The corner was twelve feet away. Eloy had been standing in the exact same spot for forty seconds.
Speedrunners count everything. Forty seconds in real-world time meant nothing. In run time, a forty-second hold ended careers. He pulled up the chat one last time.
[IsoldeSimp47]: she doesn't bite (probably)
[IsoldeSimp47]: just go
[ghostrunner_x]: make eye contact but not for too long
[val_writes]: treat her like a normal person eloy. it is very simple
[LMAO_cat]: @val_writes IT IS NOT SIMPLE
He murmured something at the empty air, squared his shoulders, adjusted his grip on the scroll, and turned the corner.
The corridor exploded.
White light split the hallway from floor to ceiling. A wave of ozone and heat blasted down the stone passage. A girl in a noble uniform flew backward through the air and hit the opposite wall with a crunch that vibrated up through the floor and into Eloy's boots.
He threw himself sideways on pure reflex. She missed his head by maybe a hand's width. She crumpled against the base of the wall, scorched fabric smoking at the hem.
The silence after pressed hard against his eardrums.
The girl on the floor shifted, got one hand to the side of her head, and worked on getting upright while coughing. No visible broken bones. Eloy peeled his eyes away from her and looked down the corridor.
"She is actually here," Eloy whispered. He swallowed hard. "I think I got incredibly lucky in the library."
[ghostrunner_x]: LUCKY HE SAYS
[nachtfalter]: i want her to do this to me
[IronWaifu]: did she just cast tier 3 lightning
Eloy stepped around the corner with the scroll already visible in his right hand. A concrete, director-signed, documented reason to exist in this specific hallway. That had to count for something in the threat calculation.
He had no idea what else counted with her.
Isolde Reichenbach stood near the far window. She faced the glass, her back to the corridor. Her hands at her sides, empty. A second noble lay on the floor to her right, completely motionless.
No combat stance. Just stillness.
Eloy had watched every animation she had across three games. The developers had never rendered this one. Her shoulders dropped half an inch. Her breathing slowed, deliberate and measured, doing her hardest to keep herself straight and not collapse right here and there.
"It is always like this." The words were low, scraping against the back of her throat. She wasn't talking to him or to anyone in the corridor. "Calm down... You should be used to this by now."
Nothing like the armored voice from the late-game audio files. This one had friction in it.
Then she felt him.
Her shoulders snapped back. She turned, and the full Isolde Reichenbach of the franchise loaded into the hallway in real time. Jaw locked, dark eyes coming forward and pinning his face with the specific expression she wore exactly two seconds before a boss fight.
"You are following me," Isolde said.
[nachtfalter]: technically yes
[hunterdoge6]: do not say that eloy
[LoreKeeper]: abort abort
Eloy raised both hands immediately, palms open, scroll visible. Same instinct as the library.
Closing the distance slowly, he covered the ground the way a bomb technician approaches a live wire. He stepped over the unconscious noble without breaking stride, his eyes locked entirely on Isolde's hands.
"No, no!" Eloy said. "You got it wrong. I swear."
He held out the scroll.
Isolde didn't take it immediately. Her eyes moved from the wax seal to his face and back, running a quiet calculation. Then she took it.
She unrolled the paper. Eloy counted his own heartbeats. He reached nine before her eyes snapped back up.
The chat tried to fill the dead air.
[val_writes]: she is going to accept
[LMAO_cat]: she is going to refuse and blast him through the wall
[IsoldeSimp47]: SHHHH let her read
[Abyss_Walker]: prepare the dodge roll input
Isolde rolled the parchment back up and returned it with a completely blank expression.
"It is a suicide mission," she said.
"It is." Eloy took it back and tapped the scroll against his leg once. "Genuinely. A complete, unambiguous suicide mission."
He scratched the back of his neck, looking down at the unconscious noble on the floor.
"How do you even kidnap the academy's top prodigy? Dual elemental mastery, highest recorded affinity in the cohort, the whole institution would've had eyes on him constantly—" He stopped.
Isolde raised one eyebrow a fraction.
"I mean," Eloy said, "he shouldn't have been kidnappable in the first place. Someone with that profile. Tactically it doesn't make sense for a standard criminal operation. That's all."
Isolde did not push the issue. She looked at him for a long, quiet moment. Her focus snagged on him. She studied his face, calculating the anomaly.
"You are strange," Isolde said.
"That's the second time someone's told me that today."
Something in her face didn't quite settle back into neutral. She looked at him for another moment. Not the guarded threat-assessment of the initial turn, but something slower, less decided. Then she let it go and looked away.
[ghostrunner_x]: she noticed
[nachtfalter]: she definitely noticed
Isolde stepped past the unconscious noble and moved toward the corridor exit at a measured pace, unhurried, like the conversation had given her everything it was going to give. She didn't look back.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Tomorrow we're mission partners, then."
She rounded the corner.
Eloy stood in the empty hallway. The first noble had gotten herself upright against the wall. The second remained on the floor, still out. The lightning strike had burned a clean black streak across the stone above the window.
A system notification chimed in the center of his vision.
[ Isolde Reichenbach — Affinity: 1 / 100 → 1.25 / 100 ]
Eloy stared at the decimal point.
"Just 0.25?" he asked the empty hallway.
[IsoldeSimp47]: 99.75 points to go lets goooo
[MayaBestGirl98]: @IsoldeSimp47 98.75* you dumbass
[notabot3000]: you have time :) (you do not have time)
He reached to dismiss the window. A second line materialized below the counter, formatted smaller than any system prompt he'd seen during the tutorial.
[ OBSERVATION: Isolde Reichenbach interrupted an active emotional self-regulation sequence upon detecting your presence. ]
[ Data logged. ]
Eloy read it twice.
The system flagged a broken sequence. His arrival had short-circuited her attempt to calm down. The moment she registered his footsteps in the corridor, she had abandoned the dropped shoulders, the slow breathing, and the quiet mantra. The entire process cut off mid-execution.
The prompt cataloged a defensive reset. His arrival had forced her to rebuild her armor from scratch.
He didn't know yet if that was good or bad. He filed it under variables with unknown values, which was its own kind of answer.
He looked at the scroll. Rank A. Tomorrow morning. Her name sat above his, sorted alphabetically, which made it look very much like the scroll had already decided who was leading the vanguard.
He did not have a route for any of this. He had one conversation in a library, one corridor encounter that had produced a quarter of an affinity point, and a mission that started at sunrise.
He was going to need one.