Chapter 140: The Sacrifice took place on the other side.

On the other side of the city, in the nightclub’s secured room, a second battle was finishing.

At Miguel’s word, the light-swords responded. They moved like arrows leaving a bow simultaneously, not sequential but all at once, driving in from different angles, converging on the green-haired man from every direction he couldn’t cover.

The physical resistance he’d built his entire mutation profile around proved irrelevant against weapons made of compressed divine energy.

The blades passed through it as though the property had no definition, the kinetic force not slowing by a single degree.

"No... this isn’t possible... what are you—?"

He was already on one knee. Blades had passed through his throat, both sides of his chest, his abdomen, both knees. He looked up with the expression of someone confronting a calculation that doesn’t resolve.

The luminescent green blood running from each wound spread outward when it hit the floor, the radiation dispersing through the air and making the electronics on the console crackle and stutter.

Miguel registered the dryness on his skin first, the specific, unnatural dryness that meant something was already passing through the surface.

He recognized it and was already reaching for the next parchment before the identification was complete, the invocation beginning before the paper was fully free of its case.

"Pure tear, primal spring, sacred divider, great god of shelter, I ask your blessing. Let me leave this place unharmed. Let your protection hold against what seeks to reach me."

The sourceless flame took the parchment. The stored magic converted into a blessing rather than a weapon, spreading around Miguel in a translucent mantle, weightless and nearly invisible. The radiation already in the air hit the boundary and stopped.

"Damn him, how many gods does one person pray to!"

The suited man’s voice had lost its cultivated ease. The expression he’d maintained through every reversal, pleasant, measured, calibrated, was finally showing the tension underneath. Things had moved far outside whatever he’d prepared for.

Miguel surveyed the room and fixed his attention on the control console. Raphael had told him where the recordings were stored. He stepped through the open iron door.

The suited man moved immediately. He sprinted for the console, reaching for the emergency control that would seal the iron door again and return the room to a closed configuration.

The light-sword arrived at his hand the moment it moved. The blade drove through the palm, through the wrist, and into the wall behind him, pinning both in place.

"Ahhh—!"

He tried to pull free by instinct. The weapon had no physical surface, it was constructed from compressed arcane energy and existed as pure force, not material.

His fingers couldn’t find it to grip. He could only feel the intense heat where it passed through his hand, constant and inescapable.

He stopped trying. He assessed his options. The room’s boundaries were no longer closed, which meant the most useful enforcement tools were unavailable to him, expulsion, the forced-departure sanctions, all of them depended on being inside a defined perimeter. He couldn’t use them here. He fell back to what he could still establish.

"According to social order and public decency, anyone who witnesses an injured person in a public space is obligated to provide whatever assistance they are able to offer immediately."

The first new rule locked in. As with every previous rule, it carried no retroactive force, the green-haired man’s blood on the floor, the bruising on the captives in the other rooms, none of it generated any compulsion in Miguel. The rule hadn’t existed when those things happened.

He understood the system now. Without Miguel triggering rule one himself, the suited man had no foundation for rule two. A person pinned to a wall with one rule that no one was breaking was a person who couldn’t do much.

The green-haired man was physically finished as a threat. Miguel walked to the control console as though neither of them were present and began working through the interface.

The green-haired man watched this through his pain, and something resolved in his face. He gathered what energy remained in his body, barely anything, with multiple light-swords still embedded in him, and concentrated it.

The charge that built in his eyes was a fraction of what it had been in the previous fight. The beam that came out was correspondingly smaller.

He aimed it at the suited man.

"What are you doing." The suited man’s voice came out without dignity, his composure breaking entirely.

Miguel had raised his eyebrow at the apparent friendly-fire incident before the purpose of it hit him.

The beam caught the suited man’s shin. A scorched hole appeared in the fabric, the skin beneath blackened at the edges, radiation immediately beginning to work inward through the surrounding tissue.

The suited man made another sound of pain, and then, through that pain, recognized what had just happened.

The first rule had been triggered.

The green-haired man, barely capable of movement, was forcing himself upright on the compulsion’s power alone, his remaining life force barely distinguishable from the ambient air around him.

He’d used himself to activate the rule, ensured that someone visible and injured was present and demanding assistance, so that the suited man would have a pathway to rule two.

The suited man, understanding that Miguel was seconds away from getting what he’d come for, opened his mouth.

"In a public space, one should not take objects belonging to others without proper authorization. Those who violate this are obligated to reflect on their conduct and, in accordance with public order, return whatever was taken to its rightful owner."

The second rule was established. But in the gap between its completion and its enforcement, Miguel had finished his search.

Raphael’s walkthrough had been accurate.

He found the correct switch on his second attempt, activated it, and the reinforced encrypted drive ejected from the console.

He didn’t touch it. Not yet. Rule two was already active, and picking up an object belonging to someone else, even to take it away, would fall under its terms. He looked at the suited man instead.

The suited man looked back at him. Began to say something.

Every light-sword remaining in the room pivoted at once and pointed at him.

The voice died.

For the first time in this confrontation, genuine fear moved through the suited man’s expression.

The careful hierarchy of concerns he’d been managing, reputation, leverage, control, collapsed into the single immediate question of the moment.

Miguel raised the silver short-sword and directed it at the center of the suited man’s chest with a small, unhurried motion of his wrist.

"NO!"

The light-swords moved without hesitation, striking from every available angle simultaneously.

The heart was reduced. The body was perforated at a dozen points. Two blades entered through the eye sockets and tore through what was behind them, ending the possibility of recovery from the inside.

This was a different quality of intent than the engagement with the green-haired man, that one had been containment, a subdual. This was termination, and every blade had been sent to guarantee it.

The suited man didn’t fall.

Transcendent life force was not human-baseline, and the body stood on what remained of it, rigid and ruined, the damage done and the systems still fighting against it.

It was enough to trigger rule one.

Miguel felt the compulsion arrive, external, not his own, insistent in the way that had nothing to do with how he felt about the man in front of him. He didn’t resist it. He let it come, and before it could execute itself he chose its form himself.

The corner of his mouth moved.

He reached into his coat and produced the capsule bottle. The warnings he’d given Raphael were still fresh, he’d said them clearly: supplement when full and the channels don’t hold.

He pried the suited man’s jaw open and placed two capsules on the back of his tongue.

The arcane energy released into a body with no deficit to absorb it. The channels were already at capacity.

The wave that hit them was exactly like a flooding river hitting a dam that was already full, the structure failed instantaneously, not gradually, nothing containing it as it went everywhere at once.

He didn’t have time to produce a sound. A single convulsion and the life that had been holding on let go.

A Lv4 bounty hunter. A name that carried weight throughout Zexi City’s underground. Known for precision, for cultivation, for the meticulous application of rules.

Dead on the floor of a nightclub’s secure room, unmourned, undignified, the very precision he’d made his name with turned against him at the end.

Miguel looked down at the green-haired man. He had lost consciousness sometime after forcing the first rule to trigger, the effort of standing on a body that had nothing left to give had exhausted the last of it. He was alive.

For what came next, the legal proceedings, the evidence, the testimony, a living witness was worth more than a dead one.

Miguel poured a recovery potion into the man’s mouth, administered enough to stabilize the bleeding, and then knocked him cleanly at the base of the skull. He would be unconscious for a while.

Only then did he pick up the hard drive.

He held it for a moment and let the breath out slowly. He put it away with the care of something that had cost considerable effort and was going to cost more before it was done.

He turned and walked back through the passage to the underground level.

The noise reached him before the doorway did.

Every captive was on their knees. Both hands tearing at the collars at their throats. The metal was lit from within, red light pulsing through it in rhythmic waves, filaments of energy extending outward from the collar’s surface and spreading along the skin like something taking root.

"What is—?"

The quality of it hit him before he could finish the question. Not a physical impact, something pressing against a different sense entirely.

Something that didn’t belong in the same category as ordinary energy or ordinary power.

His pupils contracted.

"A sacrifice ritual? Here? How?!"