Pariellete District
While Eric was still fighting for his life somewhere across the city, Max stood trapped inside the invisible green barrier with absolutely nowhere to go.
Teleportation failed. Telepathy was blocked. Even his sense of the world beyond the barrier had been cut so cleanly that it felt less like a prison and more like an erasure — as though everything outside simply no longer existed.
He tried every method he could think of, and eventually stopped.
The initial alarm had faded quickly. Anyone would panic at being dragged into a separate dimension by an unknown Aura user, but panic, for Max, had a short shelf life. What replaced it was something closer to disappointment. The trapper had gone through considerable effort to catch him, and then never bothered to show up. That was just dull. He understood, rationally, that he probably stood no chance — if the trapper truly outranked him, the fight would have been over before it properly began. But still. It would have been interesting.
"Well," Max muttered. "Too bad."
He found a nearby table, sat down, and put his feet up.
The district around him was unnaturally quiet. Whenever someone walked near the barrier's edge, they simply vanished from sight as if erased. A peaceful sort of prison. Max looked around the empty streets without any particular urgency.
Then he had the distinct feeling that someone was staring at him.
He lowered his legs and sat upright, scanning the area. Left. Right. Straight ahead. Nothing. The streets were empty — no footsteps, no movement, no sign of anyone at all. And yet the feeling persisted, oddly specific, drawing his gaze toward the empty chair directly across the table.
He stared at it for a moment.
"Uh… hello?" he said, feeling immediately ridiculous.
Silence. The chair didn't move.
Max rubbed his forehead. "The bastard is definitely laughing at me right now."
He sighed, leaned back, and closed his eyes.
"Officer, could you please sit properly?"
Max's eyes opened.
A waiter was standing beside him, staring with open confusion.
Max blinked. Straightened himself and coughed.
"Sorry."
The waiter gave him a strange look and quietly walked away. Max stared ahead for a few seconds, processing.
"That might be the shortest time I've ever been trapped."
There was a light-green note on the table. He hadn't noticed it before. He picked it up.
Meet me on Friday. Same location. Bring Eric.
Max read it twice, then folded it and tucked it into his pocket.
"That's not suspicious at all."
...
Back in the alleyway, Eric stood over what remained of the assassin.
The girl's headless body had collapsed against the ground, blood spreading slowly beneath it, staining the old stone a deep crimson. Eric's breathing was uneven. Blood dripped from his nose; he simply raised a hand to wipe it away without thinking.
The fight had pushed him harder than he'd expected. In any normal contest between Aura users of different ranks, the stronger party simply won — the power gap made everything else irrelevant. But this had been different. He'd entered her Domain completely unprepared, lost the initiative from the first second, and spent the entire battle clawing it back while she moved through the space like it was an extension of herself. If they'd been the same rank, Eric thought, he might not have walked away.
"This fight was more dangerous than it should have been." Eric ran through it in his head, the mistakes he'd made, the moments where things could have gone wrong, the openings he should have used but didn't.
Most of the paths he imagined ended badly for him. But dying was never really one of the outcomes he considered. He had that much confidence to say that.
Golden liquid seeped from his arm into the injuries across his body, and the wounds slowly closed over as though they'd never been there.
Eric snapped straight the moment a hand emerged from his own shadow. It was long, pale, and slender, the muscles corded with tension as Max dragged his torso out of the darkness. A tiny black bubble detached from Max's shoulder with a slick schlupp and floated away. Stepping completely onto the floor, Max brushed off his jacket, took one good look at Eric, and deepened his frown.
"You alright?"
Eric nodded and turned towards the body.
"Do you recognize the faction?"
Eric crouched beside the corpse and studied it. "I can't say for certain. We're missing anyone from the Mind, Imagination, or Emotion Pathways; we have no unique way to channel her spirit, trace emotional remnants, or go through her consciousness." He glanced up, giving Max a silent sign.
Max caught Eric's signal and reacted. As he walked, Purple sparks ignited along his arms, venting a violet fluid filled with blue particles that evaporated on contact with the air. A silent white bubble formed by his right shoulder as he glided to the alley entrance. While Max kept watch, Eric searched the body and emerged with three items.
The first was a shattered compact mirror, completely ordinary at a glance, but Eric understood its purpose immediately. A Mirror World escape route. His surprise attack had destroyed it before she could use it. Good.
The second was a black-and-gold badge engraved with overlapping geometric shapes: rectangles, triangles, pentagons, stacked in a vertical sequence.
"Isn't that the Dimension Pathway symbol?" Max called over.
"It is." Eric turned it over in his hand, studying the engraving. "The real question is why she was carrying it on a mission."
"Careless?" Max offered.
"Maybe. No competent operative risks identification like this unless they had a reason to." Eric paused, weighing the badge in his palm. "Or the Organization wanted us to find it."
Max raised an eyebrow. "You think they're that many steps ahead?"
"I think it's possible. Which is worse."
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"For now," Eric said, pocketing it, "we'll assume careless."
"Comforting."
"It wasn't meant to be."
Eric moved on to the last item, a short sword with a golden hilt and a silver blade polished to a mirror finish. He turned it over slowly, studying every inch of it, and caught his own reflection staring back at him from the blade.
"A relic?" Max asked, leaning in.
"Yes."
Golden liquid spread from Eric's fingers across the blade, and information arrived in a quiet flood.
Name: Mirror Knife.
Rank: Rank 5 — Auri Nova.
Pathway: Inversion Pathway.
Effects: Any surface struck becomes reflective. No cooldown.
Estimated lifespan: None.
Negative effects: Each activation temporarily reverses the user's thought process for several seconds.
Then something else came.
A young blacksmith stood before a furnace, sweat running down his face, firelight dancing across his skin. His hammer came down again and again against the glowing metal, clang, clang, clang, steady and sure, like he'd done this a thousand times before and would do it a thousand times more. Sparks scattered with every strike. Slowly, under his hands, the blade began to take shape.
He worked without pause, without doubt, fully lost in what he was making. When it was finally done, he held it up to the firelight and turned it slowly, checking every inch of the blade. A quiet pride settled over his face, the kind that only comes from finishing something with your own two hands.
Then he turned, and somehow, impossibly, he was looking straight at Eric, as if the years between them meant nothing at all. He held the blade out toward him, an offering across time.
Cracks spread through the image, spider-webbing outward until the whole scene shattered like glass.
Eric was back in the alley. He pocketed the relic and stood up.
"How many bullets did you use?" Max asked carefully.
"Three."
"And what excuse are you giving for them?"
"None."
Golden liquid extended from his foot into the corpse, and the bullets worked their way out, reforming as they emerged. Eric reloaded his revolver without comment.
"What about the body?" Max asked with a slight grin on his face.
Eric looked at him, and pink liquid threaded with black particles seeped from his arm into the corpse. He slowly closed his fist. The body began to compress. Bones cracked. Flesh folded inward with wet, grinding sounds until nothing remained but a small cube. He picked it up, walked to a nearby bin, and dropped it inside without ceremony.
"If we'd had enough resources to set up an altar, we might have extracted her Aura before it dispersed." He wiped his hand on his jacket. "Wasted."
Max's grin faded. His head jolted up, as he'd just remembered something important.
"Right. My situation."
He walked Eric through it: the separate dimension, the trapper he never saw, the crushing weight of a presence far above his rank, and finally the note. He pulled it from his pocket and handed it over. Eric read it once, expression unreadable, and passed it back.
"What day is it?" Max asked.
"Wednesday."
Max turned the note over in his hand like it might say something different the second time. "Are we meeting him?"
Eric's expression was flat. "Do we have a choice? He's stronger than us — far stronger. If he'd wanted us dead, we'd already be dead. And he came to us." He paused. "We're vulnerable right now. If we can turn someone like that into a backer, we'd be fools not to try."
Max let out a slow breath. "If he trapped me that easily, killing us probably wouldn't be much more difficult."
They stood in silence for a moment.
"How many enemies do you think are in Paris right now?" Max asked.
Eric considered it. "The trapper. Whoever tainted Claude Perrin. The assassin — though she's dead now." He paused. "But she had support. Someone was running her from the shadows. So even with her gone, at least three remain." His gaze moved toward the distant streets. "And I'm certain there are others in the city waiting for orders."
They resumed their patrol without another word. By evening, their shift had ended. After returning their weapons at the station, they walked together through Paris in the early dark.
At a crosswalk, Eric noticed a small crew of construction workers patching a stretch of torn-up road, orange cones lined up along the curb, the smell of fresh asphalt still hanging in the air. Ordinary enough. He almost walked straight past it without a second thought.
Then something made him slow down.
It wasn't much, barely a flicker, the kind of thing most people would never notice at all. But Eric had learned a long time ago not to ignore those flickers. His intuition didn't waste itself on nothing.
He drifted away from Max without a word and approached one of the workers, asking, as casually as he could manage, what had happened here.
The man straightened up, wiping his hands on his vest, and told him. A car accident had happened two days back. A woman had gone into labor without warning, right there in the passenger seat, and her husband, panicking behind the wheel, had lost control of the car. It crashed hard. Both parents died on impact. The child, somehow, had survived. Last, the worker heard, the baby was safe and healthy, resting in a hospital somewhere across the city.
Eric didn't move.
"A car accident, sudden labor, and a child that walked away from it untouched?" Somewhere in the back of his mind, a case file he had just read this morning before going to their patrol surfaced in Eric's mind, and with it came a dozen smaller details he'd dismissed before as coincidence. He turned them over quickly, one after another, pulling at every thread that connected them, and for a few seconds he wasn't standing at a crosswalk in Paris at all. He was somewhere else entirely, buried in thought, chasing something that had been sitting in plain sight the whole time.
Then, just as quickly, he surfaced again.
He thanked the worker, quiet and distracted, and turned to fall back into step beside Max, who hadn't noticed anything unusual at all.
They walked a few paces in silence before Eric finally spoke, his voice low and even, like he was still only half here.
"Now, there are four."