Devin stood before the towering obsidian slab, the experimental Cyprian venom in his veins humming a dark, anticipatory note. He raised his knuckles and rapped sharply against the cold stone.
"Come in."
The voice that bled through the heavy, rune-etched door wasn't just deep; it possessed an insidious, resonant quality that seemed to actively chill the ambient air in the corridor. It was the voice of a man who weighed human lives in fluid ounces and scribbled equations. It was obviously, unapologetically evil, yet tightly wrapped in the refined, cultured cadence of an intellectual.
It was him. Dr. Langstrum. The handler. The architect of the North's slow, agonizing demise.
It was time for the report.
Devin pushed the heavy door open and stepped in slowly. Every single muscle in Zain Ricky's augmented body was pulled taut, coiled as if a lethal, mechanical trap would spring from the floorboards at any given moment.
The office was vast. But unlike the brightly lit, sterile laboratories buzzing outside, this room was bathed in dim, calculated shadows. The walls were lined with towering bookshelves packed wall-to-wall with thick, leather-bound tomes on dark alchemy and human anatomy.
And behind a massive, polished mahogany desk sat the monster himself.
Dr. Langstrum didn't look up immediately. He simply gestured vaguely with a silver fountain pen, silently instructing Devin to take a seat in the rigid, high-backed wooden chair positioned opposite him.
Devin sat. He stared at the man.
He looked exactly the part of a prestigious, world-saving academic. Langstrum had slicked-back, pristine white hair that caught the low lantern light. He wore a perfectly tailored white researcher's coat, completely devoid of wrinkles or stains, and sharp, wire-rimmed glasses that entirely obscured his eyes in the glare. He looked like a professional doctor—a shining paragon of Northern science.
Of course he would, Devin thought, his jaw clenching. The best lies are the ones wrapped in the most comforting truths.
"Zain," Langstrum finally said. His voice was a low, gravelly hum that vibrated in Devin's chest.
"Sir," Devin replied. He forced his stolen vocal cords to remain entirely flat, burying the burning, royal rage of Prince Devin deep down into the darkest, most guarded pits of his soul.
Langstrum didn't ask for a verbal debriefing. He didn't ask how his operative felt. Without even looking at the boy, the doctor simply slid a blank piece of heavy, high-grade parchment and a sleek black pen across the polished mahogany surface.
The mandate was clear: Devin was to write down the details of the Emerald event. It was to be a written confession of a biological weapon's successful detonation.
As Devin picked up the pen, Langstrum completely averted his attention. The doctor pulled a thick stack of UEI funding requests toward him, dipped a separate quill into an inkwell, and began signing them. It was a calculated, incredibly arrogant gesture—a silent way of communicating that his sleeper agent was actively wasting his highly valuable time.
Devin uncapped the pen and began documenting the incident in astute, terrifying detail.
He had to play the part of the detached, brainwashed operative flawlessly. He wrote about the triggers. He detailed the exact hour he went to sleep, completely omitting the visit from the Mortipia twins that had likely spiked his adrenaline and accelerated the venom's violent reaction. He described how he woke up to the visceral, bloody mess covering the cramped apartment. He wrote about the coppery stench, the physical, mutilated state of the victim.
And, most crucially, Devin detailed his psychological state. He explicitly noted how he didn't feel much pity for the girl. He wrote that the emotional center of his brain felt pleasantly numbed, entirely overridden by a cold, primal satisfaction. He gave the lead researcher exactly what a monster would want to read.
Well, everything except Lotjed's miraculous cleanup.
That was Devin's one, desperate secret. He absolutely couldn't expose his grandfather's shadow network to Cypris. Instead, Devin carefully fabricated a clinical lie. He wrote about how he had systematically dismembered the remains, dissolved the bloody evidence using industrial alchemical acids stolen from the Marinakas supply closet, and scrubbed the floorboards himself, utilizing the venom's heightened stamina to finish the gruesome job before dawn.
It was all there on the parchment—an absolute masterpiece of macabre fiction.
As soon as he was done, Devin slid the parchment back across the wide desk.
Dr. Langstrum didn't even pick it up. He merely glanced at the wet ink drying on the page, gave a dismissive, airy flick of his wrist, and asked Devin to leave. He stated, with that same chilling, bureaucratic apathy, that he would contact the operative through the usual, encrypted channels after reviewing the field report.
Devin stood up, offered a rigid, soldierly nod, and walked out.
The heavy obsidian door clicked shut behind him.
Devin found himself standing completely still outside the department door in the sterile white hallway, his mind reeling. What just happened?
The sheer, overwhelming anticlimax of the meeting left him dizzy. He had walked straight into the lion's den, fully expecting a brutal interrogation, a painful physical assessment of the venom in his blood, or at the very least, a sinister acknowledgment of the murder.
Instead, he had been treated like a low-level clerk turning in a mundane inventory sheet for roasted coffee beans.
How many lab rats must there be for him to treat me so insignificantly? The thought sent a fresh, icy wave of terror cascading down Devin's spine. If a Class 4 Stark student—an 8.5 Star prodigy embedded deeply in the heart of the North's greatest academy—was just a bureaucratic afterthought to Dr. Langstrum, then Count Sapien's hidden army of sleeper agents must be vast.
They must be everywhere.
Devin wandered away from the Venom Research wing, letting his heavy boots carry him aimlessly through the sprawling, interconnected corridors of the UEI. He needed to clear the suffocating stench of betrayal from his lungs.
The sterile, quiet halls slowly transitioned. The air grew warmer and thicker, laced heavily with the sharp, industrial scent of burning fuel, heavy grease, and arcane exhaust.
Devin found himself standing at the edge of a grand, open-air stone balcony overlooking the Mechanics Department.
It was a sprawling, multi-tiered garage filled with heavy steel machinery, glowing combustion runes, and the skeletal, chrome frames of half-built Frazer cycles.
And just as Devin had subconsciously, desperately presumed, there he was.
Ferran.
The Prince of Mortipia was down in one of the primary, sunken bays, adamantly working on his own custom cycle. He had discarded his formal Stark jacket. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, revealing the thick, powerful muscles built from years of high-speed, grueling Frazer training. He was covered in smears of black grease, holding a glowing, rune-etched welding torch to the exposed chassis of the machine.
Bright sparks rained down around Ferran like a golden, violent waterfall.
Devin leaned heavily against the cold stone railing, keeping himself safely hidden in the deep shadows of the upper tier. He chose to stay away. He couldn't risk the proximity—not after what the venom had done to Emerald.
But he couldn't look away, either.
Ferran looked a lot more focused than he ever was as a kid. When they used to play in the sprawling Trangdar courtyards, Ferran was reckless, loud, and incredibly quick to laugh. Now, beneath the engine grime and the sweat, he carried an undeniable aura about him. A quiet, heavy authority. A proper prince.
He was the heir to the Mortipia Federation. He was the young man who would one day rule over the very ashes of Devin's home.
A sharp, physical pang of sorrow pierced Devin's chest, completely overriding the artificial Cyprian apathy engineered into Zain's brain. Devin swallowed hard. He missed his best friend.
He pushed off the stone railing, forcing himself to turn away before the crushing nostalgia could compromise him further. He needed to leave the campus.
But as he was exiting the outer rim of the Mechanics Department, stepping back into the main, sunlit thoroughfares of the academy, Devin was suddenly greeted by several familiar faces.
"Zain! Good to see you back, mate!" a blonde student called out from a passing group.
"Ricky! Where have you been hiding?" another laughed, slapping him on the arm. "The professors have been out for your blood!"
They were some of the fourth-year Stark students Devin had seen in Professor Vane's general lesson just hours ago. They waved. They smiled. They clapped the Cyprian monster on the shoulder as they passed.
Devin offered tight, forced, mechanical nods in return, his heart sinking like a stone in a dark pond.
It seemed Zain Ricky was incredibly popular. He wasn't just a quiet, brooding genius who kept to himself in the corners of the library. He had a prominent social standing. He had acquaintances, fierce rivals, and perhaps even genuine friends within the elite echelons of the UEI.
The perfect, unassuming disguise was actually a blazing spotlight.
Devin realized with mounting dread that he was going to have to navigate an entire web of complex, elite social dynamics completely blind, all while harboring a ticking biological demon in his blood and a dead prince in his soul.
He rubbed his temples, utterly exhausted by the endless, suffocating layers of this stolen life. He kept his head down, increasing his pace toward the main exit of the building, desperate for the anonymity of the crowded Reignn streets. He just wanted to lock himself in the apartment and think.
Clang.
On exiting the heavy wooden doors of the department, Devin bumped hard into someone who was seemingly in a frantic, blind rush.
The physical impact jarred his shoulder. A chaotic, ringing cascade of metallic noise echoed through the corridor as several heavy pieces of specialized, arcane metal the person was carrying slipped from their grasp and crashed onto the stone ground.
"Ow, that hurt," a voice grumbled from the floor.
Devin froze, looking down at the scattered metal components.
The voice didn't sound familiar to Devin Trangdar.
But a strange, electric jolt shot through the sleeper agent's nervous system. The voice was incredibly, undeniably familiar to Zain Ricky.