A full day had slipped like sand through the hourglass since Justin fled his room.

He moved along corners and through Shadow, melted into the river of bodies, changed outfits like leaves changing color.

He kept moving all day, without a bite of food, letting his presence diffuse like mist into the crowd, turning “Justin” into any face in the tide.

He’d learned this long ago, back when he still wore the badge of a Heretic Inquisitor.

Hunter and prey can trade thrones in a heartbeat, so their arts share a root, hide-and-seek born of the same spring.

Even after he shook off every Heretic Inquisitor, unease needled him, like a thorn under skin, eyes on him from every lantern-lit angle: from a winged one holding a human lover, from a maid handing out Andor Is Innocent flyers, from a blind corner where the Shadow pooled.

To scare the world off evil, Inquisitors usually strike in daylight like thunderheads; they rarely move like ghosts. Yet he’d seen no sign of their steel claw-gauntlets.

Still, instinct kept flashing red like a warning lantern. He couldn’t find whose gaze was the knife against his back.

Like when his room was sealed, he replayed every step, and still found no cracked footprint in the dust.

In SkywardCity he’d used five identities, each a separate river; one only bought him a bed. Even if the others drew suspicion, it shouldn’t splash back on the inn.

“Switch identities… no way I leaked,” he muttered, the words dry as old paper.

There was nothing to doubt, no matter how he circled the maze.

Stranger still, his room had been sealed tight, but when he broke out he found only a few Inquisitors, and just one barely counted as high rank.

It made a crooked kind of sense: lacking the steel to kill him outright, they’d use a Divine Art to bind him, then sprint to the nest for reinforcements.

But if they could hold him three hours, how hadn’t the hawks arrived?

Justin didn’t know, and the night kept its mouth shut.

“Maki… what’s happened to you, Mentor?” he breathed, the words cold as dew.

He could only guess at a twist of fate; alone in SkywardCity, with a wanted poster for a halo, his intel came late like winter sun, useless for a clean strike.

He drifted with the people like a leaf on current; at a crepe cart he stopped, slipped a copper from his sleeve to the vendor, the coin bright as a fish scale.

He wasn’t starving yet, but hunger would slow his hand and blunt his blade like rust.

Justin needed to shave every sliver off his odds of dying.

He lifted the crepe, ready for the first bite.

A wind rolled past with the iron tang of blood, a whoosh like a blade in tall grass.

A woman in a white dress bloomed in the flow ahead, in a gap no one saw; a beat ago there’d been only air.

No one noticed a monster had stepped into their circle, a wolf in bridal white.

She seemed to smile, that corpse-pale smile a crack in porcelain.

As she brushed his shoulder, he caught a familiar scent, old as scars.

In his first twenty years, every hunt into a Demonfolk den reeked of that smell, like a butcher’s rain.

Lesser Demonfolk are barely above beasts; they grab a person and gorge like a storm, meat and bone grit spattered like hail.

But the high kind, like this woman, who wear human skin like silk, bite the throat and drink the spray, set the body aside, pluck the organs like bitter fruit, then when the flesh stiffens eat it all; at the end they crack bones like dry twigs and drink the marrow, stacking what they won’t eat in neat rows—if not for the blood-reek, you’d think them nobles at table.

Justin’s left hand found the steel claw at his waist, cold as moonlight.

Even branded a heretic now, hunting heresy was bone-deep, a reflex like breath.

Someone moved first, cutting the stillness like flint.

Two Heretic Inquisitors lunged from angles no eye tracked, their attack a clean, practiced stroke.

His senses had dulled, like a blade left wet.

He hadn’t felt the crowd thin like an ebbing tide, leaving only a few dots fleeing down the street.

But his fightcraft had climbed, tempered by fire and night.

The two looked fierce, and the woman only parried like a reed in wind; yet he knew she’d only been caught cold. If she bared her Demonfolk strength, they’d be dead in a handful of heartbeats.

Justin turned and lifted the steel claw, the metal a quiet promise.

He stepped toward the storm, when a hand clamped his shoulder like a hook.

“Civilian. About-face and run. As fast as your legs can burn. This is ours—our heretic hunting ground.”

The speaker slid past Justin, toward the woman, squeezing his steel claw till it rasped like dry bone.

He knew that stance, that voice—Amanda.

Once they’d shared every secret and every fire, teammates bound like shield and spear—until Justin split from the Heretic Inquisition. If not for creed, they’d still be laughing over cheap wine.

Amanda didn’t recognize him; relief washed through him like cool rain, and then a thin ache like a hairline crack.

But with Amanda’s strength, he couldn’t beat that Demonfolk’s gale.

Justin reached toward Amanda’s back, then let his hand fall like a dead leaf.

More Inquisitors joining didn’t raise the pressure much; to a Demonfolk used to their heavy strikes, it was the same drumbeat.

She drifted through them like wind with a coppery breath; every leap stole a scrap of flesh like a hawk taking feathers.

No—she commanded wind, became wind, an instinct honing itself mid-fight, sharper with every pass.

“Civilian! Get out! If you don’t want to die, run!” Amanda’s roar cracked like thunder, and their blood ran heavier.

He didn’t know when reinforcements would arrive, or if they’d arrive like rain too late for the fire.

He didn’t know if helping would earn thanks, or a shackle after his face rang a bell.

He didn’t know which path to choose, or which path was right under heaven.

Justin reached deep into his chest pocket and gripped the warm thing, a coal against his palm.

What is justice? What is the greater cause? the thing asked, like a bell struck in fog.

To uphold the greater cause of this world—that is my justice, Justin answered, steady as stone.

I’ll give you no answer, it whispered, for only fools decide fate, though they don’t know the old road of history.

“Right. Right… I don’t know if Mentor Maki will come. If he comes, I won’t get away. So I can’t act. I can’t show I’m here. Maybe he’ll save Amanda. Maybe reinforcements will cage that Demonfolk. So without me— even without me…”

Justin turned and ran from the roar of steel, jaw clenched till his teeth felt like cracking ice.

He heard flesh tear like canvas, a sound like a heart ripped from a chest. He didn’t look back, not once.

I chose right, he told himself, the words pebbles in his mouth.

I chose right. I’m right, he said again, as if words could be armor.

From the Shadow, laughter pealed, brazen as a crow at dawn.

——————

His self-pity lingered like damp fog long after he’d found a bolt-hole.

He held a thing they called a “burger” and drank “cola,” fads that had spread overnight like wildfire.

It must’ve been this year; only “explosion” fit. A venture by some knight from the western frontier had seeded shops across the human world.

Only the Kadula conglomerate could match “Meifei,” both carving up markets like dueling scythes, trading sales wars blow for blow.

Justin sat on a restaurant’s second floor, and now and then his gaze drifted toward the Heretic Inquisition’s headquarters.

A grim tower shouldering the sky, small in footprint, the HQ in SkywardCity served as a banner, not a workshop.

The Elders and the President held council there; they did keep torment racks and cells inside, but most heretics were caged in the prison city far to the human north.

Only heroes mired in controversy, suspected of heresy, were brought here, to be judged in the public eye like statues under noon sun.

He finished the food, grease heavy as tar on his tongue.

“Not healthy… but that’s not my battle tonight,” he said, letting the thought drift.

Night had laid its cloak, yet that tower still burned with lamps like a hive.

Justin left the restaurant, slipped through a narrow alley where damp clung like moss; when he emerged, his clothes were different, his hair a stranger’s, a man reborn between two breaths.

He’d cycled through three identities, rechecked patrol routes, mapped them against his memory like stars to a chart. All green. Just wait.

With a fourth mask on his face, he went to the inn next door, paid at the counter, took his key, and vanished into his room like a stone in water.

He killed every magelamp, crouched by the window, and waited, a shadow within Shadow.

He waited for Maki to leave the Heretic Inquisition’s nest.

He couldn’t muster the will to fight his mentor; that sky-crushing might froze the marrow.

Even with the Demon Blade in hand, he had no wish to face that storm head-on.

He waited in stillness, letting the boiling in his blood cool like iron in trough, muscles slacken like loosened bowstrings.

He coaxed his battle-scarred body to rest, smoothed the edges of his wounds, drew breath back into the embers.

Before Slaughter, he would climb to his peak like a blade honed on rain.

He watched and waited until the seam of dawn paled. Before sunrise, the air carried the scent of fire and blood, a red thread tugging the senses.

Maki burst from the headquarters like lightning, and a flock of Heretic Inquisitors streamed after him.

Justin kept his seat, still as a corpse under linen; only when the street settled did he ease his stiff limbs, like thawed wood bending.

He walked toward the headquarters, each step steady as drumbeats.

“Hey, wait! Who are—”

Justin’s fingers closed on the guard’s throat; he’d meant only to choke him out, but the Demon Blade in his left hand thrummed for blood like a thirsty hornet.

“Better you die by my hand than under the Demon Blade. Hate me for it.”

He squeezed; the steel claw crushed the man’s neck with a dull crack like breaking twigs.

The Demon Blade rode his arm and cut of its own will, a single slash opening another guard’s chest like a door.

“It’s you… Justin, why—”

“For this world’s justice. For absolute justice,” he said, each word a nail.

“Absolute justice is dead. You can’t—”

“That’s why I’ll revive Him—the Deity of Justice.”

Justin touched the thing in his breast again, a broken little crystal sphere; its glow brightened like a guiding star, telling him he was nearing the Heretic Inquisitors’ sealing fragments.

“This must be justice. Beyond doubt,” he murmured, the words falling like snow.

He moved deeper into the headquarters, swallowed by its dark throat.