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The mist arrived before most of the capital understood what it was.
It came from above, spreading outward from a single source above the guild district, black-gold with a red thread running underneath, and it moved across rooftops and down through streets with the patient density of something that had no reason to hurry. People looked up. They looked at each other. They looked at the mist again.
It passed through walls.
A group of hunters on standby deployment in the guild district's eastern sector noticed it at approximately the same time. They were seven: three A-rank, three S-rank, one Mythical who had joined the Victoria auxiliary after the Overlord engagement reduced the roster. They had been waiting on a secondary response order that had not come. Now the mist was drifting through the briefing room windows and settling at ankle height.
"What is that," said one of the A-ranks.
Nobody answered. They were all watching it.
Contact felt like warmth. The evening air was cool and the mist carried heat, and heat read as safety in cold air.
For approximately fifteen seconds, the seven hunters stood in a warm mist and watched it settle and felt nothing change.
Then Soren, the S-rank on the left side of the room, put his hand on his sword.
The others heard his breathing change before they saw the movement. It had been regular. Now it was not. It was faster, each exhale shorter than the last, and something under it had the quality of something being compressed past its limits.
"Soren," said the Mythical.
He did not respond.
Under the mist, the thing that had always been in Soren pressed upward against the inside of him. He had carried it for years: the specific anger built from watching leadership make decisions that cost people he cared about, from filing reports that changed nothing, from attending debriefs and saying nothing, from continuing to serve because the institution was larger than his objections. He had managed it. He had put it somewhere and kept it there.
The mist found it.
It had introduced nothing. It found what was already there, as a finger finds a bruise in the dark, and pressed.
The anger came up faster than he had ever felt it move. It arrived as heat in the hands, narrowed vision, the absolute conviction that Gregory Hood needed to die. The person standing between him and the door was standing between him and Gregory Hood.
His sword cleared the scabbard.
The A-rank beside him had enough time to raise a hand.
She did not have enough time to say anything.
. . .
In the street below, three blocks east, the mist had found different people with different things under the surface, and the results were different.
A merchant who had carried quiet desperation for three years of business losses was now walking north with no destination, his hands shaking. A healer who had held a patient's hand as they died, had not cried, had told himself he was fine, stood against a wall and could not move. A guild runner who had been afraid every day for eighteen months was simply gone, sprinting, the fear having consumed everything else until running was the only response his body knew.
. . .
The affected hunters from the briefing room had made it two streets. The ones still capable of coordinated movement were moving toward the smell of Gregory Hood's divine frequency, following it through walls and smoke as animals follow water in dry terrain. The ones who had turned on each other were already done.
The corpse count in the eastern sector was rising in increments that emergency services were not equipped to track.
Bone Saw watched from the building above.
"Yes," he said, to no one specifically and everyone affected by the domain. "My children."
He watched a sword-wielding hunter in full A-rank kit take the head off someone moving in the opposite direction.
"Kill Gregory Hood."
He watched two hunters collide in the street below, both convinced the other was between them and their objective.
"And if someone blocks your way." He tilted the skull skyward for a moment, the eye sockets blazing. "Kill them."
He looked at the spreading mist.
"See your friend? Kill them. See your enemy? Kill them." He started laughing. "If someone looks at you in a manner you dislike, kill them."
He raised the axe.
"If you make it through all of that, congratulations, you've found Gregory Hood. Kill him."
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
Gregory Hood, standing twenty meters away in the rubble where Bone Saw had put him, looked at the streets below and at the mist spreading across them and at what the mist was producing.
"You are sick," he said.
"Yes," Bone Saw said. "We very much are."
The blood mist was thicker now. Every death fed it: the Crimson Sacrament claimed each drop that hit the cobblestones, routed it back through the First Sin, and the output from the obsidian armor increased with each increment, no ceiling in sight.
Gregory ran the calculation.
A Fated String in motion. Full causality reading. The divine staff, Armand's body, and thirty years of applied intelligence on the other side of the equation. Against a domain that scaled with every corpse produced and a source that had not yet peaked.
Bone Saw turned to face him.
The axe came up off his shoulder.
"Gregory Hood," he said. "I have been practicing this part in my head for years." He rolled his neck once, the obsidian vertebrae producing a sound like stones shifting. "Let me test your blood."
He crossed the distance.
He crossed the distance. Unhurried, axe raised at the correct angle, the Crimson Sacrament feeding him with every death in the streets below.
Gregory raised the staff.
Light flooded from it, divine frequency at full deployment, the Goddess's authority pushing against the domain's pressure, and for a moment the black-gold mist in the immediate vicinity pulled back half a meter.
Then Bone Saw hit him.
The staff caught it. The impact drove Gregory backward across the rubble, his feet carving furrows through the stone, Armand's body absorbing the force through every structure it had. He stopped at the edge of the building.
Gregory looked at his hands.
The staff was still intact. The divine frequency was still running. The impact had been fully suppressed and Gregory had still been driven backward across the roof by the shockwave.
He looked at Bone Saw.
The eye sockets were brighter than they had been at the start of the fight.
The mist was thicker than it had been at the start of the fight.
The bodies in the streets below were more numerous than they had been at the start of the fight.
Gregory ran the causality chain forward. He read the next minute, the next five minutes, the next fifteen. He read every path that involved continuing this engagement without changing the domain's conditions. He read the shapes of each outcome.
He ran it a second time to confirm.
None of them ended in his favor.
Above them, the black-gold mist kept spreading, and whatever was descending from above the roofline continued its approach.
Gregory Hood had built his career on fixing outcomes.
For the first time in thirty years, every path he read looked like it had already been fixed by someone else.