"I'll talk."
Adrian Crowe hesitated just long enough to make it look like a choice, then folded. He understood the position he was in. A blade at his throat did not invite silence. What mattered was not whether he spoke, but how much he revealed, how much he buried, and which lies he wrapped around the truth.
As long as Rowan Mercer believed he still had value, Crowe's life retained a price tag.
When Crowe finished, Rowan smiled. It was thin. Clinical.
"I know you held back," Rowan said. "And some of that was probably fiction. That's fine."
He lifted his hand slightly.
"I have other ways."
Crowe quickly put on a courteous smile, the kind forged through decades of surviving monsters and men alike. "No offense intended. I only wish to demonstrate my usefulness. Cooperation benefits us both. You'd gain far more by keeping me alive."
Rowan waved him off.
"No need."
Before Crowe could process the words, Rowan struck him square in the chest.
There was no flash, no explosion. Just a sharp, suffocating emptiness as something essential was torn out of him. The power that had once anchored his identity collapsed inward, ripped free and purified by force.
Crowe screamed.
In seconds, he was no longer anything special. Just a man on the floor, shaking, gasping, eyes wide with horror.
"You're Sun-aligned," Crowe rasped, his face contorting. Rage and terror warred behind his eyes. "Only someone that high could do this so cleanly."
He was right. Stripping power this way was not brute force. It was judgment.
Rowan said nothing.
Crowe understood anyway. The speed alone ruled out anything below the highest tiers. Whatever stood before him was closer to an angel than a man.
Still, Crowe tried to speak again.
He never got the chance.
Rowan sealed him away, folding his powerless body into containment as casually as storing a file. He had no interest in negotiation anymore. Once he acquired the appropriate memory-diving technique, Crowe's mind would open like a book. Faster. Cleaner. No lies.
Rowan examined the extracted essence briefly.
"A Gatekeeper-grade core," he murmured. "Once I'm done studying it, I'll sell it off to the Iron Front's competitors."
With that settled, he turned his attention to what truly mattered.
The creature on the ground twitched weakly, its form warped, half-divine, half-aborted. A godspawn. Barely alive.
"Now we get to the main event."
According to Crowe's information, this thing was not merely a stray abomination. It was the offspring of the so-called True Creator, a deranged god worshipped by the Iron Front's most fanatical splinter cult.
The cult claimed their god had made the world. That it existed within all living beings. That divinity was simply a matter of accumulation.
Rowan had always found that laughable.
If the True Creator existed, it was nothing more than another imprisoned horror circling the planet from beyond the veil. A failed god. A broken one. Dangerous, yes. But not special.
The cult favored those who listened. Too closely.
They heard whispers others could not. Gained power at the cost of sanity. Most of them burned out within a few years. Survivors were not stable. Just better at hiding the cracks.
Rowan lifted the godspawn.
"Let's see where your power really comes from."
He closed his eyes and sank into controlled meditation. The image rose immediately: a colossal figure, inverted, suspended upside down in a void of screaming light.
The backlash hit him at once.
Fury. Madness. Corruption.
The god tried to claw into his thoughts, to stain his soul, to nest inside his body like a parasite.
It failed.
Not because the attack was weak, but because it could not reach him.
Rowan continued calmly, peeling knowledge away layer by layer.
Paths. Rituals. Hierarchies. Names meant to rot the tongue.
The god did not cut the connection.
It screamed and attacked harder.
Rowan took everything it offered.
More secrets spilled out. Higher truths. Buried history.
Angels. Betrayal. The Ancient Sun. A name that should not have survived memory.
Rowan opened his eyes.
"…So that's how it really happened," he said quietly.
The realization settled like cold ash.
The so-called True Creator was not just insane.
It had always been that way.