Neo came out a little after the others, though before stepping through, he gave the boss room one last sweep with his eyes in case anyone had left a Soul Core behind. He found nothing. Not one. Even half-dead and barely standing, people had still made sure to strip the place clean.

’Tch, greedy bastards...’

With that thought, he took the final step and the Breach swallowed him.

The transition lasted less than a blink. One instant he was inside the tower, with blood, dust, and the stench of death still clinging to the air, and the next he was thrown back onto solid ground. Cameras pointed from every direction. Metal barriers had been set up around the area. Government agents moved back and forth with clipped urgency while voices piled on top of each other from outside the perimeter, all of them hungry for a better view of the people who had managed to crawl back out.

Richards was there.

Leo Duplain too.

The moment Neo saw him, something in his head nearly snapped. Leo stood there untouched, upright, looking exactly like the kind of bastard the world refused to stain properly. Snot caught it at once. He moved fast, came up to Neo’s side, and threw an arm behind his neck with forced ease.

"Ah, there you are, Neo. Come on. The others are over there."

Neo’s jaw tightened. "Why are you doing this? You know everyone died because of that bastard."

Snot kept the grin on his face, but his voice dropped low enough that only Neo would hear it.

"Use your head and look at him. He’s standing there like nothing happened, and all those cameras are pointed this way. If you do something now, you’ll be the one they drag away."

Neo did look.

Leo was already wrapped in distance, government people nearby, attention shifting around him in messy waves. Hitting him here would not kill him. It would only ruin Neo.

Richards reached them a breath later.

"Neo! You’re alive." Relief crossed his face with enough honesty to make it real. "Good. When I saw how few people were coming out, I expected the worst."

Neo did not answer. His attention was still on Leo.

Richards followed that line without meaning to. His expression changed the instant he understood what Neo was staring at. The name slipped out of him before he could stop it.

"Leo..."

Neo heard it and turned slightly. "You know him? Because of him nearly thirty people are dead."

Richards’ face tightened.

"How?" he asked at once, but only the word came out before he cut himself off and looked past Neo toward the swarm of cameras and officials. "No. Later." He exhaled once through his nose. "I need to deal with something first. After that, we can talk."

Neo said nothing.

Richards stepped closer. "They’ll take you to the same government building where you got your identification. Don’t worry. It won’t be an interrogation. Mostly questions about the Breach, maybe a psychological evaluation, things like that."

With that, he was already moving away.

He went toward the press first, helping push them farther back from the barrier while other agents tried to keep order. The cameras had been held at a distance for safety, but distance meant little when a fresh Breach had just spit survivors back into the world and one of the names standing near it was Duplain.

Snot watched Richards go and clicked his tongue softly.

"He seems decent."

Neo nodded once. "He’s helped me a lot." His eyes slid back toward Leo again, anger still grinding under his skin. "And thanks. You stopping me just now... I almost did something stupid."

Snot snorted. "Don’t mention it. I was close myself. That son of a bitch..." His face hardened. "If he had done his damn job, most of us would’ve walked out. You were right. He had done something weird from the start."

Neo already knew what that weird thing was.

Leo had rigged the whole situation around his own greed. His class was Mythic, higher even than Snot’s Legendary, and his family name made the whole thing filthier. A Duplain. Another one. Another bastard from the same bloodline tied to the old man’s death.

Snot gave his shoulder a small shove. "Come on. Alice and Marika are over there."

Neo let himself be pulled away and followed him.

Alice was standing beside Marika when they reached them. Two government agents had already covered Max’s body with a black mortuary sheet, though the shape beneath it remained painfully human. Marika sat beside him on the ground, shoulders drawn in, one hand pressed over the cloth near where his chest should have been. Alice stayed near her without saying much, silent as always, but there in a way that mattered.

Marika looked worse than the others.

Snot was tired. Alice had blood on her arm and dried black streaks across her clothes. Neo could feel the fight still sitting in his muscles like hot wire under the skin. Marika, though, looked like something inside her had been split open and left that way.

It made sense.

They had spent more time together than the rest. In the first week inside the Breach, before everyone fully regrouped at the base camp, those two had already been side by side. And in the tower, Max had died right in front of her, exactly because he had chosen to put himself between her and the boss.

Tears still clung to her lashes. She spoke without lifting her face fully.

"He kept his promise." Her voice was raw enough to scrape. "His last words were... ’Told you... I’d protect you.’ Because of me, he..."

The sentence broke there.

Alice lowered one hand onto Marika’s shoulder.

Marika covered that hand with her own and stayed like that, head bowed, body rigid with the kind of pain that had gone beyond crying cleanly.

Neo stood there and looked at her without knowing what to say. Nothing in his head sounded useful. Nothing came close to enough.

Movement behind the barrier pulled part of the crowd’s attention aside.

Vivienne Mourne was walking along the inner perimeter with a man who looked very much like a bodyguard, though calling him only that felt insufficient. She had come because the government had hired the Mournes as insurance if the Breach remained uncleared for too long.

She was close enough now to study the ones who had emerged.

And then she stopped.

Only for a beat, but the stop was clean enough to stand out. Her head turned. Her attention had caught on a face she recognized.

"Leo Duplain," she murmured, almost to herself.

That should have been too quiet to matter.

It wasn’t.

Cameras caught movement. A few reporters close enough to read lips reacted first, and from there the name spread in an instant. The attention on Leo sharpened into something ravenous. More bodies pushed toward the barrier. More questions flew. More camera lenses turned until the air around him felt suddenly much hotter than before.

Neo followed the shift with his own eyes and leaned slightly toward Snot.

"Why is she here?"

Snot had gotten out a little earlier than him, enough to hear the agents talking while the rest kept pouring out of the Breach.

"The government hired the Mournes in case the Breach wasn’t cleared," he said. "Cheapest offer, apparently. So she was waiting nearby in case they had to step in."

Vivienne had started moving again.

Not toward Leo but toward the survivors instead.

Neo let his attention drift from her to the rest of the people who had made it out. There were not even twenty awakened left standing or sitting around that field, all of them kids who had only recently gone through First Resonance. More than two hundred had entered that Breach.

Less than a tenth had come back out.

Breach. Tower. Boss. Soul Cores. Growth. The whole thing promised strength, treasure, and advancement, but the dead always remained the truest measure. Nine out of ten gone. Some eaten by monsters. Some crushed under pressure. Some killed by the tower. Some killed, in the end, because one bastard had decided he wanted more for himself.

Vivienne reached their side of the field at last.

Neo, Snot, Alice, and Marika were still gathered beside Max’s covered body when she came to a stop in front of them.