"Unfortunately, I’m not here to hire you."

Leon smiled, picking up a cup of tea from the desk, dragging it up toward his lips with a smile that wasn’t quite a complete smile.

"I’m here to volunteer my services to your prestigious organization."

He gave a small nod to the manager, the way someone might after saying something completely reasonable. Like his words should naturally be met with gratitude. Like the whole room should feel lucky.

A silence followed.

And well, Leon was a transcendent being. That counted for something. But it was still very hard to accept. He had walked in here, put an attendant into an illusionary space, made the entire ground floor aware that something dangerous had just arrived, and now he was sitting across from the manager with a cup of tea in his hand telling them he wanted to work for them.

Wasn’t this the same as an employee throwing his weight around during an interview because he could beat up the interviewer?

The manager opened his mouth.

"Hehe. I’ll take it from here, Sojn."

An ethereal voice spread through the office from outside, smooth and unhurried, like it had all the time in the world.

A woman in white slowly lowered herself from the sky. She stepped through the window and into the office, walking on stairs made from her own magic, each step landing with quiet precision.

"Lady Viper. It is my honor."

The manager stood immediately, bowed, and moved to the side without another word.

The woman didn’t acknowledge him. Her eyes had already moved to Leon.

"Viper." Leon set the cup down for a moment, looking at her with a snide pull at the corner of his mouth. "Very toxic name."

He picked the tea back up and this time drained it completely.

The newly arrived transcendent being watched him do it. Then she chuckled, low and genuine.

He was bold. Completely unrepentant. Sitting there like he hadn’t just walked into a cover organization and threatened the lives of everyone on the ground floor. No apology in his posture. No effort to smooth anything over.

Clearly this one was a bit of a narcissist.

She liked that, in a clinical kind of way. It told her things.

"You know my name." She took the seat where the manager had been sitting and looked at him with a smug tilt to her expression. "But I don’t know yours. Now is that fair?"

Leon’s eyes moved over her slowly.

He could feel it without trying. The weight of her cultivation, the depth behind it. This woman was in the middle stages of transcendence. Not just past the threshold, but settled into it, comfortable with it. The kind of power that had been there long enough to stop announcing itself.

If she gathered everything she had into a single strike right now, she would kill an early stage transcendent being without much effort.

He filed that away without changing his expression.

"Badur."

He held her gaze as he said it. A trace of caution in his eyes, and behind that, a trace of pride. The kind that didn’t flinch even when it had the sense to be careful.

She repeated the name once in her head, then moved on.

"Interesting name." She folded her hands on the desk. "Well. The underworld doesn’t hire just anyone. We have a process. For someone at your level, you’ll need to have a few achievements first before you even receive a mission."

She said it plainly, like she was reciting a policy she had explained a hundred times before.

They had a no background check policy. That part was real. But that didn’t mean they would hand work to someone unknown without first making sure they weren’t a threat to the organization at large. Achievements were the filter. A way to see what someone actually did when they were pointed at a problem.

A transcendent being with no track record was still an unknown.

And unknowns were liabilities.

"Coincidentally, something came up on my way here...."

She said it like it had just occurred to her, though her hand was already moving. She pulled a piece of paper from somewhere and slid it across the desk toward Leon in one smooth motion.

Leon looked down at it.

A profile. A young girl with purple hair, her information laid out in clean lines beneath the image.

He stared at it for a second. His brow pulled together slightly.

Then it smoothed out, and he broke into a smile.

"Kidnapping, huh?"

He looked up from the paper.

"What’s in it for me?"

The smile was right on the edge of becoming a laugh, sitting just behind his teeth.

Kidnapping was a particular area of expertise. He had done it more times than he could track, in more circumstances than most people would consider possible, and he had never once failed a clean extraction. It was the kind of work that required patience, timing, and a very specific kind of calm that most people couldn’t hold onto when things started moving fast.

He was good at it.

But he wasn’t a charity.

He worked, he got compensated. That was the arrangement. That was how things had always worked and he had no intention of changing it now just because the organization on the other side of the table had a woman in white who could probably kill him if she hit him hard enough.

He kept the smile where it was and waited.

The ball was in her court.

Lady Viper looked at him across the desk, the smug expression still sitting comfortably on her face.

She had expected bold. She had not expected this particular brand of it.

’Kidnapping, he says. Like he already knows how it ends.’

She didn’t reach for the paper back, rather she reached for the cup of tea on the table and hovered over Leon with a sly yet intrested smile.

’This one is interesting"