The city beyond awaited. Night air, heavy and thick with anticipation, carried the faint stench of iron, smoke, and danger. Somewhere across the winding streets, the merchant continued on his route—unaware of the invisible currents coiling toward him, unaware of the eyes already hunting.
Leximus stepped out from the narrow corridor, boots tapping against worn cobblestones. Shadows draped along him like obedient cloth, clinging, breathing, adapting to every shift of his weight. He drew a slow breath, steadying the uneasy thrum beneath his ribs.
Sirius' voice still echoed in his mind.
"You are not indispensable. The streets eat boys like you before dawn thinks to care."
Leximus had met the words with silence, but he had heard the truth in them. No warmth. No consolation. Only evaluation — a weighing of value against the world's indifference. Sirius wasn't trying to comfort him. He was probing, testing whether Leximus understood the simple reality: he was expendable, and if he failed tonight, nothing in the city would bend to mourn him.
But the cold part — the part Leximus didn't want to acknowledge — was that the thought didn't frighten him as much as it should have.
He was already used to being left behind.
The night spread before him.
He walked.
The merchant was easy enough to track. A middle-aged man with a limp that made his right boot scrape softly on uneven stones. A plain coat, patched clumsily near the hem. A satchel filled with ledgers and coded letters. Harmless at a glance.
Which was precisely why Sirius needed him alive.
Leximus kept distance — far enough that the merchant wouldn't sense him, close enough that he could intervene. He let the alleyways swallow him as he moved, letting his presence dissolve into pockets of darkness.
The air tonight felt denser than usual. Not colder. Not warmer. Just… heavy. As if something large pressed down on the city, compressing it into a tighter, sharper shape.
Leximus tasted something metallic on his tongue.
Not danger — not yet.
But something watching.
He shook the thought aside and continued forward.
The streets narrowed as the merchant veered into the industrial quarter — a labyrinth of abandoned workshops, rusted pipes, and gas lamps that flickered more than they glowed. Perfect ground for ambush. Perfect ground for people who didn't want to be seen.
Leximus watched the man pause at a junction, glance over his shoulder, then adjust his satchel strap before heading left.
He was nervous.
Too nervous for someone who'd walked this route many times before.
Leximus slowed, letting his shadow bleed outward along the wall. A faint hum tickled the back of his mind, the same hum that came whenever his power strained to sense something beyond its natural reach. He exhaled and ignored it — he had already learned the hard way how unreliable instincts could be when fueled by trauma.
He followed.
The alley grew darker. Even the gas lamps seemed reluctant to burn here, their flames shrinking as if suffocated by an unseen force.
Leximus felt it too.
A pressure in the air. Subtle. Rhythmic. Like a faint pulse in the stone.
Something about it felt… methodical.
Calculated.
He pushed forward.
The merchant stopped again, this time placing a hand against the wall as though steadying himself.
His shoulders trembled.
Leximus narrowed his eyes. This wasn't just fear. The tremor was uneven, like the man's body had suddenly forgotten the pattern of movement it had followed his entire life — as if something disrupted the instructions that kept him upright.
Leximus took a quiet step closer.
The merchant stiffened.
Then stilled.
The air held its breath.
A faint dragging sound echoed behind Leximus — soft, wet, deliberate. He turned sharply, eyes narrowing into the void. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.
He turned back.
The merchant was gone.
No footsteps. No sound. No displacement of air. Just absence — clean, sharp, absolute.
Leximus' spine tightened.
This wasn't the work of a brute. This wasn't a clumsy kidnapping. This was a surgical extraction — precise, silent, flawless.
Someone was playing with the structural logic of the scene.
And Leximus had walked straight into their sphere.
Shadows tightened instinctively around his limbs.
He exhaled once, steady and controlled.
Then the voice came.
"You're naïve."
The words weren't loud, yet they cut through the air like a blade drawn across silk.
Leximus didn't move.
The voice behind him carried no mocking lilt. No malice. It was simply a statement — an assessment from someone who had already measured Leximus and filed him under "insufficient."
Shadows rippled along Leximus' arms as he waited.
The speaker didn't step forward.
He didn't need to.
The air itself bent around the stranger's presence, unnaturally still. The faint city noises behind Leximus — dripping pipes, distant machinery, the rattle of carts on old roads — seemed to vanish. Not fade. Vanish.
The sound had been stolen.
Systematically.
Leximus' pulse thudded once.
Air manipulation.
High-level.
He turned, slowly, deliberately.
The figure stood not three paces behind him.
Tall. Thin. Impossibly still, as though motion was beneath him. His long coat hung clean despite the site's grime, not a stain or wrinkle on it. His boots, though he stood in a puddle, were dry.
But it was his eyes that rooted Leximus in place.
Unblinking.
Not in the way a predator stares.
In the way a mathematician evaluates a flawed equation.
"Turn around," the man said softly. "You don't want to see it coming."
Leximus' jaw tightened, but he stayed facing him.
Shadows writhed gently along his wrists, awaiting a command.
The man watched them without expression.
"Primitive defense mechanisms," he murmured, almost academically. "Instinctual. Crude. You don't even know what you're asking them to do."
Leximus ignored the words. "Where is the merchant?"
The man didn't sigh, but his eyelids lowered a fraction — the closest he came to impatience.
"Removed."
Leximus felt his throat tighten. "Dead?"
"Removed," the man repeated. "Irrelevant now. Your concern for him is inefficient."
Then his head tilted, just slightly.
"You followed him well enough. Better than expected. Sirius chooses his tools with some discernment after all."
Leximus' stomach hollowed at the mention.
"How do you know Sirius?"
"I don't need to know him," the man replied. "I can deduce him."
His gaze drifted briefly to Leximus' boots, the pattern of dust on his coat, the faint tremble in his left hand.
"You were not meant to survive tonight," the man continued. "You were intended for elimination the moment you were assigned this errand."
Leximus stiffened.
"You're lying."
A faint exhale. Not a sigh — a release of tension, as if Leximus' response had confirmed a hypothesis.
"You believe that because it makes the world feel manageable," the man said. "But the truth is simpler. You were expendable the instant Sirius noticed your potential."
Leximus' chest tightened. "Explain."
"Potential is dangerous," the man said. "More dangerous than incompetence. It creates variables. And variables create outcomes no one accounts for."
His gaze sharpened, cutting through Leximus like a scalpel.
"You are a variable."
The alley felt smaller suddenly, as though the walls leaned inward.
Leximus felt the shadows press closer, urging him to step back.
He didn't.
The man studied him for another long moment.
Then spoke.
"You were supposed to die following the merchant. A clean, simple loss. Sirius would mourn the asset, not the boy. That was the design."
Leximus forced the words out. "And you're here to make sure that design holds?"
"No," the man answered. "I am here because the design is flawed."
He took one slow step forward.
The air shifted — not blowing, not stirring — shifting, as if the molecules themselves realigned to allow him passage.
"You weren't supposed to notice," he said. "But you did. You weren't supposed to understand. But you do. You weren't supposed to survive the tremor a few minutes ago."
Leximus blinked.
The tremor.
When the merchant shook — that wasn't fear.
"That was you," Leximus whispered.
"No," the man corrected. "It was the structure of his movement breaking. I simply adjusted the pattern."
Air Avatars at the Savant Rank didn't manipulate elements.
They manipulated systems.
Movement. Logic. Sequence. Causality.
The man's gaze returned to Leximus.
"And now, here you are. An anomaly. An unpredicted survivor. That makes you dangerous."
Leximus steadied his breathing. "So you're going to kill me."
The man's eyes softened a fraction — not with emotion, but with certainty.
"Yes," he said. "Because the world is cleaner without variables."
The shadows around Leximus twitched.
The man raised a hand slightly — not to strike, but to silence the very idea of resistance.
"Don't," he said. "You cannot outrun a thought. And that is what I wield."
Leximus' pulse hammered.
Cold. Heavy. Inevitable.
But beneath that fear something else stirred:
Anger.
Not at the man.
At the world that kept deciding his life mattered less.
The man took another step.
"You have three seconds," he said calmly. "Turn around. You don't want to watch yourself be unmade."
The alley held its breath.
The shadows along Leximus' spine coiled.