Fredric left Zeke's district on the dawn-gray tram, the carriage humming like a hive preparing for flight. City strata thinned by degrees: cluttered neon corridors gave way to business avenues where glass walls rose in calm stanzas, each facade reflecting the next in quiet imitation. Thirty minutes later the tram eased to a halt beside the mercenary headquarters, and Fredric stepped onto pavement still slick with night rain.

From above the complex formed a perfect U, its arms sweeping forward as though to cradle the courtyard in a deliberate embrace. Daybreak caught on the acres of glass, kindling rose-gold flares that rippled across the broad concave frontage. Concrete pillars—stout, priest-like—kept silent watch beneath the sheen, their mass the hidden heart behind the glittering skin.

Fredric crossed the courtyard at an unhurried pace, boots ticking like metronome taps on stone. Trees planted in calculated symmetry leaned inward, their early leaves trembling with leftover moisture. At the plaza's center a bronze giant commanded the hush: Nathaniel Reeds, sword rooted before him, chin lifted toward storms only he could see. The sculptor had frozen a sleeve's edge in windless motion, so the metal cloak forever suggested a coming tempest.

"I really do hate seeing that face of yours, Nathaniel," Fredric remarked, voice low enough to avoid echo. The words floated up, brushed the oxidized cheek, then dissolved.

He passed beneath the statue's shadow and entered the main building. Glass doors parted with a sigh, admitting him to an atrium almost cathedral in its dimensions. Sunlight angled through skylights, breaking on polished black stone until the floor itself looked like a midnight lake scattered with shards of dawn. Suspended walkways stitched the upper tiers together, their glass balustrades humming softly as people crossed with holo-pads clutched to chests.

Twin leaderboards dominated the entrance wall: one for guilds, one for lone contractors. Names rose and shuffled in slow procession; portraits flickered; numerical glory glittered like gemstones. The competitive glow lent the hall a fevered pulse, as though the marble itself strained to climb the rankings.

"Hello, are looking for something?" The receptionist emerged from behind a curved desk whose edges bled soft cyan.

"All of these huge fucking buildings and all of them have a receptionist," Fredric sighed, the complaint rolling off his tongue like smoke.

"Excuse me?" Her practiced smile faltered, as if someone had dimmed the lights behind her eyes.

"I'm looking for Intel on blood red Nia," Fredric explained, and drew an idle circle in the air as though the request were a child's riddle.

"I apologize, we are not allowed to give away information about our members," she lowered her gaze, fingers knitting together like anxious sparrows.

"It's not your fault," Fredric said, voice almost tender. "You just work here, you probably have family you care and provide for, right? Possibly a little sibling you love and have to work tirelessly to support them?" His hand drifted in slow, hypnotic arcs.

"Ahh, Yes," she answered, the words quivering as though balanced on a spider thread. Her palms flattened on the counter. "Sir, we have a no mask policy inside of our building."

"I know," he replied. The mask's porcelain captured a reflection of the leaderboard's flickering digits, so it seemed his eyes glowed with shifting rank. Beneath the visage resembling a fox, his smile widened, invisible yet felt, a pressure change in the air.

She watched the mask tilt, watched numbers dance across its surface, and her professional composure cracked at the edges.

"I will kill every single person here if it means getting what I want!" Fredric laughed. The declaration spun through the atrium like a thrown blade, ringing against marble, glass, and steel. He executed a slow pirouette, coat flaring out, gaze lifting toward the vaulted skylights as if tracing constellations no one else could see.

A hush still lingered in the vast lobby, broken only by the soft tick of leaderboard holo-panels updating callsigns, when a broad-shouldered mercenary detached himself from the nearest lift alcove. His boots struck the marble with a deliberate cadence, echoing beneath the vaulted glass.

"Hey!" the burly man barked, voice ringing off the mezzanines. "What do you think you're spouting?"

The air seemed to fold. One heartbeat Fredric stood beneath the skylight; the next he re-materialised two metres left, palm already clamped across the mercenary's jaw. Fingers bit deep, tilting the man's head like a flower on its stem. A sharp twist, a wet snap, and a scarlet arc spattered the white floor in a crescent as elegant as calligraphy. Blood pattered the marble—first staccato, then a steady drip—painting a reflection of skylight ribs in dark red.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Gasps rose. Half a dozen contractors reached for sidearms; their motions looked underwater-slow beside Fredric's blur. He pivoted through them, coat flaring like a raven's wing. Each pass of his gloved hand opened a throat or shattered a larynx. Arterial sprays fanned across glass balusters, beading in rubies that slipped and slid before gravity gathered them into streaks. Muffled screams caught in steel and stone; gun muzzles never found time to lift.

One mercenary tried a baton swing. Fredric ducked, blade of his forearm snapping up to split the man's nose. A fountain of red hit the leaderboard pedestal, numbers ghosting crimson before the holo corrected. Another lunged with a combat knife—Fredric twisted, spine bending at an impossible angle, and the attacker's own momentum sent him spinning into a marble column. The knife clanged away; Fredric's boot followed, caving a ribcage with a sound like wet paper crumpling.

To the receptionist—crouched behind a concrete pillar, knuckles white around a fallen stylus—the carnage unfolded in fragmented tableaux: a silhouette streaking past glass, a flash of metal, a sudden bloom of crimson across a colleague's chest. The lobby's tasteful water feature trickled on, its serene burble grotesquely out of step with gargled breaths and boots skidding through slick blood.

Within half a minute the floor lay quiet save for the soft settling of bodies. Walls, once pristine, wore violent murals: ragged handprints, arterial fanning, the ghost of a boot sole dragged in scarlet.

Fredric stood at the center, chest rising with long slow breaths, drops tapping from his coat hem. Overhead the skylights caught the coppery spray and fractured dawn light through it, casting rose-tinted shards across his masked face.

"So, will you give me the information I need?" he asked, voice low, almost weary. Blood glazed his gloves to the wrist; each inhale drew a faint whistle through the mask's filters.

The receptionist wept silently, hugging the pillar as if stone alone could hold her together. Fredric's footsteps tapped toward her—measured, unhurried—and he crouched, head tilting like a curious wolf.

"Come on." Two light slaps to her cheek—not cruel, merely instructive. "You know you're useless to me like this." He rose again, crimson drops sliding from his coat and pattering on the polished slab beside her shoes.

"So will you help me or not?"

"I will," she whispered, wiping tears that smeared blood across her cheek like war paint. Legs trembling, she crossed the slaughter-wet floor to the nearest data terminal, fingertips skittering on the keys while her reflection shivered in the crimson gloss beneath.

"What exactly do you need?" she asked, screen glow bleaching colour from her frightened face.

"Where she lives, what jobs she takes, where she shits and breathes, what relatives she has," Fredric answered, words flicking from his tongue while one gore-gloved hand drew idle arabesques in the air.

Keys clacked. Database windows bloomed. Behind them cooling bodies lay in uneasy repose beneath the gaze of Nathaniel Reeds' bronze effigy outside, dawn-rain streaking the hero's brow like sympathetic tears.

"Will you kill her?" the woman asked, voice a reed in stormwater.

"Not yet," Fredric murmured.

"What about me?" she managed, striving for calm.

"I will," he sighed.

"O God!" Her prayer cracked open on a sob.

"There's no need to be sad. You will not be the first or the last person I kill. I will do it as humanely as possible," Fredric smiled beneath the mask, "just like you livestock deserve."

She pressed on, tears falling unchecked, data lines scrolling. Fredric's eyes—dark windows cut in reflective glass—showed no tremor of pity. He was night given posture, a thing beyond mercy.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked.

"It's a favour for a friend," he said, as if that stitched every wound.

Panic clung to the woman's breaths like frost on glass. Crimson reflections from motionless bodies stippled her cheeks; her fingertips, still slick with the keyboard's cold, twitched at her sides in reflexive terror.

"Please!" she pleaded. "Please don't kill me! I swear. I won't say a word!"

Fredric's boots squelched in the thin film of blood as he prowled closer, movements unhurried, predatory.

"Promises can be easily broken," Fredric remarked.

The receptionist's shoulders drew tight, tremor passing through her spine. Words caught on her tongue, then tumbled out—a last, desperate gambit born of some hidden scrap of will.

"Then I can still be of use to you."

Frederic's eyes widened, the black lenses of his mask catching stray shards of skylight like polished obsidian.

"Now that, I like that," he grinned, towering over her. "You fragile little thing, your brain must have been working on overdrive, thought climbing on top of thought, thinking of ways to prolong your miserable existence." He leaned in, and the glossy facade of his mask became a mirror reflecting her terror. "Had you not been totally pathetic, you could've likely awakened to a contract right this instance. Fine! I'll make you into my doggy."

With a slow, almost reverent motion, Fredric lifted the mask and set it aside. His exposed grin split ear to ear, a crescent sharpened by flecks of drying red.

"An undecided exception for an inconsequential speck of dust within this cruel and unforgiving narrative." He placed a blood-streaked palm atop her head—gentle, possessive. "From now on, you are mine," he whispered, voice emptied of warmth.

"I will do anything you ask of me," the girl trembled.

"Bark," he ordered.

"woof," she barked while swallowing her tears.

"Good dog." He patted her head with a twisted smile, crimson droplets dotting her hair like macabre confetti.

Sirens wailed far off—knights dispatching from nearby precinct towers. Fredric tilted his head, listening to the distant Doppler rise, then returned his gaze to the woman kneeling before him.

"Now the knights will soon come here. They will ask you about what happened here, and try getting as much information out of you as possible, and each time you will tell them this…"

"A masked figure appeared and I have no recollection about what happened after," she said as two knights questioned her inside of a dark room as her eyes glimmered with the expression of both hope and despair.

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