The other reason the Crawler hadn’t changed course was simpler.

The charges against Pandora hadn’t actually been fully resolved.

There was more than one of them.

Thinking about this, the green-haired man found himself genuinely curious about one thing.

This girl was obviously sharp—absurdly sharp—and bold in a way that defied reason. So why wasn’t she showing the slightest reaction to the fact that they weren’t turning around?

But then again...

Considering that from the moment they’d met, he hadn’t managed to come out ahead in a single verbal exchange with her—

He pressed his lips together and stayed quiet.

He had no interest in embarrassing himself further.

As for Pandora.

She wasn’t asking because she already knew.

“Theft” was only one of the charges filed against her.

Not the only one.

She had to give the Disciplinary Court some credit. It had been a considerable amount of time. Arthur and the others—their bodies, buried somewhere out in the forest floor, had probably rotted down to bare bone by now.

And yet they had still traced it back to her from scattered fragments of evidence.

But...“deliberately inciting conflict within the Academy grounds, and willfully killing fellow students?”

She wasn’t going to roll over on that one.

It was self-defense. Plain and simple.

The process had just been...slightly more vigorous than standard.

A faint, ambiguous smile settled at the corner of Pandora’s mouth.

At that moment, the view outside the window began to change.

The architecture lining both sides of the street shifted gradually away from the Dead City’s characteristic look—chaotic, deteriorating, improvised—and toward something more uniform. More severe. More clearly designed around the concept of order.

Pandora turned toward the window.

Through the glass, in the middle distance, a massive structure hunched in the city’s shadows like a black beast that had been there long enough to become part of the landscape. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

It was close now.

Towering spires. Stone walls the color of old charcoal. And those enormous iron gates—always shut, always looking like the entrance to somewhere you didn’t come back from.

The Disciplinary Court.

They’d arrived.

..................

Inside the Disciplinary Court. The interrogation office block.

As one of the Court’s core working areas, this part of the building was nothing like the exterior face that apprentices saw from outside.

The towers, the cold stone, the rigid posted guards—all of that projected exactly what it was meant to project. An aura of severity and institutional authority that made most apprentices' spines go cold from three blocks away.

In here, though...

“Hey, same deal as always—loser goes to pick up the hot pizza?”

A slightly greasy voice drifted through the room.

...The atmosphere in here was something the Dead City’s apprentice population would find almost entirely unfamiliar. For one particular transmigrator from a prior civilization, however, it would have felt deeply, bone-achingly recognizable.

It smelled like an office.

Specifically: the acidic-burnt note of cheap coffee that had been sitting too long, the artificial-cheese-and-preservative smell of frozen pizza reheated in a microwave, and the layered staleness of an ashtray on the desk that nobody had emptied in what appeared to be several geological epochs.

All of it combined into the characteristic aroma of a space where people spent too many hours doing thankless work for not enough appreciation.

A large desk occupied the center of the room—deep brown, its surface mapped with old scratches and coffee ring stains. Three people sat behind it.

A bald, heavyset middle-aged man was pinching a reheated slice of pizza between oily fingers, chewing with his mouth open while talking:

“You hear about this? Room C got a real difficult one in today. New face, apparently.”

Across from him, a young clerk who looked barely into his twenties was tipping his head back to drain a bottle of the energy drink the Disciplinary Court provided specifically for its non-powered staff members.

The liquid inside was a deeply unsettling shade of fluorescent green, bottled in clear glass.

Word was that it was essentially a diluted low-grade potion. It cleared the head and kept you awake—but apparently, in sufficient quantities, it also caused mild hallucinations.

“Yeah,” the young clerk said, setting the bottle down and producing a burp that smelled precisely like mint extract and industrial chemicals. “Sounds like a real troublemaker. Antisocial type even before enrollment—then she got power, and the ego apparently went completely off the rails.”

“I couldn’t get anything out of her,” said the middle-aged woman in the grey knitted cardigan sitting on the other side of the desk. She was pressing her fingertips firmly into her own temple, and the shadows under her eyes had the quality of someone who had been adding to them continuously for several days. “Gave up after twenty minutes.”

“But the section chief took over personally,” she added, with the particular tone of someone who is relieved something is no longer their problem. “So it should be fine.”

The bald clerk’s head snapped up at that. Something seemed to click into place for him, and he heaved his considerable bulk out of his chair fast enough to make the furniture protest audibly.

He looked at the young clerk with an expression that had gone distinctly speculative.

“Hey, kid. You've been curious about the chief’s actual abilities, right? What do you say we make it interesting?”

The young clerk gave him a suspicious sideways look.

“I’m not betting. Last time I bet I got yelled at for a week...”

“Come on!” The bald man rolled his eyes but showed no sign of backing down. “This job is mind-numbing. We've got to find some entertainment somewhere.”

He held up five fingers. Thought about it. Added five more.

“Five rounds—no, ten. Ten rounds at the Black Mist Hot Springs, full package. I’m betting the new one isn’t going to be wrapped up that easily. You in?”

The woman in the grey cardigan looked up with genuine shock. Even the shadows under her eyes seemed to recede slightly.

“You’re going that big? That’s a month’s salary.”

The bald clerk bit off another piece of pizza and shrugged with the unconcerned air of a man who had made his peace with eating instant noodles.

“We’re not those Academy brats. Worst case, we live on energy drinks until next payday.”

The energy drinks were complimentary, provided by the Court. The taste was genuinely difficult to describe in favorable terms, but they did cover the basic physiological requirements.

The young clerk appeared to arrive at some internal decision. He set his jaw, planted his palm on the desk with a satisfying slap.

“Fine. You’re on.”

“The chief will handle it. I’d bet my last copper on that. He’s the only person in this entire interrogation division who can actually get Mr. Long-Ears to cooperate.”

The words were barely out of his mouth.

Creeeeak—

The heavy oak door of Interrogation Room C—upholstered in black leather across its face, worn smooth at the edges—swung open from the inside.

A middle-aged man stepped out. Stubble that had gone past deliberate and into neglected. Eyes that were sharp in the specific way of someone who had spent a long career watching people lie to him.

He wore the Disciplinary Court’s standard deep grey longcoat. Pinned to his left arm was a silver badge—the kind that meant Section Chief, Interrogations.

“Well?” The bald clerk was immediately at his elbow, greasy face arranged into an expression of urgent anticipation. “Chief? Done already?”

The chief glanced at him without answering.

He lifted one foot instead and gave a casual kick to the interrogation room door, which—due to some accumulated warping in the frame that nobody had gotten around to fixing—never quite latched properly.

The hinges delivered a long, tooth-grinding groan that rolled through the quiet office and took its time dying out.

“Someone needs to fix this door.”

He muttered it to himself, voice low and rough.

The bald clerk made a dismissive noise.

“Every door in the interrogation block sounds like that. The one in Room S is slightly better—though every time you open it I half expect the whole frame to give up and fall apart. Don’t change the subject, chief. Did you get anywhere with her?”