Asking for financial support because i'd like to keep both writing and having electricity.
If you'd like to read up to 20 chapters ahead, you can support me on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/cw/Thanarit
Thank you for all your support. it really keeps the story going.
Not into subscriptions? No worries! If you'd still like to support my work, you can leave a one-time tip on Ko-fi.
Thank you so much, and may good fortune find you.
☕ https://ko-fi.com/thanarit
It took them the better part of half a day to reach Leylin.
They moved in short bursts between cover, avoiding the main roads, doubling back twice when patrol lights swept too close. Leylin itself was locked into a state Gregory recognized immediately: every gate guarded double, every civilian off the streets by an hour that should have still held foot traffic, the specific tension of a city that had heard about the capital and was waiting to find out if the same thing was coming for them next.
They slipped in through the guild's rear entrance, past a service door the Dark Division had apparently mapped before Gregory had even finished asking whether they knew a way in.
"You can go. I'll be fine on my own," Gregory said, once they were inside.
"Divine Hierophant, may I offer a differing opinion?"
Gregory looked at the man who'd spoken, displeasure already settling across his face.
"What."
"Our intelligence from the capital indicates you were betrayed by your own guild member," the Dark Division leader said. "Recently. Within the hour."
"So." Gregory's voice climbed half a register.
The man didn't back down from it.
"What I mean is that it will be safer for you to keep us as escort. You are stronger than any of us individually. That was never in question. But if we chose to hide instead of standing beside you, there is roughly a seventy percent chance you would not find us again before the situation resolved itself. We can conceal you when the next crisis arrives. That is a service strength alone cannot provide."
Gregory said nothing for a moment.
The logic was sound. Challenging it would require more effort than accepting it, so he let them proceed.
They climbed the stairwell in silence.
. . .
The branch guildmaster's office sat at the top of the stairwell, door unmarked, and when Gregory pushed it open he found a woman in white armor seated behind the desk like she'd been expecting company for hours.
"Master?"
Her voice carried none of the surprise the sentence implied.
Gregory knew this face too, in the vague administrative way he knew every branch manager's face: competent, unremarkable, filed away under a category that had never demanded closer attention. Competent and unremarkable had been the entire point. He understood that now.
The Knight of Aurora had been running this branch for years.
"Call Dawn and Eclipse," she said, to no one visible in the room, and somewhere below them a set of footsteps started moving.
"Yes, Master."
They arrived within minutes.
The first was an old man, silver-haired, moving with a quiet gentleness that had made him easy to overlook for years. Gregory had passed him in the halls a dozen times without registering him as anything beyond furniture with a face.
The second was a child. Ten years old, maybe younger, standing beside Aurora with the easy familiarity of a son beside his mother, which was, Gregory understood now, exactly the role he had been built to occupy.
Behind Gregory, the Dark Division stayed quiet, arranged along the wall with the particular stillness of people who had decided this was not their conversation to join.
"Report," Gregory said. "All of you. What is Leylin's current status."
Aurora spoke first. "The branch has been on lockdown protocol since word reached us from the capital. All active field agents recalled. Guild reserves secured. We assumed you would come here if you survived the engagement, so preparations were already in motion before you arrived."
"Casualties."
"None on our end. We had no assets deployed in the capital tonight."
Gregory absorbed that, then gave them the situation in return: the betrayal, the district, the escape, the Dark Division's assistance from the alchemist guild. He kept it short, giving them only what they needed to act on.
When he finished, Aurora folded her hands on the desk.
"You'll want the western safehouse, not this office," she said. "This building is registered. If anyone traces you here through guild records, it will be within the day."
"Then that's where we go." Gregory looked at the four of them in turn: Aurora, the old man, the child, the nameless leader of the Dark Division standing behind him. "I need a plan. What I need from all of you is a plan, and that alone. Something that gets me back into a position where I can end this properly."
"We can move you to the safehouse within the hour," Aurora said. "From there, we assess what remains of our network and determine which assets can still be trusted."
"Do that." Gregory's tone left no room for discussion. "Start now."
"Understood, Master."
Aurora rose from the desk. The old man turned toward the door without being told. The child followed a step behind, already folding back into the posture of someone half his apparent age.
Gregory turned to the Dark Division leader.
"Your name," he said. "I'm not calling you 'the Dark Division leader' every time I need something from you."
The Dark Division leader's expression clouded.
"We underwent surgery to alter our appearance and voice," he said. "Even our memories were removed as part of the procedure. We do not recall our names."
He paused.
"But I feel as though I remember who I am."
Gregory's brow furrowed.
"Don't be wishy-washy," he said. "Just say it."
The man smiled, and something about the smile snagged, some detail Gregory couldn't yet name.
"It's on the tip of my tongue. I can't quite reach it."
"Hm."
The word came out slow, drawn.
"Hm."
Aurora had stopped at the door. She wasn't looking at the leader anymore. She was looking at Gregory, and there was nothing in her expression that resembled concern for what was about to happen, only the flat patience of someone waiting for a scene she had already watched before.
"Hm."
Gregory's hand closed around the hilt at his side.
Then the man's face opened.
Delight broke across it in a single, total wave, the kind that belongs to a child remembering a birthday rather than a grown man mid-sentence, and it kept spreading, past his mouth, into his eyes, into the set of his shoulders, until every part of him was smiling at once.
"Oh!"
He clapped his hands together.
"I remember now!"
Gregory's stomach dropped. The man's expression settled into something warm, unhurried, patient in a way that had no business belonging to anyone standing in this room. Gregory had seen this exact warmth once already tonight. He had watched it spread across an entirely different face, in an entirely different body, in the middle of a district that was still burning behind him.
It was not a resemblance.
It was the same face.
"I am a clone of the World-Honored One."
The words landed and did not stop landing. Gregory heard them with the clarity of a condemned man hearing his own sentence read aloud, complete, with no possibility of misunderstanding, and no way to make the meaning stop once it had started.
"Namo Bhagavate Eon Tathāgatāya Arhate Samyaksaṃbuddhāya."
"Homage to the World-Honored One, Eon, the Thus-Come One, the Worthy One, the Perfectly Fully Awakened Buddha."
Gregory's legs went first.
He staggered back a step, then another, the desk catching his hip. His causality reading was already tearing through every person in the room, Aurora, the old man already gone through the door, the child, searching for the same signature and finding it, finding it, finding it everywhere, in every direction he turned, until the room stopped being an office and became something closer to a mouth that had already swallowed.
"How many of you," he said, and his voice had lost every register of command it had carried a minute ago. "How many of you are him."
Nobody answered.
Nobody needed to.
Gregory's scream tore through the office and kept tearing, past words, past meaning, until it was just a sound a man makes when he understands, all at once, that the ground he has been standing on was never ground at all.
"FUCK."