In the dead of night, three figures sat beneath a large spreading tree and said nothing.

This had been going on for a while.

Yuto sat with his back straight and his eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance, which was to say he was looking at nothing in particular. To his left, the thief was doing something with a small stone — tossing it, catching it, tossing it again.

To his right, Shiny sat slightly apart from both of them, tall even while seated, sharp face unreadable in the dark. He had not moved in some time.

He looked like a statue someone had left out here. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

An expensive statue.

The Masaki estate remained visible through the gaps in the trees, torchlight flickering unevenly behind the hedgerows like restless fireflies trapped in place. When the wind shifted just right, distant voices carried through the night, fragmented and indistinct, rising and falling in patterns that suggested a coordinated search, organized and methodical in its sweep.

A full search, by the sound of it. Precise. Unrelenting.

And yet, only a short distance away, they sat undisturbed beneath the vast tree, close enough that the estate’s light still bled faintly into the edges of their darkness, as if the world had failed to properly separate pursuit from hiding.

The thief had explained the logic of this earlier, in the patient tone of a man who had done something stupid so many times it had looped back around to genius.

*Most fugitives run*, he’d said. *They can’t help it. So the search follows the running — roads, checkpoints, outer districts, all of it expanding outward. But the area right here, right next to the estate? Nobody thinks to look. It’s the one place nobody would stay.*

Yuto had thought about this for a moment.

*That’s either very smart*, he decided, *or it’s the reasoning of someone who has survived so many bad ideas that he’s started to think they’re good ones.*

He had not said this out loud.

He had accepted the logic and sat down under the tree, and now here he was, deep in thought.

Silence wrapped around him, but inside his mind there was nothing quiet about what he carried.

He had left Gina behind at the estate, abandoned her to fate and to the cold indifference of cruel nobles. Even as his reasoning tried to justify it, stacking logic upon logic to convince him it had been the only viable choice, the weight of it still sat heavy in his chest. Every attempt at rationalisation only made the feeling sharper, like pressing on a bruise that refused to fade.

Beneath that guilt, another emotion lingered, quieter but just as sharp. Fear. The thought of challenging the First Tower tightened something in him. There was a reason most Ethereals never attempted it, choosing instead to remain as disciples rather than face what lay within. The tower was not merely difficult, it was lethal. Stepping into it was no different from signing away one’s life, and Yuto could feel that truth settling over him like a sentence he had not yet escaped.

A slow bitterness settled in somewhere behind his sternum, the kind that comes not from any single thing but from adding everything up. His life before Teki had been — not comfortable, exactly, but his. Quiet. He’d had Gina. He’d had a shape to his days. He had built something small out of available materials and it had been enough.

Then a noble had looked in his direction.

That was really all it had taken.

Teki, the Masaki family, the arrest, the escape, the Tower now rising somewhere in his future like a guarantee. All of it originating from the moment one man with too much power had decided, for reasons Yuto still didn’t fully understand, to reach downward and take something apart.

The nobles lived in excess, wrapped in comfort and indulgence, granted endless power and every pleasure the world could offer. And still, it was not enough. Even with everything already in their grasp, they had felt compelled to look down, to mock those beneath them as though cruelty itself was a pastime they could not abandon.

A thought began to take shape, uninvited but persistent, growing in the darker corners of his mind. The nobles were the problem. Not an inconvenience, not a distant flaw in the world’s design, but a rot at its core, a scourge staining the surface of everything that existed beneath them.

A voice interrupted his thoughts. "It’s time."

The thief tossed his stone into the dark one final time and did not bother catching it. He stood, stretched both arms above his head with a groan that suggested he had no interest in performing dignity, and walked over to Yuto.

He put a hand on his shoulder.

"This is where we part."

Yuto looked up at him.

In the dark, the single streak of silver in his hair caught the distant torchlight from the estate. His expression was — well. It was the expression of someone who had seen a number of situations like this and found them agreeable enough.

"Thank you for breaking me out" the theif said.

Thank you as well. Yuto replied.

The thief nodded grimly, then he turned and walked into the dark without looking back.

Silence returned under the tree. Shiny rose without comment, settling into position a few paces ahead, waiting with the patient stillness of someone who had long ago made peace with the fact that other people needed a moment sometimes.

Yuto sat for a few seconds longer.

Then he stood.

Through the tangled branches and beyond the edge of the treeline, the Astral Tower stood against the night sky, a shape carved out of absence itself. Black against black, it revealed itself only by what it erased, a vast vertical void where even the stars seemed to falter and disappear.

He looked at it for a long time.

He had left a woman behind. He was moving toward a structure built with the sole purpose of killing those who entered it. Until recently, his life had been manageable, even predictable in its own quiet way, as if it had agreed not to demand too much of him.

He exhaled slowly, the breath leaving him heavier than it should have.

Then he began to walk toward it.