Kai spent the morning trying to understand how big Adrian and Victor’s organization truly was.

The evidence in the ledger was real. He had spent the previous night verifying it, and it had held up across every check he ran. But evidence answered one question, and he was trying to answer a different one now.

Not what Victor had done but how the whole thing worked. He sat at the kitchen table with the documents spread around him and read over everything.

Victor’s name appeared everywhere. Contracts, meetings, approvals, investments, guild expansion records. Victor left a clear trail because Victor was the visible part. Every significant decision had his name attached to it somewhere, the signature or the approval, or the contact who had initiated the conversation.

Adrian’s name appeared three times across eighteen months of documentation.

But every time a company changed direction, Victor benefited. Every time an opportunity appeared in a space that should have been contested, Victor found clear ground. Every time someone gained influence that should have been someone else’s, Victor was the one positioned to use it.

There were no orders.

Because that was not what Adrian was.

Kai thought about the restaurant again. The one where Mina laughed and Leo built architecture from his food. He thought about how that restaurant existed because the owner’s father had chosen that corner, and no one had ever made him choose differently.

Adrian had not made Victor do anything, he simply positioned him and made things easier in certain directions and harder in others. And Victor always chose it.

"I’ve been asking the wrong question," Kai said.

He put the documents away and left.

...

The journalist’s building had a specific sound to it during the day. The radio the old man kept running was usually audible from the second-floor landing, low enough to be background but present enough to register.

Kai reached the third-floor landing, and the hallway was quiet.

He stopped walking, and for a moment, he grasped that the hallway was too quiet. Then he heard the footsteps a fraction of a second before it would have been too late.

He moved, and the blade passed through empty air where his neck had been. He turned and drove his fist into the assassin’s throat before the man had finished the follow-through. The assassin doubled over from the punch and hit the floor hard enough to rattle the hallway.

The second came from the doorway to his left with a knife that gave off a crimson light. Kai instantly grasped that it was a rare weapon before stepping inside the arc of the attack, and his elbow connected with the man’s jaw. The crack was audible, and the assassin went sideways into the wall and stayed there.

The third and fourth came together, coordinated, one high and one low, the combination that worked against people who prioritized one threat over the other.

Kai grabbed the high attacker’s wrist and twisted. Something snapped, and the knife spun across the tiles. His foot drove into the low attacker’s ribs with enough force to put him into the wall. The first attacker tried to recover, and Kai hit him once, and he stopped trying.

Four people were defeated in less than ten seconds.

Kai crouched beside the nearest one. The man was alive. "Who sent you?" he said. The assassin laughed while blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.

Kai checked the others and saw that all of them were prepared to die if they failed. That said more about who had hired them to attack him. He stood up and knocked on the journalist’s door.

It opened after the third knock.

The old man looked at Kai.

Then in the hallway.

Then back at Kai. "I assume those aren’t delivery drivers," he said.

"No," Kai said.

The journalist sighed. "Come in." The journalist looked through the peephole a second time before sitting down.

Kai put the documents on the table. The transaction records, the business names, and the meeting schedules from the ledger. The journalist looked at them with the attention of someone who had spent a career reading documents and knew what to look for.

The silence lasted long enough that traffic sounds from outside the window became audible.

The journalist stopped tapping his finger on the document. He looked at it for a moment longer without moving. Then he looked at the window and then at the door like he was checking to see if they still worked.

He looked back at Kai. "How much do you know about what happened to the last person who followed this particular thread?"

"Tell me," Kai said.

The old man was quiet for a moment. "He was a journalist," he said. "Better than me. Sharper. He had been following this same trail for two years when he disappeared." He looked at the photograph on the table, the one from twenty years ago. "That was fourteen years ago."

He tapped the document again.

Then the journalist said, "You’re asking the wrong question."

Kai looked at him. "What question should I ask?"

The old man tapped Victor’s name on the transaction record. Then moved his finger to the three places where Adrian’s name appeared. "Stop asking who worked for Adrian," he said.

Kai went still.

"Ask who worked with him," the journalist said.

The room was quiet.

"Victor handled people," the journalist said. He was looking at the photograph now, the one from twenty years ago. "Adrian handled problems... One built the stage and the other controlled what happened behind it."

Kai looked at Adrian’s face, then Victor’s, and the picture finally made sense. "Not boss and employee."

"Partners," the journalist said.

He thanked the journalist and left.

...

Victor found the envelope on his desk when he arrived that morning. The envelope looked ordinary and that made it suspicious.

He opened it.

One sheet of paper.

One sentence with three words.

You missed one.

Victor read it once and again before putting it down. The feeling he’d been ignoring for the last couple of days suddenly made sense. He had been thinking of those as separate events with their own explanations.

But they weren’t.

The contracts that had fallen through. The allies who had gone unreachable. The operations had quietly stopped producing results. He had been treating these as separate events with separate explanations.

He wanted them to be separate problems but they weren’t.

Someone had found information on who his guild was allied with and then began dismantling it. Countless figures appeared in his mind before he quickly started to narrow them down. And then Victor closed his eyes.

"No... It’s simpler than that... Only one of them has the power and influence to force multiple guilds to back out." He opened his eyes with a frown. "...Kai."

It wasn’t unexpected.

Kai’s retaliation had always been coming ever since the failed assassination attempt in Crimson Eden. The question was always when. He believed it would have come after the appearance of the B-Rank dungeons.

He sat down.

The office was quiet. Victor looked at the city through the window, the same view he looked at every morning. The city that had been growing and reorganizing itself since the gates fell. The city where his name was on a ranking board as an Authority Candidate and where the guild he had built was in the strongest position it had occupied since the system went live.

He opened his desk drawer.

Inside sat a second phone. He kept it charged and used it rarely. The contact list on it was short. He scrolled once.

Adrian Voss.

Victor looked at the name for several seconds. He had not called this number since before the Mythical phase began. They rarely spoke, and when they did, it mattered.

This was one of those moments.

He pressed the call, and the line rang. Once, twice. Then connected. Silence on the other end, the specific silence of someone present and waiting.

"We have a problem," Victor said. "Kai Rosefield is investigating."

A pause. Short, the length of a thought being completed.

Then a voice said, calmly and without apparent concern, "I know."

For the first time that morning, Victor frowned. Then he looked at the message on his desk and the three handwritten words.

"Then you know it’s past the point of coincidence," Victor said.

"Yes," the voice said.

"What do we do?"

Another pause. Longer this time.

"We let him come," the voice said. "And we see what he finds."

The call ended.

Victor held the phone and sat with what the calm had told him. Adrian had known Kai was investigating. Which meant Adrian had been watching this from before Victor had found the envelope on his desk. He put the phone back in the drawer.

A problem with a name was a problem with a solution, and for the first time in years, he wasn’t sure.