Shft. Shft. Shft.
Thin lines of blood sprayed as the threads sliced through everything in the sitting room in the same fraction of a second — ordinary hired guards, furniture, all of it reduced to pieces. Only one Beyonder in the room managed to whip a knife from his belt and cut through the threads aimed at him — but the moment he tried to act, a peculiar language reached his ears:
"You killed. You are guilty."
Crack.
A sharp ice spike drove up through the floorboards and skewered the Beyonder clean through. Dead before he hit the ground.
In an instant, the only person still breathing in the sitting room was Capim — who had gone chalk-white and was shaking uncontrollably. He watched the ordinary-looking but strangely compelling woman walk toward him, and his trembling intensified.
Vincent produced the sketch from earlier. "Do you recognise this place?"
"..."
Capim was still frozen in terror, unable to form a single word.
"Talk. Or die."
He felt the razor edge of a thread graze the skin of his throat. Capim's whole body lurched. "I — I'll talk. I'll talk."
He stared hard at the sketched gate, fighting to focus. After a full half-minute, he managed to say, shaking: "I... I've never seen this place. I don't know where it is."
"Are you certain?"
He swallowed with difficulty. "Let me look again."
This time he stared for two full minutes, mentally racing through every manor he had ever visited in Backlund. He came up empty — genuinely empty. Either he truly had never seen it, or the sketch was too rough for him to place it.
Then, from outside — urgent footsteps. Through the door came a man and a woman. The man wore a white powdered wig and was middle-aged and impeccably dressed; the woman held a long whip.
Capim felt a flicker of relief. Among his three Beyonder protectors, the one just killed by the ice spike had been the weakest. Mr. Harras was the strongest; Miss Katy came second. Together they'd deflected no shortage of trouble over the years.
The middle-aged gentleman, Harras, took in the carnage in the sitting room, his expression shifting sharply. He raised an iron-black metal gauntlet and aimed it at Vincent. "Exile."
Snap.
Vincent shattered like a broken mirror and reappeared behind the man. Another volley of spider threads lashed toward both of them. Harras's body suddenly blazed with a light like the first light of dawn — even his fists shimmered with a crisp, clean radiance.
He took the threads head-on, absorbing several slashes, then seized his opening, clenched his left fist, and declared with solemn authority: "Death!" His body fused with some strange force, dragging a visible afterimage behind him as he slammed directly into Vincent.
Vincent simply bent his trajectory — and sent him careening straight into Katy instead.
Crash.
The woman was knocked clear off her feet, her body folding at an ugly angle mid-air. She hit the ground already coughing up blood, breathing in more than out.
"You are guilty."
Before Harras could recover from the shock of having crushed his own colleague, that strange tongue reached him, and his spirituality gave a bone-deep shudder of dread.
The next second, his spirituality went haywire — the unmistakable prelude to losing control.
Bang.
A bullet caved in the top of his skull. Red and white scattered outward. Before Harras could spiral all the way into losing control, he was simply dead. He hadn't managed to use the Judge's most pivotal ability — Prohibition — even once.
Vincent exhaled slowly. His spirituality had been more than half-depleted. The Words of Order were unquestionably formidable — but when used to "prosecute" a Beyonder of higher sequence than yourself, the spirituality cost multiplied dramatically. For someone at Sequence 7, it was genuinely taxing.
He glanced at the Blood-Drinking Bracer on his wrist. The Herder abilities were still too limited, ultimately — especially the Apprentice pathway's "Open Door" and the Wind-Blessed's short-range flight, which contributed almost nothing in actual combat.
Conveniently, there happened to be a much more combat-applicable Beyonder soul right in front of him.
After a quick discussion with Bernadette, Vincent first released the Wind-Blessed soul from the Bracer — a sky-blue crystal slipped out from the band. Then he reached toward the dead Judge Beyonder's corpse and held out his arm. The Bracer spread across it swiftly.
The top of the Bracer split open silently. Mr. A's ethereal face peered out, eyes going red with excitement as he inhaled the Judge's soul in one long, hungry breath.
A silent scream — and then the Judge's soul was absorbed successfully into the Bracer, leaving a fresh scar across the surface.
This time, Vincent hadn't designated a specific ability in advance — he'd left it to chance. As it happened, luck was with him: he received two abilities. The first was the Judge's core ability, Prohibition. The second was Lash.
"You've now collected abilities from the Lawyer, the Judge, and the Prosecutor pathway all at once," Bernadette observed.
It clicked for Vincent: the Lawyer's Distortion, the Judge's Prohibition, the Prosecutor's Words of Order. With just those three, he felt he could probably muscle through to the mid-sequence bracket.
He walked back over to Capim, who had collapsed to the floor in complete despair.
"Ellie — the Prosecutor who's been investigating Conris. Who abducted her?"
Capim stared blankly, then blurted: "It wasn't me! I never touched her!"
"Why not? Because she works for the Prosecution Office? Because you don't want to antagonise the authorities?"
"No — no, it's because I was warned in advance. I was forbidden from taking any action against her whatsoever. I genuinely never laid a hand on her!"
"Who warned you?"
"..."
"Answer."
"Mi... MI9! It was Military Intelligence, Section 9 that warned me!"
Vincent was genuinely taken aback.
Late that afternoon, in the library of Viscount Glaint's residence, Xio gathered the intelligence she had compiled over the past two days into a neat document and handed it across to Audrey. The material focused primarily on disappearances of vagrants over the past week — plotted on a map by location and timestamp, with approximate areas marked in sequence.
"If any of these missing persons cases overlap with your man Qilangos, then he's been operating within roughly this area during that time window. More detail — if you're interested — is in the documents. Feel free to go through them at your leisure."
Audrey smiled. "Impressive, Xio. You've gathered all this in just one week."
Xio spread her hands. "In fairness, it's all inference at this point — not a shred of hard evidence."
"That's still remarkable!"
The two girls exchanged pleasantries for a while and chatted about the assorted rumours circulating in Beyonder circles, then each found a book to browse — following Audrey's lead.
Suddenly Xio's eyes lit up. She spotted two hardcover volumes: A History of the Loen Kingdom Aristocracy and Heraldry.
"Viscount Glaint, would it be all right if I borrowed these two? I'll return them promptly," she asked, looking rather earnest.
Watching from the corner of her eye, Audrey kept a composed expression and turned back to her own shelf — she'd quietly guided Xio toward those books. As a Visionary Pathway Beyonder, her gift was making a person feel that a choice was entirely their own idea. That was the living embodiment of her abilities.
She had arranged things in advance: written Mr. Fool's three-part honorific name inside A History of the Loen Kingdom Aristocracy, so that when Xio or Fors eventually read it and accidentally spoke the words aloud, they would fall into Mr. Fool's line of sight.
At the same moment, Xio glanced at the documents she'd handed Audrey — and the corner of her mouth flickered with a brief, private smile. Buried in one of those pages, she had written the honorific name of the "Lord of Chaos." If Audrey happened to read it aloud while going through the materials, that mysterious entity would take notice of her—
Ha. You're so interested in 'Brokers,' aren't you? Go ask directly, then.
The two girls happened to look up at the same moment, eyes meeting. Each wore a matching smile.
"How delightful," they said together.
To be continued…
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