The safe house was a hollowed-out cellar beneath a ruined tannery, smelling of rot and chemical lye. Cian collapsed against the cold stone wall, his lungs burning with every ragged breath. The Dragon Heart was no longer humming; it was screaming.
His E-rank mana-vessels, never intended to channel the primordial energy of a god, were fraying like old silk in a hurricane. Internal hemorrhaging had filled his thoracic cavity, and the golden-black mana was leaking into his muscle tissue, threatening to calcify his very soul.
Cian's hands trembled—a surgeon's worst nightmare. He fumbled for his kit, spreading the black-iron scalpels on the dirt floor. He didn't have anesthesia. He didn't have a sterile field. He only had the cold, clinical desperation of a man who had died once before.
'Pericardial tamponade...' his mind analyzed, even as his vision tunneled. 'I have to drain the effusion or the heart will crush itself.'
He gripped a scalpel, phasing it through his own ribs. The pain was an absolute, white-hot wall. He gasped, a spray of blood hitting the floor. He tried to guide the blade to the sheath surrounding the heart, but the Dragon Heart flared in a defensive surge, sending a shockwave of energy through his nervous system.
His fingers locked. The scalpel clattered into the dust.
'Not... yet...'
Cian's head slumped forward. The world turned to gray, then to absolute obsidian. He passed out with his hand still buried halfway into his own chest, a dying doctor in a body that had become his own torture chamber.
From the corner of the room, the shadows began to pool and stretch. Valeria stepped out, her eyes scanning the carnage of her nephew's body. She looked at the half-inserted scalpel and the glowing, fractured skin.
"Stupid boy," she whispered, though her voice held a rare, jagged edge of concern. "Trying to operate on a sun with a needle."
She knelt beside him, her hands moving with a dark, practiced efficiency to stabilize the mana-leak.
Back at the Gala, the golden lanterns flickered over a scene of butchery.
Lucian stood over the remains of Julian. He didn't see a "Ghost." He saw a precision he couldn't comprehend—a malice that was surgical. He looked at the severed arm, tossed aside like a piece of refuse, and the way the legs had been systematically reduced to pulp.
"This wasn't a fight," Lucian whispered, his voice trembling. "This was... a harvest."
The sound of heavy, rhythmic footsteps silenced the surrounding guards. The crowd parted like the sea before a storm. Duke van Astra had arrived.
The Duke was not a man of outbursts. He was a man of steel and silence, a genius who had steered the Empire's economy and shadows for decades. He walked into the center of the garden, his long, crimson coat brushing against the blood-stained grass.
He stopped at the edge of the crater where Julian lay.
For a long, suffocating minute, the Duke did nothing. He didn't scream. He didn't weep. He simply looked down at the limbless, gurgling thing that used to be the pride of his bloodline. His highly intelligent mind was already calculating the loss—not of a son, but of a legacy.
The Duke knelt in the dirt, regardless of his expensive silks. He reached out and touched the jagged stump where Julian's arm had been. His eyes, usually sharp and calculating, turned into two dead, frozen lakes.
"Duke Astra..." the High Inquisitor began, stepping forward. "We have the perimeter secured. The anomaly—"
"Silence," the Duke said.
The word wasn't loud, but it carried the weight of a guillotine blade. The Duke stood up, slowly wiping Julian's blood onto a white silk handkerchief. He turned to Lucian, and for the first time, the Hero felt a chill that surpassed even the fear of the "Silent Flayer."
"Lucian," the Duke said, his voice terrifyingly calm. "You were here. You are the Child of Destiny."
"I... I arrived too late," Lucian stammered.
The Duke stepped closer, his presence expanding until it choked the air. He didn't strike Lucian. He simply looked at him with a profound, icy disappointment.
"My son is a cripple," the Duke whispered, his quiet fury vibrating in the very ground. "My heir is a collection of broken bones. And you, the Hero, speak to me of 'timing'?"
The Duke turned to his personal guard—the Black Sun Unit.
"The Academy is no longer a school. It is a hunting ground," the Duke commanded, his eyes fixed on the shadows where Cian had vanished. "Seal the city. Kill anyone with white hair. Kill anyone who doesn't speak. If the boy is a ghost, then I will burn the afterlife until he has nowhere to hide."
He looked back at Julian, who was being lifted onto a stretcher. The Duke didn't offer a word of comfort. He simply watched, his mind already weaving a web of such intricate, cold cruelty that even the Demons would shudder.
"He didn't just break Julian," the Duke murmured to himself, a small, horrific realization dawning. "He mocked me. He left him alive so I would have to look at his failure every day."