The silence that followed lasted about two seconds.

Then Rena’s expression shifted from frozen to something considerably harder.

"I am not going anywhere," she said. Her voice was low and controlled, but the edge in it was sharp enough to cut. "I told my father not to come looking for me. I made that very clear."

The man in the grey uniform straightened from his bow and held her gaze with the patience of someone who had been briefed on exactly this response.

"Young Mistress..."

"Do not call me that here," Rena said through her teeth.

The crowd around them had begun to slow and gather in the casual but deliberate way that market crowds do when something worth watching is happening. Stalls nearby were going quieter. People who had been walking past had found reasons to stop.

Two more figures appeared from the crowd, a woman and a man dressed in the same grey uniform, moving into position on either side of the first messenger with the practiced ease of people arriving exactly on cue.

The woman looked at Rena and let out a quiet breath of relief.

"Yes," she said to the others. "It is her."

The man beside her nodded once.

Master Norman had already stepped forward, positioning himself between the messengers and his group with the instinct of someone responsible for the people behind him.

"Who are you people and what is your business with my Entrant?" Norman asked, his voice carrying the authority of someone who was not asking casually.

The woman reached into her jacket and produced a sealed document, holding it out for Norman to take.

He read it, and his expression did not change dramatically, but something behind his eyes shifted in the way of someone reading something that confirms what they already suspected.

The document carried the Steel Empire’s official seal, a detailed statement of identity confirming that Rena Ironcrown was the missing daughter of Emperor Jonah Ironcrown, and that the three bearers of the document were authorised imperial representatives acting on direct orders from the Emperor himself.

Norman lowered the document slowly.

He already knew...

Sylvester had told him the night after the Head’s meeting with Rena, quietly and without making it a wider conversation. But knowing and being confronted with imperial documentation in the middle of Citadel City’s market on Trade Day were two very different things.

He looked at the three messengers, then at the crowd that had gathered, then at the document in his hand.

There was nothing he could do. Nobody in the Frontier picked a fight with the Steel Empire’s official representatives. Not an outpost assistant. Not a Citadel City trader.

Not anyone with sense.

"We ask that you follow us back to the Heartlands, Young Mistress," the woman said, turning back to Rena. "Your father is waiting."

"No," Rena said simply.

"I understand this is difficult, but..."

"I said no," Rena repeated. "I do not want to go. That should be the end of it."

The first messenger, the one who had bowed, tilted his head slightly.

"Unfortunately, Young Mistress, the Emperor’s instructions were not conditional on your preference. If you choose not to come willingly, we are authorised to bring you by other means."

The woman nodded once in confirmation.

"That is correct. We apologise for the discomfort, but we do not have the authority to return empty-handed."

The crowd had grown considerably by now. The market had essentially stopped in this section, dozens of Entrants and traders and city residents standing at a respectful distance, watching.

"Then I am telling you right now," Rena said, her voice rising just enough for the crowd to hear clearly, "that any person who puts their hands on me without my consent is going to regret it."

The first messenger stepped forward.

"Excuse me."

The voice came from behind Rena.

Roman stepped through the group, past Norman, and placed himself directly between Rena and the three messengers.

He was not tall or imposing in the way that naturally commands a crowd. He was an eighteen year old F rank rookie in a city full of people who were all significantly stronger than him by any measurable standard.

But he planted his feet and looked at the three messengers without moving.

"She said she does not want to go," Roman said. "That is her answer. You have it."

The first messenger looked at him with the particular expression of someone encountering an unexpected obstacle that they have not yet decided how to categorise.

"This does not concern you," he said carefully. "Step aside."

"It does concern me," Roman said. "She is my partner. If you want to get to her, you go through me first."

The crowd noise picked up noticeably.

The woman in the grey uniform looked at Roman for a long moment, then looked at her two colleagues, then looked back at Roman with an expression that had moved past patience into something considerably less tolerant.

"Boy," she said quietly, "I am going to give you one warning. One. Step away from her right now, because you do not understand what you are involving yourself in."

"I understand fine," Roman said.

The woman held his gaze for three seconds, then she raised her hand, and a fireball assembled in her palm that was wide enough to cover a grown person completely.

At A rank, the heat coming off it was visible as a shimmer in the air around her fist, and several people in the crowd took instinctive steps backward.

Roman looked at it.

Then he raised both hands, and activated [Anti Balance].

The burst of compressed air hit the fireball before she released it, disrupting the formation and scattering the energy wide in a dispersal that made the crowd scatter backward with shouts of surprise.

The woman stared at the empty space where the fireball had been.

Then she looked at Roman.

"Again," she said, and assembled a second one faster than the first.

Roman sent another burst of air at once without getting a second wasted, knowing how fast he needed to be.

And another.

And another.

She was an A rank Mage with years of combat experience, and Roman was an F rank rookie with no right to be standing in her way. But [Anti Balance] had no cooldown, and every fireball she produced he disrupted before it could reach him, the limitless mana cycling through the skill without pause, and the crowd watching from the edges of the market area had stopped retreating and started pressing forward again to see what was happening.

"How is he doing that?"

"He should be an F rank. Look at his young rookie face."

"An F ranker is holding off an A rank Mage? I gotta be damned!"

The woman switched tactics, pulling a wind compression attack that she sent low along the ground, designed to sweep his legs instead of hit him directly.

Roman jumped it and responded with a wide Anti Balance sweep that pushed her back two steps and disrupted the follow up she was preparing.

The first messenger and the male messenger looked at each other, a astonished.

Then the next moment, they couldn’t be having such a scene happening any longer, as all three of them moved at once.

The crowd exploded.

Three A rankers converging on a single F rank Entrant in the middle of Citadel City’s market district on Trade Day was the kind of thing that did not happen. Ever.

And yet here it was, and the market had completely stopped functioning, every person within visible range watching with the focused attention of people who understood they were seeing something they would be talking about for a long time.

Roman managed the first combined assault through pure reaction and luck in equal measure, the [Anti Balance] keeping the Mage’s attacks disrupted while he used footwork to stay out of the physical range of the other two.

He took a hit from the male messenger’s palm strike across the shoulder that sent him stumbling, and a grazing strike from the first messenger’s weapon that opened a shallow cut across his forearm.

But you know what? He kept standing.

Rena had been watching for exactly as long as she could stand it as the next moment...

She pulled her dagger and came in from the side, her Assassin movement taking the woman by surprise long enough to create a window that she used to drive the male messenger back with two rapid strikes that he only barely blocked.

And suddenly... The next person he said by the other side made his eyes glint in awe.

Arnold appeared from somewhere in the crowd. When Roman saw him, he genuinely did not know what to make of it.

Arnold looked at the three messengers, looked at Roman, looked at Rena, and made a decision that his expression suggested he was already regretting.

He stepped in.

"I hate this so much," Arnold muttered, and drove a strike into the first messenger’s guard that bought Roman three seconds of breathing room.

The fight was loud, messy, and completely one-sided in terms of raw power, but Roman, Rena and Arnold together were creating enough disruption that the messengers could not simply end it cleanly without causing a scene that even they did not want to escalate to that level in the middle of a major city.

It lasted another four minutes before the tide shifted decisively.

The woman landed a compressed strike on Rena that sent her into a market stall with enough force to collapse it entirely, and Rena did not immediately get back up.

Arnold took a simultaneous hit from the other two that dropped him to one knee and then flat.

Roman was the only one still standing.

He was bleeding from the forearm, his shoulder was sending sharp signals every time he raised his right arm, and his Life bar was sitting at forty-one percent.

The three messengers stood in front of him, breathing slightly harder than they had been at the start, their expressions carrying the specific frustration of people who have been held up far longer than they should have been.

The crowd around them was completely silent.

Roman’s mind was moving fast.

He looked at Rena, still down in the collapsed stall. He looked at the three messengers. He looked at the crowd packed in on every side.

Then he activated [Anti Balance] at its widest possible radius, directly downward into the market floor.

The shockwave hit every loose item on every nearby stall simultaneously, sending products, display stands, signage and vendor equipment erupting outward in every direction at once.

The crowd that had been pressed in close scattered in a wave of noise and movement, and the three messengers instinctively turned to assess the chaos around them.

It lasted about four seconds.

But four seconds was enough.

Roman crossed the distance to Rena, grabbed her arm, and pulled her upright.

"Run," he shouted. "Now. Go."

"Roman..." Rena muttered, her voice shivering and terrified.

"Go, Rena. I mean it. Run."

She looked at him for exactly one second, and in that second something passed across her face that Roman did not have time to read properly.

Then she ran, disappearing into the disrupted crowd with the speed that only an Assassin could manage, and within moments she was gone.

The chaos settled, and the three messengers turned back.

Roman was standing in the cleared space, alone, Queenfang at his side, with forty-one percent Life, and absolutely nowhere to go.

The woman looked around the market area briefly, then looked back at Roman.

"Where is she?" She then asked.

Roman said nothing.

The first messenger stepped forward and grabbed Roman by the collar, and Roman did not resist because there was no point.

Arnold was still on the ground nearby, trying to get up, and the male messenger took him by the arm and pulled him upright with the efficiency of someone completing a task.

Master Norman and the rest of the Blood Trail Outpost rookies were gone, somehow, and Roman could not see a single familiar face in the reforming crowd except Arnold’s, and Arnold looked like he was still working out how he had ended up in this situation.

The woman in the grey uniform looked at Roman one more time.

"You bought her time," she said. "I will give you that."

Roman looked back at her, smile and yet didn’t let out a single word. At this point, that wasn’t even necessary.

"They are coming with us..." She said to the others. "Take them."

And just like that, Roman and Arnold were walked away from the Citadel City market in the custody of three A rank imperial messengers...

"Now that’s she’s gone. What do we tell the Emperor?" Dax asked.

"We take these two to the Emperor. We tell him that they help her escape. Whatever his reaction is, I know he isn’t taking it lightly with them."

"They didn’t know who they had messed with..." Sera said.

"They are going to face the wrath of Steel."