The plaza was quieter now, the rain softening into mist. Ichiro still stared down the street where Arthur had disappeared, his hand brushing the hilt of his sword as if the air itself had left a challenge for him to answer.
Lenny elbowed him lightly.
Lenny: "You're staring after him like you just found your long-lost brother or something."
Ichiro blinked, pulling himself back, a faint smile betraying him.
Ichiro: "He's… different. Not just some swordsman. The way he carries himself… I don't know. He's someone worth crossing blades with."
Lenny smirked, shaking his head.
Lenny: "So what now? Samurai versus knight, huh? Can't wait to see which one of you writes a poem about it first."
Ichiro chuckled under his breath, but his eyes were sharp.
Ichiro: "Next time we meet, it won't be words. It'll be steel."
On the rooftop where Arthur just had his clash with Harlekin, Arthur found himself staring down where Harlekin disappeared, his words still lingering in the air.
Arthur adjusted his black glasses and pulled his collar up against the wet. He was alone—Goliath was miles away, Null was away too, and the others in the hideout would call this curiosity reckless. Arthur called it duty, the oldest kind, the kind that didn't need an audience.
He started where every hunt starts in a city like this: where the light is brightest and the shadows are thickest because of it.
Vanterra's Haze Market never shut down; it merely changed mood. By night, the stalls became lantern-lit coves of secrets. Street cooks hissed noodles in chrome woks, vendors hawked counterfeit credentials, and mercenaries bartered scars for credits and drink. Arthur walked through it.
He stopped at a vendor whose booth was all knives and delicate springs—devices meant to hide, not to endure. The woman behind the counter had storm-grey eyes and a smile like a trapdoor.
Woman: "Evening, you look like a man who keeps steel for company."
Arthur: "I'm looking for a clown."
Her smile did not move, but her eyes did: "Then you want the men who sell jokes. I sell solutions."
Arthur: "Your solutions have been seen on the wrists of men who disappear when you blink. I need a name."
She lifted a thin blade and shaved air with it: "No names. Only invoices."
Arthur took a slow breath, then leaned in and, with two fingers, traced the pattern along the blade's spine—the pattern repeated on the interlocking clips inside Harlekin's cuffs. The vendor's eyes sharpened.
"Replica?" she asked.
Arthur: "Original, a client of yours attacked me with one."
She set the blade down.
Woman: "If he attacked you, he isn't my client anymore." A pause. "What color smoke?"
Arthur: "Black, cheap theatrics married to real technique. The dagger reforms from the shroud—neither illusion nor simple transmute. He calls it a joke."
The vendor's face lost its patience. She reached under the counter and placed a small velvet box between them. Inside, nestled in satin, a bead—matte, black as a hole in a photograph: "I'm not responsible for what my customers do with the gifts the world gives them," she murmured. "But some gifts come with… notes."
Arthur looked up.
Her smile sealed itself. But she tapped the bead, just once, with a polished nail: "If you break it, the room will forget you for ten seconds. It's not a weapon. It's punctuation." As Arthur reached for credits, she stopped him. "Don't thank me. Men who hunt shadows and clowns rarely come back to buy a second time."
Arthur: "I'll be the exception," he said and took the bead.
He cut across two districts until he reached a bakery that pretended to be poor. He knew it was pretended because only pretenders in Vanterra kept their signage cracked on purpose. The bell chimed as he entered. The woman behind the counter had flour on her apron and calluses on her fingers—and a too-subtle earpiece tucked behind one ear.
Arthur purchased a paper bag of hard rolls and held the warm weight. He didn't speak. Neither did she. He tore one roll and let steam escape. Inside, tucked where butter should be, a tiny square of cardstock, black.
He took his bread to the alley, broke the roll again, and pressed the card between wet fingers. Ink swam up from the paper like oil finding the surface of water.
NIGHT VAULTS—LEVEL 3—EASTERN SERVICE—DOORS LIE IF YOU ASK THEM RIGHT.
Beneath the letters, a logo ghosted into view and then decided against it: three hooked lines inside a circle.
Arthur's jaw worked once. "Schatten," he said, and the city's rain said nothing back.
Vanterra's Night Vaults were older than most of its laws. Whole blocks of the financial district had been reinforced beneath ground with steel and will, where money slept in rooms designed by men afraid of ghosts and poor men with keys. The east service corridor smelled like lemon cleaner.
Two armed guards joked about sports near the freight elevator. Arthur did not test them. He walked past the corridor's junction, palmed the matte bead, and snapped it gently between thumb and forefinger.
The world did not go black. It went indifferently.
Sound thinned, light forgot to attach to his outline, and the guards' eyes slid off him like rain off lacquer. Ten heartbeats stacked, and Arthur moved—a precise glide, no heat, no haste—past the elevator, through the service door whose sensor registered a ghost and was pleased to be haunted.
On Level 3 the air changed; it carried the hush of money and the hum of machines that had learned to purr. Doors lined the hall, marked only by numbers. At the end, a blank wall tried hard to be an end.
Arthur faced it.
Arthur: "The doors lie," he said to the empty space, remembering the note. "If you ask them right."
He placed his palm flat and whispered—not magic, not code—a confession: "I am not supposed to be here."
The wall shivered with something like delight and opened a seam.
Inside: an office with no windows and too much taste. Leather so soft it apologized. A bar cart with bottles whose labels pretended to be old. And in the center, a table with nothing on it except a ledger bound in hide so smooth it had to be wrong.
Arthur did not touch the ledger. He circled the room once, cataloguing vents, mirrors, and a floor that flexed too easily where a man might stand to read long. He adjusted his glasses; their inside lens clicked to a forensic filter. The room bloomed with faint traces—shoe scuffs, oil smears, and the residue of a perfume that had too much violet in it.
And there, near the ledger, was a fingertip's print that did not glow like oil or skin. It was darker, as if shadow had pressed there and left a bruise.
???: "Not your type of room? Knight."
The voice came from behind him, pleasant and wrong. Arthur turned slowly.