The metal mask hit the wet ground.
It rolled, settling with a discordant wobble on the floor.
I looked down at the face I had exposed.
It was a face made for symmetry.
Golden ratios carved into bone and flesh. He was on the verge of maturity; perhaps seventeen solar years had passed since his birth.
Sweat and dust from the rubble plastered strands of blond hair to his forehead, but even the grime couldn't mar the architecture of his features.
It was... beautiful.
Not in the way a flower is beautiful, but in the way a perfectly balanced equation is beautiful. Cold. Precise. Flawless.
"Now the Church sends children to hunt gods?" I asked, my voice dry. "The budget must be tight."
But the aesthetics didn't matter.
What caught my attention were his eyes.
They were blue.
Not the blue of the sky, or the ocean, or sapphire.
They were the blue of an unwritten tablet. A void space.
In those eyes, I saw no fear. No anger. No ego.
There was no trace of that annoying "noise" humans call personality.
He looked at me neither as a conqueror nor as an enemy. He looked at me simply as a new variable in his environment. A new superior.
I released him.
His body hit the ground with a heavy thud. He made no attempt to catch himself, no instinct to adjust the severity of the impact. He simply landed where gravity dictated.
"Name?" I asked.
My voice was a military command, sharpened by the dryness of my new throat.
The boy answered.
His voice was smooth, tenor, and melodic—but trained to suppress any emotional fluctuation.
"Unit K-L."
"Unit K-L."
I repeated the words. I tasted the name in my mouth.
It tasted of iron and bureaucracy.
"This is a designation unite," I said. "Not a name."
His stare remained fixed on nothing. "I have no name. I am a Silencer for the Church. My duty is removing magical anomalies."
"My Lord!"
Malakor crawled out from a pile of crushed porcelain. He looked insane, eyes wide and rolling. He clutched a large shard of glass, its edge stained with the blood of the old antique seller.
"We must kill him right now!" Malakor screamed, his voice trembling. "If he stays alive... if he reports to the Church... if they understand what you really are... they will boil us alive in oil!"
The boy did not flinch.
He didn't even look at the priest.
He simply knelt there, inclining his neck toward the imaginary blade in my hand.
Waiting.
With the same impatience a customer has for a barber to cut his hair.
Watching this scene annoyed me.
Not because of pity. I was beyond such low concepts.
It annoyed me because it was inefficient.
Killing such pure potential was a calculation error I refused to make.
I reached out.
I bent over, put one of my hands on his face and with the other grabbed his soft, blond hair and pulled his head back, forcing him to look directly into the depth of my pupils.
Malakor froze. "My Lord...?"
Exactly at the moment my gaze met the void of his eyes, something happened.
Something I did not expect.
The screaming of the world stopped.
From the moment of my entry into this body, I had been exposed to constant torture.
The "Migraine."
For my consciousness, reality was not a beautiful stillness. It was the terrible friction of every atom grinding against the texture of space.
Every ray of light hitting my retina pounded on my brain like a stream of cosmic data. The world was a deafening roar of probabilities that pushed the synapses of this weak body to the brink of explosion.
But now...
Silence.
That crushing headache melted away.
It vanished into a pool of cool, soothing "nothingness."
This boy's mind was like a deep, dark well. It swallowed all the cosmic noise around me.
He was a biological anomaly. A creature so emptied of "self" that when I stared into his eyes, he absorbed the overload of my perception like a gigantic capacitor.
"We are keeping him," I announced.
Malakor's jaw dropped. "We are... keeping him? As... a prisoner?"
"No," I sneered.
"Prisoners need guards. They need food and shackles and chains. They occupy space. Prisoners are an extra cost."
I looked down at the boy.
"Unit K-L. Stand up."
He stood instantly.
His movement was fluid, coordinated, as if the strings of a master puppeteer had pulled him upright. No hesitation. No trembling.
"Unit K-L is a difficult name," I said.
"From now on, you are 'Kael'."
The boy paused.
For the first time, a spark—something similar to ambiguity—flickered behind those dead blue eyes.
"Kael," he repeated.
He rotated the word in his mouth, weighing its mass. A very faint frown sat between his perfect eyebrows.
"Does this name change create a disruption in my function?"
"Yes," I answered, walking toward the broken door.
"Your function is no longer killing."
I turned back to look at him.
"Your duty from this moment on is this: you remain close to me. Always. So that in case my migraine becomes unbearable, I can resolve it with you."
"I... do not understand," he said. His tone was genuinely confused.
I didn't explain.
I stopped and looked at the gray sword on the floor.
The "Sword of Silence." A weapon engineered to neutralize magical fluctuations.
I kicked it toward Malakor.
"Malakor, hide this under your robe," I ordered. "If you want to stay alive in the streets of Zonia, learn to bury your spoils before the sharp eyes of the next Inquisitors see them."
Malakor scrambled to obey. He took the heavy sword with trembling hands, struggling to fit it amidst the folds of his dirty, dark red robe.
The weight of the blade made him list to one side, but he did not dare protest.
I looked at Kael.
He stood like a shadow behind me.
His presence made the world tolerable. It was as if a filter had been pulled over the ugliness of reality, smoothing out the jagged edges.
I turned my face to the exit.
Outside, the heavy, cold rain of the dystopian city spread broken neon lights onto the asphalt.
"There is no need for you to understand," I said to the boy.
"You just have to be carried."
I stepped into the storm.
"Get moving, My Luggage."
The rain quickly soaked my coat, but it no longer mattered.
I had drawn a vector.
Its origin was a bloody basement. Its destination was the breaking of the ancient order of this world.
And now, I had a tool that would keep my brain from collapsing along the path.