The massive structure that houses Sparkhold’s most important secret rises from the city’s heart like a steel god nailed to stone. Thick pylons extend from its crown, arcs of electricity snapping constantly from one to the next in blinding, rhythmic pulses. The energy travels outward in branching patterns, racing along pylon channels until it reaches the city’s edges, feeding the countless runes that power Sparkhold’s streets, homes, and defenses.

  From the rooftop of a nearby building, I crouch low and watch the patrols circle the base of the structure in practiced, overlapping routes. Their movements are precise, almost ritualistic. I’ve already surveyed the building days ago—mapped the rotations, identified blind spots, measured the spacing between vents near the upper pylons. All I need now is a clean opening to slip into one of the narrow access shafts near the top.

  Unfortunately, focusing is difficult with my current company.

  Boriss stands beside me like a sulking statue, arms folded, boots planted too firmly for someone supposedly “getting fresh air.” His sighs are heavy, frequent, and theatrical enough to qualify as environmental hazards.

  “Boriss,” I mutter without looking away from the patrols, “I brought you with me so you wouldn’t lock yourself in your room and brood like a tragic opera villain. Whatever happened to my big, strong KGB Russian spy?”

  “He is idiot,” Boriss says flatly. “Who teach little girl how to kill.”

  I close my eyes for half a second.

  “This is just stupid,” I say. “Clay literally told you she was happy learning from you. She enjoyed it.”

  Boriss scowls, jaw tightening. “Clay is little girl. She not know better. Is not right to teach such manly Russian things.”

  I turn toward him slowly.

  “This,” I say carefully, “from the man who constantly tells stories about his mother wrestling wolves and eating bears.” I flick my tail. “That’s honestly the manliest thing I’ve ever heard. Why shouldn’t Clay learn to be like your terrifying Russian mother?”

  Boriss’s expression shifts—not into humor, not into pride, but into something sharp and sudden. His good eye darkens.

  “Virst,” he growls, “mother wrestled bears and ate wolves.” He spits to the side, sharp and deliberate. “Second—she become strong because Vather vas weak.” His jaw clenches. “Vather die like coward. He kill self”

  I blink.

  “…Your father committed suicide?”

  “Da.” Boriss raises his hand like a pistol and mimes two shots. “Two shot. Back of head.”

  I stare.

  “That’s not suicide. That’s murder.”

  Boriss snorts. “Vrong. He vas KGB trained. KGB never allow be shot in back. Only front.”

  My mouth opens. Then closes.

  “That—ugh. That doesn’t—Boriss, that’s not how—” I stop, inhale, and force myself to reset. “Look. Clay is a [Princess] who’s going to become a [Queen]. Her parents are dead. Her brother is actively trying to kill her. The only people keeping her alive are an old man with too many secrets and us.” I step closer, lowering my voice. “She’s in the same position your mother was. And she doesn’t have the luxury of growing strong slowly. If she’s going to survive, she needs to be strong . And instead of helping, you were pulling away.”

  Boriss doesn’t respond. His face goes blank—completely unreadable. No scowl, no frown, no humor. Just stillness.

  For a long moment, I wonder if I pushed too hard.

  Then, slowly, he smiles. Softly. Almost fondly.

  “Is vhy you are leader, Comrade,” he says at last. “You are right.” He nods to himself. “I vas selfish. I vas dumb.” His smile widens just a touch. “I vill make little Clay into strong Russian voman who vill kill brother vith tiny little hands.”

  I grimace. “That phrasing is deeply concerning, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

  He straightens, visibly lighter.

  “Well,” I say, turning back toward the building, “good. Now—do you have the collar?”

  “From tiny Asian voman?” Boriss asks, already reaching into his jacket. “Yes.” He produces a makeshift collar fitted with several delicate glass vials, each sloshing faintly with volatile liquid.

  “Her name is Daiyu,” I correct. “Now wrap it around my neck.”

  Boriss does so carefully, tightening the collar with a surgeon’s precision. One cracked vial would turn me into a very effective, very dead cat-shaped bomb.

  “Vhat is mission, comrade?” he asks when he’s finished.

  I lift a paw toward the sparking building. “I sneak inside. You keep watch until I return.”

  Boriss nods solemnly. “Is good plan. Vhen you leave?”

  “Soon as I get an opening,” I say, eyes locked on the patrol routes. “Now hush.”

  A gap forms. Brief. Perfect.

  I shift into a bird and launch myself forward, wings slicing cleanly through the air. The vent is just large enough—I slip inside and transform back mid-motion, claws scraping metal as I wriggle deeper into the shaft. It’s tight, claustrophobic, and humming faintly with power.

  A stray thought surfaces:

  Then the air crackles. My fur stands on end.

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  Pain hits like a hammer—electricity surging through the shaft, locking my muscles solid. For a heartbeat, I think I’m going to black out. Then something inside me adapts. My fur flashes yellow, the pain vanishes, and the current rolls past like a rejected suggestion.

  I shake myself, breathing hard, staring at the metal still conducting lethal energy.

  “Yeah,” I mutter. “Guess they figured nobody but me would be stupid enough to try this.”

  Once the buzzing fades from my head, I continue forward, electricity growing stronger the deeper I go, until the vent opens into a grated section wide enough to pass air. I press my face to the grid and peer down.

  ______________________________________________________________

  What greets me is a room scrubbed so clean it feels hostile to life—white stone walls, polished metal fixtures, and the faint antiseptic sting lingering in the air. It resembles a surgical theater, though stripped of anything meant for healing. At the center stands a reinforced bed, its frame bolted directly into the floor. Strapped to it is a man.

  He looks less restrained than .

  His body is emaciated to the point of obscenity, skin drawn tight over bone, chest rising in shallow, uneven breaths. Whatever strength he once possessed has been leeched away piece by piece. Embedded throughout his torso, arms, and neck are white Quills—dozens of them—piercing flesh at deliberate intervals. These are not the polished, rune-etched Quills I’ve seen implanted in Sparkhold citizens. These are raw. Crude. The surfaces are smooth and pale, but instead of engraved runes, thin lines of energy creep across them organically, branching and growing like veins or roots that are in the process of mimicking runes.

  Before I can linger too long on that realization, the door slides open.

  Two men enter, both human, both wearing lab coats stiff with cleanliness. The older one moves with practiced indifference, his expression detached, eyes already scanning the body. The younger follows half a step behind, clutching a clipboard to his chest like a shield. They stop at the bedside without acknowledging the man as a person at all.

  “Skill absorption is progressing nicely,” the older man says, leaning forward to inspect one of the Quills. “Subject viability remains acceptable, though expiration after harvest is statistically inevitable.”

  The younger man nods and writes it down.

  The older man moves methodically from Quill to Quill, his fingers hovering just short of touching. “Quill one: twenty-seven percent maturation. Quill two: thirty-five percent. Quill three…” He pauses, peering closer. “Ninety-two percent. Excellent. That one will be ready soon.”

  Each number is recorded. Each breath the man on the bed takes is ignored.

  As they continue their inventory, the pattern becomes clear to me. These Quills aren’t granting skills—they’re them first.

  I think grimly.

  When the assessment is finished, the older man straightens and steps back, already done with the subject. The younger closes his clipboard, and together they leave the room without another glance.

  The door seals behind them, leaving the man strapped to the bed alone once more—alive just long enough to finish becoming something useful.

  Crawling deeper through the electrified pipe, I arrive at an opening wherein I find the second Leviathan tortured and locked down on the island.

  The passage opens into a chamber so vast it takes a moment for my mind to understand what it’s seeing. Tur dominates the space, her immense body coiled within a containment structure that looks less like a prison and more like an industrial scaffold built her existence. She rivals Kalphe in sheer scale, though where the leviathan was submerged in glass and fluid, Tur is exposed—displayed. Her form rests in a cradle of reinforced pylons and articulated chains, not meant to stop her from thrashing, but to hold her steady, to keep her positioned exactly where they can extract her fur.

  What appears to be fur is in fact an array of quills, densely packed across her body, each generating mana-charged electrical output that is continuously siphoned into pylons feeding the city’s runic infrastructure.

  With my arrival, her eyes turn to me, pleading for assistance. “You have come.”

  I think back.

  He has. You are going to place explosives on my chains. When you give us the order, we are to set them off and leave the island.

  For nearly an hour, I move like a shadow through the facility, slipping between patrol routes and blind angles with practiced ease. Every step is measured, every pause deliberate. When I finally reach the chains, I work quickly but carefully, drawing a vial from the collar and positioning it precisely—wedged so that the moment tension is reapplied, the glass will shatter. The setup mirrors what I did for Kalphe: simple, inelegant, devastating. One by one, I repeat the process until every critical restraint is primed. Only when I’m satisfied do I retreat, melting back into the structure and slipping away unseen.

  I rendezvous with Boriss beyond the perimeter, hopping lightly onto his shoulder as he waits in the shadows.

  “Plan is done?” he asks, voice low.

  “Yup,” I reply. “Now we just need to leave the island.”

  The words barely leave my mouth before something feels… wrong.

  As we approach the docks, the air changes—thick with iron and ozone, the faint tang of burned mana lingering like an aftertaste. Firelight flickers across the platforms, illuminating bodies strewn in careless heaps. Humans and wolven alike lie where they fell, blood pooling between the planks. Sparkhold [Guards] move among the dead with grim efficiency, taking notes, turning corpses, murmuring quietly to one another.

  Boriss squints at the scene. “Vat happen?” he asks. “Is like KGB training for little boys… but vith more death.”

  I glance at him, briefly tempted—and then very much not—to ask him to elaborate. Instead, I focus on the bodies. The wolven wear the unmistakable markings of the Inquisition. The humans, dressed in torn but still-pristine suits, bear the colors of the Gambino family.

  Things have escalated. Badly.

  My gaze shifts, catching on a lone figure sitting openly atop a barrel amid the carnage, as though the scene were nothing more than an inconvenience. Daiyu lounges there with a mug in hand, sipping calmly while chaos sprawls around her.

  “Boriss,” I murmur, raising a paw. “Let’s go around. We need to talk to Daiyu and figure out what exactly happened.”

  We try to circle wide, but Daiyu notices us almost immediately. Boriss scowls faintly—he’d clearly hoped to sneak up on her—but the former [Bounty Hunter] simply lifts her mug in greeting and waves us over.

  Boriss takes a seat on a nearby barrel. I wedge myself between them, tail curling.

  “So,” I say, eyeing the bodies again, “what happened?”

  Daiyu lets out a short, nervous laugh. “Your [Sub-Captain] happened.”

  “Irmgard?” I ask.

  She nods. “Yeah. She asked me a lot of questions—everything from my capture to how I ended up on your ship. I told her about the tower, the Ecclesiasticus, the Inquisition… all of it.” Daiyu gestures vaguely at the docks. “Then she made a plan.”

  I stare at the carnage. “She instigated a war,” I say slowly, the realization settling like lead. “How?”

  Daiyu shrugs. “She tipped off the Inquisition about a possible sighting of a talking cat at these docks. When they arrived, she convinced the lead [Inquisitor] that you might have been captured by men in suits. The Gambinos refused to cooperate when questioned. That refusal pissed the [Inquisitor] off. Words escalated. Weapons came out.” She exhales. “The rest… well, you can see it.”

  I grimace inwardly. On the bright side, the Gambinos will be far too busy dealing with this mess to keep an eye on me.

  “Where’s everyone else?” I ask.

  “At the Peregrine, further down the docks,” she replies. “The Timbergrove’s been emptied. The crates and barrels were left behind to make it look occupied, but they’re hollow. The ship will be sold as-is.”

  I glance back toward the Timbergrove—and freeze.

  The ballista is thankfully gone, but…

  I stare for a moment longer, then sigh. “Never mind,” I mutter. “The cannons would’ve been inferior to what’s already on the Peregrine anyway.” It stings, but it’s a loss I can live with.

  “Well,” I say, hopping down from the barrel, “let’s go. My preparations are done, and I’m ready to leave.”

  Daiyu rises first, Boriss following close behind.

  “This way,” Daiyu says, already leading us down the docks toward the waiting ship.

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