Following the hiss of expelled air that sounded like a mechanical whisper, the Leader tore the mask from his face in a single strike and slammed it onto the table.

  Serevia's eyes blew wide open, her heart hammering against her ribs with a violence that threatened to tear right through her chest. The sight before her completely stole her voice. The face of the man sitting across from her was entirely bare; from beneath that terrifying mechanical armor, a complexion as flawless and white as polished marble had emerged. Yet far beyond this physical perfection, the sheer madness of the man's act turned the girl's blood to ice. This was indistinguishable from absolute suicide.

  "W-what have you done!"

  Serevia's voice left a terror-soaked echo bouncing off the walls of the room. Her shock proved so colossal that her fury and the argument over her being a thief instantly evaporated into thin air. She lunged forward as if ready to launch herself off the bed, desperate to thrust her trembling fingers toward the man, yet found herself completely paralyzed.

  "Y-you're going to die! Are you completely insane? This is Caduta, you cannot breathe that air!"

  The young man watched the girl's uncontrolled panic, a terror so palpable it could be felt from miles away, with silent, glacial composure. It was agonizingly difficult to believe this was the exact same feral girl who had branded him a murderer and demanded a violent accounting for her brother just moments ago. Now, frozen across from him, trapped in the pure shock of witnessing an entirely irrational suicide attempt unfolding right before her eyes—even if the victim was her most despised enemy—sat someone entirely different.

  In response to Serevia's warning, one corner of the Leader's lips curled upward with slow, freezing calculation. This was a dark, terrifyingly magnificent smile completely devoid of compassion, one so utterly captivating a person physically couldn't tear their eyes away. The face revealed beneath the mask, with its sharp, uncompromising jawline and flawless nose, carried an almost godlike coldness.

  "Why the sudden panic?"

  The exact second the man's voice shed the flawless filter of the mask, the thin mechanical distance between them vanished entirely. What she heard now was a deep, sharp, and terrifyingly raw male voice, completely unfiltered by any processor. As this bare tone echoed in Serevia's ears, it rang infinitely more sinister and dominant than his masked voice ever had.

  "Wouldn't you prefer I drop dead, Serevia? Weren't you the one who just called me a murderer, who despises me with every fiber of your being?"

  When he locked his blue eyes onto the girl's, the mocking gleam burning within his gaze sharpened even further. His absolute comfort strolling along the razor's edge of death violently upended every single rule of logic in the girl's mind. Even while actively gambling with his own life, the man hadn't deviated a single millimeter from his position of absolute superiority at the table.

  Serevia found herself completely unable to swallow as she stared at the man's bare face, his stark white skin, and his mocking smile. The figure sitting across from her was no longer merely a monster, but a human forged of flesh and bone; yet in this bare state, he radiated an authority infinitely more terrifying than his masked form ever possessed.

  Serevia watched the invisible stopwatch in her mind violently tick away the seconds one by one. She counted in her head; one, two, five, ten... The violently ragged coughing fit she anticipated, the bloody shortness of breath destined to rupture his lungs, never came. Not a single flush of red stained the man's flawless, marble-white skin, nor did blood seep from his pores under the agonizing effect of the toxic gases. The rusted, heavy-metal-reeking, throat-scorching air of Caduta flooded and emptied his chest exactly as if it were a common breeze rather than a lethal executioner.

  She knew with absolute certainty that anyone stepping out from behind the walls of Sarcos, abandoning their sterile domes, paid for every single unmasked second with their lives. She had grown up with the absolute reality that radiation—that invisible monster—burned a person from the inside out like pure acid with every breath, rotting the lungs within minutes. Yet the flawless, terrifying figure sitting across from her now openly defied the laws of physics and absolutely every reality Serevia knew to be true. The man's chest rose and fell with the steady, unbothered rhythm of any perfectly healthy human.

  "B-but... y-you... how?"

  As the words spilled from her scorched throat, the young girl's voice barely exceeded a whisper. She slashed her gaze across the Leader’s face, his neck, and every single inch of exposed flesh with split-second speed. As if desperately thrashing to decipher an illusion, she dissected the entity towering across from her down to his microscopic cells. She hunted for a trick; an invisible device, a subdermal implant, or a medical miracle... With every single breath flooding the young man's lungs, Serevia held her own a fraction longer. Pure shock had violently obliterated every defensive wall inside her mind, leaving behind absolutely nothing but raw curiosity and pure terror.

  "How am I alive?"

  The question bleeding from the Leader's lips had entirely shed the suffocating, metallic resonance of the mask. That crystal-clear, heavily authoritative, yet deeply resonant tone violently echoed against the cold, bare walls of the room. He no longer smiled; yet the rigid, impenetrable expression on his face had surrendered its ground to a slightly calmer, far more analytical stance. His blue eyes dissected the mental ruin, the violently shattering beliefs of the girl across from him, reading her exactly like an open book.

  Serevia slowly shook her head, an absolute, profound astonishment usurping any actual agreement. Rather than questioning him, she appeared entirely paralyzed before an impossible reality, a physical anomaly. She clamped her fingers around the edge of the quilt with such crushing force that her knuckles turned bone-white, burying her nails violently deep into the fibers of the fabric.

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  "You are drawing breath..." Serevia whispered, entirely failing to strangle the violent tremor in her voice. "The radiation... it should have burned you from the inside out. Your lungs should be drowning in blood right now! You are a Sarcosian. You... you cannot survive outside!"

  The Leader anchored his elbow more firmly against the table and leaned slightly toward the girl. His glacial majesty sharpened into lethal focus beneath the artificial lights of the room. His gaze burned with a buried, profound superiority over this primal terror gripping the girl.

  "Absolutely everything you know is strictly confined to what they have fed you, thief girl."

  The absolute certainty anchoring his tone proved lethal enough to violently fracture the final crumb of logic inside Serevia's mind. The man had weaponized the most natural biological function a human possessed—drawing breath—into a crushing display of absolute power.

  Leaving his mask abandoned on the table, the Leader dragged a deep, lung-filling breath. The mechanical whisper that constantly trailed him had violently severed, entirely usurped by the faint, rhythmic hum of the room's ventilation system. Stripped of the necessity to bleed through the filters, the young man's tone now rang infinitely clearer and far more authoritative.

  "This is no sanctuary, Serevia," he declared, his voice flooding the room with glacial, razor-sharp clarity. "That toxic air howling outside absolutely cannot breach these walls. Colossal filters purge the atmosphere every single second."

  Serevia choked back her breath for a split second, desperately thrashing to digest what she had just heard. For a thief who had grown up knowing with absolute certainty that every unmasked second spent on the rusted, venom-reeking streets of Caduta equated to an instant execution, this reality stood as an inconceivable, mind-shattering anomaly. The pure air gently caressed her windpipe, and the faint scent of ozone flooding her nostrils violently clouded her mind.

  She knew with absolute certainty that she remained a captive here, and she knew exactly one other truth: this place looked infinitely cleaner, yet exponentially more lethal, than the gray, rotting world outside.

  "S-so... you can walk around unmasked in here?"

  The young girl's violently trembling voice echoed against the cold walls of the room. Leaning back slightly in his chair, the Leader dissected Serevia from head to toe exactly as if he were inspecting a vile insect. The razor-sharp gleam burning in his blue eyes actively mocked the girl's pure shock.

  "Yes."

  The answer struck as short and razor-sharp as a physical blade. The young man paused; he tilted his head slightly to the side, exactly as if a fresh thought had violently sprouted in some dark corner of his mind. The stagnant expression in his gaze surrendered its ground to a wave of venomous, probing curiosity.

  "That absolutely captured your attention, didn't it? Or are you actively forging fresh escape plans, thief girl?"

  Serevia hurled a brief, venomous glare at the man across from her. The impenetrable walls she had violently erected between herself and this stranger still stood flawlessly intact within her eyes. Yet seeing the entirety of his facial features from this point-blank range for the very first time actively forced the doors of an involuntary dissection open in her mind. The curved structure of his full lips, the razor-sharp line of his nose, the jawline hardening like solid steel... His pitch-black military uniform forged a violent contrast against his marble-white skin, carving out the image of a flawless statue. For an entity of such absolute aesthetic perfection to seamlessly mutate into a monster capable of snatching a life in a single strike served as pure, physical proof of exactly how lethal beauty could truly be.

  The girl's absolute silence violently escalated the tension inside the cell. That flawless symmetry resting across the Leader's face actively stoked the fury burning inside Serevia; because the reality of such a man harboring such pure savagery violently slapped the utter injustice of the world right across her face.

  The Leader made a heavy, calculated reach toward the tray resting on the table. Having pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms violently tight around her legs, Serevia watched the entire spectacle unfold from the corner of the cot. The sharp, metallic clink that echoed the exact second the young man's fingers clamped around the freezing stem of the silver fork sliced through the silence in the room like a blade. Their gazes had remained ruthlessly locked onto the last steaming chunks of meat inside the plate for seconds. Choking back her breath, Serevia desperately thrashed to comprehend exactly where this maneuver would lead.

  The Leader gripped the freezing stem of the silver fork and violently drove it straight into the fibrous chunk of meat dead center on the plate. The soft tissue tore open, offering absolutely zero resistance; Serevia held her breath as she watched the thick, dark sauce bleed through the tines of the fork and drip onto the porcelain. Slowly twisting his wrist, the young man lifted the bite into the air and brought it to his lips.

  His bare face gleamed with absolute sharpness beneath the artificial lights. He tossed the bite into his mouth in a single strike, pulled the fork back with a metallic clatter, and began to chew slowly between his teeth. Only the echo of that rhythmic, terrifying chew flooded the room. After swallowing the bite, he dragged a second piece onto the fork without a single heartbeat of hesitation. Immediately after, he consumed a small portion of the vegetables from the plate with the exact same glacial composure.

  He directed his final maneuver at the glass of water resting on the table. As the Leader clamped his hand around the glass and brought it to his lips, the bob of his Adam's apple violently grinding up and down absolutely failed to escape Serevia's scrutiny. The young man dragged a deep swallow of water, and the heavy thud of the glass striking the table violently echoed through the room. This was absolutely no theatrical show; this was a silent bridge violently forged in the exact place where words entirely failed. The blue-eyed executioner had actively ripped the pitch-black suspicions from the thief girl's mind one by one, physically proving with his own flesh that the meal was absolutely safe.

  Snatching his mechanical mask off the table, the Leader straightened up from the chair and strode toward the door, leaving the heavy, crushing echoes of his combat boots against the floor in his wake. When he clamped his hand around the doorknob, the lock mechanism ground open with a razor-sharp metallic groan.

  Just before stepping past the threshold, he paused. He turned his head slightly over his shoulder and hurled one final look at the girl violently shrunken down inside the bed. The freezing abyss burning in the man's eyes had violently stripped away every shred of the human visage he had displayed moments ago.

  "If my absolute intention was for you to die, I wouldn't toss poison onto your plate; I would shovel dirt onto your grave. Eat that food, Serevia; because in this world, I am the absolute only person who actively wants you to remain strong enough to vomit your pure hatred."

  His words hung violently suspended in the air.

  The door slammed shut.

  And Serevia...

  Remained utterly alone once more.