The lamp finally flared to life, a pale sun in a tin sky, throwing the woman and Adelaide on the floor into sharp relief.

“You—you…! You promised to tell me the secret between the Elf and the Emperor!”

“Who the hell knows that kind of thing?” The laugh came rough, like a saw on bone. “And you believed it—hah… hahahaha! Even among the Empire’s dumb dogs, you might be the dumbest mutt.”

The jeer stripped off like a mask. The voice lost its muffled sugar and turned to gravel, no longer even pretending to be feminine—and it didn’t have to. The “woman” tore off a half-length wig in one brutal rip and bared a gleaming bald scalp.

“You… you wore a wig and pretended to be a woman. You liar!”

“Bitch, you trying to lose your tongue?” His face hardened, a storm rolling in.

Fear hit first—cold water down the spine—and Adelaide curled up tight, two bright tears beading at the corners of her eyes like dew on glass.

“If not for some creep telling me this would lure in a big bug like you—and staking gold when he set the binding spell, swearing he wasn’t lying—how the hell would I be doing this?”

As he spoke, his eyes slid over Adelaide’s proud chest and hips, oil-slick and filthy.

“But she wasn’t lying about you. There probably aren’t many big bugs like you in the Empire. Looks like I get to have some fun before I shake you down.”

He stepped in. Adelaide shrieked, a knife-on-plate sound.

“D-don’t come closer! I’m warning you, I’ve got a super strong bodyguard. Even if you stuffed me in a cage with a hundred-digit code, he’d pop it like a soap bubble!”

He grinned, entertained.

“A cage? Don’t make me laugh, bitch. Why would I need a cage?” He threw a proud look at his table, a junkyard of odds and ends. “I don’t lock anything. Know why? I’m the boss here. Anyone tries to steal from me, I twist their head off that night.”

He shut his eyes, savoring his own thunder, waiting for the sweet crack of a desperate woman’s sobs to restore his manhood.

Seconds stretched. No sobs came. Her voice did—but it had shed its skin.

“In that case, all the better.”

He snapped his eyes open. The softness and panic had vanished from her face, like mist burned off by sun.

Pop—pop-pop-pop—

A chain of sharp cracks went off. The binding spells on Adelaide’s wrists and ankles shattered. She pushed her hands apart with a lazy stretch, and rings meant to hold an orc unraveled into drifting motes, starlight in dust-laden air.

“You—!”

He didn’t finish. A blood-colored butterfly sealed his mouth. Adelaide pointed, and dozens of blood-thin threads coiled out and bound him to the wall, twined tight like braided festival twine.

“Quiet, Mr. Cross-dresser. Don’t make me cut your tongue out before I ask who that ‘weirdo’ is.”

She spoke lightly, then dipped to pick up her wide-brim hat with a dancer’s grace. Even with a ward like clear glass covering her from head to toe before she’d entered the alley, her neat-freak fingers dusted the brim that held no dust, then settled it back on her light-brown hair.

When it came to conning with wigs, this gentleman was a child next to Adelaide.

She’d spotted his Adam’s apple the moment he drank. A man in a dress, paired with that gaudy play-hard-to-get act—she read his script at a glance. The only unknown was why he’d picked her.

If it was just her face and being an out-of-towner, fine. But his timing was too clean. A shadow tugged at her thoughts; she suspected hands behind the curtain, and so she took the bait on purpose.

Seems the bet paid off. Someone did know she was coming.

But who would target Adelaide and still set a trap this shabby—something that could never threaten her…?

She drifted to his junk-crowded table. Before questioning him, she meant to see if the so-called “weirdo” had left a mark among the mess. Behind her, rope creaked and flesh thrashed; the noise rose like flies. Annoyance pricked first; she frowned and didn’t bother to turn.

She could’ve used the Dream Eater Spider’s Magic Core to hypnotize him right away. But she’d felt a thread of mana on him. The Dreamfeast Spider’s suggestion is weaker on those with resistance. She didn’t want to spook a nest, so she chose acting over blunt force.

No matter. His greasy gaze had crawled over her, but she’d wrung the key detail out of him: he didn’t lock things away. End result? The same.

She pushed the thought aside and sifted the table, ignoring the muffled protests behind her. He hadn’t lied. He really didn’t hide things. In a short rummage she fished out two gold bars, their warm glow and soft luster blazing like twin suns amid a landfill of paper junk.

Huh? Real?

Puzzlement flickered. She weighed them in her palm. She’d just torn through the bindings by reinforcing her muscles with the Silver-Templed Hao Monkey’s tissue, so her sense of weight was off. But touch and give told the tale—the purity was high. Not a borderland fake.

But if the employer could pay this kind of price, why hire a street thug? That was beyond “rich and brainless.” Gold conducts mana well, a rare metal here, more precious than in the Dream.

Because the thug knew a few spells? That felt wrong. In this desert town, was there truly no one stronger than him? Adelaide tilted her head, a small crease between her brows. She flipped a bar over, searching the shallow dent her palm had felt, expecting a mint mark.

What stared back jarred her.

A smiling face—more a doodle of one—was etched into the back. Two dots, one curve. So simple, yet a chill rose like a draft under a door. The bean-like eyes and that thin, long grin didn’t match, and they pulled up images of slit-mouthed women and painted clowns from the Dream.

She shook her head and cleared the shadows. Below the face, a line of small text. She narrowed her eyes and picked the words apart one by one.

—To our guest from far across the Empire. Forgive me for not telling you the story of the Emperor and the Elf. As an apology, I’ve prepared a small surprise.

—By the way, the gentleman behind you can’t use magic.

At the final character, pain bit her palm like a lightning fang. She grunted and flung the bar on reflex—but too late.

Damn. A vision-triggered array.

As the name says, it wakes by sight. Now she knew why they chose gold. The weirdo hid the array inside the bar and used gold’s conduction; it lit the moment she read the last character.

To fool her, the array was simple, a single trigger. That didn’t calm her. The last line was the knife.

If the man couldn’t use magic, then the mana she’d sensed was a planted tool on his body, and what she’d just triggered was—

A scream tore the air behind her. Blood-threads snapped with brittle pings.

She turned. The tall man was gone. In his place, a thing crouched and panted frosty air, mouth split wide, eyes empty as dead moons. His feet had melted into tail-like stumps.

Alarms rang in her chest. He lunged, jaw yawning. In that blink, that dead, collapsing feeling rolled through her again—her movement array buckled.

Again with the Dragon Roar? Are dragon parts this common now?

She slipped aside, graceless but alive. The auxiliary arrays steadied a heartbeat later. He’d been force-fed a dragon sacrifice by some nasty method, but this was no Rachman offering a whole dragon’s head; the fodder was weaker. The dragonized man couldn’t fully dispel her arrays, only shake them.

Even so, he wasn’t easy meat. He was quick, and the stuttering roars kept breaking her rhythm.

Pressed and hounded, Adelaide gritted her teeth. The Bloodsword bloomed into her hand, red like a thorned rose. She planted her feet. Tattoos unfurled across her forearm like iron vines—reinforcement magic.

Come on. Bite my arm like a dog.

She meant to take his strike, let him clamp down, then hack his lower body off. She wasn’t sure her reinforcement would stop those serpent fangs, but it beat burning her body with Crimson Frenzy again.

He leapt. Her pulse spiked. Then—the wooden door to the side exploded, a storm splitting wood. In the corner of her eye, a sweep of black hair flashed—and in that instant, her choice flipped like a coin.

She pulled back her braced arm and slipped, blade first, past his rush. Her cut took his left shoulder. Without the shield of her forearm, his fangs drove for her un-hardened waist, a scythe’s bite about to land.

Before they did, a silver-white longsword sheared off his lower jaw. Thunder answered like a drum. Purple lightning hammered him across the room.

The intruder who fell into step with her in a heartbeat was, of course, Mira.

Odd, how seamless it was. No lag, no fumble; it felt rehearsed. One took the arm, one took the front. Clean. Efficient. Too smooth for only their second fight together.

Adelaide didn’t smile.

Her gaze snagged on Mira’s profile. A thin red line traced her cheek, beads of blood gathering like pomegranate seeds. It wasn’t an accident. In the instant Mira blocked for her, she stood where Adelaide should’ve been. She was fast, but not fast enough; the right claw shaved a lock of her black hair and left that shallow mark.

“I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

Mira turned her face away, as if to hide the wound. In doing so, the ruined wig shifted—and the gold beneath spilled out like sunlight.

Seeing those golden strands, Adelaide's long lashes quivered; heat kindled in her blood-red eyes, a blaze under glass, and even her lenses couldn’t hide the rising scarlet.

In the next breath, she flashed to the dragon-formed man still gasping, hawk-quick, then raised her sword high and brought it down hard toward his crown.

Clang—!

Metal rang; a silver-white twin of her blade slipped in like moonlight, barring the space between Adelaide and the dragon-formed man.

“Move.”

Adelaide's voice held no warmth, ice-flat, purely a command; but Mira didn’t loosen her grip, didn’t yield—she just locked her gaze on Adelaide.

In the next beat, she flicked Adelaide's blade aside; before Adelaide could move, her wrist snapped, and the longsword opened the dragon-formed man's throat like a reed, ending him.

“You can’t kill, Adelaide.”

Mira turned her head, breath a light ebbing tide, and said.

“Things like this—I’ll handle them going forward. You still have the Sacred Heart—”

“—Do you think that’s the explanation I want right now?”

Adelaide cut her off, her tone colder than ever, frost-brittle.

Mira froze; it was the first time she’d heard Adelaide speak to her like this.

Even on that birthday night, Adelaide had worn joy, not ice.

Afterward, she kept that elder-sister warmth, spring-soft, never once flaring at Mira.

In other words, Adelaide was angry at Mira for the first time, like a storm finally breaking.

She stepped forward, and Mira found herself driven back until her spine touched the wall, shadow closing in.

“Do you think that’s the explanation I want right now?”

Adelaide repeated the question, her voice pressing harder than before, like weight on the chest.

Yes, she was angry—not only because Mira was hurt, but because she’d realized something, something she should’ve seen long ago, a thorn under silk.

“You can’t use the Time Domain anymore, can you?”