The road back to Valdris took less time than the road there.

Not because Kai had found a different exploit — but because Serah, who had spent two days with her markings at their warmest intensity, was walking faster than normal without either of them mentioning it.

Kai was dragging Jameson.

Not with cruelty — he simply wasn’t going to waste any effort carrying him.

Jameson was tied with rope from the quest inventory, unconscious, arms crossed over his chest like someone sleeping comfortably if you ignored the bumps he took every time his head found a rock on the road.

Every time Jameson showed signs of waking — a flicker, a sound, the movement of someone coming out of unconsciousness — he found another rock.

Kai wasn’t doing it on purpose.

The road just had a lot of rocks.

And not because they had chosen the road with the most rocks.

---

Serah put her hand on Kai’s chest two kilometers before the north entrance.

Kai stopped.

Looked ahead.

The entrance to Valdris was visible from there — the stone arch, the dirt road becoming a cobblestone street, the torch posts unlit because it was daytime.

And the north wall, where there were always at least two guards, was empty.

Kai looked at the guard posts.

Then at Serah.

Serah was looking ahead with her nostrils slightly flared — the movement almost imperceptible.

She said nothing.

Kept walking.

Kai followed with Jameson.

---

The city was empty.

Not the four-in-the-morning kind of empty when people are sleeping.

The empty of a place where people were and no longer are, with the specific signs of hurried departure.

A stall overturned.

A bag forgotten on the ground.

The door of Valdris Pot ajar, as if someone had to leave quickly without looking back.

Kai observed as they walked.

No bodies. That’s good.

No visible blood. Also good.

No one. That’s the problem.

The Mirfeld carousel had been the silence of a closed fair.

This was different.

It was the silence of something that interrupted what was happening.

Serah walked without speaking.

Kai let her.

---

The guild was empty too.

The counter unattended.

Aldric’s papers still on the second-floor desk, visible from below through the railing.

The assessment room with the lights off.

Kai dragged Jameson to the back cell — the Valdris guild had two, for hunters who needed containment after problematic missions, a function Kai hadn’t needed to use until now — and deposited him inside with more care than strictly necessary.

He closed the door. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Jameson met the cell floor with the same expression of someone sleeping deeply.

Kai turned toward the quest board.

---

There was a new sheet.

Not the guild’s type of paper — thinner, whiter, something not manufactured in Aethon.

Pinned to the center of the board with what looked like a silver fang instead of a normal tack.

The handwriting was small, precise, tilted slightly to the right.

---

SPECIAL MISSION — SINGLE ISSUANCE

OBJECTIVE: Find the townspeople before they become dinner.

DEADLINE: Before dawn.

NOTE: I have temporarily borrowed your residents. They are comfortable. Relatively. This place has good ventilation even if it’s an indignity for someone of my standing to be here.

SUCCESS CONDITION: That the wet dog and her little piece of trash present themselves to me in person.

REWARD: The people go home.

PENALTY FOR NON-COMPLIANCE: To be determined based on my mood at dawn.

With love,

Lira

---

Kai read the entire note.

Read it again.

"With love," he said, in a completely neutral voice.

Serah, who had been reading over his shoulder, didn’t respond immediately.

Kai looked at her.

Serah had an expression that wasn’t exactly any of the ones he’d seen before — not jealousy, not tactical evaluation, not the warm glow of the last two nights.

Something older.

More specific.

Recognition.

"You know her?" Kai said.

"I know the style." Serah looked at the silver fang on the board.

"Only high-ranking vampire nobles use silver in their communications. It’s an insult to races vulnerable to it." Pause.

"And only one of them writes like this."

"Like what?"

"Like everything is a minor inconvenience she’s managing with more patience than it deserves."

Kai looked at the note.

With love, Lira.

"And is she very upset?"

"Very."

"At you or at me?"

Serah thought about it for a second.

"Probably at me." The markings pulsed.

"Though you’re also a problem for her."

Kai processed this.

"Do you have history?"

Serah looked at him.

"Vampires and primordial wolves don’t get along."

"I figured that." Kai put the note in his pocket. "Do you have your specific history?"

Serah didn’t answer.

Kai looked at her.

"Is it like in the movies?"

"What movies?"

"From my world. Vampires and werewolves who hate each other for reasons that are thousands of years old and no one remembers exactly why they started."

Serah considered this.

"That makes some sense in this world," she finally said.

Kai nodded.

"I thought that only happened in movies."

"Many things happen here."

"True." Kai looked toward the guild door. "Do you know where she might have them?"

Serah was already walking toward the door.

---

In the street, Serah stopped.

She looked at the cobblestone ground of Valdris’s main street.

Kai watched her look at the ground.

Serah lifted her foot.

And brought it down.

The cobblestone gave way — it didn’t fracture, it yielded, as if something beneath had absorbed the impact and redistributed the force outward.

The stones within a one-meter radius separated outward, and where the ground had been there was a rectangular hole two meters deep, leading to a stone tunnel that smelled ancient and of earth and of something else Kai recognized from the unstable zone of Sector 7.

Darkness.

Deep.

Kai looked at the hole.

Looked at Serah.

Serah jumped in without saying anything.

Kai jumped after her.

---

The catacombs beneath Valdris were larger than the size of the city suggested.

Kai noticed it in the first ten meters — the ceiling was four meters high, the walls were of worked stone, with niches that had once contained something and were now empty.

The tunnel forked at fifteen meters and forked again further on.

Serah didn’t hesitate at any fork.

Scent.

Kai understood without her saying it.

He followed.

At forty meters, without warning, the tunnel opened into a large chamber.

And in the chamber, in the darkness that took his eyes two seconds to calibrate, there were vampires.

Not two.

Not five.

The thirty that had materialized in the plaza.

Reorganized, distributed along the edges of the chamber, with the specific posture of those who were waiting for exactly this.

Kai and Serah in the center.

Thirty vampires in the perimeter.

Silence.

Then, from the back of the chamber where the darkness was densest, a voice.

"Punctual is not the word I would use." A pause. "But you arrived."