Phei laughed.
Not a weak chuckle. Not a broken wheeze.
A loud, booming, defiant roar that echoed through the infinite void like thunder clapping inside a cathedral of bone. Blood sprayed from his lips with every syllable, painting the stone in dark arcs, but he didn’t care.
He bared his throat—head thrown back, Adam’s apple exposed, veins throbbing purple-black under pale skin—and stared straight up at the descending sword with wild, bloodshot eyes.
"Did you really think I ca unprepared?"
Phei’s voice cracked on the edges—raw, shredded from the earlier crushing—but it carried, defiant and booming through the void like a cracked bell refusing to shatter. Blood flecked his lips with every word, dripping in thick crimson beads onto the stone beneath him.
"You might not have done your research very well. I might be weak compared to you... but you know the one universal thing that connects us all?"
The colossal white sword—longer than mountain ranges, its blade a flawless plane of annihilating radiance—froze mid-descent.
Not slowed. Not hesitated. Froze.
Its edge hovered re inches above Phei’s exposed throat, so impossibly sharp it seed to slice the very concept of distance, of space, of separation between steel and skin. The holy white flas licking along the blade flickered uncertainly—cold-hot pulses that burned without heat, strobing across his blood-streaked face in erratic flashes of blinding silver.
Sword aura radiated in blinding white cot-tails and spiraling cyclones of silver-white plasma that tore micro-rifts into the void—each rift screaming with the sound of dying stars, reality fraying at the seams like torn silk.
Sword energies coiled and hissed around the weapon in fractal fury, afterimages of the blade multiplying into hundreds of ghostly mirrors trailing in its wake, each one moving at impossible velocity yet perfectly synchronized.
Things he’d only read in novels and saw in anis... now right before him.
And the pressure.
Gods, the pressure.
He tapped his temple once, slow and deliberate. In the darkness, the only illumination ca from the sword’s rciless white glow and the pulsing crimson wound of the red door behind it.
"Intelligence," he rasped. "Being smart."
He lifted his other hand—shaking, blood-slick—and turned the screen of his Samsung toward the void. The phone was cracked, screen flickering on its last legs, battery icon red and dying, but still miraculously functional.
A single ssage glowed in the dark:
lissa:At the gates. Waiting. You better not be late, honey.
The ssage at the gate before he entered the house... he’d texted when he got the system ssage.
It was to lissa.
"I called my aunt here," Phei said, voice steadying now that leverage had finally crystallized in his blood-slick hands. Each word ca out slower, more deliberate—raw throat scraping like broken glass, but carrying weight. "She’s here to pick up. If I don’t walk out of this estate alive..."
He let the sentence hang—deliberate, heavy, a guillotine blade of implication suspended right above the Consort’s invisible neck.
Her laugh sliced through the void—sharp, mocking, utterly unimpressed, dripping contempt like venom from a cobra’s fangs.
"You think we care?" The words curled with disdain. "What would that mundane little bitch do to ? I could kill her before she finished blinking. I could kill everyone in Maxton family. I could—"
"Just like I expceted... you’re muscles no brains... Of course there’s nothing lissa can do to you."
Phei’s interruption landed calm. Almost bored. Like he was correcting a minor factual error in a casual conversation.
"But what about your boss?"
Silence.
Thick. Sudden. A pressure drop so abrupt it made his ears pop.
"What about the whole Ashford family?"
The silence deepened. Thickened. Beca sothing with mass—pressing inward on his fractured ribs until fresh blood welled up his throat in a coppery surge. He tasted it, swallowed it, kept talking.
Phei smiled—slow, bloody, teeth stained crimson against white enal—and continued.
"Let explain sothing, since you’re clearly all muscle and no brain."
The Consort’s aura spiked.
Raw killing intent detonated outward—a hurricane of murderous pressure that flattened the stone around him into spiderwebs of fractured rock, dust rising in choking clouds that stung his eyes and coated his tongue.
Her hand twitched toward her katana—fingers flexing with barely restrained violence.
Crimson eyes blazed red-hot, pupils contracting to pinpricks of contained apocalypse. The air itself scread—high-pitched, like reality tearing at the seams.
Phei didn’t flinch.
Didn’t even blink.
Play unaffected. Show no weakness. The mont you flinch, you die.
"You can do whatever you want untouched," he continued, voice level, conversational, as if she hadn’t just threatened to erase him from existence. "But this wasn’t the Ashfords’ order, was it? This was His order."
He nodded toward the red door—casual, almost dismissive.
"And if your master could act openly—if he could do as he pleased without consequence—he wouldn’t be hiding in the shadows like a sewer rat, would he? He wouldn’t need you to watch and report. He wouldn’t need to test people through proxies and interdiaries. With his power... with that power I just witnessed? He’d just... act."
The Consort’s aura flickered—once, violently—like a candle fla caught in a sudden draft.
I just hit a nerve.
"But he can’t," Phei pressed, voice dropping lower, colder. "Because even soone who stands above the Legacy Families can’t act recklessly in Paradise. Not without consequence. Not without exposure. This place has rules. Balances. And I bet—I know—that he can’t afford to tip those scales."
Phei turned his gaze toward the red door.
Faced it directly.
Spoke to the presence lurking behind it—the young voice, the boyish laugh, the terrifying power that had frozen a sword the size of mountains with nothing but a thought.
"If I don’t leave here alive tonight, lissa will burn this place to the ground looking for answers. I know you know my Clan’s power can do that to Ashfords, don’t you?"
His voice was steady now. Cold. The voice of soone who had calculated every angle, mapped every escape route, and found the single razor-thin path through the minefield.
"She’ll do anything in her power to make sure the Ashfords are held responsible. And they will be—because they have no ideathis is happening. They didn’t order this. They don’t know about you. So when questions start getting asked, what will they be defending?"
He let that sink in—deep, slow, like poison spreading through veins.
"It would expose your master. Force him into the light. And the mont that happens—the mont the other families start investigating the anomaly of my disappearance—everything unravels."
Phei held up a finger—slow, deliberate, blood dripping from the nail in fat, dark drops.
"One: Elena Ashford is head-over-heels for . She invited here personally. If I vanish from her estate, she’ll tear it apart looking for answers—and she’ll drag her mother, her family, every resource she has into that search."
A second finger—trembling slightly now from blood loss, but still steady enough.
"Two: The entire academy has their eyes on . I just declared a challenge on the entire basketball team. I’m the most talked-about student at Paradise Prep right now. Sudden disappearance? That’s not sothing that gets swept under the rug. And I know, oh, for what I just witnessed I know you know what happened between and Dravenna, right? And you know she can be terrifying.
"And we have Heavenchilds involved too... you know what that ans in Paradise, don’t ya?"
A third finger.
"Three: The Ashford Madam herself orchestrated getting into this estate tonight. She threatened Harold Maxton to make it happen. If I go missing, she’s implicated. And she doesn’t even know why.
And four... I won’t repeat my clan again."
He lowered his hand.
"So, tell , Consort—what happens when every Legacy family, Ashfords included, starts investigating the boy who disappeared from the Ashford estate? What happens when they start asking questions about anomalies and shadows and powers that shouldn’t exist?"
He smiled—slow, bloody, certain.
"They find him."
The void went silent.
Even the micro-rifts in reality stopped screaming.
Even the sword’s flas—if it had still existed—would have stopped flickering.
For three heartbeats—maybe four—nothing moved. Nothing breathed. The entire dinsion seed to hold itself perfectly, impossibly still, waiting for the response from behind that red door.
Then—
A laugh.
Bright. Boyish. Genuinely delighted.
The kind of laugh that belonged at a birthday party, at a joke between friends, at any of a hundred innocent monts. Not here. Not in this void that slled of old blood and dying stars. Not from the mouth of sothing that could end worlds with a thought.
"Wonderful."
The sword vanished.
Not withdrew. Not faded. Simply ceased to exist—one mont a mountain-range of annihilating light, the next nothing at all. The pressure lifted with it, and Phei sucked in a breath so desperate his lungs scread, fresh blood bubbling up his throat in a wet cough.
"The seven told you were smart," the voice continued, warm and amused. "They said you’d surprised them. Outmaneuvered them. Made fools of them at every turn. I wanted to see for myself."
A pause.
"And it’s true. Your explanation is crude—a bit clumsy in the delivery, if I’m being honest—but the threat itself is sound. The logic is correct. You understand the ga."
Another laugh, softer this ti. Almost fond.
"Three weeks."
The words hung in the darkness like a verdict.
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