G6 scoffed. A small, dismissive sound.
"Oh, my bad," she said. "What do you mean... 'freed'?"
Coen blinked, confusion cutting through his pain. "The man who escaped. The one who ran toward the main road. If he delivers the message—"
G6 turned away from him, dismissing the question as irrelevant. The movement was casual, unhurried—but as she turned, her hand shot out and seized the crystalline shard now visibly bulging beneath the skin of his wound. It had grown, the glint dust doing its work, a jagged piece of glittering death pushing against his flesh from inside.
She pulled.
The shard came out with a wet, tearing sound—a noise like ripping silk soaked in water. Coen's scream was wordless, primal, his body arching against the restraints as the crystalline formation tore through muscle and vein on its way out. Blood followed in a thick, pulsing torrent, splashing across G6's hands, coating her sleeves in hot, arterial red. The smell of copper filled the chamber, thick enough to taste.
G6 examined the shard. Turned it over in her blood-soaked fingers. Watched the light catch its jagged edges.
Then she tossed it onto the floor. It landed with a soft clink and lay there, glittering innocently among the spreading pool of Coen's blood.
"Make sure to get every name," she said, her voice utterly flat. No anger. No satisfaction. Just the simple instruction of someone ordering groceries. "Every person who dared to put a value on us. Who thought we could be used."
She walked toward the stairs. Her footsteps echoed in the sudden, ringing silence. Blood dripped from her sleeves, leaving a trail of small red circles on the stone.
Edmund and Zen moved closer to the chair. Coen sobbed, broken, empty, the fight completely gone from his eyes.
"Now, then," Edmund said, rolling up his sleeves. "Let's sing the lyrics right."
Coen spilled everything. Names. Positions. Meeting places. Safe houses. Weaknesses. Strengths. Numbers. Dates. The words poured out of him like water from a broken dam, each pause met with the subtle rattle of the vial in Zen's fingers or the quiet clearing of Edmund's throat.
❈.❈.❈
The basement stairs groaned under G6's weight as she ascended, each step leaving a faint, wet print. The door at the top opened into a living room frozen in time—furniture draped in white sheets, dust motes dancing in the thin light slicing through shuttered windows. Ghosts of a life once lived.
A massive shape occupied the largest couch.
Daunt sat like a king on a forgotten throne, his enormous lupine form barely contained by the furniture beneath him. White sheets bunched and tore under his weight, claws puncturing through fabric and cushion alike. His fur caught the light in silver ripples, each breath a low rumble that vibrated through the floorboards.
"Is it finished?" G6 asked. She wiped her hands on a rag pulled from somewhere, but the blood had already dried in crescents under her nails, soaked into the weave of her sleeves, painted abstract patterns across her cloak. Some stains wouldn't move no matter how you scrubbed.
"It is." Daunt's ancient eyes followed her movements. "How cruel."
"Cruel?" G6 tossed the rag aside and settled onto the couch across from him, the white sheet crackling beneath her. She didn't bother with the remaining blood. It would dry. It always dried. "You're the one who did it."
A pause. Daunt's ears flattened slightly.
"How did you enter?" she continued, tilting her head. "This place is hidden."
"Not that hard." His voice rumbled like distant thunder. "I followed your scent and entered through the boulders. You think mere human spell can stop a mythical divine creature?"
G6 looked at him. Looked away. "Arrogant."
Silence settled between them, thick as the dust on the furniture. Outside, somewhere distant, a bird called. Inside, the only sound was Daunt's slow, heavy breathing.
"Reise." His voice dropped, losing its rumble, becoming something almost gentle. "Why did you give him hope if you were going to kill him anyway?"
G6's head tilted slowly, like a mechanism turning. A smile spread across her lips—not warm, not cold, just... there. An expression that belonged on a face that had forgotten what expressions meant.
"So," she said, "when he is in hell, he won't wonder why Satan wasn't there."
Daunt stared at her.
The words hung in the dusty air, absorbing the thin light, becoming something solid and horrible. He searched her grey eyes for any flicker of humor, of irony, of something human. Found nothing. Just the flat, reflective surface of a lake too deep to see bottom.
He shook his massive head slowly, jowls trembling.
"I don't know who is evil now," he murmured.
G6 didn't respond. She was examining her nails, picking at a dried flake of someone else's life.
In his lap, his enormous paws rested on the torn white sheet. The fur between his claws was matted. Dark. Still wet.
Neither of them mentioned it.
Outside, the bird called again. The dust continued to fall. And two predators sat in a room full of ghosts, separated by species and morality and everything that should have made them different.
But their paws and her hands told the same story.
—To Be Continued…—