As the heavy iron doors of the Neon Abyss slammed shut behind us, the silence of the street was more suffocating than the casino's roar. And the tax was coming due.
My heart stuttered, a jagged, uneven rhythm that sent shocks of cold fire through my chest.
The human brain was not designed to process the calculation for twenty consecutive "impossible" dice rolls. I felt my pulse jump, then stall.
Plausibility debt, I thought, my jaw tightening as I forced myself to remain upright. I have overdrawn this vessel's account.
"My Lord?" Malakor's voice was a frantic whisper. He was clutching his side, his eyes wide with a mix of awe and terror. "You're... you're pale. The blood..."
I raised a trembling hand and wiped a dark, metallic fluid from my upper lip. A nosebleed—the first sign that capillaries in my brain were beginning to burst under the pressure of hosting my consciousness. My vessel was leaking.
"A diagnostic cost, Malakor," I hissed, the words tasting like copper. "The architecture of this world is inefficient. Moving it requires... friction."
Beside me, Kael remained a moving void. He simply maintained his three-meter distance, his blue eyes scanning the darkness for threats his master was currently too taxed to perceive.
The purple neon sign of "Salvation" flickered ahead of us, its light refracting through the acidic mist.
And then I saw her.
Standing directly under the sign, her silhouette cut through the rain like a razor.
She wore the slate-grey uniform. Her hair was cropped short, the color of cold ash, and her eyes were fixed on me with a terrifying, calm recognition.
"An elite 'saint' of the Cathedral," Kael whispered.
"Father Mollian," she said. Her voice was a flat, calm line that held the weight of a decade of shared history.
"Simone," I managed to say. The name surfaced from the stolen memories of the vessel like oil on water.
Simone. The "Pencil of God." A master of the 4th Holy Name
When the church was doing its best to quickly increase its knowledge of higher names, she had spent a lifetime perfecting the Fourth.
She was toying with a heavy metal pen, rolling it over her knuckles.
"The man I knew would have fainted at the sight of a casino," she said, her eyes tracing the blood on my coat. "He was a quiet, stuttering priest. He liked old books and feared the dark. He spent ten years in the archives praying for a God who never answered."
She stopped five paces away. Kael moved, his body tensing into a defensive crouch, but I raised a hand to stay him.
"The probability of Father Mollian surviving that casino was zero," Simone continued. "The probability of him killing a gangster with a die is even lower. The 'static' of the Law is screaming around you, Father. You've overdrawn your ledger. You're shaking. You're dying."
My ego flared—a cold, white heat that pushed back the neurological tremors for one precious second. She was looking at ME and seeing a dying priest.
"The man you knew was an empty shell, Simone," I said, a jagged smile touching my lips. "A hollow sketch. I am the final version."
Simone's hand stopped. The metal pen in her hand—the instrument of the 4th Name—was now pointed directly at my throat.
"I don't know what you are," she said. "A demon? A possession? Or did the Abyss finally get bored and spit out a monster? All I know is that the real Mollian is gone. You've stolen his face, you've stolen his history, and you've even stolen his name."
She took a step closer, her voice dropping to a dangerous hiss.
"The Church thinks you're a heretic. But I know better. You're an anomaly. You've edited yourself into our lives, haven't you? You've rewritten the strings so everyone thinks you've always been here. But I remember. I remember the man who was too afraid to hold a gun. And you... you just killed five people with a pen."
The tension was absolute. My vessel was on the verge of a neurological collapse, and I was facing the one person in Zonia whose intuition was stronger than the Law of Probability's retroactive editing.
She could see the "seams" in the Law's repair work.
She didn't just recognize me. She recognized that I was an imposter of reality.
I looked at the pen spinning in her hand. I looked at the purple neon glow of the city.
I felt the vessel's heart stagger, one beat away from total collapse, but I didn't try to speak any of the Holy Names.
I reached for the language that existed before the first star was named. The language of creation.
I spoke.
The sound didn't come from my throat; it seemed to vibrate out of the very air, a frequency of glass and thunder that made the raindrops freeze in mid-air.
Simone's eyes widened, her pen faltering in its perfect orbit as a primal, ancestral fear gripped her soul. She didn't understand the words, but she felt the terror.
"Zai ast Exion Salyon, ve nauth astur Humil ah Val-Facas na Zai."