Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Kael Everwyn sat quietly within the opposition discussion room, deep in thought as he analyzed several matters in silence.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
The faint sounds echoed softly through the room.
Kael slowly lifted his gaze toward the refreshments table positioned near the center of the room.
After a brief pause, he reached into the portable pouch attached to his side and retrieved several thin silver needles.
Without a word, he began testing the food.
One by one, the needles pierced the appetizers, desserts, and smaller snack items arranged neatly across the trays.
After confirming the appetizers, Kael shifted his attention to the drinks and repeated the same process.
Out of the nearly thirty refreshments present, five immediately reacted upon contact with the needles.
The silver darkened almost instantly.
Kael's eyes narrowed slightly.
Not enough to kill immediately, but enough to become troublesome.
Without changing expression, he quietly reinserted the contaminated needles back into the respective items that had reacted.
The remaining clean needles were sealed away into a separate pouch for later sterilization and preservation.
He continued testing.
Several more minutes passed.
Among the remaining items, three additional refreshments produced delayed reactions. The needles darkened more slowly this time.
Kael marked them the same way and returned the needles.
Only after finishing all checks did he finally begin eating the untouched food.
It was acceptable.
After a while, he leaned back slightly in his chair, letting his stomach settle while his gaze drifted upward toward the ceiling.
Then he remembered the covering above.
Right.
Kael stood and moved toward the upper corner beside the doorway, using the wall to push himself upward with controlled movement.
His fingers reached the edge of the ceiling covering.
He stopped.
Footsteps.
Voices.
People were approaching.
Shoot.
Kael froze mid-movement.
Dropping now would create noise. Unnecessary noise.
Annoying.
Click.
His watch activated.
A reflective layer spread over him, bending light and flattening his presence into the surrounding wall. From outside, the corner looked empty.
From within, he could still see everything.
He stayed still.
At first, Kael assumed it was just routine caution.
Still, he listened.
The first set of footsteps was controlled. Even pacing. Familiar structure in movement.
Assistants.
That fit.
The second set was uneven, but deliberate. Slight imbalance in weight distribution. Each step carried a faint sharp click.
High heels.
Kael didn't stop on the sound.
He had already seen that earlier.
During the meeting, the lottery group had been observed briefly. The male wore running shoes. No sound signature worth noting. The female wore heels.
So the second set matched her.
Probably one of the lottery winners.
Two voices accounted for.
The third set remained.
Deeper.
Heavier tone in the voice, but only fragments carried through the wall. The footsteps should have been clearer than they were.
But they weren't.
That was the problem.
Kael narrowed his focus, trying to isolate the rhythm again.
Still nothing clean.
Not assistant cadence. Not lottery pacing. Not any structured movement pattern he could confidently tag.
Unstable signal.
Unknown.
That alone was enough to raise concern.
He had identified two voices without difficulty.
The third should not have been this obscured.
That meant either deliberate suppression of sound… or something interfering with perception.
Kael stayed still, eyes fixed outward through the reflective layer.
He continued listening.
Then—
BANG.
The door swung open hard.
Kael nearly flinched, locked entirely into analysis a moment too late.
Pressed tightly against the upper corner of the wall, Kael carefully looked downward through the reflective layer.
From his angle, he could only see the top of the guy's head.
Marcus.
Kael watched carefully as Marcus slowly scanned the room, his gaze moving across the furniture, walls, refreshments, and ceiling.
For a brief moment, Kael felt some relief.
No normal person would walk into a room and immediately start checking the upper corners of the ceiling.
He should be fine.
Just as that thought crossed his mind—
His eyes met Marcus's.
Kael froze.
The eye contact lasted less than a second, yet it felt unreasonably long.
Several thoughts crossed his mind at once.
First, his earlier analysis had been correct.
Second, the inability to distinguish Marcus's footsteps now made far more sense.
Abnormal.
If Marcus himself was abnormal in some capacity, then the irregularity in his movement patterns was no longer strange.
At the same time, another realization struck Kael.
The concealment layer.
In the tension of the moment, he had nearly forgotten that the reflective system was still active around him. Under normal circumstances, Marcus should not have been capable of seeing anything at all.
And yet—
Something instinctively told Kael that Marcus was looking directly at him.
Not at the wall.
Not at the corner.
At him.
The silence stretched.
Then Marcus's eyes slowly shifted away as though nothing had happened.
He turned back toward the others outside the room before speaking casually.
"This is impressive," he said. "I'm looking forward to seeing what our room will be like."
"Don't you agree, Ms. Rachel?"
"Yes," a female voice replied.
A second later, Marcus closed the door at a normal pace, leaving Kael once again in the stillness of the room, where the faint remnants of sound from the corridor lingered only as muffled movement through the walls, gradually thinning as the group outside began to walk away.
Kael did not move.
Even after the footsteps started fading, he stayed in place, still held in that suspended state of attention, listening until even the residual noise collapsed into nothing he could meaningfully track.
Then he waited.
Not immediately descending, not immediately adjusting, just holding position while the absence of sound settled properly into something stable enough to trust.
Five minutes passed like that.
No return steps.
No change in pressure through the corridor.
No further disturbance.
Only then did Kael finally shift.
The earlier uncertainty about Marcus's movement still sat in his mind, unresolved, because even in memory the pattern refused to form into anything clean, and that lack of structure did not fade just because the room was now quiet.
When he finally moved, it was controlled but slower than before, as he released his grip and descended carefully from the upper corner, landing near the wall with minimal sound before pausing in a low stance to let his body settle back into balance.
His breathing was steady, but the strain from holding position had accumulated enough to register clearly now that he was no longer suspended, so he remained still for a moment longer, letting the tension drop out of his arms and shoulders before continuing.
He wiped the light sweat from his brow without urgency, then glanced back up toward the ceiling covering again, confirming its position before shifting his focus forward.
Only after that did he return to the upper section.
The climb was faster this time, not rushed but efficient, as he retraced his earlier route and positioned himself back beside the concealed point where the cover had been anchored.
A brief pause followed as he aligned everything properly, then he moved in a single controlled action that detached the mechanism cleanly, after which he dropped from the ceiling almost immediately, rotating slightly to control the descent and landing in a low stance with one knee bent and one hand braced against the floor.
The detached cover fell directly into his hand as he stabilized.
Kael closed his fingers around it, held it for a moment, then slowly straightened, exhaling once as his shoulders lifted and settled back down, releasing the remaining tension without breaking composure.
His gaze flicked upward once more, then returned to the object in his hand, confirming the retrieval before his posture returned fully to neutral.