Adam stood still after the call ended.
The street around him had not changed.
His mind was moving too fast.
'How did this happen?' Adam thought.
He had expected danger from many directions. He had expected mistakes, betrayal, and loose ends. He had never expected this exact result.
Then the answer came.
Bruno had gone from cafe to cafe and asked questions until someone finally gave him what he needed. Adam had been meeting Kenji in public too often, and he had kept using the same old-man disguise. Once those two things connected, the rest was not hard.
Adam shut his eyes.
'I was too slow,' Adam thought.
The realization came late, and that only made it more painful. He had already known the disguise was becoming dangerous. He had already known public places created patterns. He had already known that repeating the same route too many times would leave traces behind him.
And he still let it happen.
For one moment, a dark thought rose in him.
He could leave.
He could leave Kenji, leave the office, and leave the entire mess behind before Bruno reached anything more important. He could cut everything off and disappear.
Adam's jaw tightened at once.
'No,' Adam thought.
It was not just the sixteen million anymore. It was not just money. He had already put his future knowledge into this. He had already chosen his direction. More than that, he had dragged other people into danger with his own hands. Leaving now would not be caution. It would be surrender.
He had done enough surrendering in one life.
Then John's voice came back to him.
It was so sudden that Adam almost looked up, as if John were really standing in front of him again.
"What happened?" that remembered voice said. "You wanted to act smart, didn't you? That's the weakness of people like you. You learn two or three things and start believing you can defeat people who were always above you."
Adam's fingers curled around the phone.
For a second he felt exactly the way he had felt in that blood-soaked future, small, trapped, and late.
Then another voice pushed through it.
His father's voice was calmer.
"Study properly, son. Don't worry about us. As long as I still have strength in my hands, I'll keep sending you money. Just study properly."
Adam drew in a slow breath and let it out. Then he did it again. Then once more.
When he opened his eyes, the panic had not disappeared, but it had loosened enough for him to think.
"Stop," he murmured. "Start from the beginning."
He forced himself to sort the situation instead of drowning in it.
The first fact was still in his favor. Bruno did not know Adam's real identity.
That mattered more than anything else.
Yes, Kenji had been caught. Yes, the office had been exposed. Yes, the old-man disguise had become a weakness instead of an asset.
But Adam himself had not been exposed yet.
'That is my advantage,' Adam thought.
Then he moved to the next question.
Why had Bruno called?
If Bruno only wanted revenge, he could have beaten Kenji, shot someone, and waited. Instead, he had used Kenji's phone and demanded that the old man come to the office.
That meant Bruno wanted something first.
He might want answers about the fake organization. He might want to capture Adam alive. He might want to use Kenji and the others as bait to pull him in. None of those possibilities were good, but all of them pointed to the same thing.
Bruno still needed him alive for a little while.
Adam looked down at the phone in his hand.
'If he wanted them dead immediately, he would not have called me first,' Adam thought.
That was not safety. It was only time.
Still, time was enough if he used it properly.
Then another ugly truth rose in him.
He still had no real way to defend himself if things turned violent.
He had the system. He had the skill. Both had already changed his life.
But until now he had mostly used them for money, movement, and preparation. He had never truly tested what would happen if violence reached him at close range. He had been avoiding that question for days.
Now he could not avoid it anymore.
Adam looked ahead, his thoughts finally beginning to settle into order.
There was still one thing he could do.
He had been thinking about it for a while, but he had hesitated because once he crossed that line, there would be no pretending he was still only planning from a safe distance.
That hesitation ended now.
He slipped the phone away and started moving.
Inside Unit 14, the air had turned heavy.
Bruno sat across from Kenji at the desk. Kenji's face already carried dark marks from the blows he had taken. Bruno had not bothered hiding his temper. The gun was still in his hand, and his leg kept bouncing against the floor with restless force.
Behind Kenji, Shinju, Sera, and Davin sat under watch while Rafi and Toma stood nearby.
No one in the room was speaking.
Bruno kept looking toward the door and then back at Kenji. A second later he looked down at the gun, then toward the door again. Each time the silence stretched, his face grew worse.
Kenji noticed it too.
The gun did not scare him less when Bruno moved it around like that. It scared him more. A calm man could be reasoned with. Bruno no longer looked calm.
Finally Bruno slammed a hand against the desk and shouted, "Where is that old bastard?"
Kenji said nothing.
His ribs still hurt from the last hit. He could taste blood in his mouth. Even so, he kept thinking about the one warning the old man had repeated from the start: his name was never supposed to appear anywhere.
That warning meant more now than it had before.
Bruno waited for an answer, but none came.
The room fell silent again.
Then they heard the front door open.
Every head turned at once.
The next second, Wil stepped into Unit 14 in the old-man disguise.