"That," the man said finally, "is actually an interesting question."

And then he went quiet.

Not the silence of someone who had an answer ready and was choosing how to deliver it — the silence of someone who was genuinely thinking, working through it with the methodical patience of a man who had spent too many hours in a cell to waste words. He looked at the ceiling. Looked at his hands. His brow creased slightly.

Yuto waited.

He was good at waiting. He had spent most of his life waiting — for food, for work, for things to get marginally less awful. He could do it without fidgeting.

Finally, the man exhaled through his nose.

"I can’t think of one," he said. He looked at Yuto with something that might have been apology. "I’m sorry. I genuinely can’t. The moment you let yourself be taken — that was the moment it was decided."

Yuto was quiet for a second.

"It wasn’t that simple," he said. "I could have run."

"Why didn’t you?"

The question was not unkind. Just direct, the way a man gets when he has no particular reason to be delicate.

"Because running would have put my girlfriend in danger." "They would have taken it out on her. I couldn’t — " He stopped. "It wasn’t a real choice."

The man studied him with a look that was harder to read now.

"You have a girl."

It wasn’t quite a question. Yuto nodded anyway.

"We only got together yesterday," he said, and immediately felt the absurdity of it — the specific painful absurdity of a man sitting in a dungeon explaining that he had, as of approximately thirty-six hours ago, a girlfriend.

The man seemed to feel it too, because he didn’t laugh. He just looked at Yuto with a quiet expression, and after a moment he said, simply:

"I’m sorry. For all of it."

Yuto nodded once. Looked at the wall.

"I only recently became an Ethereal as well," he said. He hadn’t meant to say that either. It just came out, the way things do when the weight of them gets too heavy to carry silently.

The man went very still.

Then he turned to look at Yuto with an attention that was entirely different from anything before — sharp, focused, the look of someone who has just heard something that changes the shape of the room.

"Say that again."

"I’m an Ethereal."

A beat of silence.

"You’re—" The man stopped. Started again. "You’re an Ethereal."

"Yes."

The man stared at him for another moment, processing this with visible effort — the way a person looks when they’re revising something they had already decided. Then he leaned forward slightly, eyes moving over Yuto with new assessment.

"The last ceremony," he said. "You awakened at the last ceremony."

It wasn’t quite a question either. Yuto nodded.

Something shifted in the man’s expression. Not hope exactly. Something more careful than hope — the look of a man who had spotted a very narrow window and was calculating whether a person could actually fit through it.

Then he frowned.

"Disciple rank," he said, mostly to himself.

"What?"

The man leaned back. "You’re a Disciple. Newly awakened, last ceremony — you’d have to be." He was quiet for a moment, turning something over. "If you were a Paragon, this would be a different conversation. Paragons are rare. The kind of rare that makes powerful people reluctant to throw one away, even one who’s killed someone they care about. A Paragon is an asset. A Disciple..." He shrugged, with a kind of tired honesty. "Disciples are abundant. You’re not an asset yet. One with a very short remaining lifespan."

Yuto absorbed this.

"So there’s nothing—"

"I didn’t say that." The man’s voice had changed slightly — still measured, but with something underneath it now, the way a fire sounds different when it catches. "I said *if* you were a Paragon. Which you’re not. Yet."

Yuto looked at him.

"There might be a way," the man said carefully. "A faint one. I want to be honest with you about how faint."

"Tell me."

"If you were to conquer the First Tower — become a Paragon — it would change your position entirely. They would not execute a Paragon. The political cost alone would be prohibitive, never mind the practical loss. You’d still have done what you did, but you’d have become something they couldn’t afford to waste." He paused. "That’s your only way out of this."

Yuto stared at him.

"I’m locked in a dungeon," he said slowly.

"Yes."

"So I would have to—"

"Break out. Yes."

Yuto let that sit in the air between them for a moment.

"That’s absurd," he said.

"Probably."

"I’m bound. The walls are stone. There are guards in the corridor. And even if I somehow managed all of that—" He pressed his bound wrists together, feeling the pull of the restraints. "I’m not ready to conquer the First Tower. I awakened recently. I haven’t trained. I have no idea what I’m doing."

"I know," the man said.

"So you’re telling me my only option is to escape from a noble family’s dungeon, having been caught in their compound, and then go and do the single most difficult thing an Ethereal at my level can attempt, without preparation."

"Yes." 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

"That’s my only option."

"That’s your only option."

Yuto looked at the ceiling for a long moment.

"What happens to Gina?" he said. "If I run."

The man’s expression shifted again — softer this time, something in it that recognized the question for what it actually was.

"Gina," he said. "That’s her name?"

"Yes."

The man nodded slowly, as if filing it somewhere. "Beautiful name." He was quiet for a moment, thinking it through honestly. "They won’t blame her. They’ll know she couldn’t have had any hand in it — there’s no version of events where a girl under house arrest helps someone escape from below. She’ll either be kept on as domestic staff or released. Neither is good, but neither is a cell." He looked at Yuto directly. "She won’t be punished for what you do."

Yuto turned that over several times. Checking it for holes. Looking for the place where it fell apart.

It didn’t fall apart.

It was still a terrible plan. It was still barely a plan at all — more of a direction than a plan, a vague orientation toward something that might, under the right circumstances and with a considerable amount of luck, constitute survival. There was so much he was leaving to chance. So many things he couldn’t control or predict or prepare for. The escape itself was a problem he didn’t have a solution to. The Tower was a problem that came after the problem he didn’t have a solution to.

But.

He thought about the meals. The real ones — warm, actual food, eaten at a table, enough of it. He thought about how strange it had felt at first, eating until he was full, the specific disorientation of a body that had spent years running on not-quite-enough suddenly being given what it needed. He thought about Gina, yesterday, the way she’d looked at him.

He had spent his entire life at the bottom. Scrambling. Holding himself together with both hands and whatever he could find. And then things had started to change — slowly, painfully slowly, one foothold at a time — and he had started, quietly, to want things. Actual things. Not just survival. Things.

He had only just started.

*And now death wants to collect, now of all times. Not when I was starving in the slums and it would have almost been a mercy. Now. When I’ve finally found something worth losing.*

He felt, sitting in that cell with his bound wrists on his knees, something harden in his chest. Not courage exactly — he wasn’t sure he’d call it that. Something more fundamental. Something that said *no* in a very quiet, very final way, the way a door closes.

He was not going to die here.

He turned to the man.

"How," he said. "How would I break out of here?"