The corner of the stone hallway stood exactly twelve feet ahead. Eloy had been standing in the exact same spot for forty seconds.
He counted the beats of his own pulse. Speedrunners count everything. Forty seconds meant nothing in real-world time. In run time, a forty-second hold ended careers. He swiped his hand to bring up the chat interface one last time.
[IsoldeSimp47]: she doesn't bite (probably)
[IsoldeSimp47]: just go
[ghostrunner_x]: make eye contact but not for too long
[val_writes]: treat her like a normal person eloy. it is very simple
[LMAO_cat]: @val_writes IT IS NOT SIMPLE
Eloy murmured a quiet acknowledgment to the empty air. He squared his shoulders, adjusted his grip on the heavy parchment scroll, and turned the corner.
The corridor exploded.
White light split the air from floor to ceiling. A concussive wave of ozone and heat blasted down the stone hall. A girl in a pristine noble uniform flew backward through the air. She hit the opposite wall with a wet, heavy crunch. The impact vibrated up through the stone floor and straight into Eloy's boots.
He threw himself sideways on pure reflex. The girl missed his head by the width of a hand. She crumpled to the floor in a heap of scorched fabric.
The silence that followed pressed hard against his eardrums.
Eloy braced his back against the wall. The girl on the floor shifted. She pressed one hand to the side of her head and fought to get upright. No visible broken bones. He forced his gaze away from her and looked down the rest of the corridor.
"She is actually here," Eloy whispered. He swallowed hard. "I think I got extremely lucky in the library."
[ghostrunner_x]: LUCKY HE SAYS
[nachtfalter]: i want her to do this to me
[IronWaifu]: did she just cast tier 3 lightning
Eloy stepped fully around the corner. He kept the mission scroll visible in his right hand. At least he possessed a concrete, documented, director-signed reason to be standing in this specific hallway. That had to count for something in the threat calculation.
He had no idea what else counted with her.
Isolde Reichenbach stood near the far window. She faced the glass, her back to the corridor. Her hands hung empty at her sides. A second noble lay on the floor to her right, completely motionless.
Zero combat stance. Perfect stillness. Eloy had memorized every frame of her animation set across three entire games, but the developers had never coded this specific posture.
Her shoulders dropped half an inch. Her breathing slowed. She was running through a deliberate, structured physical sequence.
"It is always like this." The words were low, scraping against the back of her throat. They landed between Eloy's ears and nowhere else. She was not talking to him. "Calm down. You should be used to this by now."
Her voice lacked the armored polish of the late-game audio files. It sounded raw. It caught on the vowels, exposing a mechanical effort to regain control.
Isolde turned. Her shoulders snapped back and her jaw locked. Dark eyes tracked forward, pinning his face.
The full, lethal Isolde Reichenbach of the franchise loaded into the hallway in real time. The look she leveled at him belonged to a cutscene that triggered exactly two seconds before a boss fight.
"You are following me," Isolde said.
[nachtfalter]: technically yes
[hunterdoge6]: do not say that eloy
[LoreKeeper]: abort abort
Eloy raised both hands immediately. He defaulted to the exact same instinct he used in the library. Palms open. Scroll visible. Nothing concealed.
Closing the distance slowly, he covered the ground the way a bomb technician approaches a live wire. He stepped over the unconscious noble without breaking stride, his eyes locked entirely on Isolde's hands.
"No, no!" Eloy said. "You got it wrong."
He held out the scroll.
Isolde ignored the offering. Her dark eyes darted from the wax seal up to his face, running a silent calculation.
She snatched the scroll from his hand.
Isolde unrolled the paper. Eloy counted his own heartbeats. He reached nine before her eyes snapped back up.
The chat tried to fill the dead air.
[val_writes]: she is going to accept
[LMAO_cat]: she is going to refuse and blast him
[IsoldeSimp47]: SHHHH let her read
[Abyss_Walker]: prepare the dodge roll input
Isolde rolled the parchment back up. She handed it back with a completely blank expression.
"It is a suicide mission," she said.
"It is." Eloy took the scroll and tapped it against his leg. "Genuinely. A complete suicide mission."
He scratched the back of his neck, looking down at the unconscious noble on the floor.
"How do you even kidnap the academy's top prodigy? Dual elemental mastery, everyone knows his face, the whole institution would—" He stopped.
Isolde raised one dark eyebrow.
"I mean," Eloy said. "He shouldn't have been kidnapped to begin with."
The words left his mouth before his filter caught them. Isolde's face shifted. A micro-expression. The tiniest degree of adjustment, like a compass needle snapping to true north.
"Someone with his specific profile," Eloy continued, forcing a casual tone. "Dual affinity. High visibility. It is tactically strange for a basic syndicate. That is all."
Isolde did not push the issue. She looked at him for a long, quiet moment. Her focus snagged on him. She studied his face, calculating the anomaly.
[ghostrunner_x]: she noticed
[nachtfalter]: look what u have done
"You are strange," Isolde said.
"That is the second time someone has told me that today."
Isolde looked away. She bypassed the unconscious body on the floor and walked past Eloy, retreating at a measured, deliberate pace.
"Tomorrow," Isolde said. She did not look back over her shoulder. "Tomorrow we are mission partners, then."
She rounded the corner.
Eloy stood alone in the hallway. The first noble girl was upright now, pressing her back against the wall for support. The unconscious noble to his right remained perfectly still. The lightning strike had burned a thick, black streak across the stone above the window. It left a clean, total mark. The kind of carbon scoring that never scrubs out.
A system notification chimed in the center of his vision.
[ Isolde Reichenbach — Affinity: 1 / 100 → 1.25 / 100 ]
Eloy stared at the decimal point.
"Just 0.25?" he asked the empty hallway.
[IsoldeSimp47]: 99.75 points to go lets goooo
[MayaBestGirl98]: @IsoldeSimp47 98.75* you dumbass
[notabot3000]: you have time (you do not have time)
Eloy reached up to dismiss the window. A second line of text materialized below the counter. The font was smaller, formatted differently from any system prompt he had generated during the tutorial phase.
[ OBSERVATION: Isolde Reichenbach interrupted an active emotional self-regulation sequence upon detecting your presence. ]
[ Data logged. ]
Eloy read the text twice.
The system flagged a broken sequence. His arrival had short-circuited her attempt to calm down. The moment she registered his footsteps in the corridor, she had abandoned the dropped shoulders, the slow breathing, and the quiet mantra. The entire process cut off mid-execution.
The prompt cataloged a defensive reset. His arrival had forced her to rebuild her armor from scratch.
He filed the observation under variables with an unknown value. He pulled up the mission scroll one more time. Rank A. Tomorrow morning. Her name sat above his, sorted alphabetically, making it look exactly like the system had already decided who was leading the vanguard.
He did not have a route for any of this.
He was going to need one by sunrise.