“What on earth is wrong with her...?”

The words hissed out of Hazel like steam off a kettle the moment Adelaide left.

She’d long suspected Adelaide needed her head checked, but even with a bar that low, tonight was strange. That last look at the magic core—feral and lost, a snarl tangled in fog—there was panic too, like a fox cornered by its own shadow.

To be honest, when Adelaide showed up looking broken, Hazel had braced for some yandere nonsense like, “I minced Toka into paste.” But judging by the outcome, she hadn’t snapped. Not yet. She’d at least left a witness breathing.

Even so, Hazel burned to know what passed between Toka and Adelaide. She couldn’t picture an answer, but she didn’t need to guess. Toka was right downstairs. They could grab him, drag him up, and wring the truth out of him.

She said as much to Skela, already turning to retrace Adelaide’s path. Skela surprised her with a small shake of the head.

“No. Your leg’s still hurt, and you want to go grab someone?” Her lips puffed in a pout. “We go topside first, then talk.”

Hazel frowned, a storm cloud drawing across her brow. “What if Toka runs?”

“Lady Adelaide already said he can’t resist. Treat your wound first, then we nab him.”

Weren’t you the one who refused to go back before, rooted like a stubborn tree I couldn’t pull up? Why the sudden about-face? Hazel grumbled inwardly, but the spark of complaint flashed and died. Something else mattered more—the way Skela’s eyes shone with easy, rightful adoration when she said “Lady Adelaide.”

“You really do trust that woman,” Hazel muttered, tossing her head. A brittle twist crept into her tone.

Skela tilted her head, puzzled—then smiled as understanding dawned, like sunlight slipping over a sill.

“Are you jealous?”

Heat flooded Hazel’s face in a rush, a blush like a flare. “W—what? Don’t be ridiculous. Why would I be jealous of that— that woman...”

She started high, but each word wilted lower, till her voice was a mosquito hum without any spine left.

She couldn’t have convinced a shadow, much less herself.

Since their reunion, every time Skela sang “Lady Adelaide” in that sugar-sweet voice, Hazel’s chest soured. What kind of fangirl nonsense is that? And Adelaide—how does she keep up the angel act in front of Skela when her nature is so rotten? Doesn’t she get tired? Just watching her puts sand in my bones.

Her thoughts wouldn’t stop tripping over themselves. She cared—of course she cared. She stewed over why the first person Skela met at Holywell Academy had been Adelaide and not her. Seeing Skela lean into Adelaide made Hazel’s ribs feel stone-heavy, each breath a press. She stuck to calling her “Trinity” instead of “Skela,” clinging to that tiny conviction: she wasn’t like the others to her.

The moment she admitted it, Hazel’s stomach clenched, a cold knot tightening. She used to keep a lid on it, more or less. Who would’ve thought a light brush of lips between two girls could be a breached dam? Everything she’d tamped down surged all at once, a flood that even startled her.

So I’m a secret jar of jealousy after all? She bit her lower lip and rode out the stomach’s bite, trying hard to deny the new label blooming on her skin.

Then soft warmth touched her cheek.

Skela tilted her head and pressed her face to Hazel’s, skin to skin like a petal laid against a leaf.

“Easy now. Relax. I only look up to Lady Adelaide like a sister,” she breathed against Hazel’s ear, her tone all honey and hush. “Hazel’s different.”

“...!”

That coo burrowed straight into Hazel’s ear and plucked a tight string. The breath she’d been holding slipped free, and her blush deepened, hot as coals.

This isn’t right.

When did the once-simple Skela learn tricks like a little devil? Did staying by Adelaide rub off on her?

Damn it. That woman dares stain Skela with her filthy soul...!

The thought of Adelaide’s influence creeping where Hazel couldn’t see stoked her anger like wind into embers.

No. Skela’s mine now. Next time I see Adelaide, I’ll give her a proper warning. She’s to stay six feet from Skela. At all times.

Yes. Once we’re back on the surface...

Hazel fumed in silence, plans marching through her head. Then the corner of her eye caught a pale-orange wash of light spilling across rubble like thin tea over cracked porcelain.

Without noticing, they’d returned to the vast chamber where they’d fought the prison-wraith golem.

Perfect. I can bring up what happened and chew Skela out for that reckless charge. Call it payback for teasing me about jealousy— That would’ve been Hazel on any other day. But now she only stared up, slack, at the scar a legion-tier spell had carved overhead.

“Whoa. That hole is huge—you can see the sky...! Did Lady Adelaide do this too?” Skela’s excitement slid in one ear and out the other.

Hazel fixed on the mouth of the wound, on the firelit dawn clouds like embers drifting. Her thoughts tangled.

Back... on the surface?

The phrase echoed inside her skull like a pail of ice water dumped over her. The heat in her blood fled.

Skela noticed the shift and turned, worry knitting her brow. It took Hazel a heartbeat to come back to herself. Her face had gone pale, the earlier sweet-and-sour shyness blown away like mist.

“We need to leave. Now.”

Skela’s golden eyes blinked, owlish and unsure. But Hazel was serious, and trust ran like a tightrope between them. Skela nodded and murmured a short spell.

Wind rose in a rush. Whoosh. Air braided around them, tugging at coats and hair. A basic windstep, pressure trimmed to shear drag and push speed. It was only a first-tier spell, but under someone like Skela—with near-perfect affinity—it hummed like a well-tuned bow. She sprinted with a second body on her back and moved like a champion sprinter, while the mana toll stayed light—ideal for someone who’d bled herself dry through a night of battle.

There was one problem. The wind roared in the caster’s ears, a curtain of sound that ate words. They couldn’t talk at all en route. Only when they reached the last stretch before the exit—a cramped vent where magic was useless and they had to belly-crawl—did Skela finally voice her question.

“So—why are we running again?”

“Adelaide blew that hole at midnight,” Hazel gritted out, hauling herself forward on her elbows, voice wired and tight. “It’s nearly morning. They’ll know what happened here.”

“‘They’... who?”

By the time she asked, Hazel had reached the end of the duct. She wriggled out with effort, pain knifing in her injured leg, then leaned back in without a thought and grabbed Skela’s forearm, pulling her up and over.

“We’ll talk after we—”

Click.

Metal spoke behind them, a hard, precise sound, like ice settling.

The hammer had been drawn.

Both froze. Neither dared breathe a word. They could hear each other’s hearts, loud as war drums in a hollow room.

Hazel swallowed and turned, slow as if pushing through syrup.

Dawn had only just begun. The newborn light couldn’t chase all the shadows from the narrow alley. A man stood between them and the street, a wall of darkness hiding his face. Only the pistol in his hand, aimed squarely at Hazel and Skela, lay in light.

A flintlock. Its silver barrel was stained blood-red by the sun’s first blush. Engravings crawled along its skin: a black dragon breathing flame, a heart as white as milk, and a set of scales—evil, justice, and judgment, held in one line. The stock was heavy teak, its tight grain stubborn against time. The only marks age had won were a near hundred scorched-brown notches. Their shades ran from dark to pale. They spanned centuries. Each notch marked a Firestone’s spark.

And each spark marked a demon’s fall.

“náma (Judgment)...” Skela breathed, dazed. She knew this gun. Anyone who’d ever believed, who knew the Sarman Empire’s long war between justice and evil, knew this gun. It was the High Tribunal’s scepter.

It executed the Dream-Eater, Tachi. The chaos zealot, Camilla. The Follower of Pleasure, Cruz, who built a castle of human flesh. The blood witch, Fantmu, who forged over eighty legion-tier Blood Magic. One of them was the Takus Pinpoint Needle Adelaide used tonight.

The gods had given it to the world’s arbiter. It had passed from High Judge to High Judge like a cold torch.

Yet now that muzzle—meant to spit fire only at chaos—pointed at them. From the throat of the barrel, a ghost-blue glow pooled, lighting the rifling and the runed mithril round waiting at the end.

The holy gun was loaded. It only needed a breath to flare.

“You. Why are you here.”

The voice was ice-on-stone. Hazel’s fingers curled tight.

Even blind and deaf, she would have known the man who stood in that shadow. Because besides herself, Skela, and Adelaide, only one other soul knew the hidden door in this alley.

“Father...”

Hazel stared at the blue eyes in the dark—exact mirrors of her own. Cold sweat slipped down her temple.

Once again, she and Skela stood on one side, her father on the other. A night repeating itself.

Skela didn’t see the way Hazel’s breath hitched. Recognizing the High Judge of the High Tribunal, Pardini, she even exhaled in relief and stepped forward.

“Your Excellency, High Judge!” She drew herself up and pulled a thick stack of ink-blotted papers from her coat. “We found proof that Toka colluded with Rockridge. The war is their excuse. Their real aim is corpse transmutation with battlefield dead—”

“And then?”

“...Then...?”

Skela frowned and echoed him, not understanding. “We tell everyone. We stop that demon before he can—”

“I’m not asking you, Skela Trinity Poldo.”

Pardini’s voice cut clean and cold. He hadn’t once looked away from Hazel.

“Let me tell you what comes next. You denounce Rockridge in public. He still has the Council at his back. As Regent, he’ll force the mobilization edict to stand. The only thing your move accomplishes is speeding the Sarman Empire’s fracture, throwing a reeling nation into a deeper storm. More people will die, just like when you exposed Dalahaman’s resistance.”

Skela went pale at Dalahaman’s name. But the deaths of hundreds of thousands didn’t so much as dent Pardini’s tone. His words were flat, like a ledger read aloud.

“Not only that. You two will be thrown onto the knife-edge of public fury, made the faces of the opposition, a thorn in Rockridge’s eye. You’re a student. When that breaks, you won’t have the strength to protect yourself. And you won’t be able to protect her.”

His words ended, and his gaze speared into Hazel’s eyes, a blade of sight sharp enough to tear any lie, probing that window for tremors of fear or retreat.

“You know,” he said, voice flat as a winter lake, “for the good of most in this empire, and for her, you should burn those files and bury tonight.”

Skela couldn’t hold it. She surged forward a single step, like a wave breaking, even with the Judgment Sacred Gun aimed at her heart.

“Innocent people are dying because of Rockridge! You’d pretend none of it happened? You—you’re a High Judge of the Inquisition, the one meant to bring justice. How can you—”

Her voice frayed, tears rising like mist from a cold river, guilt ringing in it the way it had in that underground argument with Hazel.

Hazel watched her back, pain tightening her chest like a fist squeezing a plum till it bruised.

She knew Skela wasn’t only accusing Padini. She was pointing at her too, like a mirror showing cracks.

That weight pressed up from Hazel’s core like deep-sea pressure. She bit her lip, then let that pressure harden into resolve like iron cooling.

Hazel’s hand brushed the nape of Skela’s neck, a whisper of water magic sliding in like rain through reeds. Numbness spread from the spine like frost climbing bark. Skela’s body softened, then folded into Hazel’s arms.

“Ha…zel…?”

Her muscles went dark, sensation snuffed like candles in wind. Words broke, breath snagged, only her eyes stayed open like lanterns in fog.

“Why…?”

She watched Hazel take the papers from her hand—proofs against Toka and Rockridge—and her golden eyes wavered, like sunlight rippling through troubled water.

“Have you decided?”

“I have,” Hazel said. Her voice was soft, like a shawl laid over storm-bent shoulders.

“Rational,” Padini said, voice winter-calm, unmoved as a snowfield. “Give them to me. I’ll destroy them.”

He stepped forward, hand out, shadow crossing the papers like a cloud over rice terraces.

Hazel lifted her head first and met Padini’s eyes. Cold met cold, two shards of ice locking.

“Father, you’ve been drinking.”

Padini’s steps stopped like a cart before a cliff.

“What are you saying?”

“Yesterday was Mother’s memorial.”

“Why bring that up?”

“You never drink. Only once a year, at midnight, you open a bottle of Mother’s favorite Meilan wine. You sit alone, silent as falling ash, and finish it. Your tolerance is terrible. You start talking halfway through, more than you ever do—like you just did. You never give speeches.”

“…So what?”

“You don’t remember how the night ends when you drink. I do. I’ve heard you murmur at the window, words like cold rain. That maybe there was another path. That maybe you shouldn’t have done it then. But you chose, and you couldn’t help it.”

A tremor flickered beneath his white mantle like wind rippling rice paper.

“No one can see the future,” he said, voice clipped like a blade. “Back-solving optimal choices by outcome is useless. The most rational act is choosing by what you know now.”

Hazel’s lips lifted in a small smile, like frost easing on a windowsill. “Your logic is flawless, Father. Every sentence cuts. No room to refute.”

Blue light pricked from Hazel’s fingers like fireflies surfacing from dusk, dancing over the proofs.

“But a few hours ago, backlash nearly killed me. Maybe that’s why. The rational part of my mind feels scorched, like a map burned at the edges. I made a decision without a reason.”

She held his eyes, words placed like stones across a stream.

“I won’t become a second you, Father.”

The last syllable fell, and pale-blue flame licked across the paper like dawn snow catching light. It turned the proofs to ash in a blink. Yet it wasn’t destruction. Black ink bloomed along Hazel’s forearm like vines, each mark matching the burned words.

Bald Demon Buster—a simple transfer spell, a schoolyard trick that copies text from paper onto skin. Back at Holywell Academy, novels were banned in class. So kids invented this charm, printing stories onto their bodies to dodge the “Bald Demon” dean’s frisk. It worked too well, and the dean’s temper smoked like a kiln. The spell kept the joke for a name.

That joke turned sharp as a knife. Skela’s eyes flew wide, panic spiking like a startled bird.

“Hazel… don’t…”

She saw it now. Hazel hadn’t numbed her to erase proof. It was to stop Skela from stopping her.

They were both spent from a night of fighting, bows drawn with no arrows left. Escaping a man holding the Judgment Sacred Gun was folly, a moth rushing a bonfire. Worse, he was the Inquisition’s strongest blade, Padini, the High Judge with extreme affinity for ice.

If Padini wanted, he could take the papers and end them with one motion, like plucking a leaf. He could burn the proof like straw.

They had no leverage, no coin to bargain, no board on which to play—until now.

With the proof etched onto Hazel’s skin, he couldn’t erase it by seizing paper. So long as Hazel lived, she could rewrite it, spread it like seeds on wind.

Meaning, if Padini wanted the proof gone, he had to… kill Hazel.

She was betting her life that her father wouldn’t pull the trigger. Skela understood and fear crashed over her like a black tide. Anger and guilt fell away like leaves. Because, like her choice to reach the surface first instead of chasing Toka, the terror of losing Hazel drowned everything else.

She cried out, tears spilling like sudden rain. She reached, struggling to stop her. Hazel only brushed away her tears, the touch soft as silk, and laced their fingers, ten against ten, a knot of warmth.

Her smile bloomed gentle as a lantern at dusk, promising the path would hold.

Seeing that smile, Skela knew she couldn’t stop what came next.

“I won’t do as you do,” Hazel said, voice calm as a quiet river. “I won’t protect what matters by retreating, step by step. I’ll walk with her into whatever comes, even if the road grows thorns. Only there—only at her side—can I truly guard her.”

Padini’s hand dipped, the gun lowering a breath, his shadow shrinking like twilight.

“That’s your answer?”

“It is.”

“You know which side I choose.”

“I do. But if I can’t chamber my life now, then when facing Rockridge, I don’t even earn the right to stand beside her.”

Silence folded around them like snow. After a long breath, Padini looked up. The gun rose again, slow as winter sun.

“…You’re right, daughter.”

Just a few words, but for the first time his icebound voice cracked, a line like thaw across a lake.

Skela felt the world tilt. She understood what would happen, and horror clawed through her like talons.

No. Please. Don’t—her heart screamed, a bird beating against bars. She could do nothing. Hazel closed her eyes, as if she’d accepted the weight of fate like a stone on a shrine.

The trigger clicked.

Sparks from Firestone bit the steel. Powder flared like summer lightning in a storm. Shock burst, shattering and releasing the pressure array etched behind the mithril bullet. Vacuum bloomed in a moment like a black flower, hurling the bullet faster than this era should know.

The silver-white round spun along the rifling, lines carved into it blazing as it rotated, stacking piercing arrays in a lattice of sigils. This was the gun’s true edge—an ultra-fast, attribute-charged bullet with punch beyond a rapid-fire cannon, a thorn made to pierce armor.

Even at full strength, Skela couldn’t conjure a shield fast enough. Now, she couldn’t lift a finger, her will bound like a hawk tied to a post.

In an eye-blink, ice magic howled past Skela, cold so fierce it burned. Tears on her cheeks glazed into white frost, stinging her skin like nettles.

The next heartbeat, the binding on her faded like fog in sun. The numbness recoiled, muscle returned like water to a riverbed. She had her body again—but didn’t move. Fear locked her still, a tidal wave pressing her chest till breath broke. She refused to raise her head, refused to see Hazel—until she realized she was unhurt.

Right—right, the Life-Synch Array!

The array still held. If she was fine, Hazel was fine.

Skela’s head snapped up. Hazel’s eyes opened too, calm as winter stars. Frost ringed her brows and lips like a comic snow-mask, a strange little snowman face. Skela couldn’t laugh. She threw her arms around Hazel and sobbed like a spring storm.

“You idiot, idiot! There had to be another way. Why do this!”

She buried her face in Hazel’s chest, crying with petals of tears, while Hazel, held tight, let out a crooked smile, half-sweet, half-bitter, like tea steeped too long.

Sweet, because they were alive. Bitter, because she remembered Wednesday’s fight about coming to the underground lab. She’d told Skela the same words then, tossed like stones.

Now they’d both stood in the other’s shoes. Maybe that made it even, a knot tied off at last.

Hazel sighed inside, a breath like wind through bamboo, and patted Skela’s back, slow and steady.

When Skela’s storm eased to a soft drizzle, Hazel turned her head.

Behind them lay a sheet of pure ice, crystalline and white as a mountain face. The mithril bullet’s effect had carpeted the alley. In its center, a half-human block was pinned, like a grotesque statue mid-prayer. Hazel squinted and recognized a Blood Puppet’s upper body. Its lower half still stuck in the vent pipe they’d crawled from, the sneak attack frozen into two artless lengths of ice.

So that was why he fired. Hazel still couldn’t help the dry look she shot Padini, a thin arc like a blade’s smile.

“I thought the Judgment Sacred Gun only executes the worst of the worst.”

A Blood Puppet was just mid-grade Blood Magic. Firing at it felt excessive, a hammer for a fly. Padini didn’t seem to care. He drew out a Firestone from his chest, slow and careful as lighting incense, and scratched a char line along the grip.

“No one wrote the bullet has to enter the execution target.”

His answer was stray and sharp as a whisked leaf. Hazel frowned, confusion creasing like ripples.

The explanation came on its own.

With their voices quiet, and Skela muffled in Hazel’s chest, the alley’s background rose—shouts, bootfalls, orders like wind snapping banners.

Noise ran for a spell, then thinned. A man in a Senior Inquisitor’s uniform bolted in from the far mouth of the alley, breath white in the cold.

“High Judge, sir! We breached the Imperial Theatre on signal. All targets are confirmed and detained. The Regent and the army are being held outside by the Tommis family. Do we push down now?”

“Yes,” Padini said, voice even as a plumb line. “Proceed as planned.”

“Sir!”

The man saluted like a blade touched to brow, then ran back, footsteps drumming like rain.

Hazel stared, stunned, thoughts clattering like beads.

She’d guessed her father might spare her. She hadn’t guessed the shot was part of a plan set like stones beforehand.

“You… already accounted for this?”

“No,” Padini said, tone dry as paper. “I meant to keep you home a few days. To stop Rockridge taking you hostage.”

“…Then why didn’t you say that when you came to my room?”

“I thought you’d come home on the memorial day,” he said, eyes cold as river ice, “not walk into the enemy’s hall on your own.”

“Ahem, ahem”—two dry taps like knuckles on old wood.

Hazel coughed, awkward, her gaze drifting like a leaf on water as she steered the topic. “So what was that doom‑and‑gloom about? I didn’t know you did improv, Father.”

“That wasn’t improv.” Padini slid the Sacred Spear of Judgment back into its sheath, metal whispering like cold rain on stone. “If you chose to hand me the evidence, it means you’re not ready. During the hearings, I’ll cage you in the manor like a bird.” He turned, coat hem cutting the air like a blade. “Come. I need what you pulled from beneath the earth.”

Hazel froze for half a heartbeat, like dawn light pausing at a door. Was… that recognition?

The thought budded, and joy rose unbidden like a small flower through frost, startling her like a sudden bell in fog. Neither she nor Padini were the type to bare their hearts; since the Skela incident, a rift lay between them like a cracked riverbed. After Mother died, she was seldom home, the house a husk she passed by; some years, they met only on her mother’s memorial day, a single candle on a cold calendar.

After so long, she thought she’d grown used to it, finding the father‑daughter dance childish and grating, like toy drums thudding in an empty room.

She believed that, and yet his words turned her back into a small girl, arms wrapped around the tiny cactus she’d raised, stepping into sunlight to show her parents, joy pricking bright as green thorns.

How childish, she mocked herself, like tossing pebbles at her own reflection. Maybe Blood Magic backlash really fried her brain, to make her chase such childish sparks…

She thought that, but her voice rose lighter than usual, a note of pride glinting like a hidden coin. “You wouldn’t believe what happened below. It was a sight even battlefields don’t birth.”

“Belief isn’t the point. I need to know what shot up from the depths and punched through to the surface, like a spear of light—”

Padini’s logic snagged mid‑flow, a rare crack in a river that usually ran straight and cold. It wasn’t wine; behind him, Skela and Hazel were rustling like two birds in a thornbush, so he glanced back.

Then he saw a scene beyond the borders of his maps, like stars where the chart said blank sea.

Seconds earlier, Hazel had tried to stand, shame pricking like nettles at being carried before family. That brushed a fresh reverse scale—the one forbidden scale on a dragon—inside Skela’s chest, sharp as a new thorn. Still in fight‑or‑flight, she wouldn’t let Hazel walk, and she wouldn’t allow any argument, her stance bristling like a guard dog in rain.

“I can walk on my own. You don’t have to carry—”

“I don’t care!” Skela’s words snapped like sparks from flint. “You’re never gambling with your body again! Never. Not allowed.”

“I know, just—calm down—mmph?!”

Hazel didn’t finish. Skela’s face pressed in like a sudden tide, and Hazel’s lips were sealed in the most literal way, warmth clasping her like fire cupped in two hands.

The kiss struck again, less sugar and first‑bloom, more feral storm and long thunder. Skela pinned Hazel’s wrists, rough as rope but desperate as rain after drought, pressing her down as if to pay back the terror of near‑loss with heat and breath. Emotion surged, a river over its banks, impossible to dam; Hazel pushed back, a leaf against the current, thinking she’d forgotten something important—then that thought melted in Skela’s warmth like ice in sun. Their legs tangled like vines; their mouths joined for a full minute, until pain bloomed in their chests, breath burning like thin air at a high peak, and they had to part.

They panted, eyes glazed like night lakes under moonlight, desire rippling. After a heartbeat’s rest, instinct reached for round two like a hand for fruit.

Before that second tide, Hazel’s peripheral caught Padini standing aside, his jaw half open like a door ajar.

This High Judge, who’d executed countless monsters and seen a tide of human faces, stood there blank as a statue, words stalled like a quill frozen above parchment. In his ice‑blue eyes, confusion misted for the first time, like fog creeping over a winter field.

Hazel met his gaze, and her mind froze along with him, a thin sheet of winter sealing a pond.