The pressure descends—not merely physical, but metaphysical. A force engineered to dismember the very architecture of consciousness, to reduce beings to their most primal, fragmented state.
Leonardo becomes landscape—a terrain of suffering, each muscle a battlefield where survival negotiates with annihilation. His lungs, once instruments of breath, now transformed into crushing chambers of desperation. Each incomplete breath is an act of rebellion against a force designed to eradicate existence itself.
The moment the pressure dissolves, silence becomes a living entity. Not absence of sound, but a presence—heavy, expectant, laden with unspoken prophecies.
"Ah, I spoke too loudly," the voice says—a statement that reveals nothing, implies everything.
Leonardo collapses. Not dramatically, but systematically. His body—a machine recovering from catastrophic systems failure. Tremors ripple through him, aftershocks of a near-extinction event.
Elara sinks. Her knees—no longer structural supports, but surrender made flesh. Tears hover at the precipice of release, held back by a willpower forged in crucibles of unspoken trauma.
Then arrives Alain.
A being that defies categorical understanding. Blood-red eyes that slice through darkness like weaponized perception. His casual attire—a deliberate act of psychological warfare. Where others don medieval armor, he wears a t-shirt and shorts: a declaration that normative expectations are for the weak.
Moments ago, he was crushed like the others. Now, he rises with a fluidity that suggests the previous moment was merely a performance of vulnerability.
Takashiro's scoff is a knife—sharp, reflexive. "Who does he think he is?" The question is less inquiry, more territorial marking.
Alain moves. Not walks. Moves. Each step a negotiation with gravity, with expectation, with the very fabric of perceived reality.
Leonardo feels a memory tugging—a fragment of something half-remembered. A dimly lit loft. Alain. Another figure. Tension thick enough to carve.
The memory surfaces like a drowning truth: Why was Alain there? Who was the bandaged figure? Questions that are not questions, but living wounds.
They enter the chamber of family heads. Silence here is not absence, but a sentient force. Judgment made atmospheric. Each breath weighted with dynastic implications.
Alain approaches his father with a casualness that is itself a form of violence. The family heads react—not with anger, but with a sophisticated performance of disdain.
"Six families at the top of the pyramid," Elara reveals—a statement that is both fact and prophecy.
And then—the absence. Marquis. Not just missing, but a void where expectation once resided.
Anna's muttered "That egotistical prick" is less an insult, more a ritualistic acknowledgment of disrupted order.
The room holds its breath. Waiting.
They pass through the door, the knight trailing close behind, his presence as imposing as the silence that greets them. Anna's father is visible from where they stand, his expression a storm of barely contained fury.
"Ah, they're here," Marquis's father announces, his voice tinged with an expectant note, clearly anticipating his son's arrival. But as the other heirs file into the room, his expression shifts from anticipation to confusion.
Elara's sharp eyes catch the subtle change, and she quickly scans the area.
Her gaze darts from one heir to the next, her heart rate quickening as she realizes the familiar shimmer of blue hair is conspicuously absent.
"Wait, where is Marquis?" she asks, her voice hushed, her mind racing as she silently confirms his absence.
Marquis is known for being fashionably late, his entrances often commanding attention.
But for him to be missing now, at a gathering of such gravity, is an anomaly that sends a ripple of unease through the room. "That egotistical prick," Anna mutters, her voice laced with a mix of frustration and anger.