And what was that quote, anyway?

My brain kept snagging on the absolute nonsense Kairi had used: "He went and hanged himself and then there were none." It was utterly meaningless. I knew Kairi’s memories, her histories. I knew the things she held sacred, the esoteric texts she devoured. Christie? That entire reference was outside the scope of Kairi’s current life, her known existence. It was just another layer of infuriating, showy nonsense designed to panic the hag.

But then my mind snagged on the last word Kairi had spat out: Christie.

No. Wait.

The realization didn’t rush; it settled, like sediment after a violent tremor. The incomprehensible quote, the name I didn’t recognize, the utter panic on Valeria’s face—it wasn’t showy nonsense.

It was Bio-cipher. Kairi wasn’t quoting some forgotten hobby; she was reading the deepest, most sealed layer of Valeria’s existence.

Miss Christie. The name didn’t just belong to a person; it belonged to a legacy. It represented a structure, a body of work, an entire system of solving and creating mysteries. What Kairi had done was more than reveal an identity; she had dragged an entire meta-narrative onto our battlefield. If the names we held—Kairi, Selene, Valeria—were just disguises, just roles we played for survival, then what were we really? Was Kairi, in her cold competence, just embodying another archetype she’d read in some forgotten book? Was I just the oblivious sidekick designed to be fooled?

My fear twisted into a philosophical panic. We weren’t fighting a monster; we were fighting the source code of a fictional universe, and Kairi knew the developer’s key.

And what about that equal payment? Kairi never settles for just repayment; she always demands interest, usually in blood or irreversible consequence. The Bio-cipher had already shattered Valeria’s identity. Whatever came next was going to shatter her existence, proving that the price of messing with our reality was absolute.

Kairi didn’t wait for Valeria’s stammering response. The question—Don’t you think that demands an equal payment too, hm?—was the final ritualistic flourish before the execution.

She didn’t move her feet, but her entire presence seemed to sharpen, drawing the focus of every errant shadow in the corridor. The cold, indifferent smile remained fixed, but the air around her became toxic with latent power.

The payment wasn’t a fireball or a concussive blast. It was far more insidious.

Kairi clenched her outstretched hand, the one pointed at Valeria’s face, into a perfect, bloodless fist.

"I am not interested in your life," Kairi stated, her voice dropping to a near whisper that cut through the silence like ground glass.

"Life is a cheap commodity. I am interested in your legacy."

Valeria, her face still slick with the sweat of existential panic, finally understood. This was about more than revenge; it was about erasure. Her terror amplified, and she let out a strangled, primal cry—not of pain, but of utter possessive outrage.

The "equal payment" manifested as a sudden, horrific distortion of reality. From the single point of Kairi’s clenched fist, invisible filaments of pure Transcription power shot out and pierced Valeria’s temples and wrists.

This wasn’t magic against the body; it was magic against the mind’s internal history.

Valeria’s body remained untouched, but her entire posture seized. Her eyes rolled back, and a sound tore from her throat that sounded like dry paper ripping.

I watched, frozen in my humiliating philosophical contemplation, as Kairi started to rewrite the core of the monster.

Valeria’s staff lay forgotten on the ground. She clawed at the air in front of her face as if trying to scrape away a veil. Suddenly, a series of flickering, holographic words, visible only to her, erupted and dissolved rapidly around her head:

DEATH. MURDER. THE TRAIN. THE DESERT. THE SECRET ROOM.

These were the foundational blocks of her fictional existence—the wellsprings of her power as a creator, the truths she had bound into the essence of her being. Kairi was methodically yanking them free.

Valeria staggered, clutching her head as though her skull were splitting.

"No! You—you cannot take that! That is mine!"

Kairi’s eyes, bright and utterly merciless, reflected the dissolving words.

"I can take what was built on deceit," she corrected. "You tried to deceive my sister. You tried to deceive reality itself. The price is de-authorship."

With a final, sickening crackle of energy, Kairi pulled her hand back. The holographic words vanished, leaving Valeria stripped and exposed. The effect was immediate and catastrophic: Valeria’s posture shrunk, her robes seemed too large, and the aura of intimidating, eldritch power that had radiated from her for centuries winked out, replaced by the faint, sickly energy of a common, drained sorceress.

The payment was complete: Kairi had neutralized the source of Valeria Augusta Christie’s magical genius, turning her into a mere shell of her legendary self.

The stillness lasted only a second before the monster found its desperate, residual strength.

Valeria dropped her hands, her face a terrifying mixture of shame and boiling vengeance. The power Kairi had just stolen was immense, but it hadn’t destroyed the woman entirely—it had merely clipped the wings of the author.

"You stole my work!" she shrieked, the sound echoing through the hall, now brittle and thin, lacking the resonant power it had before. "You will pay for this audacity!"

* * *

To be goddamn honest, their conversation had never interested me to begin with.

Rather, it was exactly Valeria—this Valeria woman—who held my attention.

My mind scattered into a dozen questions instead.

Who is she? Where did she come from? Why does she know everything?

Seriously, my head would have gone crazy if it had kept running like that.

My ruminations never settled on one point; they hopped from one thought to the next.

Valeria Augusta Christie.

A name I recognized, and whose origin I already knew of.

After finally reading Selene’s mind, it was quite easy to decipher.

In fact, it was almost hilarious, considering how she had always poisoned me with knowledge of toxins when I was a child.

In a way, it felt like a number-one fan meeting her favorite artist.

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie — the Queen of Crime.

An eerie, mysterious English author with her own vast legacy.

The creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, whose works revolve around murder cases and labyrinthine intrigues.

A woman of immense talent, proven by her prolific output: sixty-six detective novels and fourteen short-story collections — seventy works in total.

And yes, I had memorized all of that by the time I recalled her full name.

To me, it felt bizarre not to recognize her greatness, especially as a doctor myself.

Alright — enough glazing. Now... let’s unravel her true ability as a magician.

Visually, images of key words began to form in my head.

And yes — obviously manifesting through my own ability: Transcription—my Verse.