—Who?
A voice ripped open from the right, hoarse, freighted with malice long suppressed.
"Been waiting for you, you bastard."
In that direction: only wavering torchlight, a few blurred, twisted faces.The words flew into the night like a bitten-through nail spat out with saliva.
…Bastard. Who?
"Can't let them off easy."
Another direction. Lower, harder, like a dull blade ground again and again on a whetstone.Not a response—a muttered soliloquy, yet deliberately pitched for those nearby to hear.
Them. Who were they?
"Only animals could do something like this."
A third voice, closer now. That rank, metallic-tinged hatred in it, the kind that chilled the spine.Not through gritted teeth—a statement delivered with terrifying calm.
Animals. Who did that mean?
—
Couldn't make it out anymore.
Too many voices, too much emotion, like a pot of boiling water knocked over, spilling in every direction.
Curses. Suspicions.Some lowered their voices to hiss accusations.Some jutted their chins and argued stiff-necked.Sobbing from one corner, quickly hushed into suppressed, shuddering breaths.Pleas, fragmented, unclear who was begging whom.
All of it blended together—thick. Scalding. Indistinguishable.
What… the hell was happening?
—
He looked around.
Pockets of torchlight. Not a hearth. Torches.
Not one or two—dozens, wedged into wall cracks, iron rings, even gripped in raised hands, like countless hungry tongues licking the night.
The flames illuminated countless red handprints.
On walls.On door panels.On pillars.
And… moving ones.
On faces.On the backs of hands.On lapels.
Dark red. Fresh. Half-dried.Smeared in blood. Painted in lacquer. Pressed on in haste. Deliberately traced.
Not totems.
ID cards.Talismans.Entry tickets.
Every owner of a red palm print raised their chin, scanning the crowd, confirming their own kind, identifying outsiders.
He reached up instinctively and wiped his own face.
Fingertips touched skin.Touched a layer of dry, slightly granular residue.
Not sweat.
He brought his finger back, lifted it to the torchlight.
Red.
His breath caught.
Then he exhaled softly.
Okay.Okay.
Not dry yet. Color still fresh. Good enough.
—
He followed the red palm prints and moved forward.
The crowd flowed like murky river water, slow and silent, all drifting in the same direction.
He was caught in it—not daring to go too fast,not daring to fall behind.
A faint tug at his back.
Barely there. Like something had snagged the hem of his shirt.
He didn't dare turn around.
He tore it free with all his strength.
The slight pull vanished. No pursuit. No shout. No further touch.
He fixed his eyes on the nearest red handprint ahead and quickened his pace.
Okay.Okay.
—
He kept moving.
A wide-open door ahead.
Massive. Heavy. Both panels pushed fully inward like the upper and lower jaws of some silent colossal beast.
The edges of the doorframe flickered in the unsteady torchlight.By that swaying glow, he could just make out the silhouette—
Darenz's largest warehouse.
Unloading goods. Storing grain. Temporarily requisitioned when needed.
He'd been here before. More than once.Escorting goods. Keeping watch. Hiding in shadows waiting for an opening.
But never like tonight.
Never walking through this door like this.
Two figures stood at the entrance, clad in strange garments.
Not the work of any local tailor.The fabric was crisp. The cut unfamiliar. Collars and cuffs trimmed with dull silver thread.
They didn't speak.Didn't move.
They simply examined each person carefully who crossed the threshold.
Their gaze skimmed over his face.
The handprint?
Or something else?
He lowered his eyes, slipped into the shadow of the person ahead of him, and stepped over the threshold.
…Got in.
He inhaled the warehouse's thick, stifling air.
All red hands here.
Who could single anyone out?
Okay.Okay.
—
"Salvation—!"
"Drop dead!!"
The sounds punched through the surging crowd from deep within, like rolling thunder, like wolf howls.
One wave not yet spent before the next layered, collided, and entwined into a colossal roar.
Through bobbing heads, raised arms, and red handprints flaring and fading in torchlight, he saw—
A platform had been erected at the far end of the warehouse.
Crude. Makeshift.
But unmistakably a stage.
Raised on discarded crates and pallets, covered with an old felt tarp whose original color was long forgotten.
Below it, people had already massed.
Packed tight. Spine to shoulder. Breath thick with sweat and a faint scent of blood.
No shoving.No scrambling for position.
Everyone crowded beneath that platform, necks craned, mouths open—
like a stretch of parched, cracked earth waiting for rain.
The platform was empty.
Only a single torch wedged between boards, casting that bare felt stage in a scorching, thirsting red.
He stood at the edge of the crowd.
He didn't push forward.
The torch was too bright.The shadows too deep.
And his heartbeat—he didn't know when it had begun—but it was already pulsing in the same rhythm as the tide of shouting around him.
"Salvation—!""Drop dead—!!"
He reached up instinctively and touched his face again.
The red handprint was still there.
Okay.
But that hand—the one he'd smeared the red mark with—
had begun to tremble.
Slightly.
Uncontrollably.
—
A deafening crash.
Like the sky being torn open.Like something colossal underground had rammed against the surface.
He flinched. Ducking instinctively.Neck stiff. Eyelids squeezed shut.
Bracing for screams. Collapse. Something worse.
Nothing.
No screams.No stone crashing down.Not even an echo.
The fervent chanting around him continued.
It had paused for only an instant—before surging back even more violently.
"—Sal—va—tion—!!"
Slowly.
Carefully.
He lifted his head.
The stage—
was filled with white smoke.
Not the black smoke of torches.Not the gray haze of dust.
White.
Thick.
Like river mist rising in early winter.
Yet instead of dispersing, it gathered—heavy, pressing down upon that small space on the platform.
Torchlight passing through it shattered into countless blurred halos.
Nothing was clear.
The figure.The stage edge.Even the torch—
all reduced to shifting silhouettes.
What was that smoke?
Powder? A mechanism? Something unnamed?
—
A hand.
Shot out from the smoke.
Fingers splayed. Knuckles thick. Palm facing downward.
Like a diver rising from deep water.Like judgment descending from the heavens.
The smoke clung to it.
Like something alive.Like thousands of thin white serpents coiling, winding, climbing—
and just before they could cover the palm—
they were flung aside.
Scattered into fragments of swirling vapor.
At the center—
a palm.
Vivid red.
Red as a heart torn fresh from a chest.
Only that one could have a palm that red.
He didn't know why he thought that.
The thought forced its way out through a crack in his fear—
like a rusted nail hammered straight into his skull.
Only that one.
It had to be.
The chanting roared on.
Sound waves pressed in from every direction, like invisible hands shoving, squeezing, rattling his skull.
Light halos. Smoke. Red palm. Black silhouettes—
everything twisted together.
No telling stage from crowd. Real from illusion.
He lost his footing.
His knees buckled.
His body pitched backward.
Shit.
I'm gonna fall.
Right now. While everyone else is looking up in worship.
I'll go down like some pathetic, gutless fool—
—
He was caught.
A hand pressed solidly against the small of his back.
Not a mere support.
A lift.
Firm. Heavy. As if receiving something that must not be broken.
He didn't fall.
He froze.
He didn't need to turn around.
Pressed against his spine was a palm.
The warmth.The weight.The silent, unwavering certainty.
He couldn't see it.
But he knew.
A red hand.
One of us.
The thought should have relieved him.
Instead, it slid across his chest like a strip of coarse cloth soaked through—
heavy.
And sank.
Without leaving a ripple.
He steadied himself.
The support behind him withdrew, silently, not lingering an extra second.
He didn't dare look back.Couldn't even confirm whether that person was still there.
He just kept his eyes locked on the stage—
on that still-churning white smoke,
and the vivid red palm suspended at its heart.
—
The smoke shifted.
Not dissipating.Not sinking.
Converging.
Those white tendrils that had been spinning, dancing, clinging in a frenzy to that hand—
now, as if hearing some silent command,
they flowed from every direction, from every crack in the platform's surface, from the residual halos around the torch,
slowly and steadily surging toward that vivid red palm.
They climbed upward along the wrist—
like vines,like rising tide—
layer after layer covering the outline of forearm, elbow, upper arm—
yet never fully submerging it.
That red palm remained exposed.
A solitary, blood-colored island in a white sea.
Unbelievable.
No one could do this.
He'd seen Darenz's deadliest thugs.Its slickest swindlers.Its smoothest talkers who could resurrect the dead with their tongues.
But no one—
no one—
could make smoke obey.
Smoke doesn't obey.
Smoke is just smoke.
It scatters and vanishes.Rises and drifts away.
It never—never—behaves like this.
Like this tamed and obedient, coiling around an open palm—
like worship,like sacrifice,like…
Like being saved.
The thought had barely surfaced when the smoke fully gathered.
No more vortices.No more spinning.No more of that wild, chaotic ritual from moments ago.
It compressed into a tight, opaque, almost tangible white sphere, enclosing that arm—
no—
the arm had actively clenched around it, like gripping something solid, something that could be conquered.
And then—
It exploded.
Not scattered.
Detonated.
The white vapor blasted outward from the center of that palm with savage force, like tides held back for millennia finally breaching the dam—
like a soundless proclamation of pure power!
He threw his hands up, shielding his eyes.
Too late.
The corner of his vision caught it—
the white already surging like a towering wave toward the churning crowd below,
swallowing torches,swallowing red handprints,swallowing face after face twisted in fanaticism—
—
The fervent chanting…
was replaced by coughing.
"Cough cough cough—!"
"Cough, cough, cough, cough…"
Around him—
a cacophony of violent, nearly lung-rupturing coughs.
Not screams.
Not shrieks of terror.
Just raw, physiological reaction to being choked.
The white mist had flooded every open mouth, every wide-flared nostril—
as if punishing them for their tireless, throat-shredding shouting.
He slowly lowered his hands from his eyes.
The torches still burned.
The crowd hadn't moved.
Those red handprints were still stamped on faces, the backs of hands, lapels.
But no one was shouting anymore.
Only coughing filled the warehouse—
rising and falling like a grotesque, profane symphony—
like a twisted hymn played by throats and lungs.
He raised his head.
Looked at the stage again.
The white smoke was completely gone.
As if it had never existed.
The stage was empty.
Only that torch, still burning in its crack.
And beside the torch—
at the edge of the felt tarp—
a small patch.
Wet.
Not yet dry.
A vivid red palm print.
—
"Don't leave us."
The first cry of anguish.
From the densest part of the crowd—
from a chest whose throat had been shredded by smoke but was still desperately forcing its mouth open—
squeezed out.
Not a chant.Not a plea.
A broken wail.
Fractured, uncontrollable sobbing.
He stood at the edge of the crowd,
hearing that voice like a fine, tough needle,
piercing the awkward, coughing-filled silence.
Then—
The second.
The third.
Countless voices.
"Don't leave us—!!"
"Don't go—!!"
"Please—!!"
No longer that uniform, frenzied "Salvation" and "Drop dead."
Those had been commands. Proclamations. The crowd coercing the individual.
What now filled the warehouse was pleading, begging to be kept, the humble, desperate last grasp of countless shattered souls reaching toward the same blurred figure.
He stood still.
Didn't join in.
He just listened.
Listened to those voices surge from every direction,
crashing against the warehouse's cold iron ceiling,
shattering into even more fragmented, sharper echoes.
Listened to what those throats had held in for too long—
what had finally burst its banks tonight.
Okay.
He thought.
Not today.
Not him.
Okay.
—
The crowd agitated.
Not the reverent convergence from before—
a collapse-like surge.
Some pressed forward.Some shrank back.
Shoulders collided.Feet trampled feet.
The red handprints on faces, softened by sweat, streaked into blurred red smears, like tear stains in the torchlight.
Then—
A wiry man suddenly shoved the person in front of him,
staggering past the ring of strangely dressed figures guarding the platform.
Unexpectedly—
No one stopped him.
Those figures, like silent stone statues,
let the man charge past,
not even shifting their gaze.
He lunged at the platform's edge.
Both hands clawed at the rough board surface.
His knees struck the base with a dull thud.
He tried to climb up.
Heaved his upper body.
One foot hooked the edge—
And was repelled.
Not pushed.
Not pulled.
Repelled.
As if an invisible wall—
soft, yet unbreakable—
gently, decisively thrust him back the instant he nearly touched the platform.
He fell into the dust below.
Scrambled up.
Lunged again.
Repelled again.
Another lunge.
Another repulsion.
The wiry man knelt at the platform's edge,
hands braced on the ground,
forehead pressed against the cold wooden border,
shoulders heaving violently.
He didn't try to climb again.
Just knelt there—
like a stubborn child refused at the door.
That person is still here.
The thought burned into every consciousness like a red-hot brand, sizzling.
Not gone.
The smoke had cleared.The stage was empty.That vivid red palm had vanished.
But those who had been repelled—
that unseen barrier refusing anyone the stage—
all of it said the same thing:
That person is still here.
Then why…
He stared at the dim emptiness of the stage,
at that wet, still-undried palm print at the edge of the felt tarp.
Why won't you see us.
The question rose from the depths of his throat.
Voiceless.
Yet it ached in his chest.
Around him,
the pleading cries continued—
wave after wave—
like tides that would never receive an answer.