Just as the two Academy Guards were sliding the final locking bolt on Daemon's cell door—signaling the end of his seventy-two hours of enforced solitude—the air in the administrative corridor grew thick with latent Aether. The polished stone floor reflected the arrival of a new, imposing presence. Duke Steiner, now Lord Constable, swept into the wing, followed by his personal guard of heavily armored Imperial Knights, their movements precise and their faces shielded by polished steel helms. The Lord Constable's entourage was immediately flanked by a pale, lean man wearing the plain, dark robes of a specialized Imperial psychic. This was the Telepath, brought from the Alpine prison to secure the true interrogation.
The two groups—the Academy's neutral, internal security and the Constable's external, aggressive force—met in a silent display of authority. The lead Academy Guard quickly ceded control of Daemon, stepping back to let the Constable's knights take the prisoner. Daemon, clad simply in his civilian trousers and tunic, was led not out of the building, but deeper within, toward the most secured interrogation chamber. He looked utterly unfazed by the shift in his custodians, his face betraying nothing of the mental fortification he had just completed.
The interrogation chamber was a masterpiece of magical counter-intelligence: small, lined entirely with inert, black obsidian that killed Aetheric resonance, and warded against sound travel. Inside, the power structure was immediately apparent. Chancellor Altdorf sat behind a stone desk, rigid and severe, flanked by the recovered Chokuto blades and the boxes of evidence. Opposite him, Duke Steiner sat with a predatory stillness, his focus laser-sharp on Daemon. The Telepath stood to Steiner's left, his eyes already glowing faintly with a focused, silver light.
A third man, a professional questioner brought in by the Academy, began the proceeding. The interrogation was meticulously two-pronged. The questioner, a mage named Krell, directed the flow of the discussion, while the Telepath simultaneously probed Daemon's mind to bypass verbal defenses and extract the core secrets of his technology.
Krell began with a series of questions designed to establish baseline information and test Daemon's willingness to cooperate.
"Your name is Daemon. Is that correct?"
Daemon's voice, raspy from three days of silence, was flat. "Yes."
"Did you forge these two blades found in your possession?"
"Yes."
"Did you, personally, place the explosive and poison devices in your apartment?"
"Yes."
Krell frowned, exchanging a quick, irritated glance with the Chancellor. This subject was offering just enough cooperation to frustrate the process. Krell continued, pressing harder. "Do you understand that the chemical agents you deployed resulted in the death of three Imperial Guards and the critical injury of an Academy student?"
"Yes."
"Do you possess the formula for the Mythril-Tungsten alloy?"
"No."
"Did you learn the principle behind the white-hot combustion from an Imperial text?"
"I don't know."
As the questioner moved into more nuanced questions about his time in Berlin and the source of his wealth, the Telepath, whose name was Sorin, initiated his full mental probe. Sorin was a veteran, accustomed to wading through fear, lies, and emotional trauma. He silently breached the initial, weak emotional barriers Daemon projected—a carefully constructed façade of fatigue and intellectual arrogance—and pushed deeper, seeking the core memory associated with the construction of the explosives.
The moment Sorin breached the facade, he felt as if he hadn't entered a human mind, but had been flung into the cold, screaming vacuum of the void. His psychic awareness, which was accustomed to patterns of Aether, elemental emotion, and simple human logic, was suddenly confronted with a raw, overwhelming flood of concepts utterly alien to this reality.
It began with pure mathematics. Sorin's mind was instantly submerged in equations that defied Euclidean space and time. He saw the shimmering, complex, impossible topology of the Riemann Hypothesis, a problem dealing with the distribution of prime numbers, but visualized in Daemon's mind as a vast, shifting, hyper-dimensional cathedral of pure logic. The sheer, overwhelming volume of the numbers and the complexity of the relationships made Sorin's consciousness reel. It was logic applied to existence itself, and it was crushing.
Before Sorin could retreat from the mathematical deluge, the focus shifted to elemental structure. Daemon's mind—now an active, weaponized forge—forced Sorin to witness the inner mechanics of creation. Sorin was shown the concept of Nuclear Fission: he saw an atom, not as a point of Aetheric alignment, but as a miniature solar system, a nucleus being deliberately fractured, resulting in an impossible, exponential release of energy. He was then slammed with Nuclear Fusion, seeing light elements crushed together by gravitational-level pressures to create the sun's fire on a scale that shattered the mental concept of 'heat'. This wasn't magic; it was the manipulation of existence at its absolute, smallest, most terrifying level.
Finally, Daemon's mind forced Sorin to visualize the outcome. Sorin was overwhelmed by the memory Daemon had once watched: the footage of a thermonuclear explosion. In the Telepath's mind, the vision was agonizingly real. Sorin saw a blinding light that was millions of degrees hotter than any natural fire, a vast, expanding hemisphere of pure destruction, followed by a colossal, angry mushroom cloud ascending into the heavens, destroying life for miles around with invisible, lethal radiation. The power was so immense, so unmanageable, that Sorin's carefully nurtured Aetheric sense screamed in violation. This was not the power of gods or demons; it was the power of nothingness becoming everything, all compressed into a single, terrifying instant.
The mental force of the vision, coupled with the incomprehensible complexity of the logic, was too much. Sorin's psychic link snapped with a tearing, agonizing sound. He was violently ejected from Daemon's mind, collapsing backward with a strangled cry. Blood immediately burst from his nose and ears, staining the front of his dark robe. He lay trembling on the obsidian floor, his hands desperately clutching his temples.
Duke Steiner instantly stood, appalled. "What in the name of the Kaiser happened? Sorin! Report!"
The Chancellor, despite his initial shock, kept his gaze fixed on Daemon, who sat completely still, his eyes clear and his breathing slow.
Sorin struggled to rise, his body convulsing, the vision of the atomic fire still burning behind his eyes. He used the stone desk to haul himself up, his voice a frantic, high-pitched gasp.
"My Duke… my Chancellor… I—I could not penetrate. His mind… it is not human. He offered me riddles, vast libraries of pure, terrible mathematics that do not exist! He showed me numbers that collapse reality! I saw equations for the sun's fire, but contained within metals! Not Aether, but matter itself being used to generate power, in ways that defy the fundamental laws of creation!"
Sorin pressed his bloody hands against the desk, leaning in desperately to communicate the existential threat he had witnessed. "The bombs, my Lord Constable, the explosions—they are a simple consequence of this knowledge! I saw the memory of the detonation. It was a sun on Earth! A sphere of pure, white destruction, larger than a cathedral, rising into a cloud of impossible, malevolent power! It was an end-of-days weapon, forged with a cold, absolute logic that felt… pre-Imperial. This commoner is not hiding a magic secret, he is hiding a world-ending science that can wipe our civilization from the map! I was overwhelmed by the sheer, devastating truth of it! We cannot use Telepathy on him again; his mind is warded by impossible concepts designed to shatter anyone who tries to enter!"
Duke Steiner stared, his face pale with a mixture of terror and furious recognition. The vengeance he sought had just been complicated by a threat far greater than he had anticipated. Chancellor Altdorf, however, watched the bloody, raving Telepath with a chilling look of intellectual triumph. The vertigo he felt from the Chokuto, the poison trap, the second blade—it all confirmed the Telepath's terrifying story. Daemon's knowledge was not only real, but it was boundless.
Altdorf slowly reached out and tapped the obsidian desktop with the metal prongs, the sound echoing through the stunned silence. His voice was quiet, but it commanded absolute attention. "The probing is over. Lord Constable, we proceed with conventional methods. No more magic. The commoner has proven that his secrets cannot be taken. They must be given."