She stepped off the rooftop.

Just a step.

As if the night air had thickened into glass beneath her bare feet. As if the hundred-floor plunge to the street below was an inconvenience she'd decided to skip. Gravity reached for her, clutched at the hem of that sinful midnight kimono, and found nothing to hold onto.

She simply refused it.

The wind didn't howl around her.

It held its breath.

The world held its breath.

In the span of a heartbeat—no, in the space between heartbeats—her katana sang free of its lacquered sheath. It was not drawn; it simply existed in motion, a crescent moon of steel too swift for eyes to follow, too pure for mortal minds to comprehend.

The blade kissed the night.

And the night yielded.

A single, invisible stroke—no thunder, no flash, only the faintest shimmer like heat rising from summer asphalt. Yet the firmament itself split open before her. The vast indigo canopy of the sky tore like rice-paper beneath a master calligrapher's boldest stroke, edges curling back in perfect, terrified silence.

Stars flickered and dimmed, as though embarrassed to witness such casual dominion.

Through the wound in the heavens poured raw possibility: threads of silver void, ribbons of unmade dawn, the cold breath of realms that had no name in human tongues. The rift hung suspended, obedient, waiting.

She stepped forward.

Bare feet touched nothing and everything. The torn fabric of the sky parted further, soft as silk, fragile as fresh tofu surrendering to the lingering heat of a katana fresh from the forge. No resistance. No sound. Only the hushed gasp of creation bending to her will.

She slipped through the laceration in reality as one might pass through a noren curtain into a quiet teahouse—graceful, unhurried, inevitable.

Behind her, the sky knit itself closed with a sigh, seamless once more, as if it had never been violated.

Poor sky. It really should know better by now.

***

Moments later—or perhaps instantly, time being the unreliable thing it was in spaces between spaces—she materialized high above an estate so vast it mocked the word "mansion."

From the air; it resembled a palace compound: layered roofs of black tile gleaming under moonlight, gardens sprawling like ink paintings brought to life, walls that stretched for acres. Patrolled by shadows that moved with too much purpose to be mere guards. Too silent to be human. Too still between movements to be anything but waiting.

The Derek estate looked like a kingdom compared to this.

The Maxton mansion looked like a toolshed.

Even Sovereign Tower, for all its hundred floors of billionaire paranoia, would have fit inside the eastern garden alone.

This was old money.

No—this was ancient money. The kind that didn't appear on any Forbes list because it had learned, centuries ago, that visibility was weakness. Let newer fortunes strut and preen while it watched from shadows so deep they had forgotten the sun existed.

She vanished again.

And reappeared in a room swallowed by darkness.

No windows. No lights. Only the faint scent of incense and old blood—the former sweet and woody, the latter copper-sharp beneath it like a secret the room had stopped bothering to hide.

The darkness here wasn't natural. It was cultivated. Fed. Kept like a pet by someone who understood that true power didn't need to be seen to be felt.

Ahead, a single red door stood like a wound in the void.

Not painted red. Not stained.

Red.

The color of things that were red before red had a name. The color of the first blood spilled in the first war. The color her eyes became when she stopped pretending to be gentle.

She dropped to one knee, forehead nearly touching the floor in perfect, silent reverence.

"Supreme Crimson Consort reporting," she said, voice low and steady. "Phei Ryujin Tiamat is still, indeed, alive."

Silence answered her.

Thick. Deliberate. Stretching long enough to bruise.

The silence wasn't just empty—it was full, packed with consideration, with calculation, with the weight of someone deciding whether your next breath would be your last.

Poor Consort.

She really should know better by now too.

But even gods enjoy making their servants squirm the way she was, and her supreme seemed to enjoy these godly theatrics.

A sigh drifted through the red door.

Disappointment made audible.

A young man's voice followed—light and smooth, as though its owner were barely past eighteen. Pleasant, even. The kind of voice that would sound charming at a dinner party, that would make mothers trust their daughters to its owner without a second thought.

Yet it carried an edge sharp enough to draw blood without ever raising its volume.

"In the end," he murmured, "the seven Main boy Legacies are useless. A disappointment to me, one more time."

A pause. The words hung in the darkness like smoke from a funeral pyre.

"And this time, when I needed them to perform at their absolute best... huh."

The sentence didn't end. Didn't need to. The incomplete thought was more threatening than any finished curse could have been—the verbal equivalent of a smile while sharpening a knife.

The words danced between fury and teasing, leaving the listener unsure whether to tremble or smile. Whether to beg forgiveness or laugh along with the joke that wasn't quite a joke.

The Consort bowed deeper, forehead pressed to cold stone.

"Yes, my lord. In the end, they could not."

A pause.

Then, softer—almost gentle, if gentle could cut: "You should have let me handle the useless Tiamat boy myself. He would be dead by now."

She kept her eyes on the floor. "My lord—" He offered no answer as if he could not hear her.

"Even tonight," she continued, the words tumbling out before wisdom could stop them, "from his own house, I could have—"

A laugh cut her off.

Bright. Boyish. And utterly chilling.

A sound that should not—could not—exist in a room that smelled of incense and old blood, spoken to a woman who could cut the sky itself.

"Where's the fun in that?" he asked, and she could hear the smile in his voice—wide, genuine, the smile of a child unwrapping a gift he already knew he'd love. "You don't truly expect me to send my own Supreme Crimson Consort to swat a single insect, do you?"

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