The moment the Church of Serenity disappeared, the effect went with it. People across the city felt the warmth drain out of them all at once, and life went back to whatever it had been before. Most didn't even notice the shift, simply carrying on with their day as if nothing strange had happened.
The people who'd been on the receiving end of all that generosity took it the hardest. Some of them were sad to see the kindness dry up so suddenly, no more free food, no more strangers pressing money into their hands without being asked. Still, whatever they'd already received would last them a few days at least, so it wasn't a total loss.
The ones who had given things away reacted differently. Most of them didn't regret it at all. If anything, they felt lighter, glad they'd been able to help someone without stopping to think it through too much. A few, though, once the warmth faded and their better judgment came back online, quietly tried to get their things back.
But who actually tracks someone down and asks for their gift back?
…
In the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital nursery room, a nurse held Voyage in her arms, cooing at him, absolutely delighted with how giggly and cheerful he'd been all afternoon. She had no idea a two-hundred-year-old ruthless demon was currently making finger guns at her.
Voyage, for his part, was having the time of his short, terrible existence. He giggled as he grabbed at her nose. At one point he attempted what could generously be called a high five and left her with a red mark on her cheek instead. Somewhere underneath all of it, a centuries-old political operative with more blood on his hands than most standing armies was babbling happily about a stuffed rabbit like it was the single greatest invention in the history of mankind.
Then, all at once, the effect wore off.
Voyage's giggling cut out mid-laugh. His eyes, usually so calm and calculating, snapped back into focus, and the full, horrifying weight of what he'd just been doing crashed down on him at once. He'd been playing patty-cake. He'd been playing patty-cake with genuine enthusiasm.
He froze, staring up at the nurse with an expression that, on an adult face, would have been unmistakable existential horror.
Then he did the only thing left available to him.
"Wahhhhhhhhhh!"
The nurse, utterly unaware she was now holding a screaming diplomat mid-breakdown, sprang into action immediately, rocking him, bouncing him, hurrying toward the milk cart with the practiced urgency of someone who had done this a thousand times before. Voyage kept crying, less out of any real distress and more because it was, at this point, the only socially acceptable outlet available to him for the sheer indignity of what had just occurred.
Halfway there, the nurse felt something warm spreading against her palm.
She stopped walking and slowly looked down even though she knew the reality of the situation clearly.
Her entire right hand, the one currently cradling Voyage, was soaked through.
Voyage looked back up at her, wide-eyed, utterly still, projecting an aura of such profound, angelic innocence that a lesser person might have genuinely doubted what had just happened. It was, without question, the single greatest acting performance of his less than one-month-old life, and he knew it.
The nurse let out a long, tired sigh, the specific sigh of someone who had, once again, forgotten to check the diaper before playtime, and adjusted her grip before continuing toward the milk cart, silently vowing to never again be fooled by a baby's smile, especially not this one's.
…
Eric left Church Street behind and teleported to the Pariellete District, golden light flickering out around him as he landed. He pulled out his phone and called Max, telling him to meet him there.
A moment later, a crack of gold split the air, and Max appeared, already moving before his feet had fully settled, worry written all over his face.
"Are you okay? I couldn't reach you at all for the last few hours. I genuinely thought you'd gotten attacked again." He didn't wait for an answer before pushing on. "And what about that Goodness Pathway effect? There has to be a Hypernova out there somewhere doing this. I used my ability to strip the emotions out of myself completely, and it just kept coming back, over and over, like something was refilling the tank the second I emptied it."
Eric let him talk, listening through every question and every half-formed theory Max threw out, waiting until he finally ran out of breath.
"The source was a church," Eric said, once Max had gone quiet. "It called itself the Church of Serenity."
Max opened his mouth to respond, but the moment the name left Eric's lips, something shifted inside him. His purple liquid surged violently, golden threads twisting through it, both of them rising together like something trying to force its way out from underneath his skin. Pain lanced through him, sharp and immediate.
He growled through gritted teeth, hands clenching at his sides. This wasn't new to him, not exactly, and he rode it out the way he always did, refusing to let it take him under. Cold sweat beaded across his forehead as the seconds dragged on, and slowly, the surge settled, the pain fading back into something manageable.
"Damn," he muttered, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. "Just hearing the name almost took me out. Was that place some kind of Rank 0 relic of the Goodness Pathway?"
Eric shook his head, arms crossing over his chest, his expression giving nothing away. "No. Not a relic. There was a man there. He called himself Father Irenaeus." He paused. "He told me the church was something bigger than a Rank 0 relic. Something we wouldn't even be able to properly understand unless we were Hypernova rank ourselves." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Just hearing its name nearly put you on the ground. Think about what actually trying to comprehend it would do to either of us."
Max nodded his head like an obedient student agreeing to what the teacher in front of him had said. "So, what happened to you exactly?"
Eric sighed and walked Max through everything that had happened, chasing the source of the effect, the conversation with the local man, the church that shouldn't have been there, his meeting with Father Irenaeus, the Angel Spirits reading through his memories without asking, and the confession he'd had to give just to walk out with anything at all. He kept the specifics of the confession to himself, along with what exactly the relic was. That could come later.
Max listened to all of it without interrupting, but his eyes narrowed a little further with every new detail.
"So you got a relic out of it," he said once Eric finished. "What is its name? What is its rank? It has to be something serious if it needed a whole confession just to unlock. The Goodness Pathway's usually built around Angel Spirits, blessings, personal sacrifice, that kind of thing. Did you get something tied to one of those?"
Eric held his gaze for a moment, long enough that Max caught the warning in it and straightened slightly, bracing for whatever was coming.
Before Eric could answer, though, Max spoke again, slower this time. "Wait. Actually, hold on." He crossed his arms. "Doesn't this feel a little too convenient to you? We get exposed, we have no backing, no protection, everyone in this city circling us like we're already dead, and suddenly a church nobody's ever heard of shows up out of nowhere and hands you a relic right when we need one most?" He shook his head. "That's not luck. That's a setup. Someone's definitely pulling strings somewhere."
Eric didn't answer right away. He'd already had the same thought himself, more than once actually, turning it over on the walk here. The timing was too clean, the offer was too generous, the whole encounter shaped a little too perfectly around exactly what they'd needed.
"I thought the same thing," he admitted finally. "I don't like how convenient it was either. But whatever's actually behind it, we're not in a position to turn it down and go looking for a cleaner option instead. We simply don't have one." He exhaled slowly. "So for now, we take what's in front of us and stay careful. If it turns out to be a trap, we deal with that when it actually becomes one."
Max didn't look fully convinced, but he let it go, some of the tension easing out of his shoulders even if the suspicion clearly hadn't left him completely.
Eric reached into his pocket and drew out a silver earring; he put it in front of Max as it jangled in his grip. It was small enough to look completely unremarkable, the kind of thing anyone would walk past without a second glance. Its appearance didn't matter. What mattered was everything underneath it.
He let the silence stretch for a moment before speaking again, deliberately, watching the tension build behind Max's eyes with every second that passed.
"This is a Rank 0 relic," he said finally. "Of the Goodness Pathway."
He laid out everything he knew about it after that, every effect, every capability, every warning that came attached.
"..."
Max just stared. For a full three seconds, he didn't say anything at all, his mouth slightly open, eyes flicking rapidly between Eric's face and the earring resting in his palm, like his brain hadn't fully finished processing the sentence.
"The Imperator's Cross," he finally repeated, quiet at first, then louder, almost outraged. "Rank zero? As in the same tier as the actual founding artifacts? As in the stuff people write entire mythologies about?" He took a step closer, leaning in to get a better look at the earring, as if proximity alone might reveal some hidden secret about it. "You're telling me you just walked into some random church and walked out with something like that?"
Eric didn't answer right away, letting him get through it.
Max kept going, listing off the effects under his breath as if saying them out loud might make them more real. Angel Spirits. Blessings. The ability to store sacrifices and turn them into weapons. Each one landed like a small explosion, and Max's expression shifted with every single one, disbelief giving way to something closer to reverent horror.
"And the negative effects," Max said slowly, dragging the words out like he already dreaded the answer. "Please tell me it's not one of those relics where you lose a limb every time you use it."
"Every activation costs you," Eric said. "A bit of your body, a bit of your mind. You don't get that back."
Max winced. "Right. Of course. Powerful things always want a piece of you." He rubbed the back of his neck, clearly running through every horror story he'd ever heard about relics like this one, before something else occurred to him and his face lit up all over again. "Wait. But the church is handling that part, right? You said the Father offered to take the negative effects onto the church itself?"
"He did."
Max went completely still.
"So you're telling me," he said, very slowly, like a man carefully approaching a sleeping animal, "that we now have access to a Rank 0 relic, with zero personal cost, whenever we want, for basically forever?"
"That's the offer, yes."
Max opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. For a moment he looked like a man who'd just been handed the keys to a superweapon and had absolutely no idea what to do with his hands. Then the excitement broke through completely, spreading across his face in a grin that was equal parts delighted and unhinged.
"Do you understand what we could actually do with something like that? We could level a building. We could probably level several buildings. We could summon an army of angels, and just, I don't know, march them straight through anyone stupid enough to come after us."
"Max."
"I mean, the possibilities here are basically infinite," they said. "As a Quantum Pathway walker, my brain automatically builds out every potential timeline. Trust me, knowing what this Relic can actually do makes it terrifying. But, like, in the coolest way possible."
"Max."
Something in Eric's tone finally got through, and Max blinked, some of the manic energy draining out of him as an old, familiar wariness crept back in. He knew that tone. It was the same tone Eric used right before reminding him why reckless plans tended to get people killed.
"Right," Max muttered, rubbing his jaw. "Free power never comes free. There's always a catch somewhere, even if we haven't found it yet."
They both fell quiet for a moment, the weight of that settling over them, the same old caution neither of them had ever fully managed to shake, no matter how many good things came their way.
Still, caution or not, the excitement hadn't fully left Max. His eyes drifted back to the earring, and something needy and pleading crept into his expression: big eyes, slightly pouted lip, the exact look he'd been using to get his way with Eric since they were kids.
Eric sighed audibly, already knowing exactly what was coming.
"No," he said, before Max could even open his mouth.
"I didn't even ask yet."
"You didn't have to."
Max huffed but didn't argue further, because deep down, even through all the excitement, he understood the risk better than he let on. Relics like this one didn't come with guarantees. Even with the church absorbing the negative effects, there were a hundred other ways something this powerful could go catastrophically wrong, and neither of them had any real interest in finding out which one applied to them first.
"Let's just try to use the bare minimum first," Eric said with a little fear in his tone. He was about to use it when he suddenly realized something. He looked around and saw they were in a crowded area. He could not have any accidents happen in public, especially when they were so vulnerable. He was worried that they might get attacked by multiple Supernovas right now from different organizations for the relic.
"Good things always seem to come with something to worry about," Eric thought, and it was true enough on both counts. He was genuinely uneasy about the crowd around them, but underneath that, there was something closer to fear about actually using the relic at all. He told himself the public setting was the real reason to hold off, and let that excuse carry more weight than it probably deserved.
"There's something else, actually," Eric said, tucking the thought away. "A low-level curse spirit has been bothering Ruby the last few days. We'll need to deal with it tonight." He glanced at the earring still resting in his palm. "That could work as a first test."
Max's smile came a little too quickly, and it didn't quite reach his eyes. "Yeah. Yeah, good plan." He nodded along, doing a poor job of hiding how nervous the idea actually made him. "Let's go, then."
They both laughed it off, the kind of laugh that covered for more than it revealed, and turned back toward their patrol. Eric slipped the earring into his pocket as they walked.
...
The rest of the day passed without incident, quiet in a way that almost felt suspicious given everything that had happened that morning.
That night, Max and Eric made their way back to the police station, guns in hand, ready to hand them in for the day. The scrawny officer was manning the register as usual, and he perked up the moment he spotted them.
"Long day, officers?" he asked, taking the weapons from them one at a time and logging them into the system.
"Nothing special," Eric said, sliding his revolver across the counter. "We helped a few people cross the street. Solved absolutely no crimes. Very fulfilling work, as they say."
The officer laughed, clearly assuming he was joking. "Slow day, huh? Guess Paris decided to behave itself for once."
"Something like that," Eric said, giving nothing else away.
Max leaned against the counter, grinning. "Honestly, the most exciting thing that happened to me today was almost losing an argument with a vending machine."
"Did you win?"
"Obviously," Max said. "I'm a professional."
The officer chuckled and finished up the paperwork, waving them off with a tired but genuine smile. "Get some rest, you two. See you tomorrow."
They walked out together, and the second they were out of earshot, Max's easy grin faded into something a little more restless, a little more electric.
They were both scared and excited to use this powerful Rank 0 relic. Who knows how many people had ever gotten the chance to even lay eyes on one, especially Max, who couldn't stop his hands from shaking with anticipation the entire walk home.
They kept up appearances anyway, walking to their apartments side by side, acting completely normal, like tonight was just another ordinary night and not the night they were planning to test something that could very easily kill them both if it went wrong.
Once they reached the building, they split off toward their own doors, having already agreed to meet back up at midnight to deal with the curse spirit haunting Ruby.
Eric opened his door, and Ruby's voice greeted him immediately, warm and familiar.
"Welcome home."
Eric stepped inside and saw Ruby making dinner. A spicy smell was coming from the kitchen. "Is it gonna be something spicy for dinner tonight?"
Ruby didn't turn her head and just nodded and replied, "Yes, I was thinking of doing something different for today. We have had too much Parisian food ever since we moved here, so I decided to make Chinese noodles today."
Eric smiled at her and asked, "So, what was the title of the video you saw?" Ruby didn't act surprised. It was too obvious at this point. She turned her face away and answered, "It was 'Five spicy Chinese foods that will make your mouth spew fire.'"
"Haha, let's see if it will." Eric laughed as he went to take a shower. He removed his clothes, looked at the earring, and thought for a second about what to do with it. He was worried someone might come and steal it if he placed it anywhere random. He didn't plan to wear it yet. He had a lot of other plans for it. He looked up and stared for a few seconds.
For some reason, there was a different type of calmness that spread upon his being when he stared at seemingly plain air. However, his premonition told him to do something else.
Eric slowly put the Imperator's Cross in the air. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Eric almost felt embarrassed, thinking about how weird he must look. But just then, a spatial rift opened up in the air, out of which a thick golden arm with three sharp-as-knives, huge claws appeared and took the earring before entering the rift and closing itself again.
"Well, that is convenient."
Eric soon stopped thinking as he took a cold shower and cleaned every part, got out, dried himself up, tied his hair into a ponytail, and wore light-blue nightwear.
He walked out and sat at the dining table with Ruby to have dinner. He sat down as he looked at what he was gonna eat tonight. It was just red noodles on a plate with a glass of water. It was nothing special, really, but Eric still smiled and looked at Ruby and asked with worry in his tone,
"Are your shoulders still hurting?" Ruby looked at Eric and said, "No." "Do you still feel someone is watching you?" Eric asked with a gentler smile. "No. The feeling is still there, but it is so small that it has become insignificant now," Ruby replied. "Good. Don't worry. After tonight, you won't ever be worried by anything like that."
Ruby stayed, and they started to eat. Eric took his fork and rolled the noodles on the fork and ate them. They were… spicy. Wait, maybe a bit too spicy!
Eric started to cough due to the spiciness and drank his glass of water in one gulp. Ruby was no different. She also drank her glass of water, and they both started to breathe heavily through their mouths to handle the spice. "Maybe… I made the noodles too spicy," she said. "Yes, you did," Eric blurted out while trying to eat another bite. After a while, they both stood up, drank more water, and finally felt relieved after drinking some cold water, but they were not uncivilized people and finished what they had made.
They sat down again with a can of milk each and continued to eat. The spice was not the bad type of spice. It was the type that makes you want to eat more of it despite hurting you. Eric praised Ruby for it while eating.
"Can I ask you something?" Ruby said, her voice carrying a note of worry she didn't bother hiding.
Eric looked up at her, still chewing. "Yes. You can ask me anything."
She glanced down at her plate first, gathering herself, before finally lifting her eyes to meet his. "Are you okay?"
He was smiling at her when she looked up, a wide, warm smile, the kind that should have reached his eyes and softened everything about his face.
It didn't.
His eyes were black. Not dark, not shadowed by the dim kitchen light, but fully black, leaving nothing but two flat, hollow pits staring back at her from behind a smile that no longer matched anything happening underneath it. It was the kind of wrongness that didn't announce itself all at once. It crept in slowly, the longer she looked, until her stomach had quietly turned to ice without her fully understanding why.
"Yes, I am," Eric said, voice light, almost cheerful. "Why do you ask?"
He looked back down at his plate and took another bite, chewing slowly, and somewhere in the middle of it he realized he couldn't taste any of it. Nothing. No spice, no heat, no flavor at all, just the mechanical motion of eating without any of the experience attached to it. He kept smiling anyway, kept his face arranged into something that looked, from the outside, like a man enjoying his dinner.
"It's just." Ruby's voice dropped to barely more than a whisper, and she looked away as she said it. "You're acting strange. And your eyes look dead."
Eric smiled at her again, automatic, reflexive, and something cold settled behind his ribs at her words. He set his fork down slowly and looked at his own hands resting on the table.
He felt nothing.
Not the fork's weight a moment ago, not the table under his palms now, nothing at all, like his body had quietly stopped reporting back to him sometime in the last few minutes without telling him first. His skin had gone cold too, he realized, properly cold, the kind of cold that had nothing to do with the room's temperature.
The smile finally slipped off his face entirely, replaced by something confused and uncertain and, underneath both of those, genuinely afraid.
He stood up without a word, gathered his plate, his empty glass, the half-finished can of milk, and carried all of it to the kitchen in silence. He set the dishes in the sink, put the milk back in the fridge, and crossed the room to the sofa, where he sat down and stared at the floor, saying nothing at all.
Ruby finished the last of her own meal a few minutes later and carried her dishes over as well, glancing toward him from the kitchen the entire time. Something about him frightened her, if she was honest with herself: those black, empty eyes and the stillness that had settled over him like a held breath. She wanted to go to him. She just wasn't sure she had the courage to.
But she thought about it a little longer, standing there with a dish towel still in her hands, and reminded herself that this was exactly the kind of moment a partner was supposed to show up for. If she couldn't manage to be there for him now, at what was clearly one of his lowest points, what good was she going to be to him for the rest of their lives together?
She set the towel down, pressed her clenched hands briefly against her own chest, and walked over to the sofa. She sat beside him and reached up, gently turning his face toward hers with one hand against his cheek.
Eric covered her hand with his own and looked at her properly for the first time since sitting down. A single tear slipped free and rolled down his cheek, landing on the back of her hand, warm against her skin even though nothing else about him felt that way right now. He was still trying to smile.
"Don't do the fake smile thing," Ruby said, pouting slightly despite the tears already gathering in her own eyes. "I know what your real one looks like."
The smile finally fell away completely. He just looked at her instead, quiet, and she looked back at him with something so gentle in her expression that it felt almost undeserved.
"I don't know what's going on with you lately, Eric," she said softly. "I know you're hurting. Stressed. Scared, maybe, even if you'd never say it out loud. I know you spend more time worrying about everyone else than you do about yourself." She paused. "I'm not going to push you to tell me things you're not ready to share. That's not what this is about."
She kept her eyes on his, warm and steady despite the tears now slipping freely down her own cheeks.
"But I need you to remember something. I'm here. Whatever you're carrying, however heavy it's gotten, you don't have to carry all of it alone. If you need someone to cry with, or talk to, or just sit next to while you figure things out, that's me. That's always going to be me." Her voice wavered slightly. "You're allowed to be a mess in front of me. I promise I'm not going anywhere."
Her tears kept falling as she said it, and for a moment neither of them said anything else at all.
Then Eric spoke.
"Can I borrow your bosom, then?"
Ruby blinked, the sob catching awkwardly in her throat as her expression shifted from heartbroken to utterly baffled in the space of half a second. Then, just as fast, baffled turned to annoyed, and she flicked him hard on the forehead.
"Ow." Eric shut his eyes and rubbed at the spot, and when he opened them again, Ruby had already opened her arms, waiting for him, her whole face flushed red like a tomato.
"Hurry up," she muttered, refusing to look directly at him.
He leaned into her without needing to be told twice, resting his face against her chest while her arms came around him properly, one hand settling into his hair. There was nothing sexual in it, nothing charged. Just quiet, and warmth, and the strange, settling peace of being held by someone who meant it.
They stayed like that for a while, neither of them speaking, until Eric finally broke the silence.
"I realized something."
"What's that?" Ruby asked, still stroking his hair.
"That I'm a genuinely bad person."
She smiled faintly, even though he couldn't see her face from where he was. "Everyone's a bad person, in their own way. Nobody's fully good or fully evil. Everyone's got their limits, their worst moments." She paused. "Why do you think you're a bad person? If you actually were one, I wouldn't have married you. That's not something I'd have gotten wrong."
He closed his eyes. "If I turned out to be one anyway. A bad guy, I mean. What would you do?"
"Depends what you mean by bad," she said. "To me, bad is neglecting someone. Being disrespectful, uncaring, selfish. Hurting people on purpose. Never buying your very cute, very hardworking wife any gifts, ever, not even once."
He let out a quiet laugh at that, the first real sound of amusement he'd made all evening. "By bad, I mean someone who hates himself. Someone who knows exactly what kind of person he is and doesn't bother trying to change it. Someone with enough awareness to see the problem clearly and still no real power to do anything about it. Someone who overthinks everything until it eats him alive."
Ruby was quiet for a moment, considering that.
"If that's your definition, then no. I don't hate you for it." Her fingers kept moving gently through his hair. "Everyone hates themselves a little. I do too, some days. And not being able to change something that's just fundamentally part of who you are, that's not really a choice you're failing to make. It's just what's true. Same with awareness. You can't help seeing what you see."
"Ruby, I." Eric tried again, the words catching somewhere in his throat. He opened his mouth, closed it, tried once more, and still nothing came out right.
"It's okay," she whispered, cutting him off gently before he could keep struggling. "Just rest. We can talk more some other time."
Eric let his eyes fall shut, and within minutes, he was asleep.
He woke up one hour later and found that he was still on Ruby's bosom. He raised his body using his hands and looked at Ruby lying on the sofa, sleeping. Eric's eyes had returned to their original heterochromatic pink eyes by now, and he felt a lot lighter.
"Let's get you to bed," he whispered as he carried her and walked to the bedroom, laid her on the bed, and walked out of the room.
Eric dragged his feet into the bathroom, his body slowly starting to shake as his vision blurred, the harsh hum of the fluorescent light vibrating straight into his skull. He gripped the edges of the porcelain sink and forced his gaze upward to face the mirror.
He wanted to check his eyes, to find some shred of familiarity, but the glass was a cruel void. Nothing looked back. His clothes, the tiles behind him, the doorway—everything was perfectly reflected. Except him. Where his face should have been, there was only a jarring space in the room's geometry.
Suddenly, a sharp needle of pain pierced the center of his forehead. He cranked the tap open, his hands trembling as he scooped up a freezing handful of water and slammed it against his skin. It did nothing to numb the ache. His chest tightened. His breath hitched, turning ragged and shallow as he bent double over the basin.
Then came the itching. It started as a sickening prickle under his skin, a swarm of microscopic needles tearing outward from the dermis. Eric watched in horror as tiny, milk-white feathers began to push through his pores. They erupted in clusters across his knuckles, down his forearms, and up his neck, splitting the skin without drawing blood. They multiplied exponentially, a suffocating blanket of downy white flesh-sprouts rapidly spreading to swallow his entire body.
Eric locked his jaw, a low, guttural groan tearing from his throat. He endured. Forcing his eyes half-shut to block out the terrifying sight, he clawed at his pocket. His clumsy, feather-dusted fingers wrapped around the vial of golden liquid. He ripped it out, uncorked it, and forced his racing mind into a chokehold of pure focus.
"Suppress it. Push it back!" Slowly, the golden light took hold. The aggressive blooming slowed. The tiny, invasive wings began to wither, dissolving back beneath his skin like melting snow until his trembling hands were bare once more. He sank against the basin, drawing in a long, shaky breath. He was back to normal. Well, almost. The pressure in his stomach was unbearable. Desperate to purge the last of the corruption, Eric shoved his fingers deep into his mouth, aggressively gagging the back of his tongue. He heaved once. Twice. Then, a violent spasm wracked his torso as he vomited the entire dinner he had eaten an hour ago into the sink. Acid burned his throat, but as the last of it splashed against the porcelain, a cold, sharp wave of mental clarity finally washed over him. He felt completely focused.
"Hey, man, are you okay?" Eric flinched, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Max was stepping clean through the solid bathroom wall, a strange, shifting grey bubble floating silently by his side. Max's brow was deeply furrowed, his face pale with genuine panic. "You were just about to lose control."