Velmira spoke as she looked at the man stepping out from the ripped space.

He wore a normal loose attire and black pants. His hair was white and long, tied behind him. His face was the kind that didn’t look like it belonged to an ordinary person — not in a way that was hard to explain, it simply looked too clean, too precise, like someone had put deliberate thought into every feature.

"You..."

Velmira narrowed her eyes as recognition flickered behind them. "Why are you here?"

The ripped space behind him closed as he turned toward her and spoke. "Hoho...little girl, you don’t seem to like your guest?" His voice was deep and light at the same time, an unusual combination that didn’t quite fit either category properly.

Velmira withdrew her Marvilas. She already knew it was pointless to keep it raised. This man existed on a completely different level from her. She didn’t know his exact cultivation rank but she didn’t need to. The answer was already clear from the moment he had torn through space with his fingers and stepped out of it like it was nothing.

"Just answer my question. Why are you here?" She said it directly, without acknowledging his teasing at all.

Silence stretched between them. The man looked at her for a long moment. Velmira didn’t back down. She held his gaze without shifting.

Finally he spoke. "Fine. I am here because I wanted to inform you about something...something you should know before you are dragged into that pest’s plans."

Velmira narrowed her eyes. "I was never going to be dragged into it to begin with, so you don’t have to wor—"

He cut her off immediately, his voice shifting to something more serious. "Little girl, you shouldn’t take that Oath lightly...Eliomor won’t spare you if you go against it, and it seems like it’s waiting exactly for that. It wants you to refuse...so it can devour your soul."

Velmira’s eyes widened.

’It wants my soul that much?...why?’

"You are thinking about why it wants your soul?" The man said it before she could speak, looking at her with a tired expression. "Hah...you have lived for thousands of years yet you still fail to understand this damned world?"

Velmira had nothing to say to that. She listened.

"Then let me tell you briefly. This damned world — Eliomor — is at its wits end trying to do ’something’. That something I cannot speak of to you directly because of your connection through that Oath. But to accomplish it, it needs souls...as many as it can collect. Quantity matters, yes, but quality matters as well. Your soul, after thousands of years of what it has been through, has become something unique. Its quality far surpasses anything else currently on its list."

Velmira listened and her eyes narrowed as she began connecting pieces together in her mind while he continued.

"Now, that pest of a King is building something — a kind of chimera, something more powerful than you. When that happens he will drag you into it. And when he does, you might end up facing the Dragon Emperor because of it. And the result?"

He paused.

"You will die...and without being able to do anything about it."

Velmira came out of her speculations immediately. Her eyes went wide. "What did you say?...I’d die to the Dragon Emperor? He is on equal footing with me, that’s impossible—"

"He ’was’ equal to you." He cut her off again, calm and direct. "Not anymore...he has reached a level equal to us now. So you might want to reconsider that thought."

Velmira went still.

Shocked. Genuinely and completely shocked in a way she hadn’t been in a very long time. "What?! How is that even possible?"

The man shook his head. "I am not here to explain how it happened. I came to inform you about it...as something of a guardian, I suppose. I watched you when you were small...so I felt the need to tell you this before it was too late."

Velmira stood there with her mouth slightly open. Marvilas and Semekrus both hummed quietly at her sides but she wasn’t registering them. Her thoughts had gone completely blank for the first time in longer than she could remember.

She understood what that gap meant. Even as a Special Ex-rank herself, she knew what it meant to face someone who had gone beyond that. The distance between Special Ex-rank and what came above it was not a gap that could be closed through combat experience or technique. They were simply on a different level of existence. Going against them was not something she could even begin to plan around.

The man sighed. He raised his hand and tore the space in front of him open with just his fingers, pulling it apart like a curtain being pushed aside. "Well...I hope you take my warning seriously. If you want to live a little longer."

He stepped through. The ripped space closed behind him and he was gone.

Velmira stepped back without realizing she had done it. The back of her legs hit the bed and her figure dropped down onto it. She sat there and stared forward in a daze, Marvilas and Semekrus still humming faintly on either side of her.

- - -

Meanwhile...

Atlas was on his way back to the Guild.

He had already worked out the problem that had been sitting in his head since the monocle turned to dust during that earlier encounter. The answer had come to him after properly sitting with the knowledge the Codex had assimilated into him about his Bloodline and the Active Vector.

The Null attribute was the direct cause. While the Active Vector Kankon-Rei used the invisible and unknown pressure of that Null to form the cross slash that restored things to zero, the attribute itself acted as a passive erasure regardless of whether the slash was formed or not. Whatever it came into direct contact with was affected. The monocle had been the first unintended casualty of that. Simple enough logic once the pieces were in front of him.

As he walked toward the Guild, Angel merchants and Explorers passing by glanced at him. The torn and worn clothes. The bare feet. The right hand wrapped from elbow to fingers in black cloth he had pulled from what was left of his attire.

He had to hide the hand. The skin color was now clearly wrong — the shadowy white that had spread during the Bloodline activation covered both hands. And the Spirit disturbance sitting around the right hand in particular was faint but present, the kind of thing a trained Explorer could pick up at close range.

As he walked he thought through the two problems currently sitting in front of him.

’First is going deeper into Celestara and targeting a Cataclysm-rank Ruin. But the Guild won’t allow it without proof of rank. I have to show I am S-rank...but that’s a problem by itself. I don’t even know where I actually stand right now. And if I go through an assessment and jump from A-rank to S-rank that fast, the attention it brings will be a disaster. A commoner jumping ranks that quickly will drag eyes I don’t want.’

’Second is those assassins. I don’t know if they are dead or alive. There could be more coming. And whoever sent them already knows about me and has connected enough dots to make a move.’

He walked for a few more steps before his thinking shifted.

’Why am I thinking like prey again? Those two slipped from my hands. That won’t happen again.’

’But for that I need to become proficient in fighting against a person, especially Humans. Their abilities, their techniques — I have no real understanding of any of it. I went in there thinking raw strength was enough. I was a fool, Information matters as much as strength and I have almost none of it when it comes to how trained humans actually fight.’

He reached the front of the Guild while that thought was still sitting with him. He turned to his Explorer bag and pulled out a claw, roughly the size of his own hand.

"I don’t have the Relic so this will do as proof..."

It was the claw from the A-rank boss he had killed inside the ruin. The Relic was gone — he had destroyed it during the process of what happened afterward. The monster itself was too large to drag here alone. The claw was the only thing that could serve as confirmation that he had cleared the ruin.

He walked into the Guild with it.

The moment he stepped through the entrance Bella looked up from the counter and her eyes went wide. "Wh—what did you bring in, Atlas?...and why do you look like that?"

She had already been carrying worry about him because of the two assassins. Seeing him walk in looking like this made that worse immediately.

She wasn’t the only one reacting. Everyone present in the Guild had turned to look at the claw with visible horror on their faces.

Atlas frowned slightly as he moved toward the counter. "It’s the A-rank boss monster’s claw. I couldn’t find the Relic so I brought this as proof."

Bella stared at the claw and then at him. "...Th—that’s not it, Atlas...why is the Spirit around you gone? A—and instead all the Spirit is focused on that claw?"

Atlas looked down at the claw and narrowed his eyes. "What...? What’s happening...?"

Internally though his thought was immediate.

’Oh shit! They can sense this shift? Even this small amount is too much for them?’

He was pretending to be surprised!

Then a subtle pressure descended on the room, nobody moved at first... then everyone turned toward the staircase entrance at the same time.

The Guildmaster stepped out from it.

"Hmm...it’s unusual to see an Explorer clear an Abyss-Rank ruin in just a single day." He looked at Atlas steadily. "And it’s even more unusual to see Spirit behaving like that."