"Kurt?"

The voice was tiny, high-pitched, and filled with a cautious, heartbreaking warmth.

Kurt flinched and took a slow, painful step back. There, standing behind Emelie, was a small girl in an oversized black cloak.

"Hope?" His voice broke. Kurt shook his head, retreating another step. "No. You... you can’t be here. I–"

"Rosie." Diana didn’t let him retreat further. She squeezed his hand, her grip firm and grounding. Her hair was plastered to her forehead, but her eyes were sharp. "Didn’t you hear what Emelie said? The children are not dead."

"... Really?" Kurt looked at Emelie, almost pleadingly.

Emelie crossed her arms as a tired but triumphant smirk playing on her lips.

"Yes."

"But... how? I felt the explosion."

"Well, you see. What had happened was..."

- A few minutes earlier -

"Hm? It’s open." Emelie drifted onto the upper balcony, noting the broken frame and the smear of fresh blood on the stone.

The room was a wreck. She saw the blood spatters on the carpet and the bedsheets had been tied into a makeshift rope. Just as she was about to turn and head for the hallway, a quiet squeak caught her ear.

It came from the massive wardrobe in the corner.

Emelie narrowed her eyes and floated a few inches off the floor. She opened the front door and closed it with a slightly audible click. She then darted to the side cupboard, pressed herself against the wall, and waited.

Slowly, the cupboard door creaked open. A small blonde head peeked out, eyes darting around the room in a panic.

’Is that...?’

"Hope," Emelie said softly.

"Eeee!" The girl let out a muffled shriek, flinching so hard she scrambled back to hide behind a row of winter coats, and cultist cloaks.

Emelie floated to the front of the cupboard and knocked gently on the wood. "Hope? It’s okay. I’m a friend of Kurt’s. My name is Emelie. I’m here to help him rescue your friends."

The coats shifted. Hope’s face reappeared, peering through the gap in the door. "Kurt’s friend? The one with the fire?"

"That’s Dominik. He’s a prefect. There are actually three of us on this mission. I’m the third." Emelie clarified, offering a gentle, reassuring smile. "It’s safe to come out now."

Hope stepped out, clutching the edges of her cloak. She looked exhausted, her small face pale in the dim light.

"Why were you hiding in there, kiddo?"

"Kurt told me to," Hope whispered. "He said it was too dangerous for me to sneak with him. He said he’d come back for me with my friends."

"Smart. So why did you come out just now?"

Hope’s face turned bright red. She shuffled her feet. "I... I really needed to pee. I was looking for the bathroom."

Emelie let out a short, surprised laugh. "Ahh. The call of nature waits for no secret mission. It’s right through that door, Hope."

Hope scurried into the en-suite bathroom. A moment later, she came running back out, her hands clamped tightly over her nose. Her eyes were watering.

"What’s wrong?" Emelie asked, alarmed.

"It stinks!" Hope cried, her voice muffled by her hands. "It smells like... like old meat and my grandpa’s feet! It’s gross!"

"Did you... you know, wipe properly?"

"It wasn’t me!" Hope retorted, her eyes flashing rebelliously. "I’m a clean girl! It was already like that!"

Emelie saw the girl’s growing frustration and the way her lower lip was beginning to tremble. She cleared her throat and backed off the subject immediately.

"Alright, alright! I believe you. Look, go back in the closet for a bit longer. I need to leave."

"No!" Hope stamped her foot. "Kurt is taking too long. I want to go with you. I want to find the others."

"Hope, it’s dangerous—"

"I don’t care!" Hope looked up at Emelie with a fierce, stubborn determination. "If you leave me here, I’m just going to sneak out myself."

Emelie stared at the girl. She saw the absolute seriousness in those blue eyes. She knew that if she left her, she’d have to worry about a rogue child wandering into a cultist patrol.

"Urgh... fine," Emelie groaned while rubbing her temples. "But you stay behind me. You don’t make a sound. You have to be so quiet that I don’t even notice you’re there. Got it?"

"Yes!"

"Shh!"

"Sorry," Hope whispered through her fingers.

Together, they slipped out of the room. Emelie was on high alert, her mind reaching out for any signs of movement, but the upper floors were strangely empty.

’Kurt’s been busy,’ she thought, noting the lack of patrols. She wondered if he was safe, her heart tugging with a rare, unspoken anxiety.

They reached the study. Emelie spotted the grandfather clock. Already knowing what the code is, she turned the long hand and pressed down. She felt the internal tumblers starting to move until the mechanism clicked and the wall swung inward.

Together, they descended the spiraling stone stairs and when they reached the bottom, Hope let out a gasp.

"They’re here!"

Hope sprinted toward the iron-barred cells. The children inside, who had been huddled in terrified silence since Kurt left, scrambled toward the bars. It was a heartwarming chaos. Tiny hands reaching through the iron, muffled cries of "Hope!" and "You came back!"

"Is Kurt with you?" a boy asked, his eyes wide as he looked at Emelie.

"He’s... finishing up some business upstairs," Emelie said softly. "We’re all friends. Now, stay back from the bars. I need to see something."

She walked toward the doctor’s theater. The sight that met her was gruesome even by her standards. One doctor was pinned to the operating table, looking like a human pincushion for every syringe in the room. The other was slumped over a basin, his face a melted, unrecognizable mess where he had been shoved into an acidic compound.

Emelie whistled low. "Yikes. Note to self, never get on Kurt’s bad side."

She returned to the cells, her face composed. "Alright, listen up. I’m taking these collars off."

The children recoiled as one. "No! Don’t!" the boy cried. "When Toby tried to break his, the bishop made it go boom! When Missy tried taking it off when the bishop wasn’t here, it still went boom!"

"I’m not ’breaking’ them," Emelie said, her eyes beginning to glow with a steady, green light. "I’m a specialist. I know how to disrupt the mana flow so that it doesn’t explode when tampered with. Trust me."

None of them moved until a small, skeletal boy stepped forward. "I-I trust her. She has the same eyes as Kurt."

"Thank you."

Emelie knelt. She placed her hands near the boy’s collar but didn’t touch it. She sent out a pulse of magic-disrupt, a complex frequency meant to temporarily halt the flow of magic. Simultaneously, her telekinesis gripped the internal pins and with a soft click, the collar fell away. Once the disruption ended, it hummed for a second and the little circle on it glowed blue, registering that it’s still detecting that it’s connected.

"There, one down," she breathed.

"""Wooow!"""

"Haha, see. I told you." Emelie smiled.

She worked through all four cells, her brow dripping with sweat from the sheer mental strain. It was surgical, high-stakes work. Just as she reached the very last child and snapped the final collar, a long, high-pitched whine filled the room.

The detonator has been pressed.

"Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me," Emelie hissed. "Kids! Get back! Brace yourselves!"

The collars on the floor all began to pulse with a violent, strobing red light. They were going to explode simultaneously. Emelie didn’t hesitate. She gathered all forty collars in a massive telekinetic net and hurled them like a swarm of angry bees toward the doctor’s theater at the far end of the hall.

As they flew, she slammed an invisible, reinforced barrier across the cell doors.

BOOOOM!!!

The explosion was deafening. The shockwave rattled the entire basement, and a second later, the ceiling over the doctor’s theater began to crumble. Heavy stone slabs and iron supports came crashing down, sealing the lab in a tomb of rubble.

"The roof is going to go!" Emelie shouted. She made a temporary telekinetic wall to hold back the settling dust and debris, but she could feel the weight of the mansion pressing down. "I have to get you out now!"

She didn’t have time for stairs. She used her telekinesis to lift ten children at a time, floating them in a protective bubble. She flew them up the spiral staircase and into the study. Four trips, back and forth. Her lungs burned and her mana reserves screamed.

Finally, the last of the children were out safely. The ground below them shook violently and the entire underground area was sealed off.

Emelie panted, leaning against the wall. Worried about what actually triggered the explosion, she looked toward the exit door.

"Something’s happening with Tobias." She muttered, pushing herself off the wall and heading out.

"Emelie! Wait!" Hope called out. "Are you going to Kurt?"

Emelie looked at the girl. She knew Hope would just follow her anyway, likely getting lost or caught in the crossfire. "Yeah. I’m going to go make sure something hasn’t happened to him."

"Take me with you!"

Emelie sighed, then extended a hand. She told the rest of the children to just be patient for a little longer and used her magic to seal the path to the study, ensuring no straggling cultists could follow. And together she and Hope ran toward the center of the storm.

.

..

...

Kurt listened to the end of the story, his head bowed, the rain washing away the last of the blood on his face. He looked at Hope, who was now standing right in front of him.

The girl didn’t care about the blood. She didn’t care that he looked like a monster. She simply reached out and wrapped her arms around his waist, burying her face in his tattered clothes.

"You came back," she whispered. "With my friends. Just like you promised."

Kurt’s hand, scarred and trembling, slowly came up to rest on the back of her head. He let out a long, shuddering breath.

A sound that carried the weight of the entire night’s trauma.

He looked up at Diana and Emelie. Diana was still holding his other hand, her presence a silent, immovable anchor. Emelie stood a few feet away, her eyes soft, her usual sarcasm buried under a layer of genuine relief.

"Dominik is waiting at the pier with the children from the fortress," Diana said, gesturing toward the coast.

"And the children from the underground cells are waiting for us to pick them up." Emelie added.

"Is that right? Hahaha..."

"Are we finally going home, Kurt?" Hope looked up to him excitingly.

Kurt nodded slowly. He looked back at the dead, unrecognisable mess that had been Tobias lying beneath the statue of Goddess Bula, then back at Hope.

"Yeah," he said, his voice finally steady. "Let’s go home."