The other Regressor made their move on a Tuesday.
Not directly. They were too careful for that.
The move came in the form of a message, delivered through an untraceable routing chain that Aria's family tracking system identified as originating from a burner server that had already been physically destroyed before the message arrived. Professional work. The kind of professional work that spoke to significant resources and significant patience.
The message contained four words.
I know your name.
Elias read it once, set it down, and made himself a cup of coffee.
The message was designed to provoke. It implied surveillance, implied a longer game, implied that the sender had been watching long enough to feel confident. The four-word construction was specific — it said name, not identity, not secret, not weakness. Name was personal. It was designed to feel intimate and threatening simultaneously.
Elias drank his coffee and thought about who would construct a provocation that way.
Someone who had seen him vulnerable in a previous life. Someone who knew his original name from before the Gates, before the guilds, before he became the force of nature that currently sat in the Aegis Tower penthouse with a Level 50 ancient serpent on retainer.
The person who had looked at him, chained and bleeding, and made the decision to let the Dragon finish the job.
Elias set down his coffee and composed a reply.
He used the same routing method in reverse — Aria's technical expertise made this possible — and sent his response through the same chain, ensuring it arrived at whatever device was on the other end as an equally untraceable signal.
His reply also contained four words.
Come and say it.
He sent it. He leaned back. He opened his System interface and began reviewing his Legion's current readiness levels.
The Regressor would not come immediately. They would interpret the reply, assess its implications, run their own calculations about what Elias's position actually was versus what he was projecting. That would take time.
That was fine. Time worked for Elias. Every day was another Gate cleared, another level gained, another shadow added, another political relationship cemented.
Time was his most reliable ally.
The notification light on his desk phone blinked. He answered it.
"We have a problem," Aria said from the other end. Her voice was clipped in the specific way it got when she was managing something unpleasant. "The Guild Council is calling an emergency session. All registered Guild Masters are required to attend, including Silas."
"What triggered it?"
"Officially? A review of the Monster Classification Act amendment that Arthur's team filed. Unofficially—" A brief pause. "Someone told the Council Chair that Aegis is operating a protected monster civilization inside an A-Rank Gate. Someone who knew exactly which specific legal maneuver we used and how to challenge it."
Elias was quiet for two seconds.
"The Regressor is faster than I expected," he said.
"You think they tipped off the Council?"
"It is the kind of move someone makes when they want to test how I respond to legal pressure," Elias said. "They want to see if I panic. If I overplay my hand. If I reveal defensive capabilities I've been reserving."
"Do we fight it in the Council session?"
"No," Elias said. "Send Silas. Tell him to admit everything and cooperate fully with the review. Make the whole thing as boring and procedurally compliant as possible."
"And the Stone-Kind?"
"Are fully protected under the Monster Classification Act as it stands," Elias said. "The filing was legally bulletproof. The Council can review it for six months and find nothing actionable. The Regressor picked a move that looks aggressive and turns out to be noise."
He paused.
"But tell Aria's family to start looking for who on the Council was approached and what they were offered to call this session," he added. "The moment I know who the Regressor has been buying, I know their resource base. And once I know their resource base, I know who they are."
He ended the call.
He looked at the city through the window. Somewhere out there, another person who had lived through the end of the world and come back to change it was sitting with their own plans and their own fears, making moves on a board they thought they understood.
But the board had changed the moment Elias stepped onto it.
He picked up his coffee, found it had gone cold, and set it back down.
There was work to do