Miss Ashbourne extended her hand.

Her hands were pale, her fingers slender, her nails trimmed clean and even.

She picked up the small crystal vial first, drew out the cork stopper, and brought it close to her nose. A single, barely perceptible inhalation.

No discernible scent.

But somewhere deep in those grey eyes, something shifted. Just barely. Just once.

Then she unfolded the parchment formula.

The paper was new. The handwriting carried a kind of aristocratic elegance to it. Neither of those things mattered. What mattered was the Disguise Potion formula—derived and modified from the base Transmutation Potion—written across it.

The cabin was perfectly silent.

Pandora waited without moving.

The green-haired man remained frozen across from her, rigid as a post, his breathing compressed to the minimum, a fine sheen of cold sweat continuously seeping from his forehead and sliding down along his temples.

Two, maybe three minutes passed.

Ashbourne finally looked up.

She folded the parchment, placed it back alongside the crystal vial, and returned both to where they had been.

When her gaze returned to Pandora, something in it had changed. Compared to the cool scrutiny of before, it now carried a barely detectable trace of... ease.

“These are indeed her belongings.”

The cold pressure that had saturated Ashbourne’s voice had dissipated considerably.

“The design logic of the formula is unmistakable.”

She paused.

Then she turned her head and looked at the rigid green-haired man beside her.

“That’s enough.”

Ashbourne’s voice was not loud. It carried the kind of authority that didn’t need to be.

“I've gotten what I came for.”

The green-haired man’s eyeballs moved with considerable effort, rotating to look at her.

“Go back and tell the Disciplinary Court that the investigation into the ring is no longer necessary.”

“This girl did not steal anything of mine.”

Her gaze dropped to the ring—its surface warm-toned and smooth—and rested there for one second.

“Furthermore, as of now...”

“I’m giving the ring to her.”

Her tone was flat, the way someone sounds when they’re deciding something that doesn’t require deliberation.

“That’s the end of it.”

She seemed to want to add something, then thought better of it and gave a small shake of her head.

“Actually, don’t bother relaying any of this. Your Court’s procedures are cumbersome enough to give me a headache.”

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As she spoke, Ashbourne raised her right hand and pulled something from the air.

A sheet of paper materialized between her fingertips, apparently from nowhere. It was a pale silver-grey, the material unusual in quality, covered in a few lines of concise text written in dark ink, with an intricate and elegant signature seal at the bottom.

Her gaze sharpened slightly.

The surface of the silver-grey paper caught flame without sound.

Cold fire. Nearly transparent. The grey of a midwinter sky with all the warmth removed.

It gave off no heat. It illuminated nothing around it.

The paper curled and blackened rapidly inside those flames, then reduced to ash—fine and grey-white, matching the fire that had consumed it.

The ash didn’t drift. Some invisible force held it gathered in a small cluster above her open palm.

Then that too dissolved. Into nothing.

As if it had never existed at all.

Done, Ashbourne turned her attention back to Pandora.

A small nod. And in those grey eyes, for a brief moment, something that looked almost like approval.

“You’re doing well. Keep at it.”

The words landed.

And then Ashbourne began to... fade.

Not disappear. Not vanish.

It was more that every color she possessed—the deep grey of her longcoat, the black of her turtleneck, the pale translucency of her skin, the lead-grey of her irises—began visibly draining away. Bleaching out. As if someone were erasing a pencil drawing with an invisible eraser, working steadily and without hurry.

Two, maybe three slow breaths.

She became a silhouette. Pure grey, flat, without depth or variation. The outline still crisp, but every detail and texture gone.

Then.

The grey silhouette shattered.

Like a mirror struck from the back—breaking apart into countless smaller, irregular fragments of grey.

The fragments didn’t fall.

They hung in the air, and dimmed, and grew transparent.

Until there was nothing left to see.

The cabin now held only two people.

Pandora. And the green-haired man across from her, who had finally reclaimed control of his own body and was currently pulling in ragged mouthfuls of air.

Along with the three items still resting on the seat between them.

“So that’s what a full-ranked Master Demon Hunter looks like...”

Pandora exhaled quietly, the words forming without sound somewhere inside her.

“Fourth rank. Fifth. Sixth. Or maybe even...”

She left the thought unfinished.

Then she turned her head and looked calmly at the green-haired man, who had recovered his motor functions but was visibly still far from recovered in any other sense—pale, unsteady, a man only recently returned from somewhere deeply unpleasant.

He felt her eyes on him. His body went taut for an involuntary instant.

He raised his head and met her gaze.

His expression was complicated in several distinct layers.

Fear. The lingering aftermath of fear. Confusion. A thin residue of displaced irritation directed at Pandora, who was in some sense the cause of all this. And underneath all of that—something harder to name. A wariness that had nothing to do with any of the rest.

“So that... that was Master Ashbourne.”

His lips moved, producing that entirely meaningless statement to break the silence, his voice carrying a tremor that he almost managed to conceal.

It seemed to serve some function—filling the suffocating air with words. Giving himself somewhere to put his composure while he found it again.

He appeared to hear how hollow it sounded even as he said it, because he gathered himself and followed it with something more substantive:

“Was she... someone you arranged to be here?”

Pandora heard the question and let out a small laugh.

It was not a kind laugh.

“What are you thinking?”

“Do you honestly believe someone like her is someone we could arrange?”

“If we had that kind of reach, do you think your Disciplinary Court would still be investigating us right now?”

The green-haired man blinked.

Then something uncomfortable crossed his face.

He understood, in the same moment the words landed, that the residual terror still rattling around inside him had done measurable damage to his judgment—enough to make him ask something that was, on reflection, fairly stupid.

He said nothing more. He drew several long, deliberate breaths and worked to settle his heart rate, which still hadn’t fully agreed to calm down, then straightened his posture and redirected his gaze to the window.

The hands resting on his knees were still clenched into fists.

Silence closed back over the cabin.

Only the heavy, steady rhythm of the Crawler’s footsteps remained, the dull reverberations of its weight moving across the Dead City’s streets, and the faint metallic scrape of the cabin joints shifting against each other.

From a purely procedural standpoint, the most serious charge—“theft of a Master Demon Hunter’s valuable property”—had just been invalidated at the root.

And yet the Giant Crawler carrying the cabin showed no sign of changing course or stopping.

It moved in the same direction it had been moving, at the same steady pace.

This was partly because the Disciplinary Court’s internal communication and procedural updates didn’t move quickly. Without receiving a formal, clearly documented directive from a superior, the green-haired man—as the operative on duty—couldn’t unilaterally abort a mission based on personal experience alone.