The cold wall pressed against his back, the rough texture transmitting a thread of real chill through his thin clothes, barely anchoring his still-drifting consciousness. Erika leaned into a recessed shadow of the corridor, gulping air in great, ragged heaves—not to replenish oxygen, but as if trying to vomit out everything lodged in his chest: fear, absurdity, all that stagnant pressure.
Each inhalation carried the Black Tower's constant, characteristic scent of dust and old paper, yet it was ten thousand times cleaner than the thick, cloying smoke in the bedroom.
His hands trembled with fine, uncontrollable shakes, fingertips icy. He wanted to clench his fists to stop this humiliating tremor, but even curling his fingers felt like wrestling against the full weight of his body. His stomach tightened and churned in waves; the earlier, extreme tension now surfaced as purely physical nausea, a sour taste rising in his throat. He swallowed hard, forcing it down. Cold sweat, delayed but relentless, began to seep from his forehead and down his spine, soaking his underclothes, clinging wetly to his skin and sending a shiver through him.
Reality returned—like jagged reefs exposed by a receding tide, slamming into his awareness piece by piece.
No instant kill.No minefield detonations.No kneeling, no groveling for mercy.
Only… sleep.
The Quinn who had sent his soul halfway out of his body, who had made him imagine countless gruesome deaths, who had even driven him to mentally rehearse kneeling postures—
was simply leaning back in his chair, asleep.
"You nearly scared yourself to death just now," Loren's voice came from beside him, kept low, carrying the aftershock of a close call and a thread of barely concealed resignation.
Erika closed his eyes. Shame, fiercer than before, crashed over him. Yes—a one-man farce, staged and directed by his own fear and imagination. Loren had witnessed the most ridiculous moment, and Quinn hadn't even stepped onto the stage. It felt more utterly helpless and laughable than any direct threat.
Loren did not mock him further. His tone turned serious, and he posed a colder, more urgent question—one that punctured Erika's brief respite like a needle bursting a bubble:
"When he wakes up, how are you going to face him?"
Face him?
The question struck like lightning, splitting Erika's muddled thoughts clean open.
Continue as before?Let himself be led by the nose by a glance, a silence, a cryptic phrase—spiraling into endless fear, speculation, and self-collapse? React even more foolishly, more fatally, when the next real crisis arrived, simply because he could not judge the other man's intent or state?
No. Not anymore.
The suffocating smoke in the bedroom.Quinn's fractured, opaque words.The crushing implications of that painting.His own absurd overreaction.
All of these fragments were suddenly strung together by Loren's question.
Erika slowly lifted his still-trembling hand and wiped the cold sweat from his brow. When he opened his eyes, the confusion and shame in his gaze were steadily replaced by a cold clarity, tempered by sheer survival instinct.
He could not remain in the Black Tower—this temporary yet perilous refuge—while knowing nothing about its master, forever trapped in passive interpretation and fearful conjecture.
What kind of man was Quinn?Where did his power come from—and what were its limits?What lay in his past?What did that painting truly mean?How deep did his hatred for the Creed run, and in what form?What was his real intention in saving Loren and him—mere whim, or something else entirely?Those words about "two kinds of people," about "decisions you won't regret"—were they idle riddles, or warnings, or concealed prompts?
Most importantly—
What did Quinn intend to do next?What was his arrangement for them?
"I…" Erika's voice came out hoarse, but far steadier than before. He looked at Loren, and at the same time seemed to look past him—toward the decision he could no longer avoid."I can't stay here, not knowing what he's thinking."
The words carried a sense of finality.
At the very least, he could no longer remain a blind man, a startled bird—terrified by nothing more than smoke and silence, so shaken that he hadn't even realized the other man was asleep.
Outside the Tower lay scorched earth and Creed hunters.Inside, a sleeping sorcerer and an unreadable future.
From that moment on, Erika decided he would rely on his own eyes, and on this mind of his—still not fully numbed by fear—to try to see something clearly.
If only so that next time,he wouldn't nearly scare himself to death because the other was simply… asleep.
The chill of sweat had not yet faded from his spine, but another cold, sharper understanding was seeping into his marrow as his breathing gradually steadied.
Leaning against the Black Tower's cold wall, his gaze seemed to pierce through the thick stone itself—past the tower, past the land scoured by Divine Retribution, and further still, toward the vast, silent shadow of the Sanctum.
The assault had not truly failed.
The thought took root like an icy seed, quickly unfurling thorned vines in his chest.
Grey-Cloak Executor Seventy-Four—a functionary as cold as a machine, who ultimately annihilated himself—had succeeded. His failure was merely tactical. By erasing himself and his companions, he had achieved the strategic objective:
Confirmation.
Confirmation of the Black Tower's location, defenses, and reaction patterns.Confirmation of Sorcerer Quinn's activity, power type, and approximate tier.
The next operation was now only a matter of time. Once the Sanctum's machinery completed its assessments, reallocated resources, and devised a plan—more meticulous, or more brutal—the Black Tower would face a strike both more precise and more merciless.
And he—
Erika's throat tightened.
Before, he had vaguely sensed that he was trouble. Now, the connection sharpened into something impossible to ignore:
The Black Tower would be found again not merely because it existed—but because he himself had become the most recent, most conspicuous link in the chain of exposure.
Quinn's fury on the tower platform, when Erika instinctively absorbed those energy fragments, had not been simple emotional outburst. It had been clear-eyed recognition—the instinctive rejection of a suddenly appearing, uncontrollable risk variable.
And Quinn could have eliminated that risk.
When he first discovered them.In the energy scrapyard.At any moment within the Tower.
With the power Quinn had demonstrated, and his unreserved hatred for the Creed, erasing two Sanctum vermin would have been effortless—and would have spared him endless future trouble.
But he did not.
He chose, for now, to keep them.
This was not trust.Still less was it mercy.
Loren being sent to sort through menial tasks.Erika being summoned into the bedroom for that fractured, oppressive conversation—
All of it amounted to an unresolved tolerance, a provisional detention pending evaluation.
What was he?An accidental test subject?A bargaining chip?A special case kept for research—or nostalgia?Or simply a reprieve, undecided in the aftermath of intense emotion?
The reasons remained unclear.The result, however, was unmistakable.
As long as he remained in the Black Tower, under Quinn's protection, then every subsequent exposure, every new round of investigation, every more violent assault triggered by his presence—
The cost of all of it—energy depletion, core damage, structural loss, even the danger posed to Quinn himself—would be silently assumed by the one who sheltered him.
He, Erika, would become a parasite clinging to risk, continuously drawing protection while steadily exporting danger. His survival would be built on the accumulation of risk-debt for his protector. And Quinn—the seemingly unfathomable sorcerer—would one day be forced to pay interest on that debt.
Interest he might not be able to afford.
This could not continue.
It was not the Creed's pursuit that drove him away—though it remained a blade hanging overhead.
It was this state of endlessly transferring risk, surrendering all choice, binding his fate to another man's undecided tolerance—
That was what suffocated him more deeply than death.
Before the Sanctum's scythe fell again, he had to leave the Black Tower.
Not to flee, but to sever the accumulation of risk.To move himself—this beacon—away from Quinn's coordinates, even by a small margin.So that the storm, when it came, would no longer center solely on the Tower, no longer force Quinn to bear the entire impact.
More than anything else,he needed to reclaim choice—and responsibility.
To live or die.To resist or hide.To uncover the truth, or vanish with unanswered questions.
All of these choices, and all their consequences—good, bad, cruel—he wanted to bear them himself.
Not be tallied as a silent cost in the vast, blood-soaked ledger between Quinn and the Sanctum.
He straightened slowly, leaving that narrow patch of shadow behind.
Leave.
The thought was incomplete, far from meticulous, without any clear route forward.But it was heavy enough to outweigh fear.Heavy enough to crush hesitation.
The Black Tower was no longer merely a refuge.
And he no longer wished to remain a variable kept on tolerance alone.
Outside lay scorched earth, the Sanctum, and an unknown hunt yet to come.
But at least—it would be a direction he chose to step into himself.