Solan shot Matt a look, half glare, half disbelief. “I wasn’t—forget it. Forget all of it.”
Matt snorted into his glass, clearly enjoying himself far too much for someone standing in a relic boutique that smelled like old money and slow rot. "Relax, man. Worst case scenario, we sprint for the exit. I'll create a distraction. Something tasteful. Something on-brand."
Solan ignored him. His mind was still tangled in the handler’s words— reserved for you —like threads he couldn’t quite pull free of. The room hadn’t shifted, but something in it had. The air felt heavier, as if the lights overhead had dimmed a shade without anyone touching them.
He took a slow breath. The amber glow of the lower floor pulsed gently against the polished surfaces, warm and breathable, but the warmth felt… staged. Manufactured.
Matt elbowed him, lowering his voice. “You know what the bartender told me? That guy digs my vibe, and says he knows people at the Severance Parlor. You know, the relic-tuning place. They calibrates your draconic factor so it resonates optimally or whatever. They’re booked solid for the next two years, but he said if we pay extra, he can get us in.”
“We?” Solan asked flatly. “I don’t have that kind of money.”
"Shit my bad, totally forgot you're broke. Damn this one is strong." He clapped Solan on the shoulder. "Okay, new plan. I'll go check the relics. You"—he pointed toward the bar with all the authority of a drunk tour guide—"should definitely try their Louis XIII . Do not ask the price. Do not think about the price. Just drink it."He paused, then added with great solemnity: " Ré-my Mar-tin. "
“Pretty sure that’s not how you say that,” Solan murmured. But Matt was already drifting toward the display cases, muttering something about “investment pieces.”
*Fine. Whatever. *Solan made for the bar, mostly to have something to do with his hands besides wring the nerves out of them. The bartender slid a glass toward him with that unsettling Aurichen smoothness—no words, just liquid gold and expectation.
Solan hadn’t even lifted it when the air changed.
Time broke in half. One second, the world was amber—viscous, suspended, a held breath in glass. The next, it shattered.
The sound was blunt and too real, like a waterlogged sandbag hurled against tile. Thud—crack. Something heavy collided with something harder. A body came spinning down from above, tumbling end over end, a discarded puppet flung by an impatient god. It hit the marble steps, bounced, rolled, slammed again. Limbs skidded on polished stone. The body finally hit the floor and slid several meters before stopping.
Too fast. No one had time to process it. Silence lasted the length of a blink. Then the man moved.
He twisted, fluid and vicious, hand snapping toward his lower back. Steel flashed. A compact submachine gun appeared in his fist, black and close-lined, stinking of oil and intent. He didn’t aim, just raised his arm and emptied his rage uphill.
The gun opened up.
The first round hadn't even found a wall before the room answered. A low, mechanical exhale ran through the floor—felt before heard—and then the panels came down. Smooth, heavy, like the building had been waiting for exactly this. The freestanding cases in the center sealed themselves behind reinforced shutters, one after another, each impact a soft, final thunk. The walls followed. Whatever Aurichen kept down here, it had decided long ago that it would survive any given night.
The people had no such mechanism.
There weren't many—a handful of guests maybe. The staff moved before the guests had finished processing the sound. No hesitation, no wasted motion—just bodies dropping, arms spreading, the handlers covering the nearest guests with the practiced ease of people who had run this drill enough times for it to live in muscle rather than mind. The bartender went over the counter in one clean motion, taking someone down with him, his shoulder absorbing the impact so theirs didn't have to.
The alarms didn't wail so much as hum, a deep, pressurized tone that sat in the chest rather than the ears. The smell changed instantly: gunpowder cutting through alcohol and old wood, sharp and wrong, like a blade dragged across a painting.
Almost at the same time, Solan’s body moved on some pre-coded emergency script, as if someone had shoved survive directly into his spinal cord. He vaulted the curved bar—hands slapping cold stone, knees skimming polished wood—and dropped into the hollow behind it. Liquor bottles rattled above him; a spray of shattered glass pattered down like sharp rain.
The world compressed, sound flattening, air thinning, his heartbeat thundering where his thoughts should’ve been. He crouched, breath quick and uneven.
And then, a breath, very quiet, slipped past his ear. Solan’s heart jerked. Someone was already there, tucked into the shadow of the heavy bar supports. A few loose strands of light blonde hair fell over half her face;the rest of her was pressed into darkness. But her eyes, impossibly clear—caught what little light there was and held it.
“Clara?” It came out louder than he meant.
“Shh.” A fingertip touched his lips.
Her finger felt like a sliver of ice, but where it met his mouth, heat flared. “What are you doing here?” she whispered, her breath brushing his ear.
“Open bar?” Solan heard himself say, defaulting to the nearest bad joke. He tried to cram his panic into sarcasm and hoped it looked like control. The excuse felt thin, ridiculous, almost offensive to the situation.
Clara blinked, thrown for just a beat. Then the corner of her mouth twitched, almost a smile, almost not. “…Ha.”
She shifted slightly. The ends of her hair swept across his cheek. A clean, soft scent—white peach, he thought, absurdly—slipped into the mix of gunpowder and spilled alcohol, wrong in every possible way, like a flower blooming in the middle of a blast zone.
His throat worked. His heartbeat forgot its job and started improvising. Somewhere inside, the system flipped the wrong switch: instead of pure adrenaline, something else crept in, light and off-timing, a sweet, dizzy flutter that had no business existing right now.
"This is… kind of a disaster," he breathed. His eyes stayed locked on her lashes, absurdly close. He didn't finish the sentence.
“What?” Clara’s brows lifted, eyes searching his.
“Didn’t say anything.” He jerked his gaze away, scrambling for cover in the only direction he knew. “I said—damn, so much for a post-miracle society.”
Clara made a small sound in her throat, half cough, half laugh, maybe equally aware of the distance that had suddenly evaporated between them. She edged back half an inch, enough to reset whatever was tilting.
“When,” she murmured, “do you think we can get out?”
“When they’re done,” someone else answered. The third voice arrived from the floor, rough with leftover terror. Matt dragged himself into their little refuge like something that had escaped a grill and landed in the ocean by mistake. His hair was plastered to his forehead with champagne foam; his shirt was mottled with stains of questionable origin. “Jesus,” he spat, casting a cautious look at the chaos beyond the bar. “I knew this place was cursed. It was wrong from the old guy and the asset check onward.”
Behind the bar, crammed into a wedge of space barely big enough for the three of them, it felt—and sounded—like the center of the storm. Bullets screamed, but they veered, striking elsewhere. Somehow, the worst of the spray kept shaving past them instead of through them.
Solan and Matt shared a look, then inched up just enough to peer over the bar—two anxious animals testing the air outside their burrow. The gunman was still on his feet, still firing in wild arcs—until his body suddenly jolted. His spine seemed to fold around an invisible impact. His jaw snapped sideways and something small and white spun out of his mouth—a tooth, streaked red, tracing a quick, glittering arc through the light like a tiny falling star.
“What the—” Solan started.
He didn’t get to finish. A figure blinked into existence at the edge of his vision, appearing so abruptly it felt like the room had exhaled him out of a wrinkle in the air. He wore a mask—odd material, wrong texture—etched with a sigil like teeth curling into a void. His movements were too clean, too timed, as if the chaos around him existed just to give context to his precision.
He didn’t bother with introductions. He leapt. A side kick, whip-fast, carved through the air and slammed into the gunman’s chest.
THUD.
The body hit the ground again, the impact lost beneath the noise. Even down, the man’s hand spasmed, finger clenched around the trigger.
The gun kept firing.
Muzzle climb dragged the shots upward, ripping through glass and shelving. Bottles burst one after another—liquid and fragments exploding outward, alcohol and shards raining down together.
Solan and Matt ducked back under cover, pressing their backs against cold wood and stone. They could feel every impact reverberate through the structure, small shivers in the bones of the bar.
Matt wiped a streak of something amber and sticky from his cheek, then stared dumbly at his fingers. “The sigil on his mask. It’s the Maw. Trust me.” Matt’s voice dropped even lower, the way people spoke in churches or crime scenes. “Only those lunatics would hit Aurichen on purpose.”
“That tooth… you think that’s part of the Kamuy?”
Matt shrugged, eyes still scanning the room beyond the bar's edge. "Maybe. Who knows."
Then he looked up. The back bar rose behind them in careful tiers, bottles climbing the wall in rows, glass catching the amber light like captive sunsets waiting out a storm. Matt studied it for a moment with the focused expression of a man doing triage. "Alright." He kept his voice low. "Emergency policy. We're picking something. In about thirty seconds half of these are getting ventilated."
"Can we maybe focus on not dying first?"
"We are. This is called morale management." Matt leaned lower, peering through the gaps between bottles. "Clara. Your call. Rich people wine list. Go."
Clara glanced up. Her eyes moved once across the labels, then stopped. "That one," she said quietly.
Matt followed her finger. "Krug Rosé." He reached up and twisted the bottle free from its cradle. He braced it against the bar rail, worked the cork loose with a soft, pressurized pop, and took the first pull straight from the neck. He didn't react for a moment. Then his brows lifted. "…Good pick."
He passed it down.
Solan took it on reflex. He hadn't planned to drink—the whole reason they'd ended up here traced back to a night he'd had too much and said things he couldn't take back. He knew that. He thought about it for exactly one second, then drank anyway. The rosé was colder than he expected. Sharp at first, then something softer underneath—strawberry, maybe, or something that had only learned to pretend.
Clara took it from him without a word. One small sip. She wiped her mouth with the side of her hand, unhurried, like the gesture belonged to a different and quieter evening.
Matt's arm reached past Solan and reclaimed the bottle. "Don't worry," he said. "Open bar."
Solan looked at him. Then at Clara. Matt was already studying the back shelf again with the calm of a man planning his next order. Clara had her hands folded in her lap, unhurried, like she was waiting for a bus. Neither of them looked like someone who had just been twelve inches from a live shooter. Solan wasn't sure if that was impressive or deeply concerning.
“So what are you doing here?” Solan asked. “Looking for some relic?”
Clara brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. A few pale strands had slipped forward in the chaos, catching the amber light. She shifted slightly, and that was when he noticed it—a white satin bow clipped into her hair, somehow still intact. His heart tripped over itself. She looked good. Unreasonably good for someone crouched behind a bar with gunpowder in the air.
"I had access tonight," she said. "Helping one of the professors run a survey. Just looking at a few pieces they don't usually show." A brief pause. "Aurichen keeps the failures. Most places don't."
"The failures?"
She noded. "Relics where the output didn't match the intent. Where something went sideways between people and the object." She glanced at the nearest case, half-visible through the bar gap. "Most inventory here went through a certified conduit during fabrication. The bearer's Kamuy gets pressed into it—that's what makes it functional. What makes it a relic instead of just expensive material."
Solan waited.
"But if Kamuy is personal," she said, "then what does a relic actually carry after the bearer's gone?" She said it the way someone tosses a coin into a fountain—not waiting to see where it lands.
Solan didn't answer. She didn't seem to need him to.
A burst of gunfire cracked somewhere above them. They both flinched. Solan exhaled slowly. "Honestly," he said, "a Glock works better than most Kamuy and relic combined."
Clara looked at him. Then the corner of her mouth moved, almost a smile. "…That's probably true."
“I think they stopped” Matt cut in.
Solan and Matt traded a look. The absence of noise felt louder than the barrage. Then, as if synchronized by the same bad idea, they eased up again, heads rising inch by inch over the bar’s edge.
The scene on the floor had rearranged itself.
At the top of the lower staircase, framed by the steps that led back to the bright, curated world above, stood the old man in the three-piece suit. The same one from upstairs—the one with the gold chain and the careful bow. His hand was raised, fingers splayed, steady as if he were adjusting the level of a drink rather than standing in the aftermath of a gunfight.
“I hope,” he said quietly, but somehow into every ear at once, “you might do Aurichen—and an old man like me—the courtesy of keeping outside violence outside. This is a place meant for quiet appreciation.”
The masked man’s head turned, the carved emblem of his mask angling toward the old man in a silent calculation.
On the floor, the gunman—bleeding, toothless, desperate—saw the momentary stillness and lunged for it. His eyes went wild. He dragged the micro-SMG up one last time, knuckles white. The trigger snapped back. Crack—
A single round spat out of the barrel, but it never arrived. The bullet stopped in midair. It hung there, vibrating faintly, buzzing with trapped momentum as if some invisible hand had gripped it by the nose.
The old man didn’t flinch. He didn’t even look at the round. He gave his raised hand the most casual of flicks, a bored shooing gesture, as if brushing a leaf off his sleeve. The bullet shivered, turned, and then—obediently, almost gracefully—dropped toward the floor like a tool being returned to its rightful owner.
It sank into the marble at the gunman’s head, carving a single, neat hole, as clean as if a craftsman had burned it there on purpose. A tiny spray of pale dust jumped up, then settled. The brass casing sat at the bottom of the crater like a small, dark eye. Silence rolled in again. Deeper this time. Heavy.
Matt’s mouth was hanging open. It stayed that way for a few seconds before he managed a whisper. “…Told you,” he muttered, voice just for Solan. “Real boss always shows up last. And doesn’t need to raise his voice.”
Something passed between the old man and the masked man—a wordless check, a weighing of scales.
In the end, The Maw didn’t speak. He simply removed his boot from the gunman’s body, turned, and moved away. His steps were almost soundless, like wind carrying bits of shattered glass up the stairs. A few seconds later, he vanished into the shadowed spill of light above.
The gun man got up, pushed himself upright, and—without a word—shoved the weapon back into the holster at his lower back. He staggered once, steadied, and walked to the other side of the bar. Sat down. Reached for a bottle. Poured himself a drink.
Noise faded. The panicked energy in the room loosened by degrees, leaving only the sticky, spreading puddles of liquor—a sweetness turning sour as it sat, seeping into silence.
Only then did Solan, Clara, and Matt haul themselves out from behind the bar. They were streaked with drink and dust, sparkling here and there with embedded flakes of glass. Under the lights, they looked like they’d crawled out of a very expensive shipwreck.
“That was… not what I was promised,” Matt said under his breath. He then slapped at his pants with more enthusiasm than success. “Next time you say ‘let’s find a place to grab a drink,’” he said toward Solan, “I’m checking whether the menu lists bullets as a side dish.”
By then, the old man had turned. He walked toward them at an unhurried pace. Each step felt measured, the way clock hands move—steady, inevitable. His face had rearranged itself back into its usual mildness. If not for the neat hole in the marble, Solan could almost have believed he’d imagined all of it.
“I must apologize,” the old man said, stopping at a polite distance before dipping his head. His tone didn’t ripple, just sat perfectly in place. “It seems we’ve allowed an unfortunate incident to disturb the evening. The auction upstairs will have to pause for a short while. We’ll resume once order is restored.”
“It’s fine,” Solan said quickly. He tried to sound relaxed, casual, like the bullets and suspended physics hadn’t happened. “We were just leaving anyway.”
The old man smiled. Not a throwaway courtesy, exactly. More like a carefully rehearsed gesture of respect offered to something larger than them—protocol, maybe. Or power.
"In that case," he said, "as a gesture of compensation for the inconvenience…" He adjusted his cuffs, almost absently. "Aurichen would like to extend a small exception—for Mr.Elric, specifically. I understand our handler had already arranged a seat upstairs on your behalf. Consider this in lieu of that." A pause. "You're welcome to choose any single item from our open market. No charge."
Solan did the math in about two seconds. The handler. The seat upstairs. **Reserved for you. All of it, apparently, for someone who had opened a student account for a $500 credit line.
His first thought was: can I cash this out instead.
His second thought was that this was probably not something you asked Aurichen.
Solan found his gaze drifting up, toward the lenses of the old man's glasses. They caught the light, soft and opaque, reflecting everything and revealing nothing. The word free rang alarm bells all the way down his spine.
He opened his mouth to refuse. It felt wrong to accept anything here—especially something labeled gift. But the old man's politeness was so solid, so anchored, that pushing back felt like trying to argue with a building. While Solan was still weighing words, Matt surged forward. “Any relic?” His eyes gleamed. “Like, any any? Just pick one?”
The old man inclined his head, smile not shifting an inch.
“Of course. Aurichen does not disappoint the guests who place their trust in it.”
✦ ✦ ✦