After midnight, the city outside went quiet in its own way, not silent, just done pretending it had somewhere to be.

Kai sat at the window with the lights off.

He had been there for forty minutes. He wasn’t working through anything. He was just letting it sit there the way you do when you already know what you’re going to do and you’re giving yourself a little more time before you have to admit it.

Marcus’s voice kept coming back. The way it had sped up toward the end, like he was trying to get everything out before the door closed. Three bases with sixty members, and a leader who orchestrated everything.

Victor had never needed to get his hands dirty. That was the thing Kai kept coming back to. Victor had watched him at the ceremony, made up his mind about something, and then built an entire operation around that decision without ever stepping into a fight himself.

He picked up his phone and saw the forums were still active.

They always were at this hour.

He scrolled without looking for anything in particular, just letting it come to him.

Three separate threads about dungeon routes in the eastern district were all saying different things but landing in the same place. People were showing up at the gates and waiting hours for a turn that should have taken ten minutes.

The respawn time on lower-level gates was a minute, maybe two. But the gates were never free. Someone was always already there, and then someone else, and nobody could work out why so many people kept running the same dungeons at the same time.

One thread had been reposted enough to hit the trending section.

Why are the Eastern Gates so slow this week!?

He scrolled through the replies.

Forty-three pages of people comparing wait times and arrival timestamps, all of them circling the same blind spot without knowing it. They were describing Ironpact’s rotation from the outside.

One team cleared a gate.

Another arrived before anyone else could enter.

A second team looping back to take the same gate the moment it respawned. Clean, quiet, and invisible to anyone who only ever saw one piece of it at a time.

One reply near the bottom read:

I’ve been using various E-rank gates every morning for two weeks. Yesterday I arrived at my usual time, and there were already six people I’d never seen before positioned in the approach. This has been happening for the last four days, and I’m tempted to just go to another city.

Kai looked at it for a moment.

Then put the phone face down on the windowsill and stared out across the city lights.

The ambush hadn’t been improvised.

Someone had watched him long enough to know his routes, his timing, the gates he favored, long enough to know where he was easiest to predict.

If he waited, they would rebuild. And when they did, they would be more careful. More spread out and harder to find. The things he knew right now were the locations, the numbers, the names.

He pictured Mina leaving for work in the morning. The route she took was the same one every day. He thought about Leo’s school and the three blocks between the front door and the nearest train station. Anyone who had spent two weeks watching Kai had spent two weeks watching all of it.

They hadn’t touched the family yet. He was fairly sure of that. While they still believed they could bring him in, there was no reason to. Even after the confrontation in the street, the order had been to contain him, not to go after anyone close to him. Victor’s call.

But orders like that had a shelf life.

He stood at the window and looked out at the city until the light started to change.

There was really only one answer. It wasn’t the one he wanted. It was just the one that kept coming up, no matter how he ran the numbers.

...

Mina’s door was at the end of the hallway, and it was closed.

Kai stood outside it for a moment.

He was not sure how long. Long enough that the floor got cold under his feet, which he noticed without doing anything about it.

He had told her enough to build fallback plans.

Routes.

Emergency contacts.

A name at her office.

He had not told her about the ambush, or Marcus, or the three locations, or any of what he had spent the last hour working through at the window.

He could knock.

She would wake up without being angry about it, because that was not who she was. She would come to the kitchen table, and she would listen, and she would ask the right questions, and when he was done, she would look at him the way she did when she had heard something bad and chosen to believe it.

And then it would be real.

Right now, it was still just him and the dark and a set of facts he had not done anything with yet.

The moment he knocked, the facts would become real.

And Mina would have to carry them too.

He stood outside her door for another thirty seconds. Then he went back to his room but he didn’t lie down. Kai sat on the edge of the bed and reopened the eastern gate thread and found the earliest complaint.

Six days ago.

The rotation had been running at least six days before the ambush, meaning it had started even earlier.

Meaning he had less time than he thought.

He closed the phone.

The room was dark and quiet, and Leo’s door was closed down the hall, and the city outside the window had reached the specific hour when even Mythal stopped pretending to be awake.

He pulled up his alarm.

He had set it at six for the past two weeks, early enough to reach the good gates before the morning crowds, late enough to get enough sleep for the day’s runs to hold together properly. Six had been the right number for the life he had been living.

He changed it.

Four-thirty.

He set the phone down.

Kai lay back and stared at the ceiling without chasing any particular thought. The alarm was set. Tomorrow would be what it was going to be.

He closed his eyes.