Alya screamed.

The sound tore through the house as she fought against the man restraining her, but he refused to let go. Leamor reached to the side as green energy formed around her head.

It spread across her face and hardened, muffling every sound that came from her until her screams became little more than broken noises trapped inside her throat.

The boy cried for his mother.

Larissa turned away.

She had watched bodies being pulled from alleys, families burned inside their homes, and victims left in conditions that no person should have ever been forced to see, but she could not continue facing the vision as the elf raised his hand over the child.

Ning did not look away.

He stared at every movement.

He saw Leamor’s face, the calm features of the elf holding Alya down, and the cold indifference of the one standing over the boy.

He memorized the armor they wore, the shape of the symbols upon it, the slight scar beneath Leamor’s left eye, and every other detail that could help him identify them again.

Then they killed the child.

Alya’s muffled screams did not stop.

Her body shook beneath the elf’s foot as she fought hard enough for the restraints to tear through the skin around her wrists, but the men did not grant her the mercy of looking away.

They dragged her head up and forced her to see what they had done.

Whatever they had intended when they first came to the house no longer mattered.

Leamor could not take her back to Faedria now, because returning with a woman who had married an outsider and given birth to his child would raise questions he could not control, while leaving her alive would risk the story reaching the people whose support he needed.

His claim to her had become useless. That left only his fury.

They killed Alya more slowly. Ning watched that too.

He watched until her struggles weakened, until the green restraints vanished from around her wrists, and until her body fell still beside her son.

Only then did the three elves begin cleaning away what little evidence they had left behind.

Leamor’s green energy burned away the marks that could be traced back to them, erased the residue from their clothing, and destroyed the objects they had touched.

They cleaned everything so thoroughly that Valen would spend years searching for answers regarding the deaths of his wife and child and never find them.

The three departed as quickly as they had arrived, leaving the broken door open and the ruined house silent.

Time moved on within the vision.

Larissa eventually turned back, although she did not look directly at the two bodies again.

Ning remained where he was.

He knew what came next before it happened.

The memory of it already existed inside him.

Hours later, footsteps sounded outside the house.

Valen arrived home.

He noticed the destroyed door first, and the experienced detective within him understood that something terrible had happened before he had taken more than a single step inside.

He entered with his weapon drawn, searched the front room, and then saw the hallway.

Ning felt the memory rise inside his mind at the exact moment the vision displayed it before him.

The confusion.

The refusal to understand what his eyes were showing him.

The hope that Alya might still be breathing.

The way Valen dropped beside her, reaching for her neck with shaking fingers even though the blood had already gone cold.

Then he saw his son.

The memory struck Ning with an intensity it had never possessed when it had existed only as information inside his thoughts.

He felt Valen’s hands tremble.

He felt the man’s breath fail.

He felt the moment something inside him broke so completely that it never recovered.

Valen did not know who had done this.

He did not know why they had come, how they had entered without being seen, or what weapon could have left behind wounds that none of the forensic experts recognized.

He only knew that he had gone to work that morning with a wife and child waiting for him at home, and that he had returned to a world in which neither of them existed anymore.

The vision faded.

The ruined house of the present returned around Ning and Larissa, drained of the life that had briefly filled it, with the broken walls and empty floor appearing almost peaceful compared to what they had just witnessed.

Larissa looked toward Ning.

She tried to say something, but there was nothing that could be said.

No apology would change what they had seen, no promise would return the dead, and no empty assurance that the murderers would eventually face justice could satisfy the man standing beside her.

Ning remained motionless.

He had been angry many times throughout his existence.

He had felt anger toward people who had hurt his family, anger toward Wills that treated entire civilizations as disposable, and anger toward enemies who had tortured or imprisoned him for lengths of time that ordinary minds could not comprehend.

This anger was different.

It came from him, but it also came from Valen.

The false memories inside his mind poured emotion into him with such force that the distinction between his fury and the dead detective’s grief became meaningless.

He wanted to teleport to Faedria.

He wanted to find Leamor and the two elves who had accompanied him, tear through every defense they possessed, and kill them before they understood that the past they had buried had finally caught up to them.

The System could locate them right now.

It would be so easy.

For a moment, he came close to doing it.

Then he stopped himself.

He held himself back because doing so would likely alert Tritus.

That thing knew about him and his strength, and it knew to watch for him. If he teleported across the world, the Constellation might realize something was wrong and run away.

For now, Ning needed to deal with Tritus first.

Once that was done, he could deal with Leamor and the others.