The boy didn't stop at one question.
"Uncle. If you're really a good person." His grip on Gregory's hand hadn't loosened. If anything it had tightened. "Why would you let General Malvick Siven slaughter Axel Krane's family?"
Gregory's mouth opened. Nothing useful came out of it.
"If you're really an innocent person." The boy's voice hadn't changed register at all, still soft, still a child's cadence. "Why would you let him kill Steven Bright and his family too?"
"If you're really a good person." A pause, and in the pause something in the boy's small face went very still. "Why the fuck would you kill me, Gregory?"
Gregory felt something prick the back of his hand.
He looked down.
A syringe. Dark green liquid, half emptied into his skin, held by fingers too small to belong to whoever was holding it steady.
The boy looked up.
And his face had changed.
It wasn't a transformation exactly. It was worse than that: an adult's expression, an adult's exact features, sitting on a child's frame, the proportions arguing with each other the entire time. The boy's small shoulders stayed small. His hands stayed small, still holding the syringe like a child holds anything, careful and a little too tight. Only the face above them had changed, and it had changed completely, down to the specific angle Ren always tilted his head when he was pleased with himself.
Gregory's stomach turned before the rest of him caught up. Some old animal instinct, the kind that recognizes a predator's shape before the mind finishes naming it, fired somewhere behind his ribs and found nowhere to go.
Ren smiled and pushed Gregory. Lightly. Barely any force behind it at all.
Gregory went down anyway.
His body locked the instant he hit the ground. He tried to push himself back up. Nothing answered the command: not his arms, not his legs, not even the small automatic muscles that kept a man's jaw from hanging open.
"Don't bother," Ren said, crouching beside him, wiping the syringe clean on his own sleeve. "That's Awakened Anesthesia. Keeps the patient awake. Keeps the body locked. Very useful for procedures where I want the person watching."
He turned the syringe over once, inspecting the last green film clinging to the glass.
"Legendary rank now, actually. Upgraded it a while back. Spent a small fortune of Fear Points on it." He said it mildly, pleased with himself, indifferent to whether Gregory cared, the same register another man might use mentioning a home renovation. "Used to wear off in a few minutes if the patient fought it hard enough. That's finished now. Whatever fight you've got left stays exactly where it is, Gregory."
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Gregory tried to curse out loud. The sound never left his throat.
He looked down to check what had happened to it.
There was no mouth to look at. Smooth skin ran where his lips had been a moment ago, seamless, like the feature had never existed.
"Don't look so shocked." Ren's amusement carried in his voice even without the smile to carry it visually. He rocked back on his heels, hands loose between his knees. "I got called uninspired once, you know. By someone whose opinion mattered to me. Said I lacked creativity."
He tilted his head, working something loose in his neck.
"So now that my power's grown a bit, I had a realization." He held up one finger, the universal gesture of a man about to make a point he was proud of. "I'm a doctor. I modify the bodies of my patients. Fix what's wrong with them. But what if I looked at everyone like that? Every person. Every problem. All of it, patient material."
He spread his hands.
"So I built a skill around it. I can graft, modify, and operate on anything, mid-combat if I need to. And if I keep refining it." His eyes went distant for a second, genuinely delighted by his own idea. "I think eventually I could operate on the world itself."
Gregory tried to scream. Nothing came.
This lunatic.
"But that's not why I'm here." Ren waved a hand, dismissing his own tangent. "I didn't come to show off the new toy. I came for something simpler."
He leaned in.
"I thought about this a lot, you know. If I hurt you. If I turned you into something worse than dead. You'd feel punished. You'd feel pain." He tapped one finger against his own temple. "But you wouldn't feel despair. People like you never do. You're too proud for it. Even at the bottom, you'd tell yourself there's a way back up, because that's what confidence like yours does. It survives everything, even the parts that should kill it."
His expression cooled by a fraction.
"What I want is for you to feel what I felt. When you were the one hunting me."
He let that sit.
"Hopelessness," he said. "Despair."
Gregory's eyes went wide with something closer to raw terror than anything he'd allowed himself to feel all night.
"That's right." Ren nodded, satisfied he'd landed it. "I have a skill now. It erases a person. Steals their identity whole. Once it's done, nobody remembers you. Your name is gone. What you built is gone. What you did to people who trusted you is gone. It's like you were never born in the first place."
He reached out and brushed a piece of dust off Gregory's shoulder, an oddly gentle gesture in the middle of the sentence.
"That part comes after, though. Right now, I'm just going to take everything that's yours." He counted it off on his fingers, unhurried. "Your identity. Your power. Your achievements. And then I'm going to ruin every last piece of it."
A single tear ran down the side of Gregory's frozen face.
"That's right." Ren's voice gentled, almost kind, which was worse than if it hadn't. "And there's nothing you can do about it. Because I'm going to replace you. And you're going to disappear. Never see, hear, taste, touch, or feel anything again."
He laughed once, short, delighted with himself.
Gregory's chest heaved with the shape of a scream his body refused to release.
Ren reached down and pressed two fingers flat against Gregory's cheek, the touch almost tender.
"Law of Identity and Skin," he whispered. "Replace."
The boy vanished from the alleyway.
Where Gregory Hood had been lying a moment ago, a man remained: Divine Hierophant's robes, the familiar face, the posture of someone accustomed to being obeyed. He opened his eyes. He sat up. He looked down at his own hands, unbothered, nothing in his expression suggesting he found anything about them worth questioning.
Nothing about him suggested he understood what he had just stopped being.
He touched his own jaw once, absent, found nothing worth commenting on, and let his hand drop.
Above the alley, the sky had begun to lighten toward morning, and the man who had once been Gregory Hood rose to his feet, straightened his robes, and walked out into it, already forming the first thought of a day that had never happened to him before.
The alley held its silence a while longer. The gutter kept dripping. Somewhere farther off, a bird began the first uncertain notes of a song it would finish once the light came properly, indifferent to what had or hadn't just occurred beneath it.