Hedi’s breath thinned; caution iced her spine. She flattened to the floor and crawled. Every spell traveled in straight lines.

To find the best spot without a direct hit, she kept flexing her path. She stayed relatively far from Evelyn, a tactical offset, ready to counter when needed.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

A few spherical spells tore the air with a razor shriek. They lunged at Hedi, fast and true.

“Stop dodging. Even a blind man could spot that ash-white hair!”

Evelyn’s mocking voice floated from the doorway, and Hedi felt the ground shift under her fate.

Still, her spatial sense caught every orb’s track. She rolled in a heartbeat, skirting the edge of the kill zone, and waited for a counter window.

“What are you afraid of?” Hedi said, crawling toward a shadow etched clean against the dark. “Standing in the doorway with small-area magic won’t hurt me.”

“Damage the core, and that’s trouble.”

“No offense if I guess wrong. Are you afraid of Olivia?”

Evelyn stared coldly at Hedi’s round, gray-white head. “A monster wracked by headaches worse than death—what can she do?”

“For example, slip something small into your arm?”

The moment the words left her lips, Hedi felt a swell of magic sweep in. She curled her fingers, bent its path, and guided it toward the nearby silhouette. A dull thud followed. The spell shattered into a spray of motes. In the brief blaze, Hedi glimpsed a creature not at all human.

Its eyes were beetles in a forest, glossy black on either side of a narrow head, unreadably cold. Its nose rose and tilted, like the lifted feelers of an arthropod. Its skin held intricate grain, chilled with metallic sheen, layer by layer of hardened shell.

“Olivia Viola,” Hedi whispered. “Are you Viola?”

The motes died.

The insectoid human sank back into shadow, a silent watcher, still as stone.

Hedi pressed her right ankle. The skin was swollen and split, like the thin peel of an overripe tomato. If she kept tangling with Evelyn, half an hour more and she’d be a pinned specimen. Like a colorful chart on a clinic wall—scraped knees, swollen ankle, bruised back—turned into a vivid warning for the next to come.

Strangely, Evelyn didn’t seize the opening. She too had seen the insect shape hiding in the flare.

Seen this way, I’m the one most endangered. Stratford ahead, Olivia behind, uncertain friend or foe.

Hedi slapped her head to cut the noise in her mind. She pitched a spell sphere toward where Evelyn stood. Just before impact, an invisible barrier blinked into being. It caught the speeding attack without a ripple.

“Instead of striking me,” Evelyn said crisply, “think how to slip past Olivia’s eyelids.”

“Monsters in the Dark Realm likely act on passive triggers.”

“You’re still analyzing at a time like this?”

Hedi stared at the door buried in darkness. The mockery worked like a tonic, and clarity cooled her nerves. I kept asking what sets Olivia apart from a roach. Now I can explain.

Evelyn fell silent.

“You said humans under Dark Realm Erosion mutate into mindless, blood-hungry monsters. They attack Investigators indiscriminately. That’s likely a defensive instinct kicked on by the Realm’s stimulus.”

“In the institute, under pain stimuli, the spray they spit is magic driven by agony. It might also be a preset defense, triggered by suffering.”

Hedi’s gaze burned. “Take the roach. That’s an active response under the Realm’s influence.”

“After your spell hit Olivia, you stopped pressing me with magic. You even blocked Dark Magic, the same shade as the dark.”

“That shows you understand Olivia’s inner mechanism: a shift from passive defense to active attack.”

“A Spellcaster’s mana is limited. You can’t balance offense and defense well. You raised that barrier early not to guard against me. Who it’s for is obvious.”

“I think monsters and the Dark Realm work in symbiosis. The Realm wrings emotion through pain; the monsters gain uncanny strength.”

“You also said the dormant core’s purpose is to shut down the Dark Realm. The monsters here just lost their memory. The Realm will drive roaches to stop Investigators.”

“So the Dark Realm and monsters are fully independent beings. And Olivia hasn’t attacked me for this long. A powerful presence that can tell right from wrong—her danger is plain.”

Evelyn stood at the door. Green phosphor crept back along the wall, a haze that filled the ragged corridor. Jagged shadows crawled over broken stone. She sighed, low and distant. Half her face fell into the dark. The light made her eyes look sunk deep.

“You’re really... too smart,” Evelyn said with regret. “But Olivia needs time to react. Her brain’s dulled by endless pain.”

“It’s fine. There’s a Dark Realm core where I am.”

“Cooperate, Melvina?”

“Right now? You can’t be serious.”

In the endless dark, a whispering rustle rose. Like brooms scraping stone, or unknown limbs furtively shifting.

At first, the sound was barely there, like dust drifting in still air. Each second, it grew more coherent, more clear. It pierced the thick black curtain and needled the inner ear. Bodies tensed, breath held, listening for the message rising from the depth.

Teased by that eerie sound, Evelyn whipped up the flood of her heart. She condensed crushing Dark Magic. In an instant, she urged long-suppressed negatives like a burst dam. She cast a chain of brutal attacks.

Each strike drove at the source of the noise, aiming to shatter Olivia in one go.

Over time, the swollen blisters on her right arm started bursting. White larvae, grain-sized, writhed through the bandage seams. They gnawed at her torn skin, greedy and relentless. Each bite stabbed like needles and lit her nerves on fire. Panic widened in the pain, and in that break—her body was pierced clean through. Pain and fear took shape, dragging her toward a deeper abyss.

“S... Stratford...” Hedi saw it and lost all sharp words. She only stammered the name.