Aldric's breath settled, the last threads of the ritual's lingering heat dissolving from his skin. The symbols on the floor had gone dull—lifeless—yet their meaning pressed against him like an invisible hand around his ribs.
Someone knows.
Not just the surface-level folklore…
Not the cheap, bastardized version thrown around in occult chatrooms…
But the real meaning—its purpose, its bloodline logic, its consequence.
And only a handful of people in the entire world could possibly know that.
Aldric wiped his palm slowly, eyes narrowing.
Whoever used it didn't just know. They knew exactly what they were provoking.
His jaw tightened.
And that meant something far worse—
They were watching him.
Cut To: The Black Car
The sedan glided down the narrow, aging road, its headlights scanning over cracked pavement and leaning pines coated in wind-stirred dust. Inside, Varron drove with the stiff posture of a man who had been trained to look ordinary. Ms. Vos sat beside him, expression unreadable, tapping something silently into her phone.
The road ended at a weather-beaten farmhouse whose paint peeled like shedding bark. The place looked abandoned—deliberately so. A broken wheelbarrow sat rusting near the porch. The windows were fogged with age. Nothing moved.
But the second Varron pushed open the door, the illusion broke.
A wave of cold, recycled air met them.
Bright monitors hummed.
Men and women in dark tactical uniforms moved in sharp, synchronized patterns.
Cables twisted along the floor. Screens showed heat-maps, surveillance feeds, satellite pings. One wall displayed a massive board of names, faces, statistics. Another displayed live footage of the law school, every hallway and courtyard marked and tagged.
The moment Ms. Vos stepped inside and removed her coat and glasses, the room shifted—subtly, respectfully. Footsteps slowed. Eyes sharpened.
A man in his late forties, with silver hair cropped short and an ear-com fitted tight, approached with crisp precision.
He bowed his head slightly.
"Good evening, President Sky. What are your orders?"
Vos—no longer the mild, composed professor—lifted her chin with a quiet authority that belonged to someone who ruled from the shadows.
"Status?" she asked.
"All covert trackers in the city are active," the man replied. "Subject signatures are stable. The Law School cluster remains our highest flagged zone. We've detected two new anomalies in the district's western quadrant."
Vos narrowed her eyes.
"Any confirmation?"
"Not yet. But the patterns match pre-operation behavior. High-risk individual movement—possibly tied to one of the criminal families."
Vos exhaled through her nose, not in frustration—in calculation.
"Prioritize the anomalies. Divert Echo-Six to surveillance. And bring me all files connected to long-form ritual behavior. Anything historical. Anything archaic."
The man hesitated—for half a second.
"The old files, ma'am? Even the classified black-tier ones?"
Vos's gaze went ice-cold.
"All of them."
"Yes, President Sky."
And just like that, agents scattered, orders buzzing across comms.
Screens shifted, re-tasked, re-focused.
The LCO—Law Correction Officers, the silent shadow-police of criminal masterminds and top-tier syndicates—was fully awake.
Cut Back to Aldric-
Night settled like a lid over the neighborhood, the quiet suburban calm wrapping everything in a false sense of peace.
But Aldric felt none of it.
He stood near the window of his dimly lit living room, chest still vibrating from the ritual's echo. A faint breeze teased the curtains, carrying the scent of cold asphalt and distant rain.
Then… a flicker.
Instinct jerked his attention to the tall building approximately eleven houses north of him—barely visible through the spacing of the streetlights.
A tiny reflection caught the corner of his eye.
A lens glare.
Someone was up there.
A figure—just a silhouette at this distance—stood at the edge of the rooftop, binoculars raised and aimed directly at his house.
Aldric's pulse steadied, not quickened.
So it begins.
His mind raced back to the ritual, to what it meant, to why someone would use something so ancient, something so unforgiving.
There were only three groups capable of even recognizing the ritual's signature… and only one that would dare employ its meaning as a message.
But they shouldn't exist anymore.
Not after what happened years ago.
Not after the purge.
Aldric exhaled slowly, deeply.
"Who the hell knows something that old…?" he whispered under his breath.
His eyes lock on the rooftop figure.
"And what exactly do you want with me?"
As if hearing his thoughts across the distance, the silhouette lowered the binoculars.
Then it stepped backward—
—disappearing into the darkness.
Aldric's throat tightened.
This wasn't random.
This wasn't curiosity.
This was a signal.
A warning.
Or worse—
An invitation.
And the real question wasn't who was watching him.
It was how much they knew…
And how long they had been watching already.