Thorne suppressed the chill quickly, his voice coming out with a slight urgency.

“That’s not it, Captain. It wasn’t that I wanted to cut the report short. It was... her.”

“She threw me out.”

“Threw you out?” Julian tilted his head slightly, one finger tapping his chin with quiet amusement.

“She realized there was someone operating behind 039? She worked out that we were watching her remotely through 039’s eyes?”

“Mm...”

No irritation. If anything, he sounded like someone who’d just been told a mildly delightful piece of unexpected news.

The ball of his right foot began tapping the floor. Light, rhythmic.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The fact that the floor in question was the still-slightly-warm, freshly-dead abdomen of a Corpse-Spider Matriarch did not appear to factor into his consideration.

Thorne said nothing. He stood quietly to the side and waited.

What he hadn’t finished saying—what he’d left out—was that there had been more to it than that.

He’d had a nagging suspicion, difficult to dismiss, that Miss Pandora had noticed him from the very beginning.

Even through the remove of Unit 039’s malachite eyes, across the distance and the layers of the communication relay, that feeling of being studied had never quite gone away. It had just sat there at the edge of his awareness, persistent and unignorable.

It was a subtle thing. Like she’d known from the start that there was a person behind those eyes—and so, from the start, her manner toward Unit 039 had been slightly, specifically different from how one treated a standard Live Iron Golem attendant.

Less of the vacancy one directed at a tool. More of a pointed, quietly amused quality directed at whoever was watching from the other side.

“Unexpected. But understandable.”

Julian stopped tapping and shook his head with a small smile.

“Maybe Aurora guessed at the details and mentioned something to her. Or maybe she just has a natural sensitivity to that kind of observation—animal instinct for being watched.”

He turned away from Thorne and let his gaze drift toward the grey sky visible beyond the gymnasium’s broken walls.

“But if she noticed, there’s no point in pushing the surveillance. I’m not especially interested in the specifics of her technique anyway. The procedural details are too dry.”

“What I’m more curious about is how this second brew turns out.”

“Can her work actually surpass yours? That’s more interesting than any particular method.”

He glanced back at Thorne over his shoulder, smile easy.

“That’s enough for now. When the results come in, let me know immediately.”

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“Yes, Captain Julian.”

Thorne nodded with the relief of a man who’d just been told he could leave.

As another team member stepped forward to handle the loot processing, Thorne turned and made his exit at a pace that was definitely not quite a jog.

What no one noticed was the look that crossed his face the moment his back was turned.

A deep, private contemplation.

He’d told Julian that her technique had, in certain moments, edged past his own.

What he hadn’t said was that he didn’t think it was quite that simple.

In terms of overall capability, he was a seasoned Third-Rank alchemist. There was no rational basis for him to fall short of a student barely through the door.

He’d seen talent before. He’d watched Second-Rank apprentices with exceptional gifts produce extraordinarily refined work. He was familiar with that kind of gap.

But what Pandora’s movements had given him wasn’t that feeling.

It wasn’t just technical proficiency. It wasn’t just skill at a particular level.

It was something internal. A quality of perfect coordination, as if every individual action she made was interlocking seamlessly with every other. Not one piece out of place. Not one motion wasted.

Like a precision timepiece. Every gear turning at exactly the right moment, meshing exactly right, running exactly clean.

That kind of organic, effortless beauty—it had put a kind of wordless awe into him, and he was a professional.

Unfortunately, she’d only let him watch the opening before throwing him out.

Which left him nothing concrete to analyze. The feeling itself was half-formed. Hazy enough that he could almost convince himself it hadn’t been real.

“Forget it.”

Thorne pressed two fingers against his temple.

“Probably just haven’t slept enough. Starting to see things.”

The murmur dissolved into the dead air of the gymnasium and was heard by no one.

..................

Inside the workshop.

The brilliant, shifting colors receded from her sight and her senses like a tide pulling back.

That quality of vividness—of having briefly touched something that felt like a fundamental rule underlying everything—dropped away, fast, leaving behind the flat and familiar textures of ordinary reality.

The gap between the two states was enormous.

It left Pandora feeling hollowed out.

And in the same moment, a cold, precise chime sounded in her mind.

【Assisted Alchemy Failed】.

“As expected...”

A quiet exhale. A small shake of the head. She pulled herself back from the drifting, half-absent feeling and returned to the room.

She looked at the three crystal vials on the workbench in front of her.

Two of them were clear—pale gold and soft blue, respectively—shifting gently in the light with a mild, clean luminescence.

The third was a milky white suspension, the body of the vial slightly cool to the touch. Inside, countless tiny motes moved in slow rotation, rising and sinking like star-dust, composing a quiet, microscopic map of some private cosmos.

These were the three compounds from her second round.

The 【Assisted Alchemy】 failure meant only one thing: they hadn’t reached the threshold of perfection as the System defined it.

That was not the same as failing at the brewing itself.

Far from it.

Pandora extended her hand and let her fingertips pass in sequence over the cool surfaces of all three vials.

She could feel it clearly—the stable, balanced, potent resonance contained in the liquid inside. Each one independent. Yet together, they described a perfect triangular circuit, each quietly reinforcing the others.

This was exactly what she had been building toward.

She picked up all three, turned, and pushed open the heavy oak door.

Two people were waiting in the broad corridor outside.

Aurora. And Unit 039, with her malachite eyes.

When Aurora saw Pandora walk out holding the completed potions, the tension that had been quietly holding her shoulders for the past hour visibly released. She let out a slow breath.

Shortly after the second brewing session had started, Pandora had sent both of them out of the workshop—citing the need for absolute quiet. It had left Aurora unsettled, half-convinced that something had gone wrong and couldn’t be fixed.

But My Lady’s expression was calm, and there were finished potions in her hand.

No disaster, then.

“Done.”

Pandora held out the three crystal vials. Her tone was matter-of-fact.

“Try these. This version has been adjusted based on the feedback you gave me earlier.”

Aurora took them without a moment’s hesitation. Something that looked like anticipation had settled into her face.

She accepted the vials, one by one, and drew the stoppers.

No sharp smell. No acrid bite.

Only three distinct, delicate fragrances, soft and entirely unlike one another, drifting quietly outward into the corridor.