Tommy curled over himself and couldn’t produce words.

"How much of it did you suppress? The trafficking. The abductions. The bribery. And what cover did you run specifically for this place?"

Tommy’s jaw clamped shut. Whatever number of people were involved in this, it was large enough to make him accept the pain rather than speak.

"I have ways of making you cooperate that we haven’t explored yet."

Raphael grabbed him by the hair, picked up the toolbox, and dragged him toward the room’s interior.

He looked at the two women on the bed.

"Go. Wait outside. You won’t be forced to come back here. You’ll have your freedom soon."

They looked at each other. They gathered the sheets, and left the way people leave when they’ve been moving toward an exit for a long time and someone finally opened it.

Raphael closed the door.

The narrowing gap between door and frame took the light with it.

---

Fourteen minutes later he came back out, pulled off a blood-stained disposable glove, and closed the door politely behind him.

He had the location of the relevant records and the access code for the secured zone.

The entrance was behind an unremarkable wall in booth 01, the one with a mounted television on it.

He found the remote, entered the specific sequence Tommy had provided, and listened as mechanisms inside the wall engaged. A section descended along a prepared track and revealed a passage going downward.

He stood at the entrance for a moment.

Once he went down, everything would enter a cascade. Whatever broke open here would reach Blitz at the castle and accelerate the ritual’s timeline. There would be no going back. And the important people whose secrets were about to be exposed would use everything available to them to obstruct, delay, and contain it.

He thought about the question Miguel had asked him.

He asked himself the same question.

"If there has to be an answer—" 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

He said it quietly, to no one.

"It’s simple."

"Because this is a story that has something to do with me."

He went down.

Inside the corridor leading to the secured zone, surveillance units lined the walls at close intervals, red indicator lights burning, tracking the uninvited arrival.

Raphael moved on and reached the end of the passage quickly. A reinforced iron door, thick and flush with the frame, no handle visible on this side, designed to open only from within.

"And you think that’s going to stop me."

He shifted into wraith-form. After enough use, the technique had become fast, the hesitation between intending and executing had compressed to something close to nothing.

He passed through the door in a half-second. The steel was solid throughout, a rough estimate putting the thickness at forty centimeters.

Without this particular skill, forcing it open would have been a different conversation.

He reasserted physically the moment he was through.

Two people in the room. One sat in front of a large control console in a well-fitted suit, adjusting the set of his tie with unhurried precision. The other stood near the door, green-haired, watching.

They looked at each other, registering his entrance method.

The man in the suit straightened his tie, made a short dismissive sound.

"You contracted a ghost-type Demon. Who are you? Bounty hunter? Red Gloves? AE exorcist?"

Raphael took in the room. No amenities, just a large curved display running constant feeds from every camera in the nightclub, a blank wall without obvious purpose, and the control console.

His target, the recordings, should still be here, the intrusion was sudden enough that there hadn’t been time to move anything.

But this wasn’t where he needed to be. His objective was Blitz and the castle. Time was the constraint.

He scanned the console briefly. By now Miguel would be moving, once the door was open, this room became Miguel’s problem. Raphael needed to deal with that, and then leave.

He took one step toward the door controls.

The suited man’s eyes sharpened. They settled on Raphael’s clothing, the robe in disarray after everything the last hour had involved, and he made a distinctly unimpressed sound.

He reached up and smoothed a crease on his own jacket.

"Those whose dress is not in proper order should correct it before entering this space."

"What?"

An invisible force drove into him and slammed him flat against the iron door behind him. It pushed to expel him from the room, but the door was sealed and gave him nowhere to go, pinning him against the metal instead, the pressure continuous.

He moved to counter it and his clothing snapped rigid.

Something like a coat in sub-zero weather, the fabric locked open, every crease and fold under some invisible tension, stiff as plate, immobilizing both arms in the position of a shop mannequin.

Then a sensation like a heated iron being pressed firmly against his back, moving in methodical strokes, the folds in the cloth being forced flat through an application of what felt like sheer will.

An invisible hand, pressing him against the door, ironing his clothes while he was wearing them.

"Damn it—!"

He had never encountered anything with this particular profile. His clothing was pinned expanded, and inside it his limbs were locked in the formal stance of a window display model.

Across the room, the green-haired man was moving with careful, deliberate precision, every gesture sized to not disturb his own loose-fitting clothes. He clearly knew exactly how this ability worked.

Through the Demonic Sense, Raphael could feel the arcane buildup in the green-haired man’s eyes beginning to rise. He responded without hesitation, shifting back into wraith-form.

The expulsive force didn’t care about the physical transition. It operated at some other level, it simply continued, pressing the translucent Raphael steadily toward the door, through it, until he was back in the corridor and the pressure released all at once.

He stood in the passage and took stock.

Clear enough. He had left the room, which satisfied whatever condition the suited man’s ability required. The enforcement ended when compliance was achieved.

He exhaled through his nose and returned to physical form. He loosened the robe slightly and worked through the wrinkles methodically.

Miguel came down the corridor, following his path, and found Raphael arranging his clothing.

"What are you doing?"

Raphael coughed once.

"The room ahead requires presentable dress to enter. Failure to comply results in forcible removal."

Miguel’s expression moved in a way that suggested he was struggling to reconcile the image of this wanted criminal taking time to straighten his coat before entering a fight.

He said nothing. He reached into his pocket and produced a small container still faintly warm from the preparation process, a gold-colored oil inside.

"Here. The dragon blood blade oil. The blood extracted from your material came out gold, which is why the color is like this.

Based on your weapon’s dimensions, you have approximately three applications, after coating the blade, you have about fifteen seconds to connect before the oil volatilizes."

Raphael took it, nodded, and gave Miguel a summary of the room’s contents and the relevant observations. He concluded:

"The suited man’s ability is unusual. His own partner moves carefully to avoid triggering it, I believe it’s area-effect with no ally exception. The iron door is solid. You won’t be getting through it on your own. I’ll open it from the inside."

Without waiting, he shifted back into wraith-form and passed through the wall.

He landed steadily.

The suited man was still at his console. The green-haired man had been waiting, the arcane buildup in his eyes had continued during the interval, both pupils now radiating visible green light and a faint electromagnetic hum.

Raphael ignored him and moved directly toward the control console.

The suited man’s expression flattened.

"In shared spaces, objects belonging to others may not be taken without the owner’s consent. In the owner’s absence, a designated guardian holds custodianship."

The console opened by itself before Raphael’s hands reached it. An encrypted solid-state drive was ejected and traced a neat arc through the air into the suited man’s waiting hand.

Raphael looked at it. He came back to physical form at the console anyway. The drive wasn’t his immediate objective. He began working through the controls, this knob, that switch, without concern for what he might disturb, looking for the door release.

Nothing in his actions violated the stated rules. He wasn’t taking anything. He wasn’t even picking anything up. He was simply touching surfaces.

The green-haired man’s eyes snapped wide.

Two beams of green light fired directly at him, the electromagnetic sound sharp and rising.

He registered the threat and his first instinct was a full roll to evade.

He stopped the impulse before it started.

A dramatic evasion would destroy the carefully restored state of his clothing. Which would reactivate the first rule. Which would put him back against the door.

The wraith-form had been running long enough that re-entry wasn’t available quickly enough to help.

He made the calculation in the time it took the beams to travel half the room, and chose.

He shifted slightly to one side and leaned back at the waist.

The beams passed close enough to feel the heat across the front of his chest. They found the control console behind him, and the impact was brief but pointed.

Then it was over.

Raphael straightened up slowly, and with both men watching, calmly smoothed the front of his coat with one hand.

Elegance. Timeless.