Her name... That single word, a simple sequence of syllables bleeding from his lips, detonated like a bomb inside Serevia's mind. Hearing the Leader pronounce her name with that glacial, authoritative tone felt as though he had violently ripped away the cloak of invisibility she had hidden beneath for years in a single strike, leaving her entirely naked and exposed. It carried a terrifyingly familiar resonance; he didn't sound like a stranger, but rather like a sinister, omnipotent phantom who had watched her from the shadows for a very long time. She involuntarily drew a deep crease between her brows as the hollow surrender in her eyes violently surrendered to a sharp, frantic interrogation. She slashed a glare at the man—screaming "What?" without making a sound—brimming with equal parts terror and pure denial.

  The sudden shock violently triggered the raw, shredded tissue in her throat. As she thrashed to swallow, she inhaled her own saliva, sending a violent shudder through her ribcage.

  "Hrk! ...K-khhh!"

  A dry, ragged coughing fit violently seized her, echoing through the room and threatening to tear her lungs completely apart. Her body violently spasmed in the chair; because the ropes prevented her from pressing her hands against her stomach, the agony instantly doubled. She flushed a deep, violent red as she fought for air, hot tears flooding her eyes. When the suffocating fit finally broke, she dragged the first gasp of air into her lungs and hurled the question actively tearing at her throat.

  "How... How the hell do you know my name?"

  Her voice sounded frail, completely sandpapered raw by the coughing fit, yet pure terror bled into every single syllable.

  From his untouchable, godlike altitude, the Leader cast a dead, expressionless stare down at the girl doubled over in the chair fighting for breath. The girl's raw unease, her absolute terror of being exposed, served as the most lethal trump card in his hand. Behind the mask, he let the corner of his lips curl into a faint, sinister smirk.

  "My knowledge of you does not end with your name, Serevia."

  The young girl violently dropped her shoulders, entirely crushed beneath the man's arrogant, omnipotent stance. Having exhausted her absolute last reserve of shock, she leaned her head back against the rigid spine of the chair with heavy, total resignation. Resisting and hiding felt entirely pointless now.

  "What do you know?" she asked, her voice decaying into an exhausted whisper. "What exactly do you have on me?"

  The Leader dismantled his dominant stance over the table and paced backward toward the empty wall of the room with heavy, rhythmic strides. He braced his back against the wall and crossed his arms over his broad chest. His casual posture forged a violent contrast against Serevia's absolute captivity, laying the crushing power dynamic of the room entirely bare.

  He drew a deep breath that hissed through the filters of his mask. Then, as if coldly reading straight from a criminal dossier, he began to speak, violently hurling every single word directly into her face.

  "I know you have spent the last five years running from the system, surviving entirely as a sewer rat..."

  He swept his gaze over the girl's filthy, rotting cardigan and her utterly wretched state. His tone hardened into the absolute blade of a judge.

  "I know you are a thief."

  He paused. An infinitely heavier, far more lethal silence than anything before it violently suffocated the room. The Leader tilted his head slightly to the side and ruthlessly locked his ice-blue eyes dead center onto hers. The final truth he prepared to deliver felt less like a secret and entirely like a bloody knife violently slammed onto the table. "And I know your brother..." Serevia's breath failed her entirely. "...is a mutant."

  The man's voice carried no pure hatred, nor any absolute disgust. He merely delivered an undeniable, glacial, and lethal reality—a freezing, absolute deduction. Yet this deduction harbored not a single, microscopic crumb of mercy or hesitation.

  The final word he uttered sewed Serevia's lips shut with an invisible thread. "Mutant." In Sarcos's ruthless dictionary, that word wasn't merely a biological classification; it operated simultaneously as a vile curse, the ultimate degradation, and a signed death warrant. Having the different blood pumping through her brother's veins violently hurled into her face as if it were her own absolute fault, a mortal sin she had personally committed, utterly pulverized the young girl's heart inside her chest.

  Yet Torn was innocent; he was merely a casualty of this cursed world's toxic lottery. But in the eyes of the man towering across from her, her brother amounted to nothing more than a glitch demanding absolute eradication. This crushing reality violently fused Serevia's fury with pure grief and rammed it down her throat; she found herself unable to swallow, unable to answer. She bowed her head, allowing the heavy silence to completely crush her.

  The room felt as freezing and dead as a morgue. The man remained anchored there, bracing his back against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, patiently watching his prey writhe.

  After agonizing minutes bled away, Serevia dragged in a deep, trembling breath—desperate to loosen the invisible noose choking her neck—and slowly raised her head. When she locked her eyes back onto the man's mask and those exposed blue irises, her gaze harbored the ashes of her former feral fire.

  "You've done your homework..." she murmured, her voice bleeding out in a weary, completely resigned tone. "You've deciphered me, yes. But that is all. My story ends here, Leader. I am of no use to you."

  Confronted by the girl's self-deprecating, "I am finished" attitude, the Leader peeled his shoulder off the wall and violently straightened his spine. The mechanical hiss bleeding from beneath his mask served as the absolute only sound in the room for a split second.

  "I am the one who decides..." he declared, his voice flooding the room with a heavy, absolute finality that violently crushed any objection. "...exactly who is useful, you thieving rat."

  He paused. He tilted his head slightly upward, taking a brief, theatrical heartbeat to think, as if actively hunting for an invisible word suspended in the void of the ceiling. When he dropped his gaze back to the girl, a venomous, nerve-shredding mockery completely hijacked his voice. "Or perhaps we should grant you a promotion? What do you say... should I have called you 'Killer' instead?" This moniker struck Serevia across the face like a freezing lash, violently hurling last night's failure—her frantic thrashing to rip off his mask and strangle him—straight back at her. The man toyed with her exactly like a predator batting around a crippled mouse.

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  Cornered by this blatant provocation, Serevia forced the corner of her lips to curl into a bitter, utterly counterfeit smirk. This expression harbored zero amusement; it stood solely as a defensive wall forged by grinding her teeth together. She entirely lacked the desire to absolve herself, to claim "I am innocent"; nothing she did could ever prove filthier than Sarcos's blood-soaked hands anyway. Yet her pride... her damned pride absolutely refused to let her swallow this accusation in silence.

  "I failed to bathe my hands in blood, yes..." she hissed, driving her eyes straight into the man's blue irises to stubbornly defend her failure. "I haven't butchered anyone yet. So technically, I haven't earned that rank, have I?"

  The man offered absolutely no answer. He didn't let a single muscle twitch on his face, acting as if he hadn't heard Serevia's defense at all. He merely peeled his shoulder off the wall, planting the soles of his heavy combat boots far more rigidly against the hardwood. Even this microscopic shift violently thickened the air inside the room. Without tearing his gaze away from the girl for a single heartbeat, he stretched the crushing silence to its absolute breaking point, actively forcing her to writhe in the pitch-black void.

  Finally, he shattered the silence like fragile glass.

  "Tell me, Serevia..." He locked his blue eyes onto the girl like a predator laying an ambush. "Last night in those ruins... Was it truly your absolute intention to butcher me?"

  Cornered by the sheer bluntness of the question, Serevia tore her eyes away from the man's face and anchored them to the polished surface of the wood. Acting as if the colossal man towering across from her had entirely ceased to exist, as if she were solely reckoning with her own conscience, she spoke in a low, exhausted whisper that still clung to a stubborn thrashing to prove the absolute truth.

  "My sole purpose..." she murmured, her voice violently catching on the knot in her throat. "...was merely to save my own skin. To survive."

  A harsh, mockingly jagged exhale bled from beneath the Leader's mask.

  "And the rounds you unloaded into my back... were those merely 'to survive' as well?"

  Without violently tearing her gaze away from the table, Serevia hissed through her teeth. "You should have let me go! If you hadn't hunted me so relentlessly, if you hadn't dogged my every step, I wouldn't have even brushed that trigger." The room violently plunged back into absolute silence for a split second.

  The Leader peeled himself off the wall and approached the table again with heavy strides. He lightly wet his lips with his tongue behind his mask; though the motion remained unseen, it bled through the damp, lethal resonance of his voice.

  He dropped his tone to a whisper, yet a whisper saturated with absolute threat. "And what of my mask? What exactly was running through your mind then? Was violently ripping it off and strangling the breath out of me merely an escape plan, too?"

  This question slammed into Serevia like a sledgehammer, entirely pulverizing her defensive walls. She jerked her head up with a sudden reflex, slashing a glare at the man built from equal parts guilt and pure terror. Her absolute intention might not have been to butcher him, but she couldn't deny that the feral thrashing she committed in blind panic amounted to an attempted execution. The gazelle had actively tried to devour its own lion to survive, and failing to sink its teeth in, it had plummeted dead center into the lion's cage.

  The feral gleam of absolute desperation ignited in her eyes.

  "As if you left me any other damn choice!"

  she screamed, her voice violently echoing through the room. Her throat burned; she swallowed hard. "I was cornered... I thought you were going to slaughter me right there!"

  The Leader absorbed the girl's explosive, terror-soaked confession with glacial, absolute stillness. Without shifting his stance a single millimeter, he answered, injecting a rigid, infinitely colder gravity into his authoritative tone. "Just as you assumed right now."

  Leaving Serevia's terror-stricken, trembling objection suspended in the air, the Leader carved a half-circle around the girl with heavy, rhythmic strides and stepped behind her. When Serevia felt the presence of that colossal shadow vanish from her line of sight only to loom against the nape of her neck, a freezing shudder violently cascaded down her spine. Desperately thrashing to turn her head and see what lurked behind her, she stammered in a jagged, nearly inaudible whisper completely choked by terror.

  "W-what are you doing?"

  The man didn't even deign to answer. Only the heavy scrape of his combat boots grinding against the floor rang out, followed by the taut stretch of fabric... Despite his massive frame, the Leader crouched to the floor with sinister, agonizing slowness. His hands, sheathed in black gloves, reached for the coarse ropes clamping the girl's wrists like a vise and violently bruising her flesh. The knots unraveled and fell away within seconds between the man's professional fingers.

  The exact second the crushing pressure vanished from her wrists, a violent rush of blood flooded Serevia's veins; her fingertips prickled as if pierced by thousands of needles. Fueled by the first, scorching sensation of freedom, she violently lunged forward in blind panic without waiting to see what the man would do next. She viciously attacked the ropes binding her legs with trembling, still-numb fingers. She gasped heavily for air, clawing at the knots until she bled beneath her nails.

  When the final rope hit the floor, she launched herself upward like a coiled spring, even though her deadened legs violently struggled to bear her weight.

  Her balance had shattered, and the room violently spun around her, but she reflexively clamped her hands around the backrest of the chair she had just been bolted to. She violently dragged the chair in front of her, wielding the wooden frame as a makeshift barricade, a fragile shield between herself and that lethal man.

  The Leader slowly straightened his spine as he watched the girl's timid, defensive thrashing. When he resumed his former position, returning to his untouchable altitude and authoritative stance, the air in the room violently thickened once again.

  "You remain here for now," he declared, his voice ringing like a heavy, absolute command ricocheting off the walls that accepted zero objections. "You are going nowhere."

  Violently struggling to process what she just heard, Serevia swept her blurred eyes blankly across her surroundings, staring at the windowless walls closing in like a tomb. Just when she thought she had finally broken free, had she merely been shoved into an infinitely larger cage?

  "W-what do you mean?"

  As if his absolute tolerance for the girl's shock and her questions had entirely evaporated, the Leader's shoulders drew slightly taut. The tone bleeding from behind his mask hardened, sharpening to the lethal edge of a blade.

  "Do not make me repeat myself."

  Just as Serevia parted her lips, desperately thrashing to hurl another word, another objection to untangle the knot in her throat, the Leader violently denied her the chance. He had already turned his back and strode toward the door. The metallic jingle of the key he pulled from his pocket shattered the silence in the room like a blaring warning bell. As he turned the lock and cracked open the heavy metal door, he paused just before stepping out. Through the crack, he cast one final look over his shoulder at the girl inside—at the violently trembling silhouette barely managing to stay on her feet. He swept his gaze over her collapsed shoulders and violently shaking legs.

  "Look at yourself... You entirely lack the strength to even stand."

  His voice bore no mockery, only an absolute, merciless deduction.

  "Pull yourself together. I will have something sent shortly to fill your stomach. Do not dwell on this... thief girl."

  Then, he violently pulled the door shut behind him.

  Click.

  The heavy, razor-sharp crack of the lock grinding into its socket became the absolute final sound echoing through Serevia's world.