After helping Anna and giving her at least an anchor that would support her for some time, Eric quickly left the place and started to find other targets.
"Now it will depend on how she walks forward. If she shows courage, she will have a fulfilling life, but if she spirals into self-pity again, she will only find herself back at the same bridge, with nothing but darkness waiting as her final stop."
Eric reached into his suit's left pocket and drew out a copper coin, smaller than a normal coin and unremarkable to look at, though it was in truth a rank five relic of the Overseeing Pathway.
Voyage had teleported it to his house at midnight, fulfilling their agreement to hand over a rank five relic of the Overseeing Pathway by Saturday. As a Nova-level relic, its ability was divination, nothing more, and its cost was that the user would occasionally lose all sense of direction. At rank five, that cost posed little real danger to a Lysi Nova, though it grew more likely to trigger the more the relic was used. So far Eric had used it only once, to find someone close to death who needed help, and that single use had guided him to Anna just in time to stop her from jumping.
It suited his purpose as Mike Jackson well: impersonating someone of the Goodness Pathway while quietly filling the Imperator's Cross with good deeds.
He had walked a fair distance from the bridge by the time he stepped into a narrow alley, closed his eyes, and sent a thread of his consciousness into the Cross. In the darkness behind his eyes he saw it clearly, its solid form turning slowly transparent until it resembled a vial filled with white-silver liquid. The liquid sat at only twenty percent, but the sight of it was enough to send a jolt of real excitement through him, and his fists clenched tight without his quite meaning to.
Ten whole percent, just from helping one person. The thought came fast and bright, almost giddy. And on top of that, I think I've finally worked out how to speed the rest of this up.
He allowed himself a quiet moment of satisfaction, the feeling of effort finally paying him back.
Helping Anna had taught him more than he'd expected. The first lesson concerned his own emotions. Committing crimes or doing wrong never seemed to subtract from the good deeds he'd already stored, but sincerity, it turned out, mattered enormously on the other side of the ledger. When his care for someone was genuine, when he gave the moment his whole attention rather than performing it, the good deeds in the Cross filled faster. That had certainly been true with Anna. His worry for her, his relief at seeing her come down from that railing, none of it had been an act.
Which meant, he reasoned, that he could in theory cause trouble himself and then step in to fix it, harvesting good deeds from disasters of his own making. He turned the idea over and set it aside almost as quickly. It would work, technically, but the effort required to stage a convincing crisis and then resolve it convincingly would far outweigh whatever it earned him.
It was simply not worth the trouble.
He had considered this exact scheme once before, back when he'd first discovered that wrongdoing carried no cost against his stored good deeds, and had thought it might be the fastest route available to him. Now that he understood the emotional cost of sincerity, he saw how naive that plan had been, and he let it go without much regret.
The faster path, he decided, was simpler: help many people at once, or help one person with his whole heart. Earlier that same morning, a round of charitable donations had raised the Cross by eight percent on their own.
Eric had a considerable amount of money, though neither Ruby nor Zoe knew the extent of it. Only one person did, and that was Max. He had built it quietly over the years through investments and careful banking, aided by his gift for deduction and no small amount of patience, and he chose, deliberately, to live a modest life on top of it. The money existed for emergencies, and for exactly this kind of experiment, testing what a relic could do when properly fed. He was grateful now that he'd kept it in reserve. It meant he could farm good deeds far more efficiently than he'd first assumed possible.
When Eric had first gained the Imperator's Cross from Father Irenaeus, the good deeds in the cross were null. The reason was that, since the father couldn't leave the church, how could he earn good deeds? When he needed to use the Imperator's Cross, he would directly use it by borrowing the power of the Church of Serenity.
After getting the cross, he helped many beggars and people with small problems, but even after helping dozens of people, only 2% of good deeds were filled. To test another approach, he decided to donate to charity, which reaped great results for him. Now helping Anna gave him even higher results!
The Church of Serenity was mysterious and mystical, genuinely beyond his understanding, and he had made a kind of peace with that. Even if he could somehow come to comprehend it, he would not have dared to. It was too dangerous a thing to look too closely. If the Father could hand him a relic of this power without so much as blinking, that same ease meant he could just as easily take Eric's life, and probably without much more effort than it had taken to give.
He had never once felt at ease using the Imperator's Cross. He trusted none of the angels living within it, not Uriel, not Pixie, not any of the others, and that wariness had never really left him. One of them had already searched through his memories once, and though something in him suspected the voice in his head had gone unnoticed in that search, he could not be certain of it. His premonition had given him nothing either way, which unsettled him more than a clear warning would have. Perhaps the church itself was capable of silencing it.
These were the possibilities that frightened him most. He had never cared much about the voice itself, what it was or where it came from, but he had always been afraid of what might happen if someone else discovered it before he understood it himself.
Still, a wise man learns to submit to his circumstances rather than fight them uselessly. Eric was, for all practical purposes, a lone force in this city. Max was the only person he trusted completely, and beyond him, Eric had only two great bodies willing to call themselves his allies, nothing more substantial than that. He held no illusions about what that meant. The moment either alliance stopped finding use for him, in this vast and hidden operation unfolding across Paris or in whatever came after it, he had little doubt he would be spent like cannon fodder without a second thought. To avoid that fate, he needed to move carefully, and he needed to grow stronger faster than anyone watching him expected.
Raising one's rank properly took time, effort, resources, the right opportunities, careful planning, and no small amount of luck- more of all five than most people ever managed to gather in a lifetime. Relics offered a shortcut around that, a way to borrow strength rather than earn it slowly, but every shortcut came with its own price, and the negative effects that followed high-ranking relics were rarely a small one to pay.
He understood, more than most, how fortunate he had been. A rank 0 relic, and no cost attached to using it. The negative effects of something that powerful were simply not survivable for someone at his rank, not without the Church absorbing them on his behalf, and he was well aware of how rare that kind of mercy actually was.
But dwelling on all of it only sharpened his unease further, and he made himself stop. He shook his head, deliberately, and let the thoughts go. The longer he sat with them, the more they would gnaw at him, and the more they gnawed, the closer he came to losing the very control he was trying so carefully to protect.
Eric rolled up his right sleeve and studied the silver skin that had crept further across his arm since he'd last checked it, a little more territory lost than the day before. He decided caution was worth the pain. Taking a small knife from his pocket, he cut the silvered skin away, and blood welled up in its place.
He drew his golden liquid from deep within his forearms and let it flow into the wounds, watching them knit closed until his wrist looked as though nothing had ever touched it. He wiped the blood away with a handkerchief and straightened his clothing before anyone could pass by and wonder why an officer of the law was standing in an alley bleeding on himself.
It was for this exact reason that he wore black tailored clothing that covered him from collar to wrist. He could not imagine what people would think, or do, if they ever caught sight of silver spreading slowly across his skin like something inhuman taking root.
He had called in sick that morning and taken the day off from work. Max already knew about his new persona and had given it his full support, and had promised to cover for him at the station, telling anyone who asked that Eric was simply unwell. He had woken Ruby well before leaving the apartment and told her he would not be going to work today, that something else required his attention. Afterward, with a heavy heart he did not let show on his face, he had asked one of the angels within the Imperator's Cross to gently reshape her memory of the night before, just enough that she would believe she had gone to bed early and simply forgotten to cook dinner. She had apologized to him for it that morning, and he had only told her, gently, to go back to sleep.
That was not the only thing waiting for him that day. A note had also arrived from Edward, carrying with it a mission and a piece of information that Eric understood, the moment he saw it, would matter more than anything else in his life right now.
It named the person they called the first one.
Eric sat with that sentence for a long moment before he let himself react to it. He was not a fool, and he understood immediately what this meant. Whatever the mission actually required of him, its true payment was the knowledge he had just been handed, and the fact that Edward had chosen to hand it over at all said something about where his loyalties truly sat. The note mentioned, almost in passing, that Divine Karma had known this information the entire time and had chosen to keep it from him.
Either this man genuinely despises Divine Karma, Eric thought, reading the line again, slower this time, or he is working very hard to plant doubt between us as allies. I would guess the former. Though I would be a fool to rule out the latter entirely.
The note itself was no ordinary piece of paper. It was a charm, mass-produced by the Blackknight family for exactly this purpose, carrying messages and information across vast distances to outside allies like him. In its own quiet way, it functioned as their signature, something anyone with even passing knowledge of the great bodies would recognize on sight, Eric included. To an untrained eye, it looked like nothing more than a plain sheet of green paper, but the moment he pressed his golden liquid into it and let it settle beneath his fingers, words rose in his mind, written in fluent Lumanian, a language he had long since mastered.
Edward opened as he always did, addressing him as the third one, before laying out the mission itself: find, help, and quietly guide a sixteen-year-old boy named Adrian Blackbell, a student at the very high school Eric and Max passed every single day on their walk to the police station.
His first reaction had been simple curiosity, tinged with suspicion. Why guide this particular boy toward his awakening at all? Perhaps Lumenia had noticed some rare talent in him and wanted him drawn into their fold before anyone else could claim him first. That was the assumption Eric had carried into the rest of the letter.
Then he reached the final section, and everything in him went still.
His eyes moved back over the words a second time, and then a third, some small, stubborn part of him refusing to accept what was written there even as the rest of him had already understood it perfectly the first time through.
This Adrian Blackbell was the first one!
That single line was the most important thing the letter contained, and everything else on the page seemed to arrange itself around it once Eric understood what he was reading. It listed everything else about Adrian in careful detail: his age, his height, his personality, his likes and dislikes, the names of his family, his daily routine, the places he was known to frequent, and a great deal more besides. What it did not list was a single friend, and that absence sat strangely with Eric, nagging at him more than it probably should have.
I suppose this Adrian kid doesn't have a single friend to his name, Eric thought, turning the idea over. Judging by what the letter says about his personality, that's hardly surprising on its own. But a high schooler with absolutely no one? I have never once heard of that before. Even I managed a few friends back then, and I walked around radiating all the warmth of a locked door. He paused on that thought a moment longer than he meant to. Or is that the point? Is this intentional, somehow? Well. It hardly matters either way, does it? Why am I even worrying about jinxing it? I'm not the one who has to sit through his classes.
He read through the letter three more times before finally taking out his phone and copying its contents into three separate files, each one saved and locked behind its own password, and only once that was done did he commit the whole of it to memory a second time for good measure. Then he turned his attention to writing his reply. The process itself was simple enough. He willed the paper in his mind to clear, and it went blank at once as he willed words to appear in its place, and they came just as readily, until his response sat finished before him.
He gripped the note tightly and threw it forward. A small rift tore open in the air to receive it, swallowing the letter whole, and Eric had no doubt it would find its way to Edward before long.
"There is still time before Adrian's school lets out," he murmured, stepping out of the narrow alley and settling back into the easy, practiced warmth of Mike Jackson. "I should make good use of it and help as many people as I can. If I can push this to thirty percent by the time I meet him, that would be more than I could ask for, and it would give me all the drive I need going forward."
He paused in front of a glass-fronted building and studied it for a moment longer,
He heaved a sigh as he whispered, "Even after changing my appearance, there is no reflection of mine." He laughed lightly to himself, sounding more sarcastic than comedic.
He tilted his head slightly, checking the angles the way a man checks a suit before an important meeting. He knew he looked exactly as he wanted to look without needing to see his reflection: handsome, graceful, kind, and effortlessly charming, the sort of face people trusted before he had said a single word to them. His eyes drifted, inevitably, to the black umbrella still resting in his grip.
Rain or shine, apparently I'm contractually obligated to carry this thing everywhere I go now, he thought, a little wry. Five hundred dollars really does buy loyalty, even from an umbrella.
He settled it against his right shoulder anyway, both hands closing loosely around the handle, and something in the familiar weight of it eased him, if only for a little while.
Even wrapped fully in the persona of Mike Jackson, Eric never let himself forget, not for long, who he actually was beneath it. Slip too far into the act, lose the thread that led back to himself, and there would be nothing left holding him together when the mask finally started to pull.
This was the sort of care anyone walking the Deceiver Pathway had to maintain, whether they liked it or not. Now the burden had fallen to him as well.
He did not carry it the same way most of them probably did. What he had built with Mike Jackson was not simple pretense. It let him see the world through a different set of eyes, and in doing so it raised a wall inside his mind — thin enough to blur the instincts of his liquid without erasing them, just enough confusion to keep the deeper, hungrier part of himself from fully waking.
He understood the risk. Lean too far into the performance, let the mask harden into something realer than himself, and that wall would collapse straight into his sense of who he actually was. There would be no walking back from that.
What set his mask apart, he had come to realize, was that it had never been built entirely from lies. Eric was, underneath everything else, a kind man. Caring, in his own quiet way. Fond of a joke when the moment allowed for one.
Those traits had simply always lived in the shadow of everything colder and sharper that ruled him day to day. Mike Jackson gave them somewhere to finally stand in the light. That was, he suspected, the real reason the wall held as well as it did.
Small as it was, cracked as it was in places, it was built from something true. And true things tended to hold weight that lies alone never could. Even if the act pulled him further than he meant to go, he trusted that some part of him would still recognize the danger in time to pull back.
Still, trust was not the same as carelessness, and he had never once let himself confuse the two.
He called on Truth, and the relic drew deeper from the golden liquid running quietly beneath his skin, until something in his very bearing seemed to catch the light differently, an illusion of warmth that wasn't quite visible and yet was somehow felt by everyone who passed within its reach. His charm sharpened. Eyes lingered on him a beat longer than they had any real reason to.
Eric let their gazes slide past him without concern and turned his face upward instead, toward the sun now sitting fully clear of the rooftops.
He hadn't stopped, not properly, to look at a morning like this in longer than he could easily remember. The light fell soft and gold across the street, catching in the last dew still clinging to a windowsill planter nearby, turning each small bead of water into something briefly, impossibly bright, before it let go and disappeared into the stone below. Somewhere close, a bird sang a few uncertain notes and then quieted, as though even it had paused to take the morning in before the day properly began. The air still carried that thin, clean chill peculiar to early hours, the kind that would not survive another hour of sunlight, and Eric breathed it in slowly, letting it settle somewhere behind his ribs.
It was, he thought, a small and quiet kind of beautiful, the sort that asked nothing of him and gave itself freely anyway, and for one unhurried breath he let himself simply belong to it before the day could ask anything of him at all.
Then he drew a longer breath, steadier now, and let it go.
He reached into his pocket for the copper coin, turned it once between his fingers, and set himself, gently, back to work.
…
A little girl stood lost in the market, black-and-gold eyes wide with panic, her small voice cracking as she screamed for her mother. The crowd moved around her like water around a stone, too busy, too loud, too indifferent to notice one crying child among so many strangers.
Then a voice reached her, gentle and warm, cutting cleanly through the noise as though the noise itself had made room for it.
She looked up. A man stood over her, umbrella in hand, his smile soft, his eyes kind.
Eric crouched down to her level, letting his shoulder block the sun so it no longer struck her directly. The little shade felt good against her flushed cheeks. He smiled and asked, "Would you like to see a magic trick, little angel?"
Before she could answer, he held up a copper coin, told her not to blink, and closed his fist around it. When he opened it again, the coin was gone.
"Where did it go?" he asked, feigning shock so childishly that it startled a laugh out of her despite herself. Then his hand dipped into her hair, and when it came back out, the coin was there again, resting neatly between his fingers.
She laughed properly this time. Eric stroked her hair gently and asked why she'd been crying. She told him her mama got lost easily, that she forgot things all the time, and that she was scared something had happened to her.
His hand paused in her hair for just a moment before he smiled again and told her she was a very good girl for worrying so much. He lifted her into his arms, settled her against his chest, and handed her a lollipop from his pocket.
"Then let's go find your forgetful mama together."
Her eyes lit up around the candy. Eric closed the umbrella, tucked it under his arm, and carried her easily through the crowd, her weight nothing at all against his strength.
As they walked, she chattered around the lollipop, telling him her mother had yellow hair and gold eyes, nothing more specific than that. Something in Eric's chest tightened faintly at the description. It couldn't be. Could it?
Twenty minutes later, a woman's scream cut through the market. "Anya!"
"Mama!" the girl shrieked, twisting against his shoulder.
Eric turned and found a young woman running toward them, yellow hair streaming, gold eyes wide with fear. The moment she saw who was holding her daughter, the fear in her face broke apart into something closer to disbelief.
"It's been a while, Anna," Eric said, handing Anya back into her arms.
Anna stared at him, stunned into silence, until Anya's small palms found her cheeks and slapped them lightly, scolding her for wandering off again. That seemed to snap her back into herself. Her face went red with embarrassment.
"Th-thank you again, Mr. Jackson," she stammered, not quite meeting his eyes. "You helped me only this morning, and now my carelessness has troubled you twice in one day. I don't know what to say."
Eric waved the apology away. He told her he didn't mind at all, that he was only glad she was making good use of the money he'd left her that morning. He'd meant it for groceries.
Anna exhaled, relief loosening her shoulders, though she still couldn't quite look at him properly.
Watching her mother fumble through her thanks, Anya piped up. "Mama! Uncle Mike is very kind. I like him a lot. Invite him home!"
"Anya!" Anna clapped a hand over her daughter's mouth and hissed, loud enough that Eric heard every word anyway. "Mr. Mike is a busy man. He doesn't have time to visit our home. Hush."
Eric laughed, genuinely this time. To think that the same woman who had stood at a railing that morning, ready to let go of everything, was now blushing over a five-year-old's matchmaking. It was a strange, quiet reminder that happiness on the outside rarely told the whole story of what sat underneath it. Everyone carried something. The old beggar carried survival. He carried his own long climb. Anna carried a past she was only just beginning to set down.
He bent toward Anya. "It's alright, little angel. If I ever find myself free, I promise I'll come visit. Just not today. In return, promise me you'll listen to your mother, and never let her out of your sight again."
"I promise!" Anya said, beaming.
Anna finally lifted her eyes to meet his, and when she spoke, her voice had steadied. "I only wanted to thank you properly. For everything. For asking nothing in return. If not for you, I'd still be a shadow of who I used to be. I promise I'll keep going, even when I'm scared. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart."
Eric shook his head, waving off the weight of her gratitude. "It was my pleasure, truly. I do this for myself as much as anyone else. Helping people gives me peace. It reminds me who I want to be." He smiled. "You living well is thanks enough. I should go now. May fate bring us together again."
He opened his umbrella, rested it against his shoulder, and turned to leave. Behind him, mother and daughter waved until he disappeared into the crowd, Anna's eyes lingering on the space where he'd been long after he was gone.
"Do you like him, Mama?" Anya asked.
Anna startled, pouted, and buried her face in her daughter's neck instead of answering, making her shriek with ticklish laughter.
Only twenty-nine percent, Eric thought as he stepped free of the market's noise. So helping the same person twice, even indirectly, still counts? But the amount isn't as much as the first time. Is it because I helped her again or helped her indirectly? I might have to experiment on this more.
…
The park bench sat under a thin stretch of afternoon shade. An elderly woman stood beside it, one hand gripping the wooden backrest, the other pressed to her knee as she tried to lower herself. Her legs shook with the effort. Each attempt brought her only partway down before she had to catch herself again, breath short, mouth tight with quiet frustration.
Eric noticed her before anyone else did.
He crossed the path in a few even steps and stopped at her side, close enough to help but not close enough to startle.
"May I?" he asked, voice low and steady.
The woman looked up, surprised, then gave a small, embarrassed nod. Eric offered his arm. She took it with a thin, cool hand. He adjusted his stance, took enough of her weight to steady her, and guided her down onto the bench in one controlled motion. When she was seated, he waited a moment longer to make sure she was settled before stepping back.
She exhaled, relief plain on her face. Then she really looked at him.
"Oh my," she said, her eyes brightening. "What a handsome young man. And so polite too." Her gaze moved over his face with open approval. "Look at those features. If I were sixty years younger, the other girls wouldn't have stood a chance." She laughed softly at her own remark, then reached over and patted the back of his hand. "Kindness like that isn't common anymore. Most people walk straight past."
Eric gave a small, polite smile. "It was no trouble."
"No trouble, he says." She shook her head, still smiling, and opened the modest handbag resting beside her. After a moment of searching, she brought out a small paper packet, neatly folded. "Here. I baked these this morning. Take them. A boy who helps an old woman deserves something sweet."
He hesitated only briefly before accepting the packet with both hands. The smell of butter and sugar rose faintly from the paper.
"Thank you," he said.
"No. Thank you." She leaned back against the bench, looking pleased with herself. "Go on, then. Before I start telling you about my grandchildren and keep you here all afternoon."
Eric inclined his head once more, the same quiet courtesy still in place, and stepped away. Behind him, the elderly woman watched him go, the smile lingering on her face long after he had returned to the path. In his hand, the packet of cookies remained warm from the day's heat, a small and unexpected weight.
…
The pawn shop sat squeezed between a closed tailor and a storefront that sold second-hand radios. Its window was crowded with old watches, scratched instruments, and trays of jewelry that had long since lost their shine. Inside, the air smelled of dust and metal polish.
An old man stood at the counter, shoulders slightly bent, both hands resting on a worn wooden case. The shop owner, a heavyset man with a thin smile, turned the case's contents over with two fingers as if they barely deserved the attention. Whatever number he had just named made the old man's mouth tighten.
Eric had only stepped in to escape the street noise for a moment. He caught the end of the exchange, then the way the owner's tone flattened into something dismissive. He walked up to the counter and stopped beside the old man, towering over both of them easily.
"Mind if I take a look?" he asked.
Both of them turned. The owner's smile thinned further. The old man hesitated, then gave a short nod. Eric opened the case properly, examined the pieces without rushing, and began speaking in a calm, even voice — not arguing, just laying out condition, age, and comparable value in a way that left little room for the earlier low offer to stand unchallenged. Each point was plain and difficult to wave away. The owner's replies grew shorter. After a few minutes, the number on the table had changed, and not in the shop's favor.
When the deal was finally struck, the old man carefully counted the notes he received and slipped them into an inner pocket. Only then did he turn fully toward Eric.
"You didn't have to step in," he said. His voice was rough, but steady. He drew out a smaller fold of money and held it forward. "Take this. For your trouble."
Eric shook his head once.
"Keep it. You needed the help more than I needed the payment."
The old man studied him for a moment, as if waiting for the refusal to crack. It didn't. He let out a quiet breath that was almost a laugh and withdrew his hand.
"Not many left who turn down clean money," he said. "Thank you, son."
Eric gave a slight nod in return, already stepping back from the counter. The shop owner watched him go with a flat expression and said nothing. Outside, the street noise closed around him again, the brief negotiation already finished, the offered payment left untouched on the old man's side of the exchange.
…
The shelter occupied the ground floor of an old community building, its walls painted in bright but fading colors. Mats were rolled against one side of the main room. A few low tables stood in the middle, scattered with worn workbooks, broken crayons, and plastic cups of water. The NGO volunteers had done what they could with limited space and limited funds. The children filled the rest of it.
Eric had come to drop off a small box of supplies. He stayed when one of the volunteers asked, half-joking, whether he could help with the afternoon lessons. The regular teacher was out sick, and there was no one else free.
He sat on the floor with them instead of standing at the front.
The first few minutes were messy. The children talked over each other, shoved notebooks forward, and asked questions that had nothing to do with the page in front of them. Eric did not raise his voice. He answered one child at a time, waiting until the others quieted enough to hear, then moved to the next. When a boy struggled with a line of simple arithmetic, Eric turned the notebook around, broke the problem into smaller steps, and had him solve each piece aloud. When a girl insisted she hated reading, he had her describe the picture on the page first, then find the words that matched what she already understood.
Slowly, the room settled around his pace.
By the time the light through the windows had shifted, several of the younger children had abandoned their own seats to crowd closer to him. One leaned against his arm. Another rested a chin on the edge of his knee, watching the pencil move. A boy who had spent the first half of the lesson kicking the table leg now sat still, waiting for his turn to show his work. Every time Eric nodded and said a quiet "good," the child's face lit up as if the word carried more weight than it should have.
When the volunteer finally called time, the reaction was immediate.
"Don't go yet—" "One more—" "Teacher Eric, look at mine first—"
Small hands tugged at his sleeve and the hem of his jacket. A girl with two uneven braids held up her workbook with both hands, insistent. A younger boy wrapped his arms around Eric's forearm and refused to let go until Eric crouched, looked through the page, and gave him the same calm approval as the others. Someone near the back shouted that he should come every day. Another voice immediately agreed, louder.
The volunteer laughed, half helpless, half pleased. "You've made a problem for us. They're not going to forget you by tomorrow."
Eric carefully freed his arm from the boy's grip and stood. Several of the children still pressed close, looking up at him with the open, unguarded attachment only children that age offered so quickly. Praise came in overlapping pieces — that he was kind, that he explained better than the usual teacher, that he didn't get angry, that his eyes were "funny but nice." One of the smallest simply leaned her head against his leg and stayed there, as if that settled the matter.
He rested a hand briefly on the crown of her head, then stepped back.
"I have to leave," he said. "Do the next page the way we did the first ones."
The complaints were loud and immediate, but they still made space for him to reach the door. As he stepped out into the corridor, a few of the children followed as far as the threshold, waving with the full, exaggerated energy of kids who had decided, in the space of a single afternoon, that he belonged to them.
Behind him, the volunteer's voice carried after him, warm with amusement and genuine thanks.
"You're welcome back anytime. They've already claimed you."
…
The dog lay on its side near the curb, sides heaving; one hind leg was bent wrong. A car had already disappeared down the street. No one else had stopped.
Eric knelt beside it, shrugged off his jacket, folding it under the animal's body to keep it off the cold ground. He checked the breathing, then the bleeding at the leg, and used a clean handkerchief from his pocket to bind the wound tight enough to slow it. The dog whimpered once when he moved the limb into a safer position, but did not snap.
"Easy," he murmured, more habit than anything else.
He flagged down a passing taxi, gave the driver the address of the nearest clinic, and rode with the dog across his lap, one hand steady on its ribs to track the shallow rise and fall. At the vet he carried it inside himself, set it on the counter, and gave a short, clear report of what he had seen and what he had already done.
Only when a nurse took over, and the animal was moved to the back, did he step away. The sleeve of his shirt was smeared with blood. He looked at it once, then went to the sink in the corner and washed his hands without comment.
Behind the door, the dog was already being treated. It would live.
…
A woman was walking ahead on the crowded sidewalk, bag hanging loosely from one shoulder, when a thin teenage boy closed in behind her. His eyes were fixed on the strap. The moment her attention drifted toward the street, his hand shot out and grabbed it.
Before he could pull free, someone else moved.
Eric stepped in from the side, caught the boy's wrist, and stopped the theft cold. The bag jerked once and then hung still. The woman spun around with a sharp gasp, both hands flying to the strap.
"Let go," Eric said.
His voice was calm. His grip was not. He held on until the boy's fingers opened, then guided the bag back toward its owner. The woman took it, stammered a quick thanks, and hurried away into the crowd, glancing back twice as she went.
Only then did Eric release the boy. He steered him a few steps out of the main flow of people and let go.
The teenager was skinny, maybe fifteen, drowning in a jacket that wasn't his. He rubbed his wrist and glared sideways, already half-turned toward the alley like he might still run.
"Stealing from people on the street will get you hurt or locked up," Eric said. "Neither helps you."
The boy said nothing. Hunger sat more plainly on his face than anger.
Eric pulled a wrapped sandwich and a bottle of water from the small bag he was carrying and held them out. After a short stare-down, the boy took both and tore into the food right there on the sidewalk. Eric waited until he was chewing before he spoke again.
"There's a shelter about ten minutes from here. They're not full today. You can get a bed and a wash, and they don't ask for papers at the door. Show up willing to follow the rules, and they'll let you stay."
He gave the street name, the landmark near the entrance, and a few plain pieces of advice — where day labor notices were posted, which places fed teenagers without trouble, how showing up clean and on time mattered more than most people thought.
When the sandwich was gone, Eric nodded toward the next corner.
"I'll walk you that far. After that, it's your choice."
The boy hesitated. Then he fell into step beside him. He never said thank you. He also didn't bolt. At the corner, Eric stopped and pointed out the final turn. He stood there and watched until the thin figure headed the right way — toward the same NGO shelter Eric had left only an hour earlier.
…
The side street was half-lit and mostly empty when the noise reached him.
A woman's voice, sharp with fear, cut through the dark. Further down, near a recessed doorway, a man had her pinned against the wall. He was clearly drunk — unsteady on his feet, speech slurred, one hand locked around her wrist while the other fumbled at her clothes. She shoved at his chest and tried to twist away. He only pressed closer, muttering thick, ugly promises.
Eric's body moved before he finished thinking. He was already closing the distance, weight settled, ready to pull the man off her by force, when headlights swept the street, and a police car turned the corner.
The officers were out of the vehicle fast. One hauled the drunk backward and forced him down against the pavement. The other moved to the woman, speaking in a steady voice, putting himself between her and the man on the ground. The attempted assault ended in a matter of seconds.
Eric stopped at the edge of the light.
An officer noticed him and asked the obvious questions — name, what he had seen, how long he had been there. Eric answered without embroidery. He described the man's grip, the woman's resistance, the clear intent in the drunk's actions, and the exact moment the car had arrived. His account was plain, ordered, and consistent. When they asked him to wait, he did. When they asked him to repeat the key points for the report, he repeated them.
The woman sat on the rear bumper of the police car with a blanket around her shoulders, still shaking. She looked over once and gave Eric a small, fractured nod of thanks. He returned it silently.
The drunk was loaded into the car, still swearing. One of the officers closed the door, then turned back to Eric.
"You were about to step in."
"Yes."
"Good thing we got here first. Still — thanks for staying. Clear witness statements matter."
Eric gave a short nod. He stayed until they confirmed they had everything they needed from him, then left the side street the way he had entered it. Behind him, the police lights kept turning against the walls, and the woman was being guided toward the open door of the second car.
…
"It is truly as the old saying goes," Eric murmured to himself, allowing a small, satisfied smile to cross his face. "Time flies by when you are having fun at work."
He glanced back over the morning without quite meaning to, the way one does when a stretch of time has slipped past faster than expected. He had lost count somewhere after the first dozen people, small kindnesses stacked one on top of another until the hours had simply dissolved between them. When he finally turned his attention inward again, sending a thread of consciousness into the Imperator's Cross to check its progress, the number that greeted him made him pause.
Thirty-nine percent.
Higher than he had expected. Considerably higher.
He sat with that for a moment, turning it over the way he turned over anything that surprised him, unwilling to simply accept good fortune without understanding where it had come from.
"The start is always the slowest part," he thought, letting the realization settle properly. "But once you've gathered enough experience with something, the advantage begins to snowball on its own. This must be why a relic grows more effective the longer, and the more often, a person actually uses it." He allowed himself a small, private smile. "I think I can finally feel that happening. Properly, for the first time."
It made sense, in hindsight. The higher a relic's rank, the more layered and complicated its true nature tended to be, each one holding depths that no amount of borrowed knowledge could reveal all at once. Only time, and use, and the kind of patience most people never bothered to spend, could uncover the rest. Now that he had several relics of his own to draw comparisons between, he could feel that truth settling into him in a way explanation alone had never quite managed.
He let the thought rest there and looked up.
The street had grown busier while he'd been lost in thought, the afternoon light stretching long and gold across the pavement. Eric lowered himself onto a small outdoor seat in front of a modest restaurant, its awning striped and a little faded, chairs scattered loosely across the pavement in front of it. This was the place, according to everything Edward's note had told him. The place Adrian came to, without fail, every single day once school let out.
He settled back, folded his hands loosely in his lap, and waited.