Malthane left her there, in the rubble of the wall, and the sound of his steps went down the stairwell, unhurried, floor by floor.
On the fifth floor, the stairwell door was already open.
Samuelle stood in the middle of the hall, satchel on his shoulder. At his feet, the grey-bearded soldier lay on his side, sleeping like a man in his own bed, breathing slow and deep.
Malthane stopped in the doorway and looked at the scene for a moment.
"You drew the first floor," he said. "And here you are on the fifth."
"Yes."
"Which means everyone in between is already down." Malthane came into the hall. "Is there anybody else below?"
"All of them are still below," Samuelle said. "They just can't really move."
Malthane laughed.
"A fine effort, Bane. Truly. But this is where you lose." He held out one hand. "The spheres. Hand them over."
"I don't have them."
The hand stayed where it was. "Meaning what?"
"I hid them."
"Then you'll tell me where, or I'll simply find them. There is only so much tower."
"You won't find them. Not you, and not anyone as strong as you." Samuelle said it without any challenge in it, flatly, like a man reporting the weather.
Malthane lowered his hand. "Explain."
"Every cursed human can feel a holder, and can feel another cursed human, if they're close enough. The reason they are capable of doing so is that the stronger the other person's presence, the more energy they constantly emit. And strangely enough, both cursed humans and Eldritch holders emit such energy, though each is slightly different. That energy could be compared to ocean waves. Those waves clash with the cursed human's resonance, which can be compared to a sensitive body of water itself, letting him detect the enemy's presence, and also estimate their strength based on the waves' intensity." Samuelle touched his own chest. "There are many ways to efficiently control your resonance. Different people have different affinities and tendencies, mostly related to innate talent. For me, the talent I have with my resonance mastery is sensing. The sensitivity of my resonance is so fluid that I can detect and feel the presence of others in a much larger range. Such affinity is completely isolated from my cursed power itself, the Apothecary Curse."
"How much range, exactly?"
"This tower fits. Maybe more."
Malthane was quiet for a moment.
"I assume I can never get my hands on the glass spheres."
"You could tear the halls apart and not find them all before the bell. And if anyone ever walked toward one by accident, I would feel them coming long before they got there, and the sphere would already be somewhere else."
Malthane looked at him for a long, level moment, and something moved behind his eyes, the look of a man doing sums and liking the total.
A guard who feels every hand in the building. A vault with no fixed place. A poison the enemy drinks without ever seeing his face. Malthane realized Samuelle was the absolute best candidate.
"Evelyn is on the floor above you," Malthane said at last. "Hurt. Her arm is broken." He turned for the stairs. "I have no interest in fighting you now, Samuelle Bane. It would be a waste to hurt the most competent member, especially when I have nothing to gain from it. And neither will the attackers."
Malthane paused, and started walking away from Samuelle.
"And don't waste the climb past her. The seventh is finished. The sphere is also destroyed."
He went down, and his steps faded, floor by floor.
Evelyn was where he had left her, sitting against the broken wall with her right arm cradled in her lap, when Samuelle came through the door.
She got the Sword of Light up with her left hand. It wavered.
He crossed the hall anyway, slow, both hands in view, and sat down on the floor an arm's length away, and set the satchel between his knees. He took out a vial of something pale gold.
"The arm," he said.
"Don't touch it."
"I won't."
He tipped the vial over her forearm and let three drops fall onto the skin.
The pain went out like a fire doused. Evelyn felt the bone pull, a deep, crawling, wrong-and-right feeling, and she watched the swelling sink and the twist in her forearm straighten itself, and by the time she thought to gasp it was already over. She flexed her fingers. They worked.
"It's not fully healed," Samuelle said, corking the vial. "It will hold, but don't trust it with everything. It still needs a few days to recover completely."
She turned the arm over, then looked at him.
"Why did you help me?"
"I didn't."
His hand was already out of the satchel. A second bottle, smaller, round as a marble. He threw it at her, no wind-up, no warning.
She was gone before it landed. Resonance to one foot, the short dash, her body moving on pure reflex while her mind was still catching up. The bottle burst on the stones where she'd been sitting and a pale gas opened out of it like a flower.
Too slow. You missed—
She was already in the air, already cutting down at him with her freshly healed arm behind the blade, and that was when her body stopped listening. Her grip went first. Then her shoulders. The sword came apart into pale light above his head, and the floor never hit her, because he caught her and set her down gently on her back.
She had dodged the bottle. She had jumped straight through where the gas had been.
Samuelle sat with her a moment, two fingers on her wrist, counting. Then he untied the cloth from her belt, took the sphere out of it, and put it in his satchel.
"This gas spreads twenty meters in less than half a second, and its effect is immediate. Paralysis within two seconds. Though I haven't tested it on stronger enemies yet, since it's my latest creation. I suspect a stronger opponent, such as your father, could be immune to it."
He laid Evelyn flat on the floor. She was only paralyzed. She could still hear every word he was saying.
"As for why it doesn't work on me, well, my curse enables me to make this with my blood, after all."
By the time the bell rang noon, the rehearsal was over, and of the seven spheres, five went back into Leonard's padded case. The other two were a hundred pieces on two different floors.
They were brought back to the room at the top, where the morning had started, all seven of them in front of the great window.
"Six points," Leonard read out. "Samuelle Bane. His own sphere, and four taken." He looked up from the paper. "Everyone else: zero."
Nobody said anything. There was nothing to say.
"Bane is the solo winner," Malthane said. "During the auction, he leads the squad inside the house."
Leonard hesitated, which he almost never did. "My lord, four posts were to be filled inside, by points. But the points..." He gestured, delicately, at the paper. "Everyone has zero except him. How do you wish to proceed?"
"By my own eyes," Malthane said. "Bane, inside. Evelyn, inside. I verified her strength myself this morning, and she is to shadow Judge Alphonse Graves in any case."
His gaze went down the line and stopped on the lean woman.
"Vessa. Inside. Her curse spins iron threads out of resonance, thin as hair, strong as an anchor chain. That is exactly the kind of lethal nondestructive fighting this house needs, and she was just unlucky she ended up on the seventh floor where I started."
The lean woman inclined her head an inch.
"Ferrin. Inside." The grey-bearded soldier straightened, still a little pale from sleeping on a stone floor. "His heart is similar to a chameleon's. His skin and everything on it takes the color of whatever stands behind him, and his feet hold to walls and ceilings like flat ground."
Malthane turned to the rest.
"Everyone else, the perimeter." The giant's jaw tightened, and he said nothing, because there was nothing to say to six points against none. "You'll have company out there. The great families and clans are lending fighters of their own to us. The crown has paid for them, and paid well. And at the entrance itself there will be two guests of honor: a son of the Kleido family, who carries a Platinum Tier heart, and a daughter of the Amanai family, Emerald Tier. The state emptied a vault to borrow those two for nine days."
"And you, my lord?" Leonard asked.
"I will be inside the building," Malthane said. "You'll hold the outside."
Leonard nodded, and made a note, and opened his mouth to continue.
Samuelle stood up.
He did it abruptly, no warning, and every head in the room turned to him.
"Two people just entered the building," he said. "One of them, perhaps... as strong as you," he added, looking at Malthane.
He stared at the door, and they watched him hesitate, and the hesitation was worse than the words.
"No," Samuelle said quietly. "Even stronger."
One of the Nauz exit mouths.
Adam, Zaid, and Zeren were about to take the steps upward. Adam had already explained his goals and next actions to Zaid on the way there, and Zaid was more than happy to help Adam and accompany him on his journey, his only desire being adventure and challenge.
"By the way, I wanted to ask about your curse, but didn't get the chance to," Adam said.
"Yeah, sure. What do you want to know?"
"You said the devil offered it to you so you could escape your family. But what is the curse itself?"
"AH, well. I call my curse the Stacking Tempo. Every hit I land while fighting an enemy adds a stack of energy to my body. I can then release whatever amount of energy I stacked in my next attacks. Though I can't hold too many stacks, or my limbs will break. But with training, I'm slowly increasing my body's capacity."
"Wow, that sounds like a strong power. Though it depends on how strong the releases are."
"Well, that depends on how strong I am, and how strong I get. I even had a weapon that matched my power perfectly. I could imbue it with my resonance and have it stack along with me. It's an old treasure my family was storing for two hundred years. A normal treasure. Though about one year ago, when the epoch started, it underwent an awakening, as if some hidden power inside it appeared. My family called it a cursed object, since its power is similar to that of a curse."
Adam stopped in his tracks, surprise filling his face.
"Where... where is it right now?" he said, stuttering.
"They confiscated it from me. They brought it with them here, and they plan to sell it at the auction. A greedy decision for a family that values old heritage."
The auction house.
Leonard was still holding his pen, and nobody in the room had taken a step toward the door, when the door opened on its own.
No knock. No footsteps in the hall before it. One moment it was shut, and the next it stood wide, and two people were already in the room, as if the thirty floors of tower below them simply hadn't applied.
A man of about fifty, straight-backed, gold threading his temples, in robes of a cut no tailor on this continent had made. And a boy of perhaps fifteen, half a step behind him and to his left, who said nothing, and looked at nothing.
Samuelle never took his eyes off the boy.
Malthane turned from the window, and if their arrival surprised him, none of it reached his face.
"Lord Zyriam," he said. "You arrived early, the auction is still one week away."
"We are early because ceremony is a luxury," the old man said, "and we no longer have it. I need one thing from you, Lord Malthane. Your kingdom has Utopia's ear this season. Put us in direct contact with them."
"That can be arranged." Malthane clasped his hands behind his back. "May I know the reason?"
"Something is happening on the Southern Continent that we cannot explain."
"And what is it?"
The old man was quiet for a moment, as if choosing how much of it to say in a room full of strangers. Then he said all of it anyway.
"We can't identify the source yet. But fake Eldritch beasts have been appearing on our lands. Beasts with fake Eldritch hearts. And every generation of them comes out stronger than the one before it. The most recent generation, the fourth, could easily be classified as Platinum grade. Perhaps Emerald."
Nobody in the room moved.
"At this rate, if we don't identify the source," the old man said, "The world might be dealing with a Primal-level threat in a few months."