He strolled out of the shrine district into the Kyoto evening, hands tucked in his pockets, a ring glinting on his right index finger.
He refused to linger on thoughts, knowing that dwelling only slowed him down, and there was still plenty of momentum he needed to keep going.
The ring caught the last of the light.
Karma sent him a gentle ripple—something that felt, if he interpreted it right, almost like approval.
“Don’t get sentimental,” he warned it.
“You’re a tool.
A magnificent, ancient, incredibly useful tool, but still a tool.”
The universe kept diplomatically quiet on whether tools were permitted to have feelings about their new owners.
He decided to take that as agreement and went to find a transport back home.
Seventy-two hours to Georg.
Somewhere out there, Ingvild Leviathan is still running out of time, and I still don’t know where she is.
The plan remains completely fine.
That night, he stared at the last line in the journal, sitting in the rundown hotel room he’d found near the terminal district, where the walls were so thin he could hear someone two rooms away arguing.
He crossed it out.
Wrote instead: The plan is what it is.
Keep moving.
That was better.
More precise.
Less like something you’d hear right before everything went off the rails.
He shut the journal, stretched out on the bed, and let Karma work the probability horizon on Georg while he slept—a compass spinning in the dark, guiding him toward the next part of the machine he was piecing together from whatever he could find, in whatever order it came, fueled by two lifetimes of stubbornness and a steady, unshakable belief that it all counted.
One hundred and seventy-eight weeks until Issei Hyoudou died in a park and changed everything.
Plenty of time, he thought, and almost meant it a little more than he had before.
Karma had opinions about Georg.
It all clicked on the morning of Week Three, when Lucian was in the east wing, ring on his finger, asking—as he often did—for an updated probability read on his confirmed targets.
Karma responded for Marsilio (stable window, low urgency), for Connla (shifting, tricky to track, medium urgency), and then reached Georg, producing what Lucian had come to think of as Longinus’ version of a pointed look.
“I know,” he said to the empty room.
“He’s the priority.”
The pointed look didn’t relent.
“I’m going.
I said seventy-two hours and it’s been fifty-six.
That’s still within the window.”
Karma adjusted its probability output in a way that suggested fifty-six hours was doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Lucian put his coat on and went to catch a train.
The thing about Georg that the light novel had conveyed and that Karma kept quietly emphasizing was that he was not, in any meaningful sense, a villain yet.
He was seventeen, just like Lucian.
His talents were beyond anything his life so far had prepared him to understand.
He’d ended up with the Khaos Brigade, drawn in by that magnetic pull powerful organizations have on powerful people with nowhere else to land—not out of belief in their ideals, but because they’d given him structure, a reason to exist, and a ceiling so high he couldn’t even imagine its limits.
Lucian had some sympathy for that.
He also had Karma running an eighty-three percent probability on Georg’s current location, and a train to catch.
The city was Prague.
He’d been mildly surprised by that—he’d expected somewhere more obviously tied to supernatural faction territory—but Karma had been consistent, and when he arrived and deployed his tracking constructs, they confirmed it within six minutes.
Four moths born from the concept of discovery drifted through the city’s aether, gathering toward a building in the old town that pulsed with the distinct soul-resonance of a spatial Longinus recently pushed to its limits.
George hadn’t yet crossed paths with Cao Cao, a fact he chalked up partly to timing and partly to karma.
It felt like the perfect moment to intercept.
Standing across the street from the building, he considered his possible approach angles.
A direct approach was off the table.
Georg was combat-ready and, as far as anyone knew, entirely self-taught—a gifted magician still exploring the limits of his abilities, with no faction support and no one covering his back, a mix that bred its own kind of caution.
Coming at him head-on would trigger his defenses before Lucian could even get close enough to talk.
Going subtle wasn’t much easier.
When Georg got nervous, Dimension Lost had a habit of warping space in unpredictable ways, making the area around him an unreliable place to exist in the first place.
What I actually need, Lucian thought, is for him to not know I’m there until I’ve already made my point.
He considered that for a moment.
Then he slipped on his Invisibility and strolled across the street.
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