"An elemental clash…?"
Nahida hovered above the Sanctuary of Surasthana, gaze narrowing. The warding beneath the temple stifled most auras, but a ripple still leaked upward—Dendro braided with something colder, older.
"Beneath the Sanctuary… someone's fighting down there."
She tasted the breath of a Dendro Vision. No one else with that signature should be there.
"Idris." She exhaled, equal parts relief and exasperation. "You really don't let me relax, do you?"
Relief flickered into alarm. If he was fighting, who dared move against the Grand Sage under her sacred tree?
Nahida didn't summon guards. She pushed her consciousness, a pale-green wisp, straight through rune-stone and root into the hidden vault below.
The undercroft was carnage.
Screams still ricocheted off the ribs of the cavern. Deadwood vines slithered back from ceiling and floor, thorns slick with a crimson sheen. Fatui masks lay split in two. Gilded Brigade shields were swallowed by the living briars. The air stank of sap and iron.
Idris stood at the center—unruffled, breath steady, Frostmourne's tip ticking blood onto the stone. Dragon-blood resilience rippled along his arms like faint, scaled motes; the Samsara Deadwood Domain coiled around him like a tamed beast.
The Fatui were finished. The mercenaries who still lived had dropped their weapons and pressed their backs to the walls, eyes blown wide. The academy elders—those who had hired blades and opened doors—had collapsed to their knees. One of them had already fouled himself; all of them shook.
"So many of us… and only a few scratches on him…" a merc whispered, numb with horror. "What were we thinking?"
Idris glanced down the line of kneeling robes. "Now," he said softly, "it's your turn."
He started forward, sword dragging, a dry rasp along the stone.
"Spare us! Grand Sage—spare us!" an elder bawled, forehead banging the floor. "The Doctor—he incited us! It was all the Fatui's plot!"
"Perhaps he nudged you," Idris replied, voice level. "But the greed? The fear of losing your slice of the pie? That was all you."
"You couldn't outplay me in means or in strength, so you bought knives. You failed. Now you beg. You should die with your naiveté."
He raised his blade—
—and a startled voice cut down the stairwell.
"What… what happened here?!"
Nahida's small figure drifted through the archway, luminous and aghast. Her eyes took in the battlefield—the withered vines, the puddled blood, the hulking silhouette of the Divine Machine sleeping in the gloom—and widened.
Idris lowered his sword a fraction and looked up. "Your Excellency." He inclined his head, perfectly calm. "You came at the perfect time."
Her gaze flicked to the elders, to the cowering mercenaries, to the last tatters of the domain curling back into his palm. "Explain."
"A mixed unit of Fatui and hired Gilded Brigade breached the sealed undercroft," he said, tone as cool as the stone. He toed a canvas pouch; metal canisters rolled out, their lids etched with crawling sigils. "They brought forbidden-knowledge canisters, tried to corrupt the mechanisms down here and eliminate me while doing it. These elders financed the attempt and opened the way."
Nahida's lips pressed thin. "Under my Sanctuary."
"Under our city," he corrected mildly. "I contained it. The Fatui are dead. The mercenaries who threw down their weapons live. The instigators…" He glanced at the elders. "I was about to pass sentence."
The elders crawled, prostrating themselves toward her instead. "Little Lucky Grass King! Mercy! We were misled—"
Idris's vines hissed, thorns angling. Nahida lifted a hand; the vines paused.
She floated closer, eyes dark with thought. "Conspiracy with a foreign power. Attempted assassination. Spreading forbidden knowledge. Sacrilege beneath the Sanctuary." Her voice was small, but each word landed like a seal. "All capital crimes."
A long breath. She looked from the corpses to the bound canisters, to Idris's steady gaze.
"I will not overturn mortal law," she said at last. "But there will be due process."
"Bind the elders. Disarm and detain the mercenaries. We will try them publicly. The Fatui you slew… leave them. I'll see to the miasma."
Idris studied her for a heartbeat—then flicked his wrist. The Deadwood Domain receded like a tide. Vines whipped out again, but now they wrapped wrists and ankles, dragging the elders into a neat row rather than tearing them apart. The surviving mercenaries let themselves be trussed without a sound.
"As you wish," he said. "Your presence gives this… clarity."
Nahida's eyes slid past him to the colossal silhouette at the hall's end—a god's husk of gears and petals, the Divine Machine looming like a sleeping statue. Shock flickered across her face; anger, too, and a twist of old grief.
"So this is what they hid under my feet," she whispered.
"A relic of past mistakes," Idris replied, unreadable. "And a magnet for future ones. Which is why I was down here tonight—tightening locks, tracing leaks, and now, evidently, taking out the trash."
He nudged the bag of canisters toward her. "Proof. Enough to break the Doctor's pipeline."
Nahida cradled one of the tins without touching it, her power skimming its surface like light over oil. "I'll purge these. Cyno is already moving outside the city; I'll have him seal the routes they used."
"Good." He wiped Frostmourne clean with a torn Fatui cloak and sheathed it, movements fluid, patient. "At dawn we announce the attack was thwarted, the source of forbidden canisters identified, and a joint crackdown initiated. As for the elders—"
"They'll stand trial," she repeated, firmer now. "Under law, not blade."
A faint smile tugged at his mouth. "Then I'll keep my blade for those outside the law."
He snapped his fingers. The last angles of the Domain unraveled entirely; only the blood remained, and even that Nahida's soft green radiance began to break down, purifying the stain.
She hovered a moment longer, reading the room, then cut him a sidelong look. "Next time you intend to 'tighten locks' in my basement, you'll inform me. You were hiding from me."
"I was sparing you the mess," he said, unblinking. "But—duly noted."
Her gaze moved once more to the machine's sleeping face. "This stays sealed. No more 'projects' without my knowledge."
"For tonight," he said, "we seal. Tomorrow, we speak of what to do with it."
From above, faintly, the city stirred. Patrol boots. Shouted orders. The law was moving.
Nahida lifted two fingers; green sigils bloomed around the prisoners. "I'll send word to Cyno to collect them. And… Idris?"
He arched a brow.
She swallowed, set her jaw. "Don't make me arrive just in time to stop you again."
He inclined his head, a razor's edge softer. "Then arrive just in time to witness."
Her eyes narrowed—annoyed, relieved, something else. "Hmph."
Light gathered around her as she began purging the lingering taint, and Idris turned away, already composing the dawn proclamation in his mind: treason foiled, Fatui pipeline exposed, justice to be seen and believed.
Perfect timing, indeed.
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