Chapter 101: Chapter 99 One of the Nine Hammers

Dawn did not enter that apartment; it was admitted. The light did not arrive like a simple blessing over the city, but like a selected guest, filtered through glass panels so tall and clean that they seemed not to have been built to look at the world, but to remind whoever lived there that he could contemplate it without belonging to it.

From that height, the city stretched below like a fatigued organism that had still not finished opening its eyes, a mass of concrete, smoke, reflections and sleeping geometries that was receiving the first gold of the day with the docility of something too small to oppose it. The nearby buildings did not interrupt the view; they moved aside. The avenues, still restrained by the hour, seemed like veins of an immense body from which no one had asked permission to keep breathing. The sky, instead, unfolded with arrogant slowness, letting the sun finish rising behind the farthest line of towers, as if even dawn understood that in that place it could not burst in: it had to present itself.

The apartment was made of expensive silences. The polished stone floor returned the brightness with the coldness of an opaque mirror. The furniture did not fill the space; it administered it. Each piece, from the black table with precise edges to the leather armchair that dominated the main room, seemed chosen not out of taste, but out of an obsessive form of aesthetic discipline that rejected all vulgar excess and, nevertheless, turned luxury into a quiet threat.

There were no photographs, memories, flowers, or anything that suggested shared life. There was spaciousness. There was control. There was an order so clean that it felt more hostile than any disorder. At that hour, with the dawn light barely sliding over the contours of the furniture, the place did not seem like a home, but a private height torn from the world so that someone could sit above it.

And he was there.

Sitting in the leather armchair before the window, with his legs open in a posture of dominance so natural that it would have seemed like carelessness in another man less conscious of himself, the owner of that stillness observed the city like someone looking at a board that had still not finished arranging itself before the next move. The robe rested open over his slender body, revealing white, clean skin, cared for with a frivolity that in him did not seem soft, but sharp.

He did not have the heavy musculature of an ordinary combatant nor the stiffness of someone who needs to prove strength through volume; his was something else, an elegant thinness, dangerously well composed, the shape of a man who did not need to impose himself with physical presence because everything about him, from his posture to the way he held his head, conveyed the certainty of having been born to occupy the upper part of any room. His golden hair fell with calculated carelessness, already lit by the edge of dawn, and his green eyes, attentive without tension, had that unpleasant serenity of those who can speak of ruin with the same voice with which others would ask for a drink.

At his feet, kneeling between his legs, there was a woman. Her black hair fell messily over her shoulders and part of her face, but not enough to hide the signs of an old and repeated violence, marks that were not reduced to a blow or an isolated wound, but composed the complete map of an obedience torn out through exhaustion. She wore a dog collar tightened around her neck, and her posture was not that of a person accompanying another, but that of someone reduced to a function, placed there with the obscene naturalness with which others would place a side table.

She remained kneeling, subdued, silent, occupying that space beneath him as if the entire apartment had been designed so that even degradation seemed like an extension of the furniture. The man did not look at her at every moment. He did not need to. The certainty of her submission was so installed in the scene that he could allow himself to ignore her while holding the phone beside his ear and contemplating the dawn with a slightly pleased expression, almost in a good mood.

The call did not seem urgent. That was what made the tone with which he spoke heavier. There was no altered breathing, there was no visible anger, there was none of that impatience of men who have not yet learned to hide fear behind authority. His voice descended softly, well modulated, with a superficial warmth that was not born from kindness, but from the habit of commanding without needing to raise his volume.

—There will be changes —he said, without taking his eyes off the city—. We have lost too many assets against enemies who should never have caused this level of wear.

He paused. Not because he doubted, but because he liked the weight of his own words when they had enough space to settle.

—They were supposed to be on our same level —he continued then, and a minimal, elegant, almost lazy smile hinted at the corner of his mouth—. Or at least that was what we were asked to consider for a time. What a generous gesture. What a kind idea.

The woman remained motionless, except for the discreet trembling of her breathing. He still did not look at her. His long fingers rested serenely on the arm of the armchair, and the dawn light, touching his face in profile, did not make him human or close; it sculpted him. Every line of his face found in that early brightness an almost offensive precision. He was beautiful in a way that did not inspire clean desire, but vigilance, the kind of beauty that seemed aware of its effect and for that very reason used it as part of domination.

His eyes followed the remote movement of the city: the first vehicles, the beginning of activity, the common illusion that every morning brought with it a new possibility. That amused him. Not because he believed in the dawn, but because he knew too well the ease with which the weak confused continuity with hope.

On the other side of the phone, they spoke for a few seconds. He listened in silence, inclined barely to one side, without his expression changing more than in a brief shadow of annoyance. He had lost assets, yes. There were points on the board that no longer responded as planned. There were names, routes, and resources that had been becoming costly to sustain.

But none of that enraged him completely. Anger belongs more to those who still feel that something can be taken from them. His was something else: a correction. A cold rectification, almost elegant, of the mistake of having allowed too much movement to forces that, in his mind, did not even deserve to be called rivals.

—It is agreed —he murmured at last, and now his green eyes did sharpen with a satisfied gleam, as if the world had just aligned itself again with a logic that seemed more correct to him—. Those inferiors will be allowed to enjoy their small achievements while they still believe they mean something.

The light finished rising a little more, touching the edge of his open robe, the armchair, the glass, and the battered skin of the kneeling woman. He let that instant breathe before pronouncing the second part, because certain phrases, to him, deserved the privilege of being born slowly.

—When they lower their guard —he said with the same cordial voice with which others would speak of closed deals or future dinners—, we, the Smiths, will finish off those insignificant beings.

There was no visible response that mattered to him. He heard the acceptance on the other side of the line, allowed a minimal farewell, and hung up. Then he left the phone on his lap for an instant, as if the device had ceased to exist as soon as it fulfilled its function. His attention did not return suddenly to the room; it descended slowly from the city toward the interior, toward the contained light of the apartment, toward the kneeling figure at his feet.

The dawn was already high enough to erase the boundary between gloom and clarity. The room had stopped seeming like a chamber suspended outside of time. Now it was once again what it had always been: a domain.

He lowered his gaze at last.

The woman remained still, reduced by fear, by exhaustion, and by the habit of obeying even before the order fell complete. Her black hair, disheveled and dull, barely allowed the defeated outline of her face to be seen. From above, he could read her not as a person, but as a consequence. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

There was something almost tender in the way he tilted his head toward her, not because he felt compassion, but because he knew the value of contrast very well. Cruelty that screams resembles a loss of control too much. His never needed that. His knew how to touch softly before destroying.

He raised his hand with deliberate slowness and sank his fingers into her hair, taking her by the top of the head with a firmness that simulated care. The pad of his thumb brushed the crown of her head only once, as if he were offering a caress to someone who truly mattered to him.

—Love —he said.

The word fell over the scene with a sweetness so out of place that it made it crueler than an open threat. He did not pronounce it with visible mockery. He did not smile immediately. He said it like someone naming something intimate, cherished, domestic, and precisely because of that, the entire apartment seemed to become colder around them.

—Stop.

She obeyed in that same instant. She raised her face with that obedient speed that was not born from discipline, but from the fear of arriving late to an order. Her black hair moved aside enough to reveal the true extent of the damage she carried on her. There was not a single gesture of dramatic dignity or defiance in her; only exhaustion, visible marks of mistreatment, a beauty broken by use and by the long habit of having been treated as an object before a life. The dawn light touched her face without beautifying it, not because she was ugly, but because exhaustion, blows, and humiliation had devoured any right she had to seem safe. Her eyes searched for his with the automatic docility of someone who still hopes that the next instruction will not make everything worse.

Then he smiled at her. It was not a wide or caricatured smile. It was worse. Barely a calm curve, a minimal kindness, the expression of a man who in another scene might even have seemed affectionate. His green eyes softened by one degree. The hand holding her head did not tighten more. Everything in him said the same thing for an impossible second: calm, reward, closeness.

The woman could not know that, for someone like him, tenderness was not the reverse of violence. It was one of its most refined forms.

His other hand slid backward, behind the backrest of the armchair, with the naturalness of someone reaching for a forgotten glass or a habitual object. His fingers found the weapon in the exact space where he had left it before sitting down, because men like him did not improvise even their most intimate impulses. He took it without hurry. There was no visible tension in his shoulders, no trembling in his wrist, not even a notable change in his breathing. The weapon then appeared beside his side like a logical extension of his person, clean, small, efficient.

The woman managed to see it, and that was the only thing that changed in the scene. Not a scream. Not a plea. Only a brief, instinctive shudder, the silent reflex of someone who understands too late that sweetness was merely the most comfortable door toward the end. He kept smiling.

—Thank you —he said in an almost affectionate voice.

And he fired.

The sound was dry, contained by the luxurious breadth of the apartment, incapable of becoming a scandal inside a place built to absorb even the filthiest acts and return them as silence. The woman fell to one side without greatness, without visible tragedy, collapsing onto the polished floor with the clumsy abruptness of that which stops holding itself up in the same instant that will is interrupted. The collar around her neck struck the stone once. After that, there was nothing.

Not a true startle in him. Not an exhalation of relief. Not the later trembling that sometimes betrays those who still distinguish between killing and finishing a task.

He lowered the weapon with serenity and observed the body lying beside the armchair as if evaluating a minor stain in an otherwise impeccable space. For one long second, the dawn light kept growing over the city on the other side of the glass, continued rising over buildings, avenues, and rooftops, followed its magnificent and vulgar course over millions of lives that would never know that, high above, a woman had just ceased to exist without altering the balance of the day in the slightest. That seemed appropriate to him. Truly important death rarely needed witnesses. The rest were props.

He rested the weapon on the arm of the armchair and looked back at the city.

He did not look at the body again immediately. For a few seconds, he let the dawn finish settling over the city, as if even after the shot he still wanted to grant the world the humiliation of continuing to exist under his contemplation. Morning was no longer being born: it was asserting itself. The initial gold had become a firmer, more stable brightness, and the line of towers on the horizon was gradually losing that uncertain veil of the newly awakened to become architecture again, traffic, glass, concrete, verticalized misery and distance. Everything was still there. Everything persisted. The city did not stop because a woman had died at his feet, and precisely because of that the scene preserved its balance. He had always liked that kind of continuity; not out of compassion toward the world, but out of contempt. Common reality had the involuntary elegance of not understanding when something had just happened that should have ashamed it.

Then he stood up.

He did not do it with brusqueness or with the clumsy discharge of a man who can no longer contain what he feels. He rose with the same neatness with which he would have stood to pour himself a drink or close a boring conversation. The robe fell better over his slender body as he straightened, sliding over his figure with the naturalness of a garment that already knew the type of anatomy it dressed: the long back, the firm waist, the clean shoulders, the impeccable whiteness of skin that did not carry the slightest trace of physical struggle despite the recent death breathing on the floor. He took one step. Then another. His bare feet made no sound on the polished stone, and that absence of sound made everything more offensive, because the apartment still seemed like a space designed for calm while inside it advanced a fury of another order, one of those furies that do not announce themselves in screams from the first second, but first walk, breathe, observe, calculate where they are going to discharge their weight so as not to waste it.

He stopped before the window.

The entire city opened before him once again, immense and subordinated by the height, reduced to a distant movement of lights, lines, and pale smoke beneath the morning that was already finishing consolidating itself. For an instant he seemed simply to contemplate it, as if he wanted to resume the previous gesture and erase from the scene any trace of disarray. But then he raised his hand and placed it against the glass.

It was not a blow. It was not a charge. It was a contact. The palm settled slowly on the transparent surface, the fingers extended, the wrist straight, the pressure growing without visible haste, and there was something in that initial stillness that proved worse than open violence, because the glass, perfect until that moment, began to respond as if it had understood too late what kind of hand was touching it.

First a fine line appeared, almost elegant, a crack so thin it seemed drawn from inside the glass. Then a second opened. Then another. The sound did not come as an immediate burst, but as a series of contained, dry, intimate creaks, a broken breath spreading through the transparency. In a matter of seconds, the fissures multiplied from the center of his palm toward the nearby edges, branching in every direction with the cold geometry of a shattered web. The window did not give way completely, but it stopped being a proud surface; it became a contained wound, a fracture suspended before the dawn.

The man’s hand did not bleed. Not a cut. Not a hesitation. Not even a natural reflex of defense. The skin remained intact against the broken glass, as clean as before, as if fragility belonged only to the world and never to him. It was then that his face truly changed. He did not lose composure; he barely deformed it. Rage did not manifest in a vulgar grimace or a hysterical outburst, but in something crueler: a sudden hardness in the line of his mouth, a brief tension in his jaw, an icy gleam that sharpened his green eyes until they became almost unrecognizable beneath the morning light.

He did not seem furious like an ordinary man. He seemed insulted. There was in his expression the proud violence of someone who considers another’s failure a personal offense, a stain thrown against a hierarchy that should remain intact by simple law of existence.

—How is it possible...? —he murmured first, without pulling his hand away from the glass, and his voice came out low, too low, with a softness that did not soothe but warned that something in him had descended to a darker point than shouting—. How is it possible that one of the Nine Hammers...

The sentence remained suspended for a second. Not for lack of words, but because the humiliation of pronouncing them demanded a kind of internal order so as not to become useless foam. The city remained spread out on the other side of the cracked glass, unaware, vulgar, too alive. He barely closed his eyes and then opened them again with an almost ceremonial slowness, as if even his rage needed style.

—...the highest authority of the Smiths... was unable to kill two adolescents.

The last word fell with such visible contempt that it seemed to dirty the air. His fingers pressed the window a little more, and a new crack extended upward with a dry sound.

—Two adolescents —he repeated, now with the sharpened bitterness of someone who still does not accept the exact size of the offense—. An old woman. An ordinary woman.

He turned his face slightly, not to move away from the city, but to look at his own broken reflection in the glass. The fragmented image returned to him the slender profile, the golden hair, the open robe, the measured fury, and for an instant the reflection seemed to be that of another man locked behind the fracture, one as beautiful as he was sick, as elegant as he was ruined inside by the mere idea of having allowed such an outcome.

—All the money I moved for that —he continued, and he was no longer murmuring; he spoke with a hard clarity, fiercely contained, each syllable sharpened by disbelief—. Everything that came out of my pocket, from my routes, from my favors. All the force I sent. And not even then. Not even then.

He exhaled through his nose with a brief, dry violence, and the vapor barely fogged a minimal part of the cracked glass before disappearing.

—An elite force —he said—. Men chosen not to fail. Enough resources to close off a city if it had been necessary. Even a level eighteen meta-human.

Now he did show his teeth, not in a full smile, but in a brief, hostile contraction, almost beautiful because of how precise it was.

—Level eighteen —he repeated, as if that single figure should have been enough to seal the result—. And even so they could not eliminate an old woman, an ordinary woman, and two insignificant beings who should not even exist as a problem within my morning.

The apartment remained silent. The body remained on the floor. The city breathed on the other side of the broken glass. Everything seemed to keep an offensive distance from his rage, and that only made it sharper inside him. He was not furious because the operation had failed in practical terms; he was furious because failure had brushed against his name, even if it was through others.

Because there was his money, his will, his authority, and his hierarchy buried under that result. Because someone below, someone unworthy of even looking toward the height where he lived, had managed to survive a machinery that should have fallen upon them like destiny, not like an uncertain possibility. That was the intolerable thing. Not the damage. The insolence.

He barely rested his forehead against the broken glass, only for an instant, not out of exhaustion or defeat, but as if he wanted to better hear the intimate noise of the cracks spreading beneath his own pressure.

—Useless —he spat then, and the word did come out with true disgust—. Useless men dressed in hierarchy, useless men fed with my money, useless men who will still have the cowardice to call it a complication when it was nothing more than incapacity.

At last he moved away from the window.

He withdrew his hand slowly, and the glass remained there, cracked, still suspended in a false dignity that no longer belonged to it. The cracks preserved the shape of his pressure like a mute signature. He looked at the damage for only a second, with the same cruel serenity with which he had previously observed the corpse. Then he turned his face toward the armchair, toward the floor, toward the dead woman.

The body remained where it had fallen, defeated on its side over the stone, already reduced to an object. The blood had spread a little more, without invading too much, and the morning light made it less scandalous and colder. He contemplated it without visible emotion. No guilt. No pleasure. No memory. Only a kind of aristocratic weariness, the slight annoyance produced by a minor task in the middle of a larger concern.

He took a step toward her. Then another. His bare foot first brushed the clean floor, then the edge of the stain, and finally rested on the woman’s head with such terrible naturalness that the gesture seemed to form part of a broader routine, an old custom, deprived of dramatism.

He did not need to look down when he applied pressure. The movement was brief, dry, impersonal. There was no theatrical cruelty or visible satisfaction, only an act of absolute contempt, a minimal correction exercised upon something that, to him, had already stopped having human form long before the shot. He reduced her to definitive silence without granting her more attention than necessary and immediately withdrew his foot, as if even that final manifestation of violence deserved the same treatment as a closed door or an empty glass set aside from the table. By the time he moved again, the woman no longer belonged to the scene. She was residue. She remained behind. She was not worth one more second of contemplation.

He continued walking toward the bathroom, crossing a side strip of the apartment where luxury mutated from display to intimacy without losing its discipline. The hallway was not long, but it was clean enough to seem designed within the same logic that governed the main room: dark stone, sober walls, indirect lighting that did not caress the contours but defined them, impeccable surfaces where there was no room for the accidental. On one side, a narrow console held a glass tray with bottles of liquor that no one had touched that morning. Farther ahead, a veined marble wall cut through the space with severe elegance. Everything there spoke of the same owner: someone incapable of tolerating disorder because he understood too well that the environment is also a form of command.

He advanced without hurry, with the fury still inside him, but already organized, already converted once again into a colder and more useful current. He pushed the bathroom door and entered. The space was wide, silent, built with an opulence that bordered on ritual. The floor changed to a lighter stone, almost white, crossed by gray veins that seemed like cracks stopped before collapse. A long mirror occupied much of one wall, without ornamental frames, returning an exact and cruel image of whatever stood before it.

The shower rose at the back behind a separation of frosted glass, and the sunken bathtub in the floor rested to one side as if it had been carved for someone who did not conceive of washing as a necessity, but as a ceremony of restitution. The light entered there in a more controlled way, less golden than in the room, and turned the bathroom into a private chamber where beauty no longer pretended to please: it pretended to obey.

He stopped before the mirror. For the first time since the shot, he observed himself with direct attention, not with empty vanity, but with that exact review with which certain men verify that the world still belongs to them in the correct measure. His golden hair fell somewhat more disordered than at the beginning, but not enough to speak of deterioration. His expression had lost the false sweetness with which he killed the woman and now preserved something more suitable to his true nature: a contained severity, a clean violence that still inhabited his face without ruining his beauty.

The open robe revealed the white, firm chest, free of marks, and the line of the abdomen descended with the same cruel sobriety as the rest of his body. He was slender, yes, but not fragile. Never fragile. There was in him the exact shape of an instrument refined to dominate without mussing his hair.

He raised a hand and loosened the robe without ceremony. The garment slid down his shoulders and fell to the floor with a mute softness, gathering at his feet like something unworthy of continuing to touch him. He was left completely naked before the mirror, exposed to a clean clarity that granted no refuge to any lie. The front of his body preserved the same sharpened perfection as before: white skin, muscles defined without excessive volume, elegant proportions, a presence built to intimidate precisely because it did not need to exaggerate itself. But the heavier truth was not in front.

He turned, and his back appeared whole in the mirror, along with the tattoo. To say it occupied it was insufficient. It was not placed upon his skin as decoration nor as aesthetic provocation; it was imposed upon it like a creed engraved by force, like a total mark destined to turn his own body into a standard. The design covered his entire back from the nape to the base of the waist, spreading broadly over the shoulders and sinking its visual presence into every plane of muscle and bone.

At the center rose the gigantic form of a hammer, not simple or clean, but ancient in spirit and brutal in intention. The handle descended along the line of the spine as if it had taken it for itself, and the head of the weapon opened over the shoulder blades with an almost monstrous width, heavy even in ink, so well traced that it gave the impression it could fall upon the flesh and sink it.

But the hammer was not made of common metal. Its structure was born from skulls. Dozens of them, perhaps more, superimposed, fitted together, visually welded to one another to raise the complete form of the weapon. Some appeared whole, with the empty rigidity of their sockets turned toward no god. Others were split, fissured, opened by fractures that did not seem accidental, but the consequence of repeated blows.

Several had been represented with metal reinforcements embedded over the bone: plates, staples, dark clamps, cruel joints that did not truly repair the ruin, but turned it into utility. There was something obscenely doctrinal in that image: destruction not as an end, but as working material; death not as closure, but as a resource shaped until it served again under a higher purpose.

Even still, the tattoo gave the impression of weighing.

The shadows drawn between the skulls deepened the sensation of relief, making the hammer seem to emerge from inside his back instead of resting upon it. The darker lines accumulated around the head of the weapon, where the skulls pressed against one another with a sickly density, while the handle, though narrower, descended with an almost ceremonial firmness, as if the weapon had not simply been drawn upon a man, but implanted in him as a symbol of rank, belonging, and threat. Under that controlled clarity of the bathroom, the ink seemed to absorb the light instead of reflecting it. It did not beautify his body. It claimed it.

He observed the tattoo through the mirror with absolute stillness. There was no ostentatious pride in his expression, because he did not need to admire himself for bearing that. Nor was there any soft emotion. He contemplated it as one contemplates a truth that no longer needs to be explained. The gigantic hammer, made of broken skulls reinforced with metal, was not a private extravagance. It was a wordless confession. A perfect summary of the organization to which he belonged and of the authority he occupied within it. It was not enough to destroy. One had to choose which remains were still useful. Which bones could once again sustain a weapon. Which ruin deserved to be reinforced. Which life could be bent until it served. In that design was the entire faith of the Smiths, and upon his skin that faith stopped being doctrine and became identity.

He remained like that for a few more seconds, naked before the mirror, with his back turned into an emblem, while the silence of the bathroom wrapped around him with an almost sacred neatness. Outside, the morning continued growing over the city. Behind him, in another part of the apartment, the corpse was beginning to cool. Inside him, the rage remained alive, but no longer as a disorderly fire, but as metal placed in the flame: hardening into a new form, more precise, more useful, more cruel. And across his entire back, the gigantic hammer remained there, made of skulls, fractures, and metal, as if his own flesh had accepted long ago that the only beauty worthy of enduring was the one born after breaking something.

The water finished running over his body and fell across the pale stone of the bathroom with almost perfect discipline, as if even the residue of his rage had learned there to descend in silence. He remained motionless for an instant beneath the shower, his head barely inclined and his breathing already recomposed, letting the last moisture abandon his white skin, letting the steam thin around his silhouette and the fury stop seeming like a flare in order to become something more useful again: a decision. The mirror, fogged at the edges and cruel at the center, returned to him once more the image of a man whom violence did not deform, but finished ordering. When he shut off the water and stepped out, there was no visible haste in him. Only purpose.

He took a dark towel, dried himself with precise movements, and set it aside without disordering it. Then he headed toward the adjoining dressing room, a natural extension of the same severe luxury that governed the rest of the apartment. There, too, there was no vulgar excess. Everything was arranged with a clean logic: dark wood, warm and contained light, glass, polished metal, watches aligned like small machines of prestige, shoes placed with obsessive exactness, and behind the glass a succession of garments that did not seem chosen to dress a body, but to construct a presence.

He did not take long to decide. He chose a slim-cut suit, made to adhere to his figure without rigidity, of an ivory white so clean it bordered on offensive beneath the light of the dressing room. It was not an innocent white, but a costly white, cold, arrogant, sustained by a fabric of the highest range that did not need shine to reveal its price. The lines of the suit were sober, sharp, impeccable, and along the inner edges of the collar, the cuffs, and certain barely visible finishes ran golden details of calculated subtlety, minimal flashes that did not seek to attract just anyone’s attention, but to confirm, for whoever knew how to look, that this was not common elegance: it was money refined into insolence.

He dressed slowly. The shirt closed over his torso with an almost ritual neatness. The trousers adjusted to his waist and to the long fall of his legs with the precision of a garment made for him or for someone exactly like him. Then came the jacket, which sealed his figure in a clean verticality, immediately returning to him that image of beautiful and unpleasant authority that the bathroom had not erased, only stripped bare. He did not choose a flashy tie or excessive ornaments. Discreet cufflinks were enough for him, a watch of pale metal whose value needed no explanation, and impeccable shoes that seemed incapable of ever having touched the dust of the real world. At the end, he observed himself once more in the mirror.

The man who returned his gaze was no longer the naked figure marked by the hammer on his back, nor the executor in an open robe who had spoken on the phone before the dawn. He was the recomposed version of both, now wrapped in a more social beauty, more presentable, more suited to entering any place and contaminating it from within without raising his voice. His golden hair, now arranged, preserved that exact carelessness that seemed born from privilege. His green eyes had recovered their calm. Only someone very attentive would have detected that beneath that serenity something harder was still moving, a rough current, a rage that had not been granted release, but direction.

He left the dressing room and crossed the apartment again. He did not look at the corpse, not because he had forgotten its presence, but because he no longer needed it within his attention. The floor, the armchair, the clarity spread through the room, and the cracked window remained where they were, but his interest had moved elsewhere. He crossed the room with the same naturalness with which others would leave a room after turning off a lamp. At that height, what had happened there was already past. The trace remained, yes. The pending cleaning remained. The material mark of a minor act remained. But none of that deserved to compete with the decision that had been forming inside him since he understood the real extent of the failure.

He took the apartment’s private elevator. The doors opened without sound and received him with the polished reflection of their internal panels. He entered, pressed the descent command, and remained still while the cabin began to go down. He did not lean on any surface, did not check messages or seek distraction. He stayed looking at his own reflection multiplied in the metal and in the dark glass of the panel, as if even during that vertical journey he needed to preserve a mute conversation with the image he had just reconstructed.

There was something almost liturgical in that descent. Floor after floor, the skyscraper swallowed him toward its lower levels while above remained the corpse, the broken glass, and the dawn already consolidated over the city. But none of that was truly leaving him behind. It was only ordering it into layers.

When the doors opened on the parking level, the air changed.

The height had held the silence of a display case; below there was a more functional coldness, crossed by the faint smell of clean concrete, expensive fuel, and machines at rest. The skyscraper’s private parking area did not seem like an underground level, but a technical extension of the upper luxury: white lighting, impeccable pillars, polished floor, discreet cameras, hidden sensors. No ordinary vehicle would have belonged in a place like that. He walked without hesitation toward section A1.

The car was waiting for him there. A single glance was enough to understand that it was not just a high-end sports car, but one of those objects designed to turn speed, prestige, and money into one recognizable form. The bodywork, a deep white with faint gold metallic details, returned the light with brutal cleanliness. The profile was low, aggressive without vulgarity, beautiful in that way certain machines seem built to elegantly humiliate everything left around them. He approached, and the vehicle responded before he touched it: lights activated, system awakened, door unlocked with immediate obedience.

He got in. The interior received him with pale leather, impeccable panels, and a silent interface that seemed to wait only for his will in order to exist. He closed the door, rested one hand on the steering wheel, and for a second remained motionless, looking ahead. Then he started it. The engine did not roar with stridency; it asserted itself with contained, expensive, disciplined power, and the car left section A1 with a smoothness that only underlined the sleeping potential violence beneath its structure.

Minutes later, he was already outside. The city now unfolded from another height, not that of the penthouse, but that of the wide avenues and fast routes where speed could disguise itself as normality among glass buildings, regulated crossings, and traffic still manageable because of the hour. The skyscraper was gradually left behind in the mirror, still raised above the urban line like a symbol of clean power, almost intact to the eyes of anyone who did not know what had occurred inside it. He drove with one hand, without visible tension, letting the car obey every minimal correction with insulting precision. The ivory white suit, impeccable on his body, seemed even more expensive inside that machine.

Then he opened the glove compartment. From inside, he took out a small circular device, with a smooth surface and a single button in the center. He did not observe it too much. He did not need to. He held it for an instant between his fingers, turning it slightly as if it were a private coin, an old habit, a closing prepared in advance for a scene he had never intended to leave open. Then he pressed the button.

In the distance, in the line of the rearview mirror, the upper floor of the skyscraper responded.

The explosion did not open like a chaotic collapse, but like calculated destruction, contained within the upper part of the structure, a precise chain of charges that tore away the glass, the luxury, and the secret of that area without compromising the complete stability of the building. From the distance, the blast seemed almost silent for an unreal second, a violent flower opening at the top before the fire and fragments became fully visible. It was not enough to bring down the skyscraper. Only to mutilate its crown. Only to erase a part of its memory.

He observed it through the mirror for an instant. No surprise. No regret. No open satisfaction. Barely a serene, almost administrative acceptance. That was how places that had already fulfilled their function were closed. That was how minor errors were cleaned before they could transform into a problem. He withdrew his gaze from the rearview mirror and left the device on the continuous seat.

—I suppose I will have to go see those insignificant beings myself —he said with clean, almost kind sarcasm, as if the phrase were directed at someone sitting beside him and not at the silence of the car—. Especially the adolescents. After all, they were the ones who started all the problems.

The mockery lasted no longer than that, not because he had lost interest, but because he no longer needed to keep speaking to the void. He extended his hand toward the vehicle’s central screen and activated it. The interface awakened with cold clarity, displaying routes, commands, and an assistance system whose voice was born from perfectly programmed artificial courtesy.

—Indicate destination —the car said.

He did not take long.

—The Horizon Institute.

There was a small processing silence. Then the voice responded with the same impeccable neutrality:

—Route plotted.

The car immediately adjusted the navigation, and the city, open before the windshield like a network of routes still unaware of what was about to reach them, began to order itself in a single direction.

_____________________________________________

END OF Chapter 99

The path continues...

New Chapters are revealed every

Sunday, and also between Wednesday or Thursday,

when the will of the tale so decides.

Each one leaves another scar on Sebastián’s journey.

If this abyss resonated with you,

keep it in your collection

and leave a mark: a comment, a question, an echo.

Your presence keeps alive the flame that shapes this world.

Thank you for walking by my side.

If this story resonated with you, perhaps we have already crossed paths in another corner of the digital world. Over there, they know me as Goru SLG.

I want to thank from the heart all the people who are reading and supporting this work. Your time, your comments, and your support keep this world alive.

If this story resonated with you, I invite you to support me — your presence and backing make it possible for