The quotation had done its work, but not on her. On Valeria.

I didn’t need Selene to grasp the reference yet. I mean, why should I?

Her understanding was optional. But not for Valeria.

Christie.

That single word had landed exactly where it was meant to.

What I wanted it to be.

I watched the side effect to eventually propagate throughout Valeria’s posture like a rehearsed chemical reaction reaching to her—muscle tension misfiring, breathing desynchronizing, pupils struggling to anchor to reality. People like her lived inside authored identities. Remove the author, and the character panics.

Selene, meanwhile, was still stuck on the surface layer—Why that line? Why that name?

Annoying. But predictable.

She was trying to reconcile the quote with my known memories, my known influences. She couldn’t find the connection, and that absence was bothering her more than the woman unraveling in front of us.

I ignored it. Not that it was important.

The truth was simple: I hadn’t quoted for effect. I had addressed the substance.

Miss Christie wasn’t merely a name. It was a framework. A methodology. A way of structuring causality, mystery, revelation. Valeria hadn’t just taken inspiration from it—she had encoded it into herself. Her Verse wasn’t power; it was authorship.

And authorship can be revoked.

Selene’s fear was mutating into something more abstract now—philosophical panic. I could sense it twisting: questions about identity, roles, whether we were anything more than functions inside someone else’s system. A pointless detour. Existential dread is what happens when people mistake observation for participation.

I stepped forward before Valeria could attempt to stabilize.

I wasn’t interested in hearing her try.

"Don’t you think," I said calmly, "that demands an equal payment too?"

The words weren’t a threat. They were a conclusion.

I didn’t move my feet. I didn’t need to. Presence alone was sufficient. The corridor responded accordingly—shadows bending inward, ambient mana tightening, the environment acknowledging a shift in hierarchy.

My hand remained raised.

Not for spectacle.

For precision.

"I’m not interested in your life," I continued, lowering my voice until it cut cleanly through the silence. "Life is abundant. Cheap. Replaceable."

Her eyes locked onto mine, finally understanding.

"I’m interested in your legacy."

That was when fear became certainty.

Valeria screamed—not in pain, but in possession. The sound of someone watching ownership dissolve.

I closed my fingers into a fist.

Transcription responded instantly.

Invisible filaments deployed from a single locus point—thread-thin, perfectly calibrated—piercing not flesh, but continuity. Temples. Wrists. The anchoring points of identity and creation. This wasn’t an attack on the body.

It was surgery on internal history.

Valeria’s form locked in place, muscles seizing as her Verse was forcibly externalized. Her staff slipped from her grasp and hit the floor, forgotten.

Words began to surface around her—fragmentary, unstable, visible only to her cognition:

DEATH.

MURDER.

THE TRAIN.

THE DESERT.

THE SECRET ROOM.

Foundational elements. Narrative keystones. The engines that powered her magic.

I pulled.

One by one, the concepts tore free—not erased, but disowned. Decontextualized. Stripped of authority.

She clawed at the air in front of her face, trying to grab something that no longer recognized her as its origin.

"No—!" she choked. "That’s mine! You can’t—!"

"I can," I corrected evenly. "Because it was built on deception."

Another pull.

"You imitated me. You deceived my sister. You attempted to overwrite reality with borrowed structure."

Final extraction.

"The price," I finished, "is de-authorship."

The last filament snapped back into my hand.

The effect was immediate.

Valeria collapsed inward—not physically, but existentially. Her posture shrank. Her robes sagged. The oppressive weight she carried for centuries vanished like a deleted file. What remained was a woman—drained, ordinary, fragile.

A shell.

I released the Verse.

The corridor exhaled.

For a single second, there was stillness.

Then Valeria lifted her head, eyes burning with humiliation and residual fury.

Whatever power I’d removed hadn’t killed her—it had only taken away the part of her that mattered.

"You stole my work!" she shrieked, voice thin and brittle, echoing off stone that no longer acknowledged her authority. "You’ll pay for this—!"

I watched her calmly.

No—condescendingly would have been more precise.

After all, I was looking down on her. Literally.

Within only a few seconds, she had already made her first truly defiant move.

And if I were going to be honest... it defied me, crushing all of my expectations.

Great.

Now what?

All of a sudden, a lightning attack struck—one more than ready to blast me away.

No... apparently, it was more than enough to turn my body to a spectacle — speckles of dust.

So this was it.

The true power of "Narration" as a Verse.

Deadly, yet profoundly illogical—a power that merely bends whatever logic is existing, twisting it until meaning itself becomes supplementary—no more than a plot device.

Surgically brutal. Precisely fitting.

Almost too fitting for someone posthumously known for writing intricate plots, for threading intrigue of patterns through every premise she ever authored.

In a way, if I were a human in this story...

Then perhaps I was already standing before the Goddess of Mystery itself.

Agatha Christie.

"Apparently, fortune is still upon your plea," she said calmly.

"That’s fascinating."

She smiled.

A smile capable of freezing time—enough to send chilling fissures through one’s body.

A boreal surface drawn across her lips... masquerading as passion.

A passion to kill me, obviously.

Oh, right... looks like I’ll get cooked at this point.

"Perish, you little peasant."

Her eyes were dead.

No light remained within them—only hollow depths steeped in madness, laced with something quietly repulsive.

It felt as though I had violated a taboo. Something I was never meant to touch—perhaps her identity itself. Or perhaps she was simply enraged by my attitude.

Either way, my reaction was absolute—without ambiguity.

Soon after, I tilted my head toward Selene.

She was completely unresponsive.

No reaction. No movement.

What the hell—

What the f*ck was she doing this whole time?!

If I were to go die, then my very first instinct was quite simple:

Punch her solar plexus relentlessly. That’s it.

No matter what. She needs to pay as well.

"Selene!"

The scream of my voice tore through the observatory room, roaring up toward its ceiling—as if begging even the wind itself to listen, to carry my frustration, and to bear witness to this suffocating hopelessness.

The one that apparently would never end.