The man in the black suit and white mask walked into Malvick's office without waiting to be announced.
Malvick was on his feet before the door finished closing, one hand already moving toward the sword leaning against his desk. Then he stopped.
"Gregory."
"Malvick."
Malvick's hand stayed near the sword but didn't close on it. He studied the mask, the suit, the posture, everything about the man in front of him that read as Gregory Hood down to the particular way he stood with his weight slightly favoring his left side, an old habit from an old injury nobody outside the two of them knew about.
"What happened to you," Malvick said. "You look."
He stopped.
"Fine," he finished. "You look fine. Not like a man who lost everything in a single night."
The mask smiled. It had no features to smile with, and somehow it managed it anyway, the same trick it had always managed, the one Malvick had stopped questioning nineteen years ago because questioning it never got him anywhere.
"It took considerable effort to escape the guild," Gregory's voice said. "You'd be surprised what a person can survive when survival is the only option left."
"I would not be surprised. I've watched you survive things that should have ended you twice."
"Three times, if you're counting the border collapse."
"I don't count the border collapse. You cheated."
"I improvised."
"You cheated," Malvick said, and something in his shoulders eased that hadn't eased in nine hours, the specific relief of an old argument landing exactly where it always landed. He sat back down, gestured at the chair across the desk. "Sit. Tell me what happened. All of it. Nine hours of silence from you is nine hours I don't want to repeat."
Gregory sat.
Behind him, two figures remained standing near the door: a tall knight in red armor, faceplate down, and a monk in saffron robes with his hands folded into his sleeves.
Malvick's eyes moved to them and stayed there a beat too long.
"Yours?" he said.
"Dark Division. Alchemist guild assets. They got me out." Gregory's hand moved, an easy gesture toward the two of them, the kind of introduction a man makes when the introduction doesn't actually matter to him. "I owe them more than I can currently repay."
"The alchemist guild doesn't run field assets like that."
"They do now."
Malvick studied the knight and the monk for another moment. Something about the stillness of both of them didn't sit right, the specific quality of people standing exactly where they'd been told to stand and nowhere else. He filed it, the same instinct he used on most things that didn't add up cleanly, and let it go for now. There would be time to ask better questions once Gregory had finished the version he was ready to give.
"Tell me," Malvick said again.
Gregory told him.
He gave a version that was mostly true, the specific mostly-true of a well-constructed lie: the betrayal by Wei Liang, real. The Bone Saw fight, real, if trimmed of certain details. The flight through the sewers, real. What he left out was everything that mattered, every place where the man telling the story was not the man the story was about, and he told it with the exact cadence Gregory Hood used when he was choosing his words carefully, thirty years of political instinct compressed into every pause.
Malvick listened without interrupting. When it was done, he sat back.
"You're certain it was Ren Hector."
"I'm certain."
"The doctor from Qintara."
"The same one we declared dead nineteen days ago."
Malvick's jaw tightened. "The Fated String held. I watched it hold."
"It held against the version of him that existed nineteen days ago. He's not that version anymore."
"How."
"I don't know yet." Gregory's voice carried something that might have been genuine frustration, and it was, in its way, though not for the reason Malvick would assume. "I intend to find out."
Malvick was quiet for a moment, turning it over.
"I should have been there," he said. "In Victoria. I told Renata I'd go the moment you went dark, and then you walked in here before I had to."
"You would have died there."
"You don't know that."
"I do," Gregory said, and something in the register shifted, quieter now, closer to what Malvick would have called honest if he'd had any reason to doubt it. "I watched what he did to a district full of Legendary and Mythical-rank hunters in under an hour. You walking into that would have been a second body added to the count. Mine, probably, trying to keep you out of it."
Malvick didn't answer that right away.
"Then what do we do," he said finally.
"We find him. Before he finds either of us again." Gregory's hand came up, palm open, the gesture of a man asking for something small. "Give me your hand."
Malvick looked at him.
"For what."
"A tracking mark. Something that lets me find you if this happens again. If he comes for you next, I want to know before you're another nine-hour silence I have to sit through."
Something in that landed exactly where it was aimed. Malvick extended his hand across the desk without further question, the trust of nineteen years doing exactly what it had always done, closing the gap between suspicion and action faster than either man had ever needed to examine.
Gregory's other hand produced a needle, and it moved fast, faster than the gesture should have allowed, aimed at the base of Malvick's palm.
It didn't penetrate.
The needle snapped clean against Malvick's skin, the shard spinning off across the desk, and for a fraction of a second nothing in the room moved.
Then Malvick felt it. A threat signal arriving from everywhere at once, the specific alarm of a Legendary-rank body registering danger its instincts hadn't caught in time to name.
He was already moving when the portal opened behind him.
He saw it for less than a second, a tear in the air with nothing sane behind it, before something red and enormous drove a boot into his back and sent him through.
The portal held for exactly as long as it needed to.
Bone Saw went in after him, laughing before the tear had fully closed.
Retractor snapped his fingers. The portal sealed, the air where it had been settling back into ordinary stillness, as though nothing had ever opened there at all.
He turned.
Not to Gregory.
"Father," he said. "Can Bone Saw win, one against Malvick, with nobody else involved?"
Ren's face didn't change, still wearing Gregory Hood's features, still smiling with a mouth that had never once belonged to him.
"They're both built for a full battlefield," he said. "Bone Saw needs bodies and blood to scale. Malvick needs allies to coordinate through, terrain to use, a war to actually be Malvick in." He tilted his head, considering it. "We just sent them to the middle of nowhere. Ten thousand kilometers of nothing in every direction. No civilians. No terrain either of them has studied. No one for either of them to draw strength from."
"So they're both cut off from what makes them dangerous."
"Both of them. Badly."
Retractor's expression, what little of it showed beneath the placid original face, sharpened with interest.
"Are we lending a hand, Father?"
Ren's smile widened.
"Yes," he said. "We are."
He reached for the staff at his side, the one that had belonged to a Divine Hierophant an hour ago and belonged to him now, gold light already threading up through his fingers.
"Malvick Siven," he said, and the words carried the weight the invocation demanded, "shall die by the hand of Major General Axel Krane, today."