The air in the Cinder-Reach hub was thick enough to chew. It wasn't the clean, thin air of the Sol peaks or the damp, salt-heavy mist of Zenith. It was a stagnant soup of coal smoke, ozone, and the metallic tang of a thousand cooling furnaces. Vane led the way through a narrow alleyway where the soot had settled into drifts like black snow, his boots making a soft, rhythmic crunch that Valerica struggled to match.

They had been moving through the industrial outskirts for three days. The process was exhausting in a way that had nothing to do with combat. It was the constant, low-level stress of being surrounded by people who looked at a clean pair of boots as a week's wages. Vane didn't use the carriage after the first day. A carriage in the hubs was a lighthouse for trouble, and he wasn't interested in wasting energy on low-level thugs who thought they were predators.

"We need to eat," Vane said, stopping in front of a rickety wooden stall wedged between two leaning brick tenements.

A large iron pot sat over a bed of glowing coals, bubbling with a dark, oily liquid that smelled vaguely of onions and charred fat. A man with a face as lined as a map and hands stained permanently black was stirring the concoction with a heavy wooden paddle. The steam rising from the pot was thick and grey, carrying a scent that made Vane's stomach growl and Valerica's nose wrinkle in instinctive protest.

Valerica stopped beside him, her hood pulled low to hide the violet of her hair. She looked at the pot, then at the man, then back at the pot. Her hands were tucked into the pockets of her grey traveler's cloak, her fingers likely twitching with the urge to cast a purification spell on the entire block.

"Is that meat?" she whispered, her voice tight with a mixture of horror and fascination.

"It's whatever was unlucky enough to fall into the trap this morning," Vane replied, pulling a few battered copper coins from his pocket and slapping them onto the grease-slicked counter. "Two skewers, Old Man. Extra char on the edges."

The man grunted, a sound that carried no hospitality, and pulled two wooden sticks from the pot. They were loaded with chunks of something unidentifiable and glistening with a heavy, dark grease. He handed them over without a word, his eyes already drifting back to the bubbling cauldron.

Vane took a large, aggressive bite out of his skewer, closing his eyes as the hot fat dripped onto his chin. The texture was questionable, a mix of gristle and soft muscle, but it was hot and calorie-dense. He chewed slowly, enjoying the way the salt hit his tongue.

"Not bad," Vane said, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. "Needs more pepper, but the texture is right. It's better than the dried rations we've been chewing on since Tuesday."

He held the other one out to Valerica. She stared at it as if it were a live serpent. Her fingers, even under the grime they'd applied for the disguise, were long and elegant, entirely unsuited for holding street carrion.

"Vane," she said, her voice dropping to a hiss. "I can see a hair on this. A very long, coarse, black hair. It's sticking out of the middle chunk."

"That's how you know it's fresh," Vane said, grinning through a mouthful of meat. "Eat it, Val. Your body is burning through your reserves just to keep your internal temperature stable in this damp. You're a Rank 3 Elite, but you're still human. If you don't get some fuel in the tank, you're going to be slow when the squad shows up. And out here, slow is just another word for dead."

Valerica took the skewer with the same trepidation one might use to handle a live explosive. She looked around the alley, as if hoping for a sudden monster attack to distract her from the meal. When none came, she took a tiny, tentative nibble from the top chunk. Her eyes widened, her nose wrinkling in a way that would have been comical if they weren't in a slum. She chewed slowly, her throat bobbing as she forced herself to swallow.

"It tastes like... burnt rubber and despair," she muttered, wiping her mouth with a scrap of cloth. "How do people live like this? How is this the foundation of the Empire?"

"Because they don't have a choice," Vane said, his voice losing its playful edge. He tossed his empty stick into a pile of refuse in the gutter. "The high-rank dining halls at Zenith are a lie, Val. This is what the world actually runs on. This grease, this soot, and the people who are too tired to complain about either. Gareth and his squad aren't coming here to save these people. They're coming to prune the weeds."

They continued walking, Valerica taking small, pained bites of her skewer while Vane scanned the crowds. He wasn't looking for mana flares. In a place this crowded, the background hum of thousands of low-level mages was a constant, confusing static. Instead, he was looking for the things that didn't fit. He was looking for a break in the rhythm of the hub.

In Cinder-Reach, everyone had a cadence. The workers moved with the heavy, slumped shoulders of people who had twelve-hour shifts ahead of them. The children moved with a frantic, desperate energy, always looking for a scrap of copper or a dropped piece of mana-coal. Vane watched the eyes. He watched the way people avoided certain corners or lowered their voices when they passed specific buildings.

They turned a corner into a small, enclosed courtyard where a group of children were playing near a rusted steam-pipe that hissed with a constant, rhythmic leak. Most of them were shouting, chasing a ball made of wrapped rags and twine. But one girl was sitting apart from them, perched on an overturned wooden crate near a stack of discarded iron pipes.

She was small, even for her age, with a shock of tangled, dark hair and a face that was surprisingly clean compared to the others. She was holding a small piece of broken bottle glass in her lap, turning it over and over in her hands with a quiet, intense focus.

Vane stopped. He felt a faint, familiar prickle at the back of his neck. It wasn't a flare of mana, but a sense of wrongness in the physics of the area. The light hitting the girl's hands wasn't reflecting off the glass in a normal way. It was bending, curving around the edges of the shard as if the air itself were being rewritten.

"Look at the girl," Vane whispered, his hand subtly moving to grip Valerica's arm to keep her from walking further.

Valerica followed his gaze, her posture instantly shifting from a weary traveler to a focused predator. Her violet eyes narrowed, tracking the girl's movements. "The one with the glass? She doesn't look like much. She's barely an Initiate by the look of her presence. She's almost invisible."

"Watch the crate," Vane said.

A boy from the group ran past the girl, his foot catching the edge of a loose cobblestone. He stumbled, his shoulder clipping the girl as she sat. She flinched, her grip tightening instinctively on the glass shard in her lap.

For a split second, the air around her hand didn't just shimmer. It fractured. The transformation was silent and terrifyingly fast. The piece of glass in her hand didn't break, but the wooden crate she was sitting on didn't just splinter under her weight. It turned. The rough, grey timber was replaced by a block of solid, transparent crystal, perfectly capturing the grain of the wood in a frozen, prismatic lattice.

The boy who bumped her didn't even notice. He just scrambled back to his feet and kept running after the ball. But the girl's eyes widened in a sudden, sharp fear. She scrambled off the crate, her breath coming in short, panicked gasps. She quickly threw her oversized, threadbare cloak over the crystal block, looking around the courtyard with a terrified, hunted expression.

"She's the one," Vane said, his voice barely audible over the hiss of the steam-pipe.

Valerica moved closer to him, her hand hovering near the hidden spear under her cloak. The playfulness from the food stall was gone, replaced by a fierce, protective heat that seemed to radiate from her core. "She's just a child, Vane. She has no idea what she's holding."

"She's holding a death sentence," Vane replied.

He stepped forward, his heart starting a slow, heavy thud against his ribs. He pulled the [Usurper] to the surface, but he didn't reach for the Silver Fang. He didn't reach for any of his stolen combat skills. He reached for the core logic of his Authority, the part of him that was designed to categorize and understand the world so he could eventually take it.

He focused his vision, narrowing the world down until there was nothing but the girl and the silver light beginning to pool in his irises. He pushed his intent through the visual spectrum, stripping away the grease, the soot, and the fear until the raw data of her existence laid itself bare before him.

[Authority Activated: Target Analysis]

The silver lines of the Imperial script etched themselves into the air above the girl's head, glowing with a faint, ghostly light that only Vane could see.

Name: Mara

Age: 12

Rank: 1 (Initiate)

Authority: [Crystalline Lattice] (S-Rank)

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