Damian freshened up and dressed in his suit.
He went straight to the garage where Luna was already waiting for him in her school uniform, holding both their helmets.
"Catch!"
She tossed them lightly, and Damian caught them without looking. He took his helmet from her without a word.
He was exhausted from last night's training, his eyes carried the faint redness of someone who hadn't slept, and the silence wasn't rudeness so much as him conserving every ounce of focus. He wore the helmet, mounted the bike, and started the engine.
Luna climbed on behind him and fastened her own helmet.
The engine rumbled beneath them as they pulled out of the garage and onto the road leading toward her school.
For the first few minutes, the ride was silent.
Then Luna's arms tightened around his waist. It was not a casual grip for stability, but a deliberate hug, her cheek pressing against his back.
Damian's shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly.
"You can stop acting when you're with me."
Her voice came through the helmet's communicator, soft and steady.
"I promise I won't judge you. I'll still treat you the same."
Damian didn't answer immediately. The words landed somewhere he hadn't prepared for.
"…Is it that obvious?" he finally replied, voice low.
"I don't know if Mom and Dad can see it as clearly as I can. But I've always been able to see through you easily."
She paused, then continued, her voice losing its usual shyness, replaced by something quieter and more certain.
"I know you better than you know yourself. Or at least, better than the 'you' from yesterday. Mom and Dad told me everything about your memories last night."
Damian said nothing.
"Your behavior has changed a lot. But I can see more from your eyes, they turn cold from time to time, even when you're smiling. The way you carry yourself now… it's different. Before, you used to force your confidence. Now it just comes naturally, like it's always been there, waiting."
Her voice dropped even quieter.
"It's… even more attractive."
The last words were almost a whisper, swallowed by the engine's noise.
Damian didn't catch them clearly, his attention was still caught on the earlier part of her words, on the strange warmth of Luna holding him tighter than she had in years.
'She's behaving like she did when she was younger. Before she got shy around me.'
He smiled inside the helmet, a small, genuine smile that Alessio's face had never learned to make.
"Yeah. I was trying to make it easier for everyone. For myself too. Acting the way I used to… it gives me something to anchor to while I figure out who I am now."
A long pause.
"But I should've known you'd see through me, Luna."
"Be careful, brother…"
Her voice had shifted back to its usual teasing tone, but with an edge of fondness underneath.
"At this rate, you'll develop an acting skill on your status screen."
Damian chuckled, a real chuckle, not the measured sounds he'd been making since the memories returned.
Luna laughed softly against his back.
The rest of the ride passed in a comfortable silence that felt like something neither of them had experienced in a long time.
****
"You go to your class. I want to see my teachers."
Damian parted ways with Luna at the school's entrance and headed toward the faculty wing to inform his former teachers about his results and thank them for their help.
The hallways were quiet. Most students were already in their classrooms.
His footsteps echoed faintly against the polished floors as he walked, his mind still half-lost in memories of last night's training, the bullet that had finally moved, the feeling of Aura flowing through a specialized round, the slow realization that his will could reshape reality if he pushed it hard enough.
Then he heard it.
Panicked voices from a distance.
His head snapped up, instincts already shifting gears.
Then –
BOOOOOM!
The world turned white.
The blast threw him backward, slamming him against the wall with bone-rattling force. His head struck concrete, and for a long moment, all he could see was blinding whiteness and all he could hear was a high, piercing ring.
"Argh…"
His vision slowly returned in stages… blurry shapes becoming recognizable, the ringing in his ears fading into muffled screams and gunfire.
When his sight cleared, he saw them.
Armed men in black clothes, masked and carrying weapons, herding panicked students and teachers toward the center of the hallway. The blast had torn a gaping hole through the outer wall of the school, daylight and dust pouring through the gap.
Terrorists.
'How many are there? And what rank?'
He didn't need numbers yet. He needed to move.
Damian pushed himself to his feet, his ears still ringing, his side aching from where he'd hit the wall.
He slipped into the flow of panicked students running in the opposite direction… blending in, moving fast, his hand sliding into his pocket to grip his bike keys.
His mind was on one thing.
'Luna.'
Every other concern – the terrorists, the bomb, the dead bodies he glimpsed out of the corner of his eye – all of it was background noise compared to the single, overriding need to reach his sister.
As he moved, he ducked into an empty classroom and waited for the crowd to thin. His hand reached inside his blazer and unbuckled his gun holster, easing the weapon free but not drawing it yet.
'I can't use the gun. A single shot will alert every terrorist on this floor and bring them all down on me!'
'I should've asked Dad for a silencer.'
The thought was almost amused in its frustration. A small oversight from this morning that now felt costly.
'No time to dwell on it. I have to find Luna first!'
He peered around the classroom door.
A masked man was walking past the hallway, weapon slung loose, clearly not expecting resistance in this section of the school. His footsteps were casual and confident.
Damian waited until the man's shoulder crossed the doorframe.
Then he moved.
In a single fluid motion, years of Alessio's muscle memory flowing through Damian's body for the first time in combat, he clamped his left hand over the man's mouth from behind and drove the jagged end of his bike keys into the side of the terrorist's neck.
Once, twice, three times, a fourth in rapid succession…
The keys weren't designed for killing. They were metal, sharp enough to pierce but not deep enough to sever cleanly.
So Damian compensated with repetition, punching them into the same spot over and over, widening the wound with each strike.
"!!!"
Gurgle… gurgle…
The terrorist's eyes went wide as he struggled, his body thrashing in Damian's grip, trying to scream.
But Damian's hand was clamped tight over his mouth, and the only sound that escaped was the wet, choking gurgle of blood filling his throat.
The man's hands flailed uselessly against Damian's arm, grabbing, clawing and trying his best.
But… Damian didn't release him.
He held on patiently, his cold expression unchanged, until the terrorist's struggles weakened and finally went limp.
Then he dragged the body back into the classroom and shut the door.
He knelt beside the corpse, searching it methodically. Two knives strapped to the man's belt, a communications device in his jacket pocket, a handgun holstered at his hip, which Damian ignored, since his own was better.
He took the knives.
The blades were short but sharp. Whoever had equipped these terrorists had supplied them properly.
'It's definitely a professional organization!'
He stood up, tested the weight of both knives, one in each hand now, and walked back to the door.
His eyes were colder than they'd been a minute ago.
****
The hallway was a graveyard.
Bodies lay scattered across the polished floors – some students and some teachers. Most were dead... A few were still moving, moaning and dying slowly from wounds nobody was coming to treat.
Damian moved through them like a ghost.
Every terrorist he encountered, he killed them silently, efficiently and mercilessly. One person's throat opened from behind, one had his eye stabbed through the socket into the brain and one had his heart pierced between ribs with such precision that the man didn't even have time to scream.
His movements weren't frantic. Every motion was deliberate and every strike was placed exactly where it would end a life with minimum effort.
An artist performing the craft he'd spent decades mastering.
But as he moved, he saw the bodies of teachers.
Mr. Hendricks – the math teacher who'd given Damian extra lessons after school when he'd struggled with theory.
Mrs. Collier – the portal history teacher who'd always brought homemade cookies on exam days.
Ms. Vega – the young teacher who'd been only twenty-three.
Their bodies lay in positions that told clear stories. None of them had been killed running away.
All of them had died facing their attackers, placing themselves between the terrorists and the students they were trying to protect.
They had died shielding students.
Students just like Luna!
Something cold and terrible bloomed in Damian's chest.
His eyes hardened further, and his movements, already brutal, became something worse.
The next terrorist he caught didn't get a clean death. Damian gouged out his eyes first, pinned him to the floor, cut off his hands, and carved into his torso in deliberate patterns before finally ending him.
The one after that was worse. Damian took some time, making sure the man felt every second of what was being done to him.
The one after that, worse still.
He wanted them to understand, in the final seconds of their lives, what it meant to die afraid.
What it meant to feel helpless while something larger and crueler than them decided exactly how much pain they would experience before the end.
He wanted them to feel what those teachers had felt in their final moments.
'I'm wasting time… I need to be faster.'
He wiped a knife clean against a dead terrorist's jacket and moved on.
After silently killing three more, he reached his destination.
Luna's classroom.
****
The door was open.
Damian stepped inside, and froze.
The classroom was empty of living students.
But it wasn't empty.
Bodies lay scattered across the desks and the floor, still wearing the school uniform Luna wore. Some had died fighting, some from single clean shots, some from worse.
Damian's heart seized.
He moved through the room methodically, checking each body, his breathing shallow, his hands steadier than his mind felt.
Not Luna.
Not Luna.
Not Luna.
Relief crashed through him when he confirmed that none of the bodies were Luna's, but the relief was immediately replaced by something far more dangerous.
'If she's not here, she's been moved somewhere with the other hostages.'
'Which means she's still alive and I still have time!'
But as he was checking the last body, his focus slipped. Just for a few seconds. The weight of emotional relief breaking through his combat awareness long enough for his senses to dull.
He failed to notice the masked man stepping silently out from behind a supply cabinet.
The knife came fast.
Only when Damian turned did he see it, already slicing toward his back.
"Argh!"
He twisted reflexively, his torso rotating sideways in a motion that saved his spine but not his side. The blade bit deep into his ribs, punching through the muscle and scraping against bone.
Pain exploded along his flank.
The terrorist didn't pause. He pressed forward immediately, trying to capitalize on the wound, his knife already arcing for a second strike.
Damian drew one of his own knives and blocked it.
Clang!
The two blades met, sparks flying, and both men locked into close-quarters combat.
No words were exchanged.
No taunts, no demands and no posturing was done.
Just pure, raw killing intent exchanged through their gazes as they fought in brutal silence, knife against knife, step for step, each man trying to open the other's throat.
They wounded each other repeatedly. A slash across Damian's arm, a cut along the terrorist's chest, a gash on Damian's thigh, a stab into the terrorist's shoulder…
But Damian had two things the terrorist didn't.
Forty years of experience in his soul.
And a reason to survive.
"Argh!"
When he finally caught the man's wrist and disarmed him with a sharp twist, the fight ended in one brutal motion. Damian drove his knife into the terrorist's knee, collapsing him, then followed up with a strike to the throat that didn't kill, just disabled.
He wanted this one alive.
He grabbed the man by the hair and ripped off his mask.
"Tell me where the students are."
"Hehe…"
The terrorist's grin was defiant despite the blood running down his chin.
"They're gathered in the most spacious area we could find. The Seminar Hall on this floor."
His voice carried mockery, not fear.
"But that's not for you to worry about, kid. Unlike me, the ones guarding the hostages are all E rank awakened. You wouldn't be able to handle them."
He chuckled with a wet and dismissive sound.
"Go home before you get yourself killed, little–"
Damian didn't say a word.
He raised his knife and started carving the man's right eye out of its socket .
"Mmph!!!"
The terrorist tried to scream, but Damian's hand was already clamped over his mouth, muffling the sound into a strangled whine.
Blood poured down the man's face as the blade worked patiently.
The mockery vanished from the terrorist's remaining eye within seconds, replaced by shock, then horror, then a dawning understanding of what he was looking at.
This wasn't a kid playing hero!
The boy kneeling over him tortured with the quiet practice of someone who had done this many times before.
Someone who didn't ask questions, someone who didn't threaten, someone who just worked, slowly and methodically, making each second last longer than the one before.
The terrorist realized with sudden, terrible clarity that this kid was more of a criminal than he was.
His one remaining eye filled with pleading.
Damian ignored the plea.
When the eye was finished, he lifted his hand from the man's mouth.
The terrorist opened his mouth to scream… desperate now, terrified and begging for anyone to hear him and rescue him from the monster cutting him apart.
But… Damian's other hand shot out.
He caught the man's tongue between two fingers.
'No…'
The terrorist's eye locked onto Damian's – cold, unblinking and almost daring him to make another sound.
Then the knife came down.
Slice!
The tongue came away in a single clean motion.
The terrorist thrashed silently on the floor, his hands clawing at his face, his mouth opening in screams that made no sound. Blood bubbled up through his lips and spilled down his chin.
But he didn't scream aloud.
He couldn't.
He didn't dare to, because the devil kneeling over him would carve him apart piece by piece before his comrades could reach him!
Damian reached for a notebook and pen lying on a nearby desk, knocked loose during some earlier struggle, and tossed them at the terrorist.
The man flinched but caught them reflexively.
"Write the total number of your allies in the Seminar Hall and their ranks."
The terrorist wrote immediately and desperately. His hand shook so badly the letters were nearly illegible, but he pressed through, scrawling everything he knew.
He even volunteered extra information, the total number of terrorists spread throughout the entire school, the rough positions of other patrol units, anything that might convince this monster that he was worth keeping alive.
When he finished, he looked up, trembling.
'I hope he won't kil–'
His thoughts cut off as Damian's knife came down one final time.
His head struck the floor with a wet thud.