The council chamber in the flying castle that hovered over the Beast Glades had excellent acoustics.
Lymur had noticed this the first time he'd been here and was noticing it again now, specifically because it meant that every voice in the room resounded perfectly regardless of where it was coming from, which was not something he was finding particularly amusing at the moment.
King Dawsid Greysunder was speaking.
"— left the facility without any prior consultation with the council. The protocol established at the time of the Arbiter's appointment was explicit! Any active operation conducted under the mandate requires — "
Lymur's pinky finger moved toward his ear, about to pick on it, but he stopped it.
Nope, he told himself. I'm in a meeting. I'm a professional.
His finger fell back to his side.
" — the operational report was due within six hours of the site departure, not the following morning, and not delivered by courier as if this were a — "
That was Merial Eralith now, which meant Dawsid had either finished or paused. The switch was so smooth it felt like the same complaint, just coming from a different mouth. Her voice was sharper than his, though — less loud, more precise.
" — chain of accountability exists for a reason, and circumventing it on the first operation sets a precedent that the council cannot simply — "
Priscilla Glayder this time. Lymur was always fond of the human queen — in more ways than one. Aside from her obvious and mature "older lady" type of beauty that Lymur found especially likable (and himself weak against), he recognized her cadence.
Lymur was standing impatiently in the center of the chamber with his arms crossed and his face technically attentive. He was still tracking what was being said — he always did; a toned-down and passive Theosophy made that hard to ignore — but it had stopped giving him anything new about four minutes ago.
Since then, it had just been circling the same points.
Left the facility without consulting — yes, we've covered that.
Report delivered by courier — yes, also covered.
Responsibilities of the Arbiter —
"Has he forgotten," Priscilla said, with a voice Lymur always found distracting in its strange delicacy, "what the responsibilities of this position actually entail? The Arbiter is not a — "
Gosh, what's wrong with me? She's a married lady and a mother of two, Lymur. Snap the hell out of it.
He set aside, with some effort, his private attraction to the human queen and cleared his throat.
"Ahem."
It was a small, quiet sound. Nothing special — a cough you'd hear in any meeting. It didn't cut her off so much as end the sentence, the way a door closing ends a conversation on the other side.
But the room went quiet, nonetheless.
It wasn't a polite silence, where people pause to let someone talk. This was when everyone suddenly remembered who was standing in the middle of the room — something the last ten minutes had almost made them forget.
Lymur looked around at the council. Six rulers of three kingdoms, each having governed for years. Each of them had handled difficult people, difficult situations, and what it meant to hold authority over large numbers of other people. They were not, individually or collectively, individuals who were easily made uncomfortable.
He watched each of them undergo exactly that from a mere clearing of a throat.
The titles and the protocols are real and I take them seriously enough, but this room should know that my being here is a choice I'm making.
He uncrossed his arms and put his hands on his pockets.
"I left the facility," he said, looking at Dawsid, "because I'd already seen everything worth seeing. There was nothing else that required my presence. Waiting at a site I'd already scavenged to satisfy a reporting protocol seemed like a damn poor use of time, so I didn't."
Dawsid's jaw moved. He said nothing.
"As for you, the report was delayed," he continued, turning to Merial, "because the volume of information I gathered needed proper organization before presentation. A disorganized report would have wasted your time more than a six-hour delay, so I made a judgment call." He paused. "I stand by it."
Merial held his gaze. She was better at that than most people in the room.
He turned to Priscilla.
His eyes burned a bloody red as he paid an almost threatening kind of closer attention, the glow at the edge of the iris shining like a pulsing crimson star.
Priscilla did not look away.
"I understand my position. Fully," he said, quietly. "I'd ask that you also understand yours. In this relationship."
Then he exhaled, and the seriousness of the moment vanished, and he was just himself again — standing in the middle of the council in a formal uniform, looking at six people who governed a continent with an out-of-place, irrational casual face and attitude.
"Now." He clapped his hands together once, lightly. "I've already received the preliminary details on the next target."
He pulled the relevant file from his coat and dropped it open on the nearest table surface.
"The Stark family, right? A noble, Sapin-based, multi-generational house."
He turned a page.
"Also a front organization for WICKED, probably, based on the communication records I pulled from the facility. Cartel operations across all three kingdoms for the past forty years. Human trafficking, sexual violence, forced labor, illegal augmentation trials."
He paused, looking at the page with that flat, neutral expression of someone reading something they already understood, just saying it out loud because the room needed to hear it.
"The methodology part of is not pleasant reading. I don't recommend it before a meal."
The room was very quiet.
"They have private military capability as well," he continued. "This council hasn't moved on them because of money and politics. Which I understand, kind of."
He closed the file.
"But the determination has apparently been made that the cost-benefit has changed, and I've been asked to address it."
"We would ask," Priscilla said, in a voice that had recovered its composure, "that the operation be conducted discreetly. The Stark name carries big weight in certain circles and a public — "
"If there are civilian casualties," Dawsid interrupted, smiling viciously, "that falls entirely on your— "
"It won't."
Dawsid stopped.
"Civilian casualties," Lymur said, looking at him directly, "won't happen. I don't work that way if I can help it." He picked up the file and tapped it once against the table to straighten it. "Unless the Starks have started stationing civilians in their private compound as a defense strategy, in which case we have a different and more interesting problem."
Nobody laughed. He hadn't expected anyone to.
He tucked the file into his coat and nodded and turned on his heel.
His cape fluttered behind him as he walked.
He heard Blaine Glayder say something to one of the advisors. He didn't reach back for it. Whatever it was, it was their business.
The chamber doors opened at his approach and closed behind him.
The Starks, he thought.
He'd read the file properly. The methodology he'd mentioned to the council — he'd read it at two in the morning in his office, Gerald on the windowsill, the rain still going outside. It wasn't exactly a good read, considering what this particular group of people did for a living.
It won't be pretty again. The next operation was already taking shape in his mind. He walked toward the exit. But then, nobody said it would be.
Alea was standing on the hallway as he passed. It looked like she was waiting, but he didn't want to assume.
"Your first job and you're already getting yelled at," she said, tucking a couple strands of hair behind her hair. "You're better at this than I was."
Lymur smiled gently and scoffed jokingly. "I'll tell you more if you treat me to lunch."
Alea narrowed her eyes, frowned, and hurried into step beside him. "Isn't it your turn? If I remember right, food was on me last time."
Lymur just chuckled as they left the flying castle together. Alea was busy as a Lance, and Lymur was an adventurer, a professor, and an Arbiter. Both of them were good friends, but they had duties and responsibilities — at times heavy, at other times not. But it was precisely because of it that they could appreciate little moments and hang-outs more, since matching free time come far and few between.
···---⚜---···
The bathroom mirror showed him his reflection. He stood there with his toothbrush, looking at his own face while knowing this was pointless. Not the brushing — the brushing he understood. The mint and the routine before bed was actually satisfying.
What was pointless was the skincare that came after, using the products on the shelf, each one picked with more thought than most of his combat decisions.
His skin could not be blemished. It was not a possibility available to it. His body was maintained at a cellular level, and no amount of late nights or bad weather or forgetting to moisturize was going to change that. He could even choose his hair length.
He was, in every meaningful sense, immune to the concept of a bad skin day.
But he applied the toner anyway.
For the feel of it, he thought, patting it in at the cheekbones the way the instructions said. Just for the feel of it.
He'd never really thought about this habit too much. He knew, somewhat, that his apartment was more expensive than it needed to be, the wardrobe bigger than it needed to be, and the skincare lined up in front of him probably cost more than most adventurers made in a week.
He'd always chalked it up to having money and liking nice things.
Which was true.
Partly.
The rest of it sat somewhere he didn't look at too closely—the part of him that knew, without really putting it into words, that the golden-eyed ghost in his dreams didn't care about any of this.
The ghost was old and vast. Way past things that came in bottles on a bathroom shelf. It had seen everything, been most things. As far as Lymur could tell, his ghost had no thoughts at all about moisturizer.
And I do, he thought, applying the last step. So we're not the same.
And to push back against the idea that the ghost was his "other self," he leaned into building habits he knew the ghost didn't have—small, intentional differences, just to carve out an identity that felt entirely his own and not artificial or "archetyped."
It was not a rebellious phase against his creator, exactly. He didn't think of it that way, even in his own head. It was just—his.
This small part of his life that had nothing to do with where he came from. The products or the apartment, even the way he'd spent a dozen gold coins on a coat last month without thinking twice.
He put the products back in order and turned off the bathroom light.
···---⚜---···
He wore his favorite pajamas tonight. It was dark blue, very soft, and seemed worth the price. He pulled them on, climbed into bed, and arranged the duvet.
He stared at the ceiling for a moment.
Then, he closed his eyes and chose sleep. His body let him do that if he wanted to. The darkness behind his eyes shifted into something deeper, real sleep taking over, and the apartment settled into its usual quiet.
It was 11:47 PM.
......
At 3:04 AM, the window opened.
Not noisily. Not with any of the sounds that windows made when they were opened. It opened and the five figures that came through it moved into the apartment's darkness and were part of it immediately, their concealment so well-maintained that the air itself seemed to accept them as belonging there.
They were humanoid. Tall, all of them, with a dense aura built for violence. The horns rising from their heads weren't for show. They moved through the apartment without sound.
The five of them gathered and looked at the person in the bed — deeply asleep, completely still, the duvet arranged with suspicious neatness.
"This is him?" One voice, male, muttered low.
"Yes." A woman answered. "Prepare the dosage. Make sure it's concentrated enough. We need him under for the full transport window."
"Why don't we just kill him here?"
A pause that was its own answer.
"That isn't the mission."
"Right, whatever."
They got to work efficiently and masterfully. The syringe that appeared from the lead figure's coat was large and the needle found the inside of Lymur's elbow in the dark.
Nothing happened for a moment.
Then nothing continued happening, which was apparently the correct result, and they bagged him with a containment wrap designed for exactly this, sealed at the wrists and the ankles with bindings.
Four minutes after coming through the window, they were back out of it.
......
The Beast Glades received them an hour later, somewhere in the deep middle section where the trees were enormous. They moved at speed through the upper air, the one carrying Lymur keeping him wrapped against his chest.
For an hour, the assignment proceeded exactly as it should have.
Then the carrying man looked down at the bag.
Curiosity, he thought. Just a moment.
He reached down and tapped the outside of the pajama pocket. Testing, checking if there was anything there.
Lymur's eyebrows moved. Just slightly. Then the bag moved. The bindings at his wrists pulled tight for a moment, then loosened. The arm that pushed through the sealed front didn't really tear it open—it just made it clear the seal wasn't needed anymore.
A fist connected with the carrying man's face.
The impact was purely instinctual, just the first thing a body did when something touched it while it was asleep and was very good at defending itself regardless. The man dropped into the Beast Glades like a stone, hitting the ground a second later with enough force to send a shockwave through the canopy.
The remaining four reacted right away. Mana flared in four different colors and shapes — black crystal spikes manifesting along one's forearms, black flames building in another's hands, void-dark wind coalescing around a third, the fourth drawing shields of compressed force.
They were trained and they were fast and the four of them moved as one unit, simultaneous, their attacks converging on the space where Lymur was now hovering.
He was still in the bag.
His eyes were still closed.
The attacks hit the space around him—and vanished as a void opened between his palms.
It wasn't big. It shouldn't have been able to take anything like that. But it did anyway, pulling in the spikes, the flames, and the wind all at once.
In the dark of the Beast Glades' night sky, the void was visible as an absence so complete it defined itself — black past the point where black was a color, bordered in eerie blue disk where spacetime pressed against it, straining against something that shouldn't exist at all.
The void pulsed. The blackness of it slowly went white, the blue borders went red. The whiteness it produced was so absolute, it washed the sky above the Glades in a moment of pure illumination that the nocturnal things below would feel in their instincts for weeks.
Then it released.
The repulsive force propagated the same instant it formed—instant, one-directional, the unreasonable violence of a pure spatial void's pressure releasing.
The four in the air were caught in it. Three of them held while the fourth—the frontliner, the one built to take what others couldn't—took it head-on across his upper body. And past a certain point, there just wasn't an upper body anymore.
He and his shield were scattered through the air over the Beast Glades in a way that stopped being meaningful almost immediately.
The man who'd been punched into the ground reached them a minute later, his jaw clearly out of alignment and his eyes doing worse. He took in the scene—four left standing, one gone, and their target now floating in the air between them in torn pajamas, eyes still closed.
The man's mana flared, joining the others.
They looked at him.
He floated lazily, eyes shut. He looked like a person who had rolled over in bed and not yet decided whether to wake up.
Not one of them made the mistake of thinking that was accurate.
But despite knowing, one of them attacked anyway. The black spike was large and rotating and moving fast enough that the air carved itself around it in a visible line of disturbance. It crossed the distance and hit, the impact snapping Lymur's head back.
A thin line of blood traced down from a small scratch at his hairline. It healed before it reached his jaw.
His eyes finally opened.
......
His posture changed in the same moment. He looked around him, looked at the four of them, and wiped the blood with the back of his hand.
"Were you guys trying to kidnap me?" he asked.
The woman looked at him. " "You aren't supposed to be able to move," she said, her voice carrying disciplined control that was clearly holding back something closer to genuine shock.
"Yeah?" He stretched his neck to one side, then the other. His eyes had gone deep and red in the dark sky, the glow feeling extremely unsettling against the natural dark around them.
"Tried to drug me or something? Too bad." He finished the stretch and looked at them with a cold smile. "I'm sorry if you thought you'd get to leave alive. It seems I fought you in my sleep." He tilted his head. "Didn't mean to make it complicated."
"In your sleep?" One of the men asked. "Pesky little lesser, you expect us to — "
"I don't expect anything from you," Lymur cut off. The cold smile stayed exactly where it was. "I just felt a little bad that you had to go through that part." He looked at the space where the frontliner had been.
"I'm not exactly a pretty sight in my sleep, you see."
···---⚜---···
He fought them for twenty-two minutes.
He could have ended it in ten. Probably in seven, if he stopped performing the calculus of information-gathering against the calculus of finishing it.
But he needed to know things, and the only way to learn things about people like this was to stay in close contact with them long enough for them to start making assumptions about where his limits were.
Their magic is wrong, he thought, deflecting a void-wind spiral with the flat of his forearm and letting it scrape along the sleeve. Not wrong as in bad. Wrong as in — nonstandard.
Dicathen's combat vocabulary was broad. He'd spent years seeing what this continent's mages could do, what its adventurers could do, what its Lances could do, and the Asuras he'd encountered had pushed past that vocabulary into something larger but somewhat still related.
These five didn't feel related. They felt like they'd learned combat from a completely different source and the source had different ideas about what mana was for.
The black crystal. The texture of their void-attribute attacks. The way they moved as a unit — like a shared tactical grammar that produced perfect teamwork without needing communication.
They're from the other continent, he thought, letting a punch hit his ribs to watch how the follow-up came. I'm almost certain.
The follow-up was a spinning kick from his left and a spike manifestation from above, simultaneous, designed to catch whatever the body did to absorb the rib impact. He moved through both with more effort than he would have liked to admit, which was useful data.
If these five showed up in an almost imminent war, he thought, blocking a black flame burst with a Confluence compression that ate it, and I mean just any of these five, against a conventional Lance unit —
It was not a comfortable scenaario.
He wasn't scared for himself. That wasn't the feeling. He was scared for the Lances, for the soldiers, for every person who would show up to the war they all knew was coming. He was scared for Alea or Aya and Vanesy and the students in the Team Fighting Mechanics class who were very good and would not be good enough—never be good enough.
He intentionally let a punch connect with his chest, full force, and felt the impact spread through him the way it did when the thing hitting you was genuinely strong.
What perfect teamwork, he noted, two others immediately pressing the advantage that the punch was supposed to have created.
"By the Vritra," the man he'd punched at the start said, sending void-winds from three angles while the others compressed the space around him with their own attacks. "I can't believe I was actually worried."
"Mission's compromised," another said. "We eliminate him here. We can't have him in the war between Alacrya and Dicathen. He's too dangerous."
Bingo.
They finished the bombardment.
The mountain face behind where he'd been standing was not a mountain face anymore. The cloud of dust and debris expanded outward and when it settled, the place where Lymur had been was empty.
The woman felt it before she understood it — a chill moving down the back of her neck.
"So you really are from the other continent~." His voice came from directly behind her. "Alacrya, is it?"
She turned and threw everything she had into a defensive working, but it lasted the same time it took for Lymur's fist to reach it.
Black and red light coiled around his punch — the Black Flash. Spiritrons spiked at the exact moment of contact, the amplification hitting the exponential rather than the linear, and the woman's chest opened with a bloody hole that the night air immediately filled with cold.
She hit the sky and kept going.
The three remaining closed in on him simultaneously but he was already gone.
Flash.
Three separate points, three separate moments, three separate Incision lines drawn through the air. The lines had no thickness and no forgiveness and the three remaining horned demons in the sky above the Beast Glades fell into downward arcs toward the canopy below.
He landed on the ground near where they hit.
"Now let's see what you're made of~."
Craters. Three of them, ragged at the edges from the impact, the dark earth thrown outward. He looked at the nearest and let Theosophy open to analyze.
But a feeling of wrongness hit him half a second before it materialized.
He brought his arms up in a cross, wrapped in a telekinetic shell of Ruler's Authority pressed tight against his body, and the nearest two corpses detonated.
Black spikes in every direction exploded, dense and fast and omnidirectional, the kind of fail-safe that was designed into the body rather than chosen by the mind.
They hit his Authority and scattered. He felt the impacts as pressure rather than penetration and stood in the middle of it with his arms still crossed and waited for it to stop.
It stopped.
Somewhere in the distance — several hundred meters, by the resonance — he felt the other three bodies explode the same way. One after another, sequential.
Then nothing.
He lowered his arms and looked around.
"What the hell?"
There were no mana signatures, no residual heat of battle. No biological trace, no material trace, nothing that a thorough search would find useful. The battlefield itself was the only evidence. If someone came here tomorrow, they would find a site of significant violence and nothing at all to explain it.
He looked down at himself.
The pajamas had not survived the evening at all. The dark blue was a past memory. The left sleeve was gone entirely. The right side had a third of its original fabric. They'd been good pajamas.
"These were my favorite pajamas, though..."
He stood in the ruined forest and looked at the dark sky above the canopy gap the fight had made.
The other continent's name is Alacrya, and those guys came from it.
They broke into Xyrus. They broke into my apartment specifically, which means someone told them where I live.
They had a drug calibrated for something far more resilient than a human. They had a containment wrap and a transport plan.
They weren't sent to kill me. They were sent to take me somewhere.
Where? To Alacrya?
He didn't have an answer for that and there was nothing left in this clearing to give him one.
He thought about the implications of a war almost certain to come. He thought about what would happen if anyone other than him stood in front of what he'd just fought.
I'm one person, he thought. That's the whole of it. I'm just one person.
He'd never found that fact particularly troubling before. One person had always been enough. One person had been more than enough, for everything he'd encountered so far.
He looked at the craters, the demolished mountainside, and the three-hundred-meter radius of what one night in the Beast Glades had produced.
I can't save everyone, he thought. No matter how hard I push, there's going to be a gap somewhere and people are going to fall into it and I won't be able to reach every single one of them.
He stayed with that.
It wasn't a new thought. He'd known it in the abstract since before he understood what a war was. But abstract things had a way of becoming specific when you were standing in a clearing at 4 AM in ruined pajamas thinking about the faces of people you'd started caring about without fully noticing when that had happened.
"I guess that's just a given," he said, to the dark sky and the trees. "I should probably get used to it soon."
The Beast Glades didn't answer.
He looked at the pajamas one more time.
Then he pushed off the ground and flew back toward Xyrus, because the Starks were his next targets and tomorrow was still tomorrow and the gap between what he could do and what needed doing was not going to close itself by standing in a crater.