Medics rushed the moment Evan's order hit the walls. Boots hammered the titanium floor. Stretchers rattled. Cases snapped open, spilling coils of tubing, sealable masks, syringes, and trauma probes. The air filled with the acrid bite of antiseptic and the metallic smell of blood left over from the crystal's explosion and the pressure event that followed.
The first team split, sweeping toward the staff who had collapsed during Ren's skill test. They moved with the clipped economy of people who knew seconds mattered: one medic checking pupils with a penlight, another threading an airway, a third unsealing a cranial monitor. The second team angled for Elias, still upright but paralyzed, eyes fixed and furious. A third team veered toward Veyra; they didn't get within five steps.
"Back off," she said without raising her voice.
They froze. She hadn't reached for a weapon or lifted a hand. She just looked at them. That was enough. The team lead nodded once, slow, and redirected his crew to the line of downed analysts.
No one approached Ren. He stood in the middle of the devastated testing space, the last shreds of shadow and alchemical residue curling off the floor around him. He looked like something that shouldn't fit in a room: clean suit hanging torn at the stomach, fourteen limbs still for once, human silhouette settling back into its proper boundaries. No blood dripped. No wound gaped. And no medic stepped near him.
A monitor wailed from the far left. "Director," a medic called, already elbow-deep in the first casualty's gear. "We've got signs of intracranial pressure spike and diffuse vessel rupture. Pupils are fixed. There's brainstem involvement."
Another leaned over a second patient, hands shaking just enough to betray the mask of calm. "Same here. Massive hemorrhage, posterior circulation. We can bag and oxygenate, but—" He glanced up at Evan and dropped his voice. "There's no saving them, Director."
The words snapped across the room and hung there. Evan's face tightened, the control he wore like armor slipping for the first time. His jaw set. A tendon stood out in his neck. He didn't speak.
Ren rolled his shoulders once and let the last shiver of his Domain bleed away. The tentacles retracted. The tools vanished. He stood there as a man again: tired eyes, torn suit, one hand at his side where Veyra's blade had opened him minutes earlier. The skin beneath was smooth. Not a mark.
He looked at Evan. "Hey, you. Evan. Fucker."
Evan blinked, like he had been a long way away and someone called him back. "Huh? Oh—sorry, Mr. Hector." His voice tried for calm and missed. "They attacked on their own initiative, and I had to protect the staff, so I couldn't step in."
Ren stared. "Do you think I'm fucking stupid? Who would believe something that stupid?"
The Director didn't flinch, but color rose in his cheeks. Around them, the medics worked under a heavy silence that made every zipper and click too loud.
"I'll fight you to the death," Ren said, level and soft, "if I don't get an explanation."
Evan's mouth opened, then closed. He looked past Ren to the ring of casualties, then back. "Mr. Hector—"
"It can wait," Ren said.
Evan's brow furrowed. "What?"
Ren jerked his chin toward the line of bodies. "Those guys."
Evan followed the gesture. The nearest medic had stopped CPR and folded his hands over a chest he wouldn't reopen. Another was holding an ultrasound probe and watching a blank screen. A third was taping a line he knew wouldn't deliver a miracle. Evan's throat worked.
Ren raised a hand. "I can cure them."
It wasn't loud. It didn't have to be. The sentence didn't sound like bravado or threat. It sounded like a fact he resented having to say out loud.
Evan's head snapped back to him. "Huh?"
"My class is a doctor, you fucker," Ren said. "Even if it's a strange one, I can cure people."
He hooked a finger into the torn edge of his coat and pulled it aside. The fabric gaped. Beneath it, the skin of his abdomen was whole, color returning from the flush of accelerated healing to normal tone. "Look at me. I just healed my body."
Evan's eyes dropped, took in the ragged tear, the clean skin under it, and then lifted again. Some calculation in his expression flickered and changed. "So you are really a healer class," he said quietly.
Ren's answer came without ceremony. "So you, fucker are you going to save them or not?"
The Director looked back at the unconscious staff lined along the wall. One of the medics had a hand on a young analyst's shoulder, thumb pressed to the collarbone in an absent, human gesture that meant I'm still here. Another medic, older, kneeling by a man with blood drying at the corner of his eye, hadn't moved in ten seconds. He was listening to breath that wasn't coming.
"If you can save them," Evan said, voice roughened, "please save them."
He looked at Ren again. The set of his eyes softened. Not pity. Not relief. Something like respect pushing past anger. Ren caught it and squinted, because he didn't like reading kindness on faces that had just tried to measure him like a weapon.
So this guy, Evan thought, and it showed in the way his shoulders dropped, although he looks like a monster, he's kind, hah.
Ren said, "No."
The word cut the room in half. Evan stared. Veyra's head tilted by a degree. A medic near the wall swore under his breath and pretended he hadn't.
"Huh?" Evan said, shock clean as a slap.
Ren stepped once, just enough to set himself in the middle of the Director's view, and smiled without humor. "Beg me, you fucker, and bow your head low."
Silence. The medics kept working because professionals don't freeze when the air goes wrong, but the work got tighter, smaller. The ones with nothing left to do found more to do: taping, checking, tidying.
"Hu—" Evan started, then stopped, because the rest of the sentence didn't fit in his mouth.
Ren didn't blink. "And ten million dollars per person, fucker."