Richards had not asked Neo to come back to the apartment this time.

He had sent an address instead.

The place turned out to be a narrow bar tucked between two brighter streets, half hidden beneath an old sign and a strip of amber light. Inside, the room carried the lived-in warmth of a place that had survived years of tired workers, cheap arguments, and people who needed one drink before going home to something worse. Dark wood, scratched tables, the smell of coffee, oil, and liquor worked into the walls so deeply that nothing short of fire would ever get it out.

Neo found Richards already there.

He sat near the back with a glass in hand and his coat thrown over the chair beside him, posture looser than usual. The man still gave off that government shape, but tonight it sat on him less stiffly, like he had unbuttoned something in his spine on the way in.

When Richards saw him, he raised two fingers.

"There you are."

Neo stopped by the table. "You pick strange places."

Richards snorted. "That coming from you is rich."

Neo pulled out the chair and sat. "My standards are practical."

"That explains the face."

A server came over, and Richards ordered before Neo could say he didn’t need anything. Something to drink for him, something non-alcoholic for Neo, and a plate of fried food to sit between them so the evening didn’t resemble a formal debrief with bad lighting.

Neo took in the room once while the server moved away. "So this is what government men do when they’re off duty."

"Sometimes," Richards said, turning the glass slowly between his fingers. "Other times we drown under reports and listen to idiots swear they were standing nowhere near the murder weapon." He lifted the drink slightly. "This version is kinder."

For a while, the conversation drifted along easier currents.

Richards asked how Arandom was treating him. Neo said the city still felt like a place designed by people who had never worried about a ceiling leaking onto their bed. Richards laughed at that. Neo asked whether all government workers drank after work or only the ones with enough sins stored up. Richards said the good ones drank after work and the bad ones drank during it.

That helped.

Not because it made Richards harmless. It didn’t. It simply loosened the frame around the conversation enough that Neo stopped waiting for the first real question every second it didn’t arrive.

The food came. Richards nudged the plate toward the center and watched him over the rim of his glass.

"I just didn’t want to talk about this stuff in the apartment," Richards said. "It makes everything feel heavier than it needs to." 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

Neo picked up one of the fries. "That’s your reason?"

"Yeah." Richards took a sip from his glass. "And I wanted to see if you’d actually come."

Neo chewed, swallowed, and gave him a flat look. "You make it sound like I’m difficult."

"You are difficult."

"Fair."

Richards smiled faintly at that, but the smile didn’t stay long.

"One of these days, I want you to come with me," he said.

Neo leaned back a little. "Where."

"To work."

He said it plainly, which made it easier to take seriously.

"Not all day. I’m not trying to bury you in paperwork. Just come with me once. See how things actually work from the inside."

Neo frowned slightly. "You want to show me your job?"

"Yeah." Richards rested his forearm on the table. "You’ve got opinions about the government. That’s fine. I’m saying you should see how it really moves before you decide exactly what you think of it."

Neo turned that over for a moment.

He didn’t see much reason to refuse. Watching cost him nothing. Learning almost never hurt unless the other side was holding a knife while smiling.

"I can do that," he said. "One day."

Richards nodded once. "Good."

The server passed by again, and for a few seconds the conversation paused on its own. Neo took another drink and set the glass down.

"You didn’t ask me here just for that," he said.

"No," Richards replied. "I didn’t."

Neo gave a small tilt of his head and reached for his drink. "Alright, then. What did you want to talk about?"

Richards rested his forearm on the table and studied him for a moment, less like an official and more like an older man trying to decide how direct he wanted to be. "Before that, tell me something. How have you been doing lately? Really. You’ve had a rough stretch these last weeks."

Neo took a sip before answering. "I’ve been fine. Busy, more than anything."

Richards gave him a dry look. "You always say fine when the real answer is that things were a mess and you got through them anyway."

Neo shrugged lightly. "That usually is the real answer."

That got a quiet laugh out of Richards.

"Fair enough," he said. "Still, you look different. Better, I think. Heavier in a way that tells me your last few days weren’t wasted."

Neo let that pass. "I went out to Dry Scar with Alice."

Richards’s attention sharpened at once. "Dry Scar? That’s farther than I expected. How did that go?"

Neo leaned back a little in the chair. "On the way there, the driver told us something. He said there’d been rumors lately about an awakened killing other awakeneds around the hunting grounds."

Richards blinked once and gave a small nod. "Ah. That case." He rubbed his thumb once along the side of his glass. "Yeah, one of my juniors had it. Poor girl’s been chasing scraps for a while now and hasn’t found anything useful."

Neo’s mouth shifted faintly. "She won’t need to keep looking."

Richards went still for half a beat.

He did not interrupt. He did not ask the stupid version of the question. He just held Neo’s face and waited for the rest.

Neo gave it to him.

"The rumor was real. We found signs first. Dead Soul Beasts, fresh enough that the wind hadn’t swallowed them yet. After that, we ran into him near a ruin." Neo rested the glass back on the table and added, "He wasn’t some idiot attacking people at random either. Smart bastard. Careful. He talked first, acted polite, gave us advice about the place, and kept the whole thing sounding normal while he was setting up the kill."

Richards’s expression tightened. "What kind of class?"

"Sand." Neo’s tone flattened with remembered irritation. "A bad one to deal with in a desert. He had a puppet with him too, made out of sand. Good enough to pass as a real person until the wind started breaking pieces off it."

Richards exhaled slowly through his nose. "That does sound annoying."

"He was," Neo said. "He fought to waste time. Kept moving, kept breaking our footing, kept making Alice burn Soul Essence while he stayed just far enough away that I couldn’t get a proper hit in."

Richards nodded once. "And in the end?"

Neo met his gaze. "He’s dead."

This time Richards leaned back fully, one hand leaving the glass and coming up to his jaw for a moment. Not shock. Not even surprise, really. More like the final click of a shape he had already half assembled.

"So that’s what you meant," he said quietly.

"Yeah."

Richards let the thought settle. Around them, the bar kept moving in its own small life, plates shifting, people talking, a burst of laughter near the counter that belonged to a different world entirely. When he looked back at Neo, the line in his face had changed.

"That makes me want you to come with me even more," he said.

Neo lifted a brow. "To work?"

"Yes, to work." Richards gave a short, dry smile. "You hear a rumor from a driver, take it seriously, go out there, read the situation properly, and come back after solving a case one of my juniors couldn’t crack for weeks. I’d be stupid not to take an interest in that."

Neo let out a faint breath through his nose. "You make it sound more impressive than it was."

"Do I?" Richards asked, voice calm. "Because from where I’m sitting, it sounds exactly as impressive as it should."

Neo said nothing to that.

Richards leaned forward a little and folded his hands on the table. "I mean what I said before. Come with me one day. Watch how things work from inside the government, how cases move, how reports become action, and how often they don’t. You might find it useful. More than that, I think you might actually be good at it."

Neo stared at him for a moment, expression flat in the usual way, though his mind had already moved past the flattery and into the practical shape underneath it.

"Maybe," he said. "I’ll come and see it first."

Richards nodded. "That’s all I’m asking."

Neo took another drink, set the glass down, and tilted his head slightly. "Then tell me something first. How much of Gray Hand do you actually plan to explain to me?"

At that, Richards’s mouth curved faintly.

"There it is," he said. "That’s a much better question."