WARNING: This chapter contains a bit of brutality and R18
The dust of the fire extinguisher's explosion had barely settled into the cracked floorboards when the temporary silence was punctured by a sickening, wet thud.
Vincent, gasping for air that felt like jagged glass in his lungs, looked up. He was ten feet from the back exit—ten feet from the dark safety of the alleyway—but the route was suddenly, violently closed.
From the shadows of the leaning flour racks, Clara moved with the speed of a striking viper. Her hand, pale and claw-like, clamped around Oscar's throat. With a guttural snarl, Elise followed, her heavy combat boot connecting with the back of Oscar's knee. The crack of bone against wood echoed through the ruins as Oscar was forced to the ground, his face contorted in a mask of silent agony.
"Stay down, little delivery boy," Clara hissed, her fingers digging into the soft tissue of his neck.
"Oscar!" Vincent screamed, his voice cracking. He pivoted, his hands trembling as he tried to summon one last dimensional rift, but the air in front of him solidified.
Tess and Maeve stepped through the shattered front window, their kinetic rifles leveled at his chest. The blue charging lights of the weapons cast long, flickering shadows across the floor, painting the bakery in a ghostly, electric hue.
"One more inch, Vincent," Tess said, her voice a flat, metallic monotone, "and we turn this room into a vacuum chamber."
Then, the temperature in the room plummeted.
The stasis field—that oppressive, violet weight that had crushed the city for hours—suddenly vanished. The silence that followed was even more terrifying than the noise. The violet glow faded, leaving the bakery in a shroud of natural, suffocating darkness, illuminated only by the dying embers of the oven and the tactical lights of the AXILE soldiers.
From the center of the dark, a figure materialized. He didn't walk into the room; it was as if the shadows simply coalesced into a human shape.
Ian.
His face remained a void, hidden by the high collar of his coat and the deep, reflective glare of his spectacles. He stood in the midst of the two witches, his presence so overwhelming that even the air seemed to bow away from him.
"Clara. Elise," Ian said. His voice was a calm, silk-wrapped blade. "The boy is resilient. His mind is a labyrinth of MACE conditioning and 'a sorcery World' shadows. Break him. I want to see what he's hiding in the cellar of his consciousness."
The two witches didn't hesitate. They joined hands over Oscar's kneeling form, their fingers interlocking in a complex, agonizing knot. Their eyes rolled back, turning a milky, blind white as they began to chant—a low, discordant hum that vibrated the very atoms of the room.
They were "Weaving" directly into Oscar's cerebral cortex.
Oscar's body began to convulse. His jaw locked, a thin line of foam forming at the corners of his mouth as the two witches forced their way through his mental defenses. Under normal circumstances, they wouldn't have dared such a high-risk intrusion—the feedback alone could lobotomize a practitioner—but with Ian standing behind them, his hand resting lightly on the air between them, they felt invincible.
"Open... for us..." Clara whispered, her voice layered with a thousand ghostly echoes.
But then, something happened that no one in the room—not even Ian—had predicted.
Deep within Oscar, something that had been dormant, something buried beneath layers of shadow-factor and delivery-boy pretense, suddenly recoiled. It wasn't a defense mechanism; it was a rejection.
A massive, invisible shockwave erupted from Oscar's forehead.
It wasn't kinetic; it was a psychic blast of pure, unadulterated "Nothingness."
Clara and Elise were blasted backward as if hit by a freight train. Their hands were ripped apart, their bodies flying across the kitchen to slam into the heavy iron ovens. They didn't scream; they simply crumpled, their eyes closing instantly as they slid to the floor in a dead faint. The "Old World" magic had met a wall it could not climb.
The room fell into a heavy, ringing silence.
Vincent saw the opening. He saw Ian standing still, seemingly surprised by the backlash. He prepared to lunge, to grab Oscar and tear a hole in the floor to the sewers.
"Fascinating," Ian murmured.
Before Vincent could move, Ian stepped forward. He didn't use a weapon. He didn't use a spell. He moved with a terrifying, mechanical grace. He reached down and grabbed Oscar's head with both hands.
His grip was a vice. Oscar, still dazed from the psychic backlash, couldn't fight back. He looked up at the void where Ian's face should be, his eyes wide with a sudden, primal terror.
"You have a very interesting 'gate' in your mind, Oscar," Ian said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "But if I cannot go through the door... I will simply remove the windows."
Ian shifted his grip. His thumbs, reinforced by the subtle gleam of titanium-mesh gloves, positioned themselves directly over Oscar's eyes.
"No... NO!" Vincent screamed.
Ian's thumbs were still buried deep in Oscar's eye sockets, the wet, sickening sound of the intrusion echoing off the tiled walls. Oscar's body was a rigid lightning rod of agony, his fingers clawing uselessly at Ian's sleeves.
"The architecture of the mind is so fragile," Ian murmured, his voice a calm, clinical drone that made the blood in Vincent's veins turn to ice. "But the vessel... the vessel is simply a container for the harvest."
A heart-wrenching, soul-shattering scream tore from Oscar's throat. It was a sound that didn't belong in a bakery, a sound of absolute, irreversible agony that seemed to vibrate the very foundations of the building. Blood—thick, hot, and dark—spurted between Ian's fingers, splashing onto the flour-dusted floor.
Oscar's body went rigid, his fingers clawing uselessly at Ian's wrists before his arms fell limp. The scream died into a wet, rattling wheeze.
Vincent froze.
The sight of his best friend, his brother in arms, being mutilated with such casual, calculated cruelty broke something inside him. The "Door Dimension" power, which had been boiling in his blood, suddenly went cold. The adrenaline vanished, replaced by a paralyzing, leaden despair.
He looked at the kinetic rifles pointed at him. He looked at the blood pooling around Oscar's knees.
"Stop," Vincent whispered, his voice barely audible over the sound of the wind. "Please... stop."
Vincent was on his knees, his hands trembling, his vision blurred by tears and the white haze of the flour-dust. "Ian, stop! Take me! Just leave him alone!"
But Oscar, even through the blinding, world-ending pain, heard the break in Vincent's voice. He felt the weight of the surrender. With a final, superhuman surge of will, Oscar's hand didn't claw at Ian—it reached out toward Vincent, his fingers slick with his own blood.
"DON'T... YOU... DARE!" Oscar's voice wasn't a wheeze; he spread his hands mustering strength to use his shadow ability to twist the vision of the people who were in front of him with a rifle. It was a raw, jagged roar that tore through the throat of a dying man. "RUN, VINCENT! OPEN THE DOOR AND RUN!"
Ian's head tilted slightly, the light reflecting off his spectacles with a surgical coldness. "Loyalty. A fascinating biological defect."
Ian didn't pull his thumbs out. Instead, he tightened his grip, his fingers hooking under the base of Oscar's jaw while his palms pressed against the crown of his head. With a sudden, violent twist and an upward surge of industrial-grade force, Ian ripped.
The sound was like a heavy tree limb snapping in a storm.
In a single, fluid motion of horrific brutality, Ian separated Oscar's head from his shoulders. But as the spinal column severed, a localized, violet flare of stasis energy erupted from Ian's palms. In a nanosecond, the flesh, the muscle, and the blood of the severed head were atomized—scoured away by a high-frequency thermal pulse.
By the time Ian's hands stopped moving, he wasn't holding a head.
He was holding a bleached, ivory skull, still steaming with the residue of the stasis-burn.
The headless body of Oscar slumped forward, hitting the flour-dusted floor with a hollow *thud* that sounded like the end of the world. Ian turned casually, tossing the skull to Tess as if it were a common piece of evidence.
Tess caught it, her gloved fingers clicking against the bone.
"Keep that," Ian said, wiping a single drop of dark fluid from his cuff. "The neural imprints on the parietal bone are still fresh. We can use the fragments for the Dark Magic ritual."
"OSCAR!"
The scream that erupted from Vincent was no longer human. It was the sound of a human whose soul had been cauterized. The paralyzing despair that had forced him to his knees evaporated, replaced by a white-hot, singular vacuum of rage.
Vincent didn't surrender. He didn't blink.
The kinetic rifles of Maeve and Tess hummed, the blue lights turning a violent, strobing red as they prepared to fire. "Target is moving! Open fire!" Tess commanded.
But Vincent was already gone.
He dived to the left, his body a blur of motion. He didn't just reach for the air; he punched into it, his fist tearing a jagged, bleeding hole in the fabric of the bakery's reality. The stasis field was down, and the adrenaline of a dying friend's final command acted as a catalyst.
The **Door Dimension** didn't open like a portal; it exploded outward like a shattered mirror.
"Stop him!" Ian shouted, his calm finally cracking as he realized the boy had bypassed the residual dampeners.
A volley of kinetic rounds tore through the space where Vincent had been standing a millisecond before, shattering the heavy iron ovens into scrap metal. But the white light of the rift had already swallowed him and instantly closed.
Mahito just looked at this unfolding with no hint of change of emotions. His hands rested on the blade while looking at the skull in Tess hands.
The Hotel de Malte — Fourth Floor
The mahogany door of the suite had just been turned into shrapnel. Sonia was slumped against the wall, her shoulder bleeding, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps as the neural strain of her vector-shields began to collapse her nervous system.
Scarlet was advancing, her serrated blade raised for the finishing stroke, while Klaus stood in the doorway, his heavy pistol leveled at Yunli's head.
"Goodbye, little bird," Scarlet whispered.
Suddenly, the air in the center of the room twisted into a violent, spinning knot.
A rift of pure, blinding white light tore open directly between Yunli and the advancing AXILE commanders. Vincent tumbled out of the void, his bakery whites matted with Oscar's blood, his eyes wide and glowing with a terrifying, fractured intensity.
He didn't hit the floor; he landed in a crouch, his hand catching the edge of the dresser to steady himself.
"Vincent?" Yunli gasped, her eyes widening as she saw the blood on his hands—blood that wasn't his. "Where's Oscar? Where is he?"
Vincent didn't answer. He couldn't. He looked at Klaus, then at Scarlet, his teeth bared in a snarl of pure, unfiltered grief.