The pencil moved steadily against the page while Dove kept her eyes down, and I kept talking.

I had already walked her through the approach to the Nexus, my reasoning behind it, and what I found inside. About the Outsiders and Entropy being the curses placed into the world by the same lunatic God.

I had told her I went on a hunch, a gut read, and that I had told Mitsuki I was a Fugen agent sent to investigate suspected Entropy activity in order to get her cooperation without burning time on explanations she would not have believed.

All of that was true.

"The ritual was running without issue when the cultist struck," I continued, keeping my tone even and precise, the way you speak when you are giving a corporate presentation. "And I was hit by Outsider illusions immediately. I managed to break free before I opened the door, partly because of Garek’s voice cutting through the illusion. Then I heard Mitsuki scream. I wanted to go rescue her, but Garek tried to stop me, told me I was risking 136 lives by going. But I didn’t listen."

Dove’s pencil kept moving.

"The door exploded inward before I could open it. It was the cultist. I went out and fought my way through the horde to Mitsuki, got her back inside, and sealed the entrance with my roots. Because I knew the living quarters won’t hold the Outsiders till morning, especially with the cultist outside. I managed to get a rhythm going after that. The barricade was holding, I was managing the Outsider tide, and then the cultist struck again. With his cursed blade, he took my arm, my leg, my eye, and my stomach."

Dove looked up from the page for a brief moment.

"What you have said so far checks out with what Garek and Mitsuki have claimed," she said, in a flat tone, before looking back down.

And what I said next froze her stiff.

"The cultist himself was a Tier 5 Human Cultivator running Arlen Hale’s cultivation technique," I said.

The pencil stopped.

Dove’s head snapped up, and her eyes found my face, and I watched the calculation run through them as the full significance of what that single sentence meant assembled itself.

She held my gaze for a long beat, and I held hers, and I let her turn it over as long as she needed to, let her scan my eyes for any hint of a lie as long as she needed to.

"Look," I said. "Take that information how you will. I will make no speculations."

"Hm," she said, and the pencil resumed after a deep sigh.

"I had almost defeated him," I continued, without a stutter in my delivery, "... but he transformed during the fight."

The pencil paused again, and this time she did not look up immediately, but the pause lasted long enough to mean something.

I did not acknowledge it.

What I had just said, a single small sentence, flatly and without emphasis, was that I had come within reach of beating a Tier 5 Cultivator running one of the strongest techniques in the known world while missing an arm, a leg, and an eye, and with a Tier 9 curse working through my body.

I had not pointed that out. I had simply said it as the next line in a sequence of facts.

"Seeing no way out, he performed a ritual self-impalement with a Tier 9 cursed blade..." I continued. "The transformation produced two escalating phases. Both phases could still deploy the First Sequence of the cultivation technique. I inflicted enough cumulative damage throughout the fight to create a significant cavity in the chest of what he had become, which exposed the cultist’s body inside the transformation with the original sword still embedded in him. I neutralized him by removing the sword from his body. And as I pulled it free, the transformation began dismantling itself. After that, I killed him with my blade."

Dove looked up from the notebook but did not speak immediately.

I watched her face, and I could see her doing what she had done in the carriage the first time we met, taking the surface of what I had said and turning it over to find the tactical reality underneath it.

She was the Commander of the Knights and had spent years translating reports into actual pictures of what happened on the ground, which meant she understood, better than most people would, exactly what the sentence I had just delivered truly meant.

"So you pulled the sword out of him..." she said, slowly and without any inflection that would give away what she was feeling about it, "... a Tier 5 Cultivator running one of the most powerful cultivation techniques in the known world... While he was in the second phase of his Eldritch transformation. While a horde of countless Tier 3 Eldritch Accurseds were coming at you from every direction. With one arm. One leg. One eye. A stab to your gut. And an active Tier 9 curse."

"Yes," I said.

The room was quiet for a long moment after that.

Nom-Nom was sitting very still at the foot of the bed, which she did not do often, and her violet eyes were on Dove’s face, analysing exactly how normal people reacted to what was normal to her.

While Peko did not move at all.

Dove held my gaze, and I could see her doing the math, whether what I was describing was even possible, whether the alternative, that they had in fact severely underestimated what I was capable of.

And I could tell, she didn’t know which version of it was worse.

Eventually, she looked back at the notebook and said-

"Continue."

And so my first weave of lies began.

"After his death, I turned my full focus to the Outsider tide and held the line for the next six hours, until sunrise."

"I see." She finished writing and looked up. "Nico. Do you... Do you truly recover mana faster than you can spend it?"

"For now, yes," I replied with a single nod. "My recovery rate currently exceeds my total capacity."

This was built on every lie I had constructed since the southern border, the entire fabricated backstory, the Pantheon experiments, the seven hundred children reduced to one survivor, all of it, and I stacked the next lie on top of that foundation of lies.

"You already know the story," I continued without a single stutter. "That was the entire focus of my training since I was a child. Pantheon wanted an Infinite Mage. Though I believe that as I tier up, my mana capacity will eventually outgrow my recovery rate. But it will never take me long to get back into the fight."

She nodded, and her stiff shoulders loosened slightly.

Given her station, it was only natural that she would be looking for a limit in what effectively appears to be limitless.

She had been searching for that ceiling since the moment I walked into her professional awareness, and I had just handed her one. Albeit a fake one, because frankly, there was none.

"What about the cultist’s body?" she then asked. "Or his sword?"

I felt both Peko and Nom-Nom look at me in the same instant, felt the two sets of violet eyes arriving on the same side of my face simultaneously, while I kept my gaze on Dove’s.

After all, both the sword and the body were currently sitting in my inventory. The question was whether I was willing to give them up. Because just like Peko, Amaya too can extract memories; in fact, she was much more skilled at it than Peko.

Giving it up would’ve meant Fugen would get all the information they so desperately needed.

But then again, so did I.

The plan that had taken root in my head hinged on it.

"I don’t know," I shook my head. "My attention shifted immediately to the oncoming Outsiders. I believe other Entropy operatives must have recovered his remains and the sword while I was managing the tide."

"You must have seen his face," Dove said. "You said you killed him with your blade."

"He was wearing a helm," I said. "So I never saw his face."

Dove looked at me for a moment, and I looked back at her, and the lies sat between us in the quiet of the room without any visible seam on them.

She wrote something on the page and then set the pencil flat across the notebook, which was the first time since she had opened it.

With a deep sigh, Dove looked back at me with a different look than the one she had been using throughout the interrogation.

The professional focus was still there, but underneath it, sitting within the steadiness of her eyes, was the sincerity that had been there since she walked in and proposed I join the Knights.

Sincerity that had not gone away when I said no, nor did it flicker when I told her the protection she offered would be limited, and I told her I knew.

She had sat through this entire conversation with that thing still present in her eyes, and now that the notebook was closed and the pencil was down, it was just more apparent to see.

So much so that I also caught something else. An emotion beneath the layer of the Commander, where just Dove resided.

Hope was perhaps the simplest answer. But it was more than that; there was a wish in there too. One that knew it may never come true.

After all, she was not naive, nor was she sentimental in any obvious way.

I remembered the first time we had spoken, she had held her own in an exchange where most people would have flinched, how wisely she had tested Alaric’s loyalty with coldness that was born more out of experience than anything.

From the carriage that day, she had known my stance from how I spoke about the people behind me and my ideals.

And she had walked into this hospital room today with that conclusion still intact.

The conclusion that I was someone who felt things with the same sincerity as herself.

That I was someone who’d put himself in front of an Eldritch horde and a Tier 5 Cultist operating one of the strongest cultivation techniques in the world for people he had known for less than a day.

She hoped that when the stakes became too high, when the cost to everyone else became too much, I would not stand idly by, even if it meant risking my people.

Too bad.

"Now, before I take my leave." She looked at me with that expression, the one still holding the last of the hope she had walked in with. "Do you have anything else you want to tell me? A speculation, an assumption, a deduction. Just... just thoughts."

And as I looked her in the eyes, I saw it clearly, what she was actually asking, the door she was holding open one final time.

I couldn’t help but think about the cultist’s body in my inventory, and about everything he had told me in the last moments before I put the blade to his throat, and about the sword sitting in the same inventory, about every piece of critical information I had been holding...

And I just looked at her, I held eye contact, and I said with a straight face-

"No."