The beautiful red setting sun illuminated the land of Paris, spilling long and low across rooftops and cobblestones alike, gilding the edges of every window it touched until the whole city seemed to glow faintly from within, like something quietly burning down to its last, gentlest hour.
Many people were making their way home in that light, unhurried, the day's noise softening into something calmer as evening settled in. Some had stopped altogether, drawn out onto balconies or into parks, faces tilted upward, content to simply stand still and watch the sky do something none of them could quite put into words.
Anna was among them. She stood on the roof of her house with her daughter Anya beside her, the two of them framed against the fading light, and a small, quiet smile had found its way onto her face, the kind that didn't need to explain itself to anyone. There was something almost startling in how different she looked now compared to that morning, compared to the version of her who had watched the sunrise with hollow eyes and nothing left to hope for. The sun had gone all the way around the sky since then, and somewhere in that stretch of hours, so had she.
Not far away, on a footpath threading through the same fading light, Eric was walking too, though there was no stillness in him, no small smile waiting to surface. He still wore his Mike Jackson persona, using Truth, the Imperator's Cross swinging faintly from his left earlobe with each step, catching the same red light that gilded the rooftops above him, though on him it looked less like warmth and more like something sharp being sharpened further.
Where Anna had spent her day slowly climbing back out of despair, Eric had spent his descending steadily into exhaustion; one small act of goodness after another chipped away at whatever reserves he'd started the morning with. He had done a great deal today, more than he cared to count, and he was tired now in a way that had settled into both his mind and his body equally, the two forms of fatigue blurring together until he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.
It had started with convincing a woman not to end her own life, sitting with her long enough to hand her some fragile, borrowed version of hope. From there it had only kept going: helping strangers whose names he'd already half forgotten, checking in on Anna again, trying to make sense of exactly how the Imperator's Cross actually worked beneath its surface. He'd spent hours divining after that, and if he was honest with himself, he'd lost his way more times during it than he cared to admit, each wrong turn eating further into a day that had already felt too short for everything he needed to do. And somewhere near the end of it all, there had been a teenager, wide-eyed and overwhelmed by a world he didn't understand yet, who needed guiding and answering and reassuring in equal measure.
Eric checked the Imperator's Cross out of habit as he walked, and found it sitting at forty percent now, not the thirty-nine it had been earlier. Uriel hadn't returned yet, which meant, as far as Eric could tell, that the beggar he'd hired had actually done what he'd been asked to do, faithfully, without cutting corners.
"He is quite the honest man," Eric murmured, unable to help a small note of genuine approval creeping into the thought. He'd been fully prepared to watch the old man die at Uriel's hand if he'd taken that money and spent it on cigarettes or liquor instead. It was almost a relief, in a distant, detached sort of way, that it hadn't come to that today.
Eric had considered this method before, hiring beggars like this one and paying them to go do good in his place. It was less efficient, he knew that much going in. Fewer good deeds came out of it, and what did come out carried less weight, since he wasn't the one directly doing the helping, wasn't fully present in the intent behind it. But there was little else to be done about that. He couldn't very well take time off from his work as a police officer every single day just to wander the city, being the kind of man who helped everyone he crossed paths with.
Yes, there are chances that many people won't do as he says and end up dying, but is it his fault? It is their own greed that will make the angels he sent with them kill them. In the first place, most of those beggars were in their current position due to their poor decisions in life. If, even after getting a chance in life, they decided to chase their addictions, then they deserve worse than death.
Some beggars might even scheme against the others, implicating one another to seem more deserving in his eyes, but there was nothing Eric could do about that either. Training them properly, teaching them to work honestly and cooperatively, would take more time and effort than he currently had to spare. He was also reluctant to use the Imperator's Cross to influence their minds directly, not out of any real restraint on his part, but because he remained inwardly wary of the Church itself, some quiet instinct warning him to hold back from using its full potential until he understood exactly what he was dealing with.
After walking for a few more minutes, passing shop after shop and face after face without really seeing any of them, Eric reached a crosswalk. He didn't step off the curb, though. He simply stopped there and looked up at the setting sun, and in that stillness, the full weight of everything waiting for him settled in at once.
There was his friend's upcoming marriage to think about, and what it might mean for him. There was his own need to keep growing stronger, and the delicate work of staying a good ally to the two great bodies he'd aligned himself with, without ever letting either of them believe they could simply use him when convenient. He needed to keep an escape route open for himself at all times, always, without exception. He needed to stay wary of the Truth Seekers too, who had remained utterly silent since he'd become aware of them, acting as though he didn't exist at all, and that silence unsettled him more than open hostility would have.
He also had to safeguard himself against the Organisation, whose intentions toward him he still didn't fully understand. He needed to reach out to Voyage and Edward for information, to probe deeper into the true shape of this Paris operation before it swallowed him whole. He had his own advancement ritual to prepare for, resources he didn't even know he needed yet, and that voice in his head had told him to kill, a task he hadn't touched and didn't know how to approach. There was the matter of why he needed to remain a virgin, a requirement he still didn't understand the reasoning behind. There was the constant, quiet effort of not losing control. And beneath all of it sat the deepest mystery of all, the secrets behind the Church of Serenity and the voice that had lived in his head for years now, offering guidance he'd never fully trusted.
And, somehow, more urgent than any of it: he still needed to farm good deeds.
There were so many threats layered over each other that Eric could hardly separate one from the next. The road ahead was thick with uncertainty, some of it external and easy enough to name, some of it internal and harder to face, some of it mysterious in ways he hadn't even begun to unravel, some of it entirely unknown to him still, and some of it he understood only vaguely, in fragments, like pieces of a picture he hadn't been given enough of to see clearly.
And yet none of it frightened him. If anything, standing there cataloging every danger waiting for him, Eric felt something closer to excitement stirring beneath the exhaustion. A life without trouble had never appealed to him much. He didn't dislike peace, exactly, but peace alone had never been enough to make him feel truly alive. It was struggle, setback, the constant press of difficulty against his back, that lit something in him no calm, comfortable life ever could.
This entire Paris operation remained deeply mysterious to him, a puzzle he still hadn't found the edges of. He had found himself pulled into it, trapped here in ways he didn't fully choose, but he'd also come to understand that danger like this was often where real opportunity hid, tucked just behind the risk of it. He thought of the relics he'd already gathered from so many different organizations in such a short time, more than seemed reasonable for someone who barely understood his own place in any of this. Someone, somewhere, clearly saw value in him. He didn't know why yet. Maybe that didn't matter as much as he thought it should.
Taking a deep breath, Eric turned left and kept walking. The sky had slipped from red into something closer to true dark now, and he needed to get home soon. Ruby would be waiting for him.
As he walked, his mind kept circling through the same tangle of thoughts it had been sorting through all evening, restless and unwilling to settle. Then, without warning, one particular question rose out of the noise, sharper than the rest, a question that had been quietly gnawing at him for longer than he wanted to admit, one he realized now he'd been avoiding without ever consciously deciding to.
Eric stopped walking. He looked up at the dark sky above him and asked himself, plainly, "What is my ambition?"
He had once had a dream. A goal, a want, some clear meaning that had shaped his life back when he was young. But somewhere between who he'd been then and who he was now, he'd lost hold of it entirely. He couldn't remember how it had slipped away from him, or when exactly it had happened. There was only the absence of it now, a blank space where something important used to sit. And if he couldn't find his way back to remembering what that goal had been, the consequences waiting for him would be nothing short of catastrophic.
Why would that matter so much, though? What did remembering some half-forgotten childhood dream have to do with something as serious as his advancement? And yet it did matter, more than he wanted it to. If he couldn't remember his dream, couldn't become clear and certain about what he actually wanted from his life, then advancement wouldn't be the only thing beyond his reach. His life itself might end along with it, the moment he finally lost control for good.
There were six ranks an Aura user could climb through, starting from the weakest, Nova, all the way up to the strongest, a True Supernova, and every single rank carried its own method of control, a way of increasing how firmly a user held the reins over their own Aura, keeping its subconscious from ever rising and consuming their mind entirely. Every method of control, without exception, was built from three steps.
The percentages themselves meant little to Eric standing there in the dark, but he ran through them anyway, the way he always did when his mind needed somewhere steady to land. The first step, he reminded himself, took a person from one percent up to forty. The second carried them from forty-one to seventy. And the third, the final stretch, closed the gap from seventy-one all the way to a hundred. Once someone reached that full hundred percent, once their control was absolute, the risk of ever losing themselves to their own Aura dropped away to almost nothing. Only then would the truth of the advancement ritual and the resources required for it finally reveal themselves.
Control, Eric thought bitterly, watching his own breath fog faintly in the cooling evening air. As if that were the easy part.
The actual process of advancing was something else entirely, and he found himself walking through its shape again now, slowly, like tracing an old scar with his thumb. Identify yourself. Recognize yourself. Accept yourself. Three steps, and every one of them asked something of a person that no sword or technique ever could. It wasn't about strength at all. It was about understanding, plainly and without flinching, exactly who you were.
He'd finished the first step so long ago it barely felt real to him anymore: that early discipline of building a list of morals and holding to them without exception, the way he still did now, the way Max did, the way every Aura user who'd made it this far still did, long after the step itself was behind them. That part had never been the problem.
It's the second step that's going to be the death of me, Eric thought, and something almost like a humorless laugh caught in his throat before he swallowed it back down.
Recognizing yourself. Knowing who you loved and who you hated, without excuses. Understanding the gap between how you presented yourself to the world and who you actually were underneath all of it. Being honest about your own feelings, ruthlessly honest, sorting the real ones from the ones you'd only convinced yourself were real. Knowing what you wanted. Knowing where you were walking and why. Every small thing mattered; he'd learned that the hard way. There was no shortcut through it, no way to fake your way past your own reflection. You simply had to be true to yourself, all the way down, whether you liked what you found there or not.
And then, if you survive that, Eric thought, you get to accept it.
The third step waited past the second like a door he wasn't ready to open yet. Acceptance. Sometimes, he knew, a person carried pieces of themselves they didn't even know existed, buried so deep that only the honesty of the first two steps could ever drag them up into the light. And once they surfaced, they didn't always fit the picture a person had spent their whole life building of who they were. Sometimes that picture simply broke.
He thought of the Church of Serenity without meaning to, the memory rising uninvited the way it always did, sharp and cold even now. He'd nearly lost himself there, that day. He understood why now, standing here with a clearer head than he'd had in the moment. Confessing everything out loud, laying himself bare in front of strangers, had dragged him straight into the third step before he was ready for it, before the second step beneath him had finished settling into place. He'd only been at sixty percent control then. Sixty. And the shock of accepting something he hadn't fully recognized yet had cracked something open in his mind, just enough for the subconscious weight of his own Aura to lunge for the opening.
I was lucky, Eric admitted to himself, and the admission cost him something to make. It wasn't fatal. But it could have been.
That was the part that still unsettled him, months later. The first two steps existed for a reason beyond simple order. They cleared the fog. They simplified everything a person carried about themselves down into something focused, something they could actually hold in both hands before they were asked to accept it. Skip ahead, even by accident, even out of desperation in a quiet confession booth, and the third step became something closer to a blade than a mirror.
So where does that leave me?
He already knew the answer, had known it for a while now, even if he'd been quietly avoiding looking at it straight on. The first step, done. The second, nearly finished, so close he could almost feel the edge of it. But two questions stood between him and the rest of it, two questions he kept circling back to and then flinching away from every single time.
Do I actually love Ruby?
The thought arrived the way it always did, unwelcome and immediate, twisting something uncomfortable in his chest. Or am I just using her? Using what she gives me. Using the shape of a normal life she lets me borrow for a few hours at a time. He didn't linger on it. He never let himself linger on it. The question surfaced, and he pushed it back under almost on instinct, the same way he had every other time it had come close to the surface.
And the second question.
That one he couldn't push away nearly as easily. It had been sitting in his chest all evening, patient and unmoving, waiting for him to finally stop walking and actually look at it.
What is my goal? What is my ambition?
He stood there a moment longer under the darkening sky, no answer coming to him, only the quiet, familiar ache of not knowing, and somewhere underneath that ache, something that felt uncomfortably close to fear.
He has been roaming around his whole life, confused, unaware of what he wants, what meaning he wants to give to his life. He has tried many things and achieved so much, but he still feels empty and lost inside his heart. It feels suffocating. It is like the answer is right there, but he is unable to grasp it. It is a very frustrating feeling.
He has been roaming around his whole life, confused, unaware of what he wants, what meaning he wants to give to his life. He has tried many things and achieved so much, but he still feels empty and lost inside his heart. It feels suffocating. It is like the answer is right there, but he is unable to grasp it. It is a very frustrating feeling.
Eric stood at the edge of the crosswalk, unmoving, the question still hanging in the air around him like something he could almost reach out and touch if he just stretched his fingers far enough. What is my ambition? He turned the words over again, and again, searching for some crack in himself where the answer might be hiding, some forgotten drawer he'd simply never thought to open. Nothing came. There was only the same hollow space that had always been there, quiet and patient, refusing to fill no matter how hard he stared into it.
His sky-blue eyes darkened slowly, bleeding into black by degrees, the way ink spreads through water when no one's watching closely enough to catch the exact moment it happens. The easy, practiced smile he wore as naturally as his own skin slipped from his face without his permission, leaving something colder underneath it, something far more honest.
He turned his head forward, not really looking for anything, just needing somewhere to point his eyes that wasn't inward. That was when he saw them.
A young mother stepped out of a shop just ahead, her son beside her, a football tucked under one small arm like a trophy he refused to put down. The boy was practically vibrating with excitement, bouncing on his heels as he looked up at her, his voice carrying easily across the quiet street.
"I love you, mama! I will practise hard and become a great footballer! Even Ronaldo will be in awe of my skills!"
The mother laughed, bright and unguarded, the sound of it carrying none of the exhaustion Eric felt sitting heavy behind his ribs. She reached down and ruffled the boy's hair, nodding along with his declaration like it was already a certainty rather than a dream, and took his small hand in hers, the two of them turning together toward home, already lost in some conversation Eric was too far away to hear.
Eric didn't move.
He watched them go, watched the boy's easy, unshaken certainty in exactly what he wanted from his life, watched the mother's effortless belief in him, and something in his chest pulled tight and refused to loosen. That boy knew. He was eight years old, maybe nine, and he already knew, clean and simple and whole, exactly what he wanted to become. He would say it out loud to anyone who'd listen, unashamed, unafraid of being wrong. He hadn't lost it yet. He hadn't buried it under years of survival and strategy and the slow, grinding work of simply getting through each day.
I used to be like that.
The thought arrived quietly, almost gently, and somehow that gentleness made it worse. Eric could feel the shape of something old stirring beneath it, some faint impression of a boy who had once wanted something too, who had once said it out loud without flinching. He reached for it instinctively, the way his tongue might search for a missing tooth, and found only smooth space where the memory should have been.
When did I lose it?
He didn't know. That was the worst part, the part that sat in his stomach like a stone. Not that he'd forgotten his dream; people forgot things. That was simply what time did to a person. What frightened him was that he couldn't even remember losing it. There had been no single moment, no clear before and after he could point to and say, there, that's where it slipped away from me. It had simply gone, quietly, sometime between who he used to be and who he'd become, and he hadn't even noticed it leaving.
His hands curled slightly at his sides, not quite fists, just some small, involuntary tension he wasn't fully aware of. The mother and son had already turned the corner ahead, their voices fading into the general hum of the street, but Eric kept staring at the space where they'd been anyway, as if the answer might still be standing there if he looked hard enough.
What did I want? Before all of this. Before the Aura, before the Church, before Ruby, before any of it. What did that boy want?
Nothing answered him. The street stayed quiet, the evening settling further into full dark around him, streetlights flickering on one by one down the block like the city itself was exhaling. Eric remained still for a long moment, black eyes fixed on nothing, feeling the full, suffocating weight of not knowing settle over him more heavily than it ever had before.
It would have been easier, he thought distantly, if the answer were simply gone. Erased. If there had never been a dream at all, he could have made peace with that, built something new from nothing. But he could feel the shape of it, faintly, the outline of something that used to matter enormously to him, sitting just beyond his reach, close enough to torment him and far enough to stay hidden. It was like standing in a dark room he'd once known perfectly, certain the furniture was still there, unable to find a single piece of it with his hands out in front of him.
He heaved a long, slow breath, and when he let it out, some of the tension eased from his shoulders, though none of it left his chest.
I'll find it, he told himself, and the thought felt less like comfort and more like a vow forced through gritted teeth. Whatever it was. Whatever it still is. I'll find it again, even if I have to tear my own mind apart looking for it.
His eyes slowly bled back from black to their familiar sky-blue, the change as quiet and unremarkable as it had been sudden, and the ghost of his usual smile crept back onto his face, practiced and easy, a mask sliding back into place over something that hadn't actually healed at all.
Eric turned left and started walking again, his footsteps steady against the pavement, the sky above him finally settling into full darkness. Somewhere ahead, Ruby was waiting for him, and behind him, a boy with a football was still dreaming out loud without a single doubt in his heart.
Whatever Eric's goal had once been, it remained unclear now, buried somewhere he couldn't yet reach, forgotten in a way that felt less like loss and more like a wound still waiting to fully show itself. But he would find it. One day, however long it took, however far he had to dig, he would find it again. And when he finally did, he would do whatever it took, without hesitation, without mercy for anything standing in his way, to become the man who could actually reach it.