On a warm and beautiful morning, in a shabby apartment in the lower district, a young man in blue robes stood holding a dead noble by the head.

Blood stained the wall behind them heavily. The dead man’s skull had caved inward after being smashed repeatedly into the stone, leaving no doubt about his fate.

His name was Teki Masaru.

The young man holding him was Yuto.

The guards stood in the doorway and stared.

Nobody moved.

For a long moment the whole scene held itself like that — Yuto, Teki, the wall, the guards, the morning light still coming through the kitchen window with complete indifference to what had just happened in front of it. The world had not adjusted its lighting for the occasion. Yuto found this faintly insulting.

Then he looked at Gina.

She was still at the kitchen doorway, hands pressed to her mouth, eyes fixed somewhere past him. She was unhurt. She was standing. Those were the two facts that mattered and Yuto catalogued them immediately — fast, quiet, filed away.

Then the rest of it arrived.

He had killed a noble. In his apartment. With witnesses. With Gina standing ten feet away.

The panic came in fast and cold, not the hot kind that made people do stupid things but the other kind — the kind that sat in the chest like swallowed ice and made everything very clear and very terrible at exactly the same time. Whatever happened to Yuto from this point forward, he could survive. He had a rank. He had Shiny. He had a body that had been through worse and kept going.

But Gina.

He had walked Gina directly into this. He had let Teki through the door, let the situation build, let himself snap in the one place and in the presence of the one person he absolutely could not afford to make collateral damage. One moment of lost control and she was standing in a room with a dead noble and three guards who were now, visibly, snapping out of their shock.

The head guard’s voice cracked through the silence like a whip.

"Seize him."

They were on Yuto before the sentence finished. Three of them, trained and moving with the practiced efficiency of men who did this for a living — arms wrenched back, something cold and heavy clicking around his wrists, the floor tilting briefly as they hauled him upright. Yuto let it happen. He didn’t resist. He stood there and let them bind him and thought.

He could summon Shiny right now.

The thought arrived clean and precise. Shiny would dissolve the restraints in approximately one second. The guards would understand what they were dealing with in approximately two seconds. Whether they survived the next thirty seconds after that was, frankly, not guaranteed.

But then what.

Yuto ran the scenario forward and it fell apart almost immediately. Even if he fought his way out — even if he and Shiny cleared the room and made it into the streets with Gina — the Masaru family had resources that didn’t require physical proximity to be effective. Nobles talked to nobles. Every town, every district, every gate settlement across all eighteen villages maintained those networks the way merchants maintained their ledgers — carefully, constantly, and with significant attention to anything that threatened the bottom line.

A dead noble’s body would be the announcement. Yuto and Gina’s faces would be the description. Every town would close around them like a fist.

And that was before accounting for Gina getting hurt in the escape. Before accounting for what happened to her if she was caught separately, without him there.

Yuto exhaled slowly.

He watched them cuff Gina.

She didn’t fight it either. She looked at him once — quick, searching — and he looked back, and neither of them said anything, because there was nothing to say that the guards shouldn’t hear.

They led them both outside into the morning.

-----

As cages went, it was adequate.

Yuto sat in the barred compartment bolted to the back of the Masaru carriage and observed that this was, technically speaking, the first time he had ever been transported in a carriage. The bars were an unfortunate detail, but the carriage itself was well-made — good wheels, smooth axle, the kind of construction that came from not having to worry about whether you could afford quality.

He was, in a sense, moving up in the world.

Through the bars he could see Gina sitting inside the carriage proper — uncuffed, upright, staring at her hands in her lap. Not bound to anything. Sitting like a person. That was something. That was, he decided, a win, and he was going to call it a win because he needed at least one.

Yuto leaned his head back against the bars and watched the district pass.

He thought about last night.

Last night he had fallen asleep with Gina’s warmth beside him and a smile he couldn’t quite explain, and this morning he had woken to the smell of breakfast and found her in his shirt at the stove, and thought — with the particular foolishness of someone who has briefly forgotten how the world works — that nothing could touch this.

The distance between that moment and this one was approximately four hours.

Life, Yuto reflected, had a very consistent sense of humor.

He thought about Teki.

He thought about Teki quite deliberately, because thinking about Teki was more productive than thinking about the alternative — which was the precise sound the wall had made. Teki, who had shown up every morning like a recurring inconvenience made flesh. Teki, who had walked into their home uninvited, again and again, and looked at Gina like she was something he could simply decide to take. Teki, who had made that specific threat — casually, smiling, like it was a fun thing to say — and had then seemed genuinely surprised when it landed badly.

Teki bore significant responsibility for this situation.

And another thing — wasn’t Teki an Ethereal? So what kind of Ethereal died like that?

What kind of Ethereal, got his skull caved in by a so easily?

What a bum.

The carriage stopped.