The Bureaucratic City was never designed for war.

Its streets were too straight, its buildings too symmetrical, everything constructed on the assumption that law was shield enough.

Tonight, that assumption burned alongside half the western district, its ashes mixing with golden sand that spun through the air like a storm with patience.

Orter Madl wasn't looking at the fire.

He was watching the shadow moving between the buildings. His sandstorm expanded east, south, sweeping every alley with a precision he had spent years refining. Not to find the other Innocent Zero members. The others could be handled by someone else.

Only one target. And his sand had recognized it before his eyes could.

Three months ago, that battle should not have lasted as long as it did.

But you moved in ways that didn't fit any threat database, and when his sand finally tore through your left side, your expression didn't shift into panic.

You smiled.

Not a victory smile. Something between categories that he couldn't name.

And that was what made him pause for half a second too long—half a second you used to leave three wounds across his chest and disappear.

He stood in the destroyed hall with blood on his clothes and breathing that wouldn't settle. For the first time in his career, he didn't immediately write the report.

He only stood. And thought about the way you smiled.

His sand found you at the base of an academy building that had already lost its top two floors.

You stood between half-collapsed pillars. Your left side was bleeding. The air smelled of burning concrete, ozone from recently discharged magic, and underneath everything, the copper smell of blood that hadn't dried.

Your eyes found his at the same moment.

"Late," he said. His tone was wrong, too quiet for the situation, like someone who had finally arrived somewhere they had wanted to be for a long time. "You made me wait."

Tonight, Orter attacked first.

His sand came from four directions at once, not to wound but to cut off the escape routes. You turned left, your magic broke concrete into projectiles, and Orter walked through the dust without lowering his hand. His own blood dripped from the edge of his sleeve. An old wound reopening.

He didn't look down. His eyes stayed on you.

His sand reached your wrist before your incantation finished forming. Coiling. Slowly.

Hot. Hotter than you anticipated — not like fire but like a surface left too long under sun, and its grains were fine enough to feel in every gap of your skin.

Inside your head one calculation was running: how much magic remained, how far the exit—

The coil tightened.

The calculation stopped.

Orter stopped moving. The entire momentum of the fight that had been running at full speed for the past two minutes stopped like a clock running out of spring.

In the sudden silence, with his golden sand circling your wrist, his glasses caught the firelight from far away.

His muscles didn't ease.

"You're weaker tonight," he said quietly. "You fought before this."

The sand tightened one millimeter. The heat rose one degree.

Inside your head, one useless sentence that came on its own: he shouldn't look like this from this distance.

Orter reached into his pocket. Something thin. Metal. A single document with the official Magic Bureau seal.

An execution order. Not an arrest warrant.

Your eyes read it in one second. You were an Innocent Zero subordinate, highest threat classification.

Under Magic Bureau law, subjects with this classification held no right to detainment.

The law was clear.

Orter was the most law-abiding person who had ever existed.

But his sand didn't move in the direction it should have.

He put the document back into his pocket.

His glasses caught the fire. The muscle along his jaw moved once, very faintly, like someone who had just made a decision that existed in no protocol anywhere and was fully aware of it.

His sand began to creep higher, tracing the contour of your wrist down to your palm. He could feel your pulse at the point where the sand pressed.

You knew he could.

And that was what made something along your spine run cold — not from fear.

"Three months ago you ran before I was finished." His voice dropped one register, something that existed in no interrogation protocol anywhere. "Tonight there's no one waiting for you outside."

Behind him, another building collapsed. The fire was getting closer. The sounds of the other Visionaries were getting further.

Orter didn't turn.

For the first time in his life, he chose to break the one thing he had always held.

And his expression showed no regret whatsoever.

"So," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved in the wrong direction for this situation, "where exactly do you think you're going?"

His sand waited.

He waited too — with the patience of someone who had already decided that tonight would not end the same way as three months ago.

This marriage never had the right name.

Not a happy marriage. Not a failed one.

Something between them, colder than either — two people occupying the same house on schedules deliberately arranged not to intersect, eating at different hours, sleeping in different rooms, and never once discussing any of it.

Orter left at five in the morning.

You arrived at the Magic Bureau at eight.

You passed each other in the house corridors sometimes, nodded, and continued walking.

A neat marriage. An efficient one.

One you decided to destroy two years ago.

Your gravity magic wasn't conspicuous. That was what made it useful.

No explosions, no light too bright, no trail easy to trace. Only small shifts in spatial pressure around a target — a document falling from a desk at precisely the right moment, a concentration breaking apart in the middle of an important fight, a footstep that suddenly felt heavy with no explanation anyone could give.

Innocent Zero accepted you for exactly the right reasons.

You were clever. You were invisible.

And you had access to the movement patterns of a Divine Visionary that no other subordinate could ever possess.

Your objective was one. Nothing more.

Thirteen of Orter's operations were disrupted over two years.

Thirteen times he came home with reports that weren't clean, with results below what they should have been, with an expression slightly more rigid than usual.

You recorded all of it from across a dining table you never used together.

Tonight, you knew something was wrong before you opened your bedroom door.

Not because of a sound. Precisely because there wasn't one.

A house that usually hummed with cooling machinery and the distant, distinctive sound of Orter's footsteps was too quiet, and silence with this particular texture only ever meant one thing.

Someone was waiting.

The door to the underground vault was already open when you reached the bottom.

Orter stood in the center of the room with his hands in his pockets, his glasses catching the light of the crystals embedded in the walls.

No weapon drawn. No sand circling.

But the entire air in the room felt like the moment before lightning.

"Close the door," he said.

You closed it.

The lock engaged from outside with magic that wasn't yours.

He didn't produce a file. Didn't recite a legal clause. Didn't explain what he knew or how he had come to know it.

Orter simply raised his hand, and his sand came out.

Not slowly. Not measured.

The first wave came like a wall, and you jumped left with your gravity pulling your own weight downward to accelerate the movement, landing on the wall and pushing off to slide into another corner before the sand hit the stone where you had been standing.

Stone dust scattered.

You didn't stop moving.

Your gravity pressed a point on the floor between you both, trying to create a pull that would break his attack rhythm, but Orter had already read the direction of the pressure and stepped to the unaffected side in a way that made you realize he had been studying your magic.

For a long time.

How long — that was what made you lose concentration for half a second.

Half a second he used.

His sand coiled around your ankle and pulled, not hard but with a constant pressure that gave no room to resist, and you hit the floor with your knee first then your palms, cold stone against your skin and a burning sensation at your ankle from the friction of the sand.

The room stopped moving.

Only your breathing didn't.

Orter walked toward you. His steps were unhurried.

His sand still circled your ankle, its pressure constant, and when he stopped in front of you and looked down, his expression was something more dangerous than anger.

Empty. Too empty. The emptiness of someone who had already decided something and was no longer arguing with himself about the decision.

"Two years," he said. His voice carried the same flatness as every report he had ever written. "Thirteen operations."

His sand crept slightly higher.

"Gravity magic with a maximum operational radius of forty meters, effective on targets unaware of the pressure shift." His head tilted one degree. "You trained in secret. The Magic Bureau has no record of your class advancement."

Not a question. A diagnosis.

You looked up at him from the floor with your ankle held and your palms still warm from the impact, and something in the way he stood above you made your anger rise in a way that felt different from usual.

"You didn't report me," you said. Your voice was steadier than you expected.

Orter didn't answer immediately.

His sand moved — not upward, not downward, but rotating in place at a speed just enough to feel against your skin like the friction of sandpaper, slow, entirely deliberate.

"I am a Divine Visionary," he said finally. "Reporting is a choice, not an obligation. In situations involving internal Bureau parties, direct resolution is permitted under protocol twelve."

He knelt in front of you. One knee. So that his eyes were level with yours.

His glasses reflected your face.

"What I am asking," he said, quieter, in a tone that existed in no protocol anywhere, "is why the target was only me."

His sand stopped rotating. But it didn't release you.

(free Scenario)