Back in the hallways, Emil's party split up into two groups. Emil and Hortensia found their way to an unoccupied lecture hall. The lights were off, with only the emergency lights giving some shade around the exits, but they had no intention to turn them on. Their steps echoed along the concrete walls as they stepped between rows of chairs down toward the lecture stage.

"You got us into some real trouble again," Hortensia lamented.

"Sorry," Emil apologized with a slumpy neck.

"But your plans have worked out in the end so far," She added.

"So far, huh?"

Emil's hand dragged along the empty desks, collecting the small layer of dust on top. His eyes were sunken, empty like two voids.

"Well, this isn't the first time I've broken any laws," Hortensia tried to cheer him up with a laugh.

No answer, just monotonous steps down to the bottom.

"Is it Orel?" She could tell.

Finally, his eyes woke up, only to look back up to the seats. He imagined them full of curious, bored, and anxious students, waiting for their lesson to start.

"Did I ever mention that I studied history?"

Hortensia felt stunned by the question. "I thought that was a bit given?"

"Well, I did. It was for me to become a teacher."

"Really? You?"

"There was a decent university in a neighboring city. While researching was fun, I always wanted to share that knowledge."

"Then, what gives? You didn't like kids?"

"No, nothing like that," Emil shook his head. "It was that I tried to research my roots as a small project of mine, but soon found that I came back empty-handed. While I could trace my mother's side for centuries, I found nothing about my father. I knew he was a foreigner, but I could not find his name in any sort of registry. I wanted to find out."

Hortensia could read the somber face on Emil like a book.

"I abandoned my family for this." He let the words painfully slip between his lips.

"But you're getting closer, aren't you?" Hortensia reminded.

"Even if I did find out, would it have been worth not seeing Orel grow up? All these years Tuja has been raising him herself while I have been looking for some useless piece of lore."

"Then you just need to make it up to them," She shrugged.

"There's no taking back the years I missed," Emil shook his head left and right.

"You didn't seem that bothered before."

"I just didn't think about it. I was too busy. Before I knew it, years had passed, yet I was still just scratching the surface. Meeting Orel was a wake-up call. How long would I have chased my father's shadow if he would not have come here?"

"So, are you going to give up and go home after this?"

"I don't know." Emil sighed. "What about you, Hortensia? Don't you have a family? You always told us how crowded and busy your home was."

"Oh? yeah, I do. What about it?"

"Why did you leave? Couldn't you have stayed to help around the house?"

"Why..." Hortensia scratched her neck. "Because it was a pain in the ass."

Emil's face twisted wide and long with sudden confusion. He took a minute to get his bearings. "But what about your family?"

"Of course, I still love them but try to live with six brothers under the same roof. Besides, there was something I wanted to do."

"So you just left them on their own?"

"They'll get by without me." Hortensia smiled, sat down next to the stage, and looked at her hands. "Deutz wants to be a doctor, James a baker, Phil would like to provide social help for teens, Whipley likes engineering, Tory is studying to be a carpenter and Fendley is still making up his mind. Everyone wants to do something. I wanted to go exploring, like grandma." She counted with her fingers.

"Sounds familiar," Emil nodded along.

"I know it's a bit different with you and me. You have a family of your own, but you also knew they would still be alright, right?"

"Of course."

"So, do you feel like this was a mistake?"

Emil felt too conflicted to answer.

"Sorry, that was a bit too harsh." Hortensia jumped to the stage. "Think about it this way: They know this thing must mean a lot to you. It's not like you went out to buy milk and disappeared for a wild goose chase. Well, even if you did, you can always come back and I'm sure they'll still take you. Sure, you might have missed some years, but you can always make it up to them, as long as you don't come back as an old grandpa."

"Thank you, Hortensia," Emil smiled.

"Save that for when we get out of here." She offered her hand.

With the warm grip of her hand, Emil rose to the stage.

"Now what?" She asked.

"There's some room in the backstage. We could hide in there." Emil pointed.

"Right." Hortensia watched as dust trickled down from the curtain onto the spiderwebs below. "I hope everyone else is doing alright."

"Me too," Emil let out a worried sigh.

Orel heard the Talon agent's description and confidently searched the halls. That was until he noticed a trail of blood. Diarmuid and Ándras followed shortly behind. The stains were fresh, leaving a pair of bloody footprints behind down another of the countless corridors.

"What happened here?" Ándras asked.

"A fight. A bloody one," Diarmuid analyzed the scene. He picked up a strand of long, gray hair from the pool. "Fur?"

"Could it be Catori?" Orel suggested, slightly concerned.

"Maybe he ran into those agents," Ándras peered further into the corridor.

Though Diarmuid did not mention it, the amount of blood was not a good sign. He had seen that amount plenty of times, but what he would be dealing with by that point was rarely alive.

The group silently followed the trail, leading them to an unassuming door. It had nothing to it except a numberplate and the fresh stains over the dark wood.

"Should we go in?" Àndras asked.

Orel grasped the doorknob without a word, yet before he could open it, he found his hands shaking with cold sweat.

"I can't still be scared." He said to himself and twisted it open.

The room was dark storage full of dusty boxes and shelves along the walls riddled with all sorts of equipment, yet what it seemed to be even more full of was the looming metallic smell of blood. At the very back, against the bare concrete wall was a mess of fur and flesh in the rough shape of a person. The three approached carefully, barely keeping their meals inside their stomachs from the sight. A rugged sword pierced the torso and pinned the body to the wall.

"C-Catori?" Orel managed to utter from behind the hand covering his mouth. "Is that you?"

The thing seemed idle, breathless, dead. Yet, after a moment, it coughed up some more blood on the floor and took a gurgling breath.

"He's still alive?!" Diarmuid stepped back.

"Damn, you're almost as tough as me," Ándras gulped.

"What happened to you? Was it the agents?" Orel asked.

"G..." Catori tried to utter, his face battered to a pulp.

"What is it?" Diarmuid crouched next to him.

"Get..."

"Get?"

Catori's swollen eyes peered into the darkness. "Get out...Of here."

Diarmuid got the smallest glance for a reaction before something struck him. He flinched away and pushed everyone out of the room with his arm still aching. The runes did nothing to stop the blow, being overpowered by the force behind it. He had never felt such a thing. If he had not been on guard the strike could have snapped the whole arm off. He could feel the broken bones stabbing his muscles, rendering the limb almost useless.

"Diarmuid, are you okay?" Ándras asked.

"This is nothing." Diarmuid lied to keep the others from worrying too much. In reality, moving anything below his elbow was nearly impossible.

Orel watched the door, and soon enough Adler walked out of the room.

"As I thought. Other rats were still squirming around here," He said from the shade of his hat. He looked back into the room to the defeated Catori with a cold sneer. "It seems your efforts were for nothing. Even as you held your tongue, these fools marched to your help, as expected."

"Aren't you confident? You talk like you could defeat all three of us." Diarmuid reminded, trying to snap the bones back in place.

"What exactly do I need to be afraid of? A one-armed man, a child, and some burly brute? Don't make me laugh. Though I suppose the fact that you managed to slip in here is a meritable feat, a mere thief's feat, that is."

"I'll beat this guy to a pulp." Ándras declared, steaming with anger. "And get that cool hat."

Adler analyzed his opponent and sighed. "I suppose those will be your last words." He took a tight, professional stance with his fists ready to punch out.

Before Ándras could defend himself, Adler sprung forward with speed as if he had disappeared. With the little he could react, Adler slipped past his defenses and delivered a solid blow into his chest. Ándras recoiled backward, almost losing his balance with the imprint still in his chest. However, instead of inflating back into place like fixing a dent in a car, the hole stayed, turning black from the internal bleeding. Adler went in to finish him, his left arm ready to hollow his torso out. Yet, his eyes caught something before he could reach him. Ándras' arm reached for him from below, ready to crush his arm. It forced Adler to dodge backward, creating distance between the two.

Once reclaiming his balance, Ándras looked down at his chest in utter confusion, like someone being hit in the face for the first time.

"Are you okay?" Orel asked.

"I don't know," Ándras felt around the wound. "I feel...Cold." He stumbled in his steps.

While the two were focused on the injury, Diarmuid focused on their adversary. He noticed something about Adler, more specifically, his arm. A fleeting, white trail escaped the white glove and the turquoise sleeve. It was not quite like steam, closer to mist, yet something still felt off about it. That was when Diarmuid looked back at Adler's expression. It was still stoic, but it had the slightest telling of pain he tried to hold in by biting the side of his lip. That, with the sensation of him getting hit despite his automated rune defense and its canceling of Ándras' healing factor led to only one conclusion.

"Anti-magic?"

Adler turned his grim leer toward Diarmuid with now obvious, cold murderous intent. "Sharp eyes for a rat. Indeed, this arm is a mystic mutation, called the Manus Dei. It disperses energy, rendering any form of magic against it useless, as you can see."

"Why is he telling all of this?" Ándras asked while pressing his wound.

"You can strengthen your magic by revealing its effect to your opponent. It's pretty risky, but I guess he is just that confident," Diarmuid explained.

Adler glanced back to Ándras, whose bruising had just begun to lighten up. " Seem that I missed the heart." He rotated his wrist in preparation.

"I won't let you!" Orel jumped in between the two.

Adler would not care for even a moment and instead went straight for whoever was standing in front of him. Whether that person was a child or an old man, it did not matter, as long as they were an enemy. Orel, recognizing the direct hostility in front of him, prepared himself. The approaching death made his mind go blank. Before he was filled with anxiety and various ideas he could not process in the ongoing chaos, yet with the imminent threat coming from him, those distractions disappeared, with only one thought in his mind: To protect his friends. He noticed blue glimmering sparks around him and knew what to do.

"Per Aspera Ad Astra!" He chanted hastily.

With no time to see what the lights would do, Orel grasped one at random and hoped for the best. Whatever it would do would be a mystery a blind yet hopeful step for a better future.

The glimmer before him surprised Adler. He did not think that such a young man would have achieved a spell, though he was aware that talent was rarely an observable trait. He would not have been bothered about it if it was a regular fireball or some other typical spell, but the ambiguous effect of it distracted him. It could be a problem if it were something that his Manus Dei could not neutralize, but that was if he could not neutralize Orel before that. Just to be sure, he heightened his senses from hearing to sight. Surely enough, they picked up something behind him.

Abandoning his target, Adler turned over to block whatever attack he felt coming. While his body was ready, his mind was not. It was Catori's sword spinning toward him from the storage room. He grasped it with his left arm, cutting open his glove. He was surprised, for sure, but for a different reason. The event had nothing to do with the spell, or that was what he thought. With a glance into the room, he would be proven wrong. The sword was still in Catori. Yet, the thing he was holding was not dispersing into mana either. What he caught was the real thing, an exact replica.

Adler dropped the blade in shock. He turned back to Orel with his stone-cold expression finally broken. It was replaced with a perplexed look with overwhelming bloodlust seeping from the cracks.

"What did you do?" He asked, staring him down.

A chill went down Orel's spine, yet it passed in a flash as he realized what happened.

"I did it!" He looked back into his palm with joy, quickly becoming confused. "How?"

Ándras' eyes peered to another fact that made them sparkle with child-like glee. "Robot arm!" He pointed at Adler's arm.

Indeed, what appeared from underneath the ripped glove was a shining, metal hand with intricate chromatic lines going through it like computer wiring. What's more, it appeared with something obscuring the clean iron. A cold, prickly layer of frost ran through the hand to the connection point at the wrist, turning the skin purple. Adler covered the arm by pulling his sleeve further out.

"You saw it, didn't you?" His hostility leaked through his eyes. He calmed himself after realizing he had lost his cool. "Then I do not need to capture you alive. I will not allow any government secrets to slip out."

"You were never aiming for that." Diarmuid objected.

"No, I was merely prepared to face any punishment for such an occurrence."

Diarmuid smiled through his pain. "Now who's a lawbreaker?"

"Petty laws and regulations will not stand against progress."

"Progress for who?"

The question made Adler fall silent. "That is irrelevant." He shook his head.

"Come again?" Diarmuid was taken off by how easily he breezed past his question.

"My judgment should only be aimed toward how to best complete the mission, not to question my superiors."

"Oh, so you just blindly follow orders then?"

"A tool is made to be used. Its only purpose is to work as well and efficiently as possible. A hammer does not question or hesitate. It is granted all its needs and freedom as long as it works when needed and serves its purpose well." Adler let out a long sigh. "What a pointless conversation. I will not allow you to impede my work any longer with this." He took out his fists.

Orel gripped his fist with an eager smile on his face. "I think I can do this."

In the darkness of the storage room, Catori was on the brink of death. His mind wandered off somewhere else his limbs becoming numb, his vision turning hazy and his headache growing worse. It had started right as he saw Adler. He could almost grasp a vision of something beyond his memories. Then, on the very edge of death itself, the whole picture was unlocked. With it came a realization. His mind was at ease and his body relaxed. His limbs straightened down to his fingers and toes and a mellow smile warped upon his face. With the smooth feeling in his body, even his sword slipped out to the floor like a knife through soft butter.