The necromancer stopped.

Not because he had to, but because he was curious, and he was the kind of person who indulged curiosity.

He turned back toward Damon with the same pleasant expression he’d worn throughout, dark green eyes carrying the particular attention of someone who had decided this was worth a few more seconds.

"Yes?" he said.

Damon looked at him for a moment.

"Five of your lieutenants entered an A-rank rift yesterday," he said. "You should probably send someone to check on them."

The station held its silence.

Something moved behind the necromancer’s eyes. A small and almost controlled, but there. The pleasant expression didn’t crack exactly. It just became slightly more deliberate, which was its own kind of crack.

He held Damon’s gaze for longer than necessary.

Beside him, across the other three lieutenants’ faces, mixed emotions flashed. Some were surprised by the remark, and others were angered, but none acted before their vice leader gave an order.

"Is that so..." he murmured.

Neither of them moved for a moment.

The necromancer studied him with the particular attention of someone reassembling a picture they thought they understood, only to find the pieces that no longer fit the frame they’d built.

Then, slowly, the pleasant expression returned to something more genuine.

"Interesting," he said quietly. More to himself than anyone else.

He held Damon’s gaze for one more second, the kind of look that meant he was filing something away that he intended to return to, before turning back toward the northern exit.

He didn’t say anything more as he and his group simply left.

The green smoke drifted out behind him as his group disappeared through the exit, taking Jax’s body with them, leaving nothing behind but the amber light and the blood on the station floor.

"Why were you trying to provoke them?" Ivy asked, slightly confused about his last remark.

"I wasn’t."

Ivy raised a brow. "What do you mean?"

"He already knew," Hana suddenly spoke up, only now snapping at the terror she was feeling during the entire exchange. "They have someone with the ability to locate other people by only seeing them once. They knew the moment they died."

Damon nodded.

It was just as he expected.

He had a feeling that the man already knew that he had killed their five lieutenants, and he simply wanted to say it to throw him off. It was quite easy to tell that he was the type who wanted to be in control and have people act as he expected them to, so Damon did the exact opposite of what he would’ve normally done and simply said it outright.

"It worked... I think," Hana murmured, knowing Damon’s earlier intentions from reading his thoughts. "You made him confused."

"Good," Damon said simply.

A brief silence settled over the station. The amber light held steady across the blood on the floor, indifferent to everything that had just happened in it.

Victor was the first to move, stepping forward quietly and crouching beside the spot where Jax had fallen. He stayed there for a moment without saying anything, which told you more about who he was than most things he could have said.

He stood.

"We should go," he said.

Theodore, who had been uncharacteristically quiet since Jax went down, rolled his shoulders once and looked toward the exit. "About damn time."

Ivy looked at Damon. "What do you think they’ll do now?"

Damon lingered on the question for a moment before replying. "Stall. We took out five of their lieutenants. No matter how confident they feel, they won’t attack until they at least recover what they already lost.

"What about us? What do you think we should do?"

"Quit stalling," Damon’s gaze darkened. "It’s time to make our moves."

That landed quietly across the group.

Ning Xiaoyu said nothing, but her hand had already moved to her sword’s hilt, not drawing, just resting there, the unconscious gesture of someone whose mind had already moved to what came next.

Nyla looked between Damon and Ivy with the focused expression she used when she was ready and simply waiting for direction.

Hana had straightened from the pale stillness she’d held since Jax died, her notebook nowhere in sight for once, her eyes carrying something that hadn’t been there before the exchange.

Damon looked at all of them briefly.

"Back to the citadel," he said. "We’re done waiting."

He turned toward the exit without looking back at the blood on the floor.

**

The walk back was quieter than any of their previous returns.

Nobody spoke much. The weight of the station followed them out into the afternoon light, the blood on the floor, Jax’s expression in that final second, the necromancer’s pleasant tone that had never once wavered. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

Victor walked beside Damon, still with the dried blood at his collar, which he hadn’t attempted to clean. Whether that was intentional or simply forgotten was difficult to tell.

Instead, he found himself having a conversation with Damon, which wasn’t exactly like them.

"So if you killed five, how many lieutenants do they have left?

"Nine," Damon replied.

Victor absorbed that without comment.

They reached the citadel as the sun began its descent, the familiar noise of the settlement finding them before the gates did. The people inside had no idea what had happened at the station.

They were going about the particular rhythm of a community that had found its routine and trusted it completely, leaving everything else for someone else to handle.

But soon, that routine would have to change.

Damon was already thinking about how, when Hana appeared at his side, slightly breathless, and with her notebook open.

"I kept reading him," she said quietly. "The necromancer. Even as he left."

"And?" Damon asked, and everyone else found themselves moving slightly ahead of them now, Ivy ready to deal with any of the citadel matters, while the others wanted to rest after the stressful exchange that took place.

Hana glanced down at her notebook, then back up.

"He wasn’t just confused. He was also angered."

Damon raised a brow. "Angered?"

"Yes. He thought something about being given wrong information about you. I think he was angered at that person."

’Wrong information?’ Damon pondered over it for a moment before his gaze suddenly hardened, and, reading his thoughts, Hana spoke up.

"That’s right," she said, her voice only a whisper now. "Someone from our citadel had given him information about you and everyone else."