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. 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, and he 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.
Golden liquid seeped from his arm into the injuries across his body, and the wounds closed over as though they'd never been there.
He straightened up just as a hand emerged from his shadow. Veins stood out along the arm as Max hauled himself out of the darkness, a small black bubble drifting beside his shoulder. He dusted himself off, took one look at Eric, and frowned.
"You alright?"
Eric nodded and turned toward the body.
"Do you recognize the faction?"
Max crouched beside the corpse and studied it. "Can't say for certain. We're missing anyone from the Mind, Imagination, or Emotion Pathways — no way to channel her spirit, trace emotional remnants, or go through her consciousness." He glanced up. "That's your department, honestly."
Max moved to keep watch near the alley entrance while Eric searched the body. He came up with three things.
The first was a shattered compact mirror — 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. "The real question is why she was carrying it on a mission. No competent operative risks carrying identification unless..." He paused. "Either she was careless. Or the Organization wanted us to find it."
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"For now," Eric said, "we'll assume careless."
The third item was the short sword — golden hilt, silver blade polished to a mirror finish. Max stared at his own reflection in it.
"A relic?"
"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: six months. Negative effects: Each activation temporarily reverses the user's thought process for several seconds.
Then something else came.
A young blacksmith standing before a furnace. Sweat and firelight. The repetitive ring of a hammer against glowing metal — clang, clang, clang — as the blade took shape under his hands. The pride on his face when it was done. And then the blacksmith turned, as if he could somehow see across time to where Eric stood, and extended the finished blade toward him.
Cracks spread across the image. It shattered.
Eric was back in the alley. He pocketed the relic and stood.
"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.
"The body?" Max asked, with a slight grin.
Eric looked at him. Then pink liquid threaded with black particles seeped from his arm into the corpse, and Eric 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, which Eric picked up, walked to a nearby bin, and dropped inside.
"If we'd had enough resources to set up an altar," he said, "we might have extracted her Aura before it dispersed. Wasted."
Max's grin faded. Then he remembered something.
"Right. My situation."
He explained everything — the separate dimension, the unseen trapper, the overwhelming pressure of a higher-ranked Aura user, and finally the note. He handed it to Eric, who read it once and handed it back.
"What day is it?" Max asked.
"Wednesday."
"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 construction workers repairing a stretch of road. He almost walked past. Then something made him slow — a small thing, barely worth naming, but his intuition didn't often make noise for nothing.
He approached one of the workers and asked what had happened there.
A car accident, the man explained. Two days ago. A woman had gone into labor suddenly. Her husband panicked at the wheel. The car crashed. Both parents died on impact, but the child had survived. The baby was safe at a hospital now.
Eric went very still.
A case file surfaced in his memory. His thoughts moved quickly, pulling at threads, and for several seconds, he was somewhere else entirely. Then he came back, thanked the worker quietly, and fell back into step beside Max.
After a moment, he spoke.
"Now, There are four."