Heavy smoke drifted across the ruined courtyard, settling over the broken edges of the facility like a shroud that refused to lift.
Zekai stepped through the fractured wall of Chamber Twelve.
His crimson-stained clothes moved in the hot wind. His breathing stayed level.
His eyes never left the man standing atop a collapsed slab of concrete.
The rifle in the stranger's hands wasn't built for ordinary warfare. Black metal fused with crimson crystal, ancient runes crawling along the barrel like veins under skin. Worse than any of that — the chain hanging off his waist.
It looked less like a rifle and more like an artifact that had forgotten it was ever meant to be held by human hands.
Dozens of crystal pendants clinked softly against each other. Some sat empty. Others glowed faint from within.
One held a tiny figure in a long black coat. Aldric Marune. Imprisoned.
Not frozen like a corpse in glass. Moving. Watching. Actively looking back out at the world he'd been cut off from.
"...That crystal isn't holding a body." Zekai's voice cut through the heat. "It's holding a person. Alive."
His eyes narrowed to slits.
"You're pulling him out of that thing."
As if the words themselves had triggered something, the wolf pendant stirred, a low growl rattling inside its tiny prison.
Another pendant answered. The raven unfurled one wing, its single glowing eye locking onto Zekai. Even the pendant holding nothing but swirling dark trembled faintly against the man's hip.
One after another, every imprisoned thing woke up.
Not reacting to their owner.
Reacting to the crimson-eyed boy standing across the wreckage.
The Collector caught it instantly. His fingers tightened around the rifle's frame.
"...Quiet. I was saving something delicious for you." He glanced down at the trembling crystals, then lifted his eyes again, expression unreadable.
"You noticed." His gloved fingers brushed the hanging pendants, soothing them still. "Beautiful, aren't they."
"My personal collection."
"Every one of them cost me something to get."
He reached toward the side mechanism of the rifle.
Click.
A fresh, empty pendant slid into place beneath the firing chamber. He didn't look away from Zekai once.
"Once it fires, it belongs to whatever it catches." His thumb rested against the weapon's safety switch. "Every shot needs a prison waiting for it."
Unlike ordinary ammunition, the pendant itself became the round.
"One soul per crystal," he said, almost conversational. "Fill it once, and it's done. No refills." His eyes dragged over Zekai's stance, critical. "So pick carefully. Become a memory in my collection. Or don't."
His thumb tapped once against a small encrypted comm hidden under his collar. No words. No visible signal. Just one deliberate press, and both hands returned to the rifle like nothing had happened.
An explosion tore through the silence.
BOOOOOM!
A wall of molten fire burst upward behind Zekai.
Beyond the courtyard, columns of dark smoke rose off the other ruined sectors of the underground headquarters. Barrier specialists were already bending the smoke back toward the facility with localized resonance fields, preventing anyone above ground in Greyhaven from seeing the true extent of the destruction.
Only a faint orange glow leaking from the underground entrance hinted anything had gone wrong at all.
The world outside kept moving. Nobody up there had any idea what was tearing itself apart underneath their feet.
The fanatic slammed back into the courtyard, concrete and dust exploding outward around him. Clothes shredded. Blood dark across his face. Madness still burned in his eyes, untouched by any of it.
He laughed, spitting blood onto the stone.
"I'm your opponent!"
"I'M THE ONE WHO KILLS HIM!" His magma blade roared back to life.
The Collector sighed, soft and unbothered.
"...Always in such a hurry."
He raised the rifle without another word.
The fanatic charged, screaming.
The Collector pulled the trigger.
Click.
The crystal round drifted through the air in silence.
At the exact same instant, the fanatic's blade came down.
Two attacks. Two entirely different lines of approach.
Both converging on Zekai at once.
From the corridor, Sebastian's heart stopped cold. "No—!"
Zekai didn't panic. Something inside him went unnaturally quiet instead.
The world didn't slow down. His thoughts did.
He caught the fanatic's muscles contracting, weight already shifting to the leading foot.
He caught the Collector's finger settling against the hair-trigger.
The crystal round turned once in the air.
Twice.
Its whole flight path opened up inside his mind — not as one certain line, but a spread of overlapping possibilities, branching out into dozens of paths, then hundreds.
His body moved before the thought behind it had even finished forming.
One small step sideways. The magma blade passed within an inch of his shoulder, cutting nothing but air.
Another calm step. The crystal round drifted past his cheek, close enough to feel the heat off the runes, missing him by a hair.
For the first time, something cracked in the Collector's composed expression.
"...You've survived two Relic rounds." A pause stretched out. "You're the first."
His emerald eye narrowed to a point. "...No wonder the others failed."
For the first time in longer than he cared to count, the Relic Collector's calculations stalled out completely.
Interesting.
His single eye tracked every step Zekai took through the debris.
Not raw speed. The boy never outran a single attack.
He simply stopped standing in the places they were destined to land.
The rifle dropped a fraction in his grip.
He didn't dodge danger. He selected the only surviving path out of a hundred dead ends—each one ending in his death.
A faint, dangerous smile slowly appeared on the shooter's face.
"...Now this..."
"...is a prize worth hunting."
Zekai stared back at him through the shimmer of heat.
"You sound sure of yourself." He took another slow step forward. "Try it. I'm still here."
The fanatic stumbled, overextended from a strike that had cut nothing but smoke.
"Stand still!" His voice cracked, blind fury eating whatever was left of his composure.
He unloaded another wild storm of slashes. The courtyard became a roaring inferno. Concrete exploded under the heat. Reinforced steel melted into sludge. Billowing black smoke swallowed everything in sight.
Inside the chaos, Zekai kept walking. Not fast. Not for show.
Every movement he made was small. Every step landed exactly right.
The Collector lowered his rifle another inch, watching through the smoke.
"...You're not faster than either of us."
"You're just choosing correctly."
Zekai's brow tightened, focus unbroken.
"I just know."
"Where not to be."
For the first time since setting foot in BSA headquarters, genuine curiosity crossed the Collector's face.
"...Impossible."
Behind them the fanatic screamed again, mind fully unraveling at his own inability to land a single hit.
"I SAID LOOK AT ME!"
He threw himself forward, both hands locked around the hilt of his burning blade, the molten edge cutting a clean line through the smoke straight for Zekai's throat.
Zekai didn't turn to look at it. He just waited.
Three.
Two.
One.
Now.
He pivoted on his heel, left hand snapping backward and closing around the fanatic's ankle mid-air with total precision.
The fanatic's pupils shrank to pinpricks behind his cracked mask.
"Wha—?!"
Zekai used the man's own momentum against him, spinning his whole body through the motion.
The fanatic's weight turned into a human projectile, launched at full speed straight toward the Collector.
His eyes went wide with real terror as he traced his own flight path through the air.
The relic round already in motion wasn't headed for Zekai anymore.
It was headed for him.
"...WAIT!" Every trace of fanatic conviction drained out of his face at once.
"DON'T FIRE!" His voice cracked into something close to a child's scream. "IT'S ME!"
For the first time, the Collector's composure shattered outright. His finger had already committed to the trigger. The round had already left the barrel, already living in the space between them, already unstoppable.
And now his own ally was flying directly into its path.
"...Move!" the fanatic screamed into the wind. Too late to rewrite anything now.
The drifting crystal pendant caught three distinct reflections in its glass surface as it closed the distance.
The Hunter.
The Fool.
The Sacrifice.
The relic round burned brighter, ancient symbols igniting along its surface, a low hum of gravity building around it.
Waiting. Ready to accept its next eternal prisoner.
Then the crystal reached him.
✦ End Chapter 40 — The Hunter and the Fool ✦