The aroma of roasted coffee beans filled the small coffee shop. Gael took a sip of his black coffee and took a bite of a perfectly flaky croissant. Life was good. The odds were in his favor, and the entire world had become his personal casino.
Suddenly, reality fractured.
A lacerating pain, like a red-hot nail, pierced his skull from side to side. Gael dropped the porcelain cup, spilling the dark liquid. He hunched over the table, grabbing his head in desperation. An agonizing scream escaped his throat, drowning out the background music and the frightened voices of the customers. The torment wasn't physical; it was a violent and direct intrusion into his consciousness.
When he opened his eyes, the coffee shop had disappeared.
There were no more wooden tables or the smell of baked bread. The air was heavy, suffocating, and loaded with a strong metallic scent. Gael staggered to his feet. A thick, crimson liquid reached his knees. There was no horizon. There was no sky. Only an immense plane, swallowed by a perpetual gray fog. It was an oppressive void, identical to Moros's astral prison where hope died of asphyxiation.
Ten meters away, the surface of the red lake began to boil.
The crimson liquid rose, defying gravity. It created a grotesque vertical bubble, a cocoon of blood that burst with a wet snap. From its guts emerged a female figure. Her skin was pale as ash, and her eyes lacked pupils. It was a Daeva, a creature from ancient Persian mythology, made only to cause anguish and pain. It was a new Hound of Destiny. Moros would no longer send blind beasts made of shadow. He had sent a conscious, relentless executioner.
"Worm," the woman hissed. Her voice resonated in the fog like steel cutting through bone. "You are a disgusting anomaly. A statistical error that dirties the fabric of causality. Your existence ends here. You deserve to be disintegrated."
The creature raised her hands slowly. Her fingers stretched with a horrifying crunch of cartilage. Her blackened nails grew, twisting into long, serrated whips. They were ready to tear through flesh and mind alike.
Gael took a step back on pure instinct. The dense liquid halted his movements immediately. His brain, now like a probabilistic supercomputer, tried to process the variables. But the equation yielded a terrifying result: the room was empty. There were no scaffolds about to collapse. There were no out-of-control garbage trucks. There were no innocents around him. If his luck depended on the Law of Equivalent Exchange, in that cursed lake he had nothing to offer.
With no possible collateral damage, his probabilistic shield was gone. For the first time since the goddesses made their mistake, Gael was totally cornered.
The first blow was devastating.
Gael tried to pull away, trusting his new superhuman reflexes. However, the crimson liquid trapped him as if it were quick-setting cement. The black keratin whip tore through the air with a sickly whistle and slashed across his chest.
The fabric of the coat split. The skin opened.
The pain wasn't just physical. It was an injection of pure, distilled agony that burned his nerves and made him see white flashes. Gael fell to his knees, splashing in the thick fog. Hot blood gushed from his wound, mixing with the red lake.
"Your arrogance is pathetic," the Daeva mocked, closing the distance with graceful steps. "Moros designed this pocket dimension specifically for you. There are no rusty scaffolds here. No clumsy pedestrians or trucks without brakes. Your luck is useless if it has no one to steal life from."
Gael gritted his teeth. The pain was blinding, but his mind clung to cold, pure logic. He tried to invoke a miracle. He wished with all his might for a meteorite to fall on the creature. Or for the entity to suddenly fail catastrophically.
Nothing. The air remained stagnant.
The equation was locked. The universe needed a toll to save itself. Since there were no innocent victims in that empty dimension, the system canceled the transaction.
He was defenseless.
The Daeva raised both arms. The serrated nails elongated and twisted like hungry snakes, ready to strike.
Gael looked down at his own blood. And then, the epiphany hit him.
Variables.
He remembered the casino. He had called it a perfect Petri dish. A closed ecosystem. This suffocating red lake was no different. It was an absolutely isolated quantum system. There was no one else. Only him and his executioner.
If the Law of Equivalent Exchange was a rule of the universe, the collateral damage wouldn't just disappear. It would simply find the closest conductor to release the energy.
A hoarse laugh, loaded with dark cynicism, bubbled up from Gael's throat. He stood up slowly. He ignored the cut on his chest. He no longer tried to back away.
"What are you laughing at, anomaly?" the Daeva growled, hesitating for a fraction of a second.
"At your stupidity," Gael replied, raising his face with total superiority. "You thought that by isolating me, you were stripping me of my shield. But all you did was lock yourself in a cage with a grenade whose pin has been pulled."
Gael spread his arms wide, exposing his heart.
"Finish this once and for all, Persian bitch!" he roared, challenging her with all the contempt in the world. "Show me how hard Destiny itself hits!"
Anger distorted the Daeva's ashen face. She let out a deafening shriek and lunged. The two black whips shot out at the speed of sound. They aimed directly at the arteries in Gael's neck. An absolutely lethal attack. Impossible to dodge. Impossible to survive.
In that microsecond, Gael demanded the miracle.
Save me.
The universe obeyed. Gael's probability of survival went from zero to one hundred percent in an instant. The cosmic system demanded immediate payment. A massive amount of lethal misfortune had to be downloaded. The universe scanned the empty plane. It found no pedestrians. It found no machines to break.
It only found her.
A millimeter from Gael's jugular, the whips stopped, as if crashing into a diamond wall. The Daeva choked back a scream.
The crimson liquid at her feet, which until then had been stagnant, rebelled. The physics of the dimension collapsed in on itself. A whirlpool of absolute pressure formed right beneath the creature. The very laws holding her astral body together reversed themselves due to the massive payload of bad luck.
Her nails snapped from the root. Her arms twisted at strange angles and broke. The force of gravity crushed her, and only her.
"No! This is impossible!" the deity shrieked, as the gray fog turned into corrosive acid and began to dissolve her alive. "I am pain!"
"And I am the house," Gael whispered, lowering his arms and watching her disappear with coldness. "And the house always wins."
The Daeva imploded with a dull snap. Not even dust remained of her. Being the only variable in the closed system, she absorbed all the collateral damage of her own deadly attack.
The red plane trembled violently and shattered like a broken mirror.
Gael blinked.
The smell of roasted coffee flooded his nostrils again. The porcelain cup was still in the air, mid-fall. He caught it with a fluid movement of his right hand, just before a single drop more could stain the wooden table.
The pain in his chest had disappeared without leaving a scar. His clothes were intact. The coffee shop customers were still chatting and laughing. They were oblivious to the cosmic war that had just been fought and won in the blink of an eye.
Gael took a sip of the black coffee. It was perfect.
He had just discovered his ultimate technique. The absolute loophole. By turning his greatest weakness—being alone with an enemy—into his best tool, he now knew how to hunt gods.
He looked up at the ceiling, right to where he assumed Moros was watching him from the abyss.
"You sent me to a closed system, Moros," Gael said. He smiled coldly while enjoying his coffee. "I suggest you bring your friends next time. You're going to need them to share the damage."