"This can't be. Only I know this place..."

Hazel’s eyes flew wide, shock ringing like a struck bell; the fact sat in front of her like cold stone, and a thought snapped tight as a noose.

"That idiot...!"

Her words ground like grit. Composure blew away like sand in wind. She lunged two steps to the mouth of the shaft.

"lingwë helma (Mimic Scales)!"

Pale-blue water mana bloomed like fish scales, slicking the pipe’s skin, turning the passage into a river slide.

Hazel dove without a heartbeat’s doubt. A wet thud echoed like a wave on rock, and in a blink she vanished into the gap.

...That urgent?

Adelaide stared at the slick, scale-like pattern and felt a cold crawl, like an eel under the skin. She worked with flesh and viscera daily, yet anything aquatic made her stomach knot.

Even so, she couldn’t just stand here like a rooted stake. After a heartbeat of wavering, she ducked into the passage.

It was likely a ventilation duct, steeper than she’d pictured, a chute carved through stone. Water mana filmed every side, stealing any foothold like oil on glass.

Seeing she couldn’t brake, Adelaide stopped fighting; she shut her eyes and held her breath, refusing the phantom stink of fish like brine in the lungs.

The drop ate more time than she’d guessed, meaning the theater’s underworks ran deep as caverns; carried idle on the slide, she sorted her intel like beads on a string.

Over the past year, things flowed as planned into Prince Neprah’s arc: Dalahaman’s ruin, Rockridge’s tyranny, the rise of the Red Orchid Society, and Neprah’s public split with Samir.

Yet not everything moved like the “script”; Rockridge’s methods cut crueler than ink foretold, while Neprah flayed Samir’s inaction openly, the brothers’ clash burning hotter than the pages warned.

But deeper than all that, the fault lay with Skela.

She hadn’t ended up at Neprah’s side.

After the assassination affair, she and Neprah did forge a friendship—warm greetings like sunlight on water—but it stopped there; no steps beyond, no joining the Red Orchid Society, even with both standing for common folk.

Of all the changes, that baffled Adelaide most; it gnawed at night like a rat behind the wall.

She couldn’t see how the hidden thread tugged those two; most affection flags had popped, yet the route was right while the heroine wasn’t—like a straight bridge over a crooked river.

A sudden weightlessness snapped her out of it; the water slide ended, and Adelaide trimmed her posture midair, landing behind Hazel with a dancer’s grace.

She lifted her gaze. Hazel pressed her left palm to the wall; filaments of blue mana threaded from her skin, seeping into the door—or rather, the yawning hole that used to be a door.

Char radiated outward from the ragged rim like a black sunburst; beyond, the passage was jammed by a caved-in ceiling, the collapse fresh as a raw wound after the blast.

"Oh? That’s interesting." Adelaide picked up a shard, thoughts kindling like lantern light behind her eyes.

In her hand sat specially reinforced metal, the break etched with fine cracks from heat and chill; she wiped off baked soot and revealed crisp hexagons—the signature of a metal-element defensive array.

"Someone blew through metal-forged work. Our visitor’s a prodigy at combined fire, lightning, and ice."

Hazel’s probing spell must have reached the end of the collapse; the blue in her palm broke like glass and flowed back as mana, and she clenched her fist and slammed it into the blockage.

"Damn it!"

Adelaide didn’t press; she waited, quiet as snow, for Hazel to steady. At last Hazel gathered herself and turned to the other side of the corridor.

"The lower level’s completely caved. Clearing it will take too long. We find another way down."

She said it and was already running, an arrow loosed from the bow; Adelaide followed, voice cool as moonlight over a river.

"The night has only just begun. Why the rush, Miss Hazel?"

"Save it. Just keep up."

"Hm. Let me guess. The visitor who beat us here… is the famed prodigy of combined magic—Skela Trinity Purdo?"

Hazel’s stride hitched for a heartbeat; Adelaide knew she’d struck true.

After the assassination incident, Skela stayed close to Hazel, shadow to flame, day to dawn.

To Adelaide, it remained a riddle; Hazel never appeared in the “script,” and shouldn’t have intersected Skela at all, like two lines meant not to cross.

Yet after the tribunal, the two stuck together for a long while; Skela visited Hazel’s classroom daily to play, until the student council felt hollow, an emptied hall after rain.

Adelaide knew Skela was guileless and bright, warm to everyone like spring sun; but Hazel? She’d skipped classes before like mist drifting off, and her sudden diligence was too clear—even fools saw it had to do with Skela.

And Adelaide could feel it—the distance between them wasn’t the same as between herself and Skela, a subtle gradient like shade under a tree.

She had asked Skela, circling the point; Skela closed her eyes, thought hard for a long moment, then found no answer, words falling like petals.

"I just… want to be around her? It just… feels safe!"

Skela’s hazy reply solved nothing for Adelaide; then the imperial army marched, and something in their bond shifted, speech thinning like winter sunlight.

They seemed both distant and quietly cross, clouds holding back rain, thunder muffled.

A few days ago, Adelaide meant to “stock up” from Hazel; before she reached the door, two silhouettes showed through the window, voices bleeding out, blurred and boiling.

She lacked reagents for a sensing spell, could only tell both were heated; when she got close, the storm had passed, Skela tore the door open and left, and Hazel stood at the threshold, staring after her like a statue.

Her hand lifted to call Skela back, then fell like a wilting leaf; she clenched her teeth and shut the door, and Adelaide’s knocking met silence like a sealed tomb.

Thinking on it now, Hazel must have come because of that fight.

Even so, she offered no explanation; her stride only stuttered once, then she bolted on, until they reached the corridor’s end like the edge of a cliff.

Another massive metal door awaited, this one intact; hexagonal marks identical to the shard’s covered almost all its face, yet the array at the center stood odd, out of tune like a wrong note.

"You know how to open this array, don’t you."

Adelaide eyed the familiar, uncanny sigil, her gaze thinning like a blade in fog.

"I can, but…"

Of course she could; she’d undone this array countless times, the motion etched into her hands like grooves in stone.

Yet she didn’t move.

"Don’t you think this is unfair? We’re partners about to dive into danger, yet I don’t know what this place is, what risks wait—and why Blood Magic leaves its shadow here."

She’d suspected a little; but seeing a Sealing Array identical to the sigils on the scroll the Blood Magic outfit gave her, she was sure, the hidden thread glinting like wire.

In other words…

A thought formed, cool and sharp as night steel; Hazel’s answer set the seal on it like wax.

"This is a royal black site for human experiments—and it’s where Mira was remade."