Georg was having lunch alone in a café on the building’s ground floor.
It was so far from what Lucian had expected that he paused in the doorway, unseen, quickly rethinking his entire threat assessment.
The café was unremarkable—wood paneling, the smell of coffee, and a radio in the corner playing something instrumental.
Georg sat at a corner table with a bowl of soup and a book, his Longinus dormant, his posture that familiar mix of relaxed and alert that comes from years of eating alone in public, learning how to shrink just enough to avoid notice.
He looked, very simply, like a tired teenager eating lunch.
Right, Lucian thought.
That’s going to make this harder.
He found a table, made himself visible again in the way that required absolutely no one to notice the precise moment of transition, ordered coffee he didn’t particularly need, and spent twenty minutes reading the room.
Georg checked the exits twice.
He kept his book at an angle that let him watch the door without obviously watching the door.
When a large group came in, his hand moved fractionally toward a point near his collar—the Gear’s activation site—before settling again.
Not paranoid.
Careful.
There was a difference.
Lucian knew he was alone out here.
He’d come to Prague because something about the city pulled him in, like the way a spatial Longinus feels the urge to stretch.
He’d been following his own pull for so long that being alone no longer felt like something missing—it had become simply the way things were.
There was no talk, no offer, no setup, no slow erosion of trust.
Georg stood alone, unattached, heading down a road that would end badly—not from any fault of his own, but because Dimension Lost, in the wrong hands at the wrong moment, created a very particular kind of disaster, and Lucian had read that story before and wanted no part of it.
He stood and reached out, and with a quick, silent flick, he cast Stupefy on George.
In the next moment, he cloaked them both in a Notice-Me-Not charm before apparating them to safety.
The soul-work came to him easily now, sharp and precise, like threading a needle only he could see.
Georg’s Gear, tied to his soul as all Sacred Gears were, pulsed with its own distinct rhythm.
Ever since the Momiji extraction, Lucien had perfected the skill of locking onto that signal and following it straight back to its origin.
He found it in about four seconds.
Lucian pulled Dimension Lost free with ease—no contact, no warning, no chance for Georg to react.
It slipped away like a splinter removed at just the right angle—a quick, distinct feeling, then nothing where something had been.
The night before, he’d reworked the second Pawn piece just as he had the first: compacted, reshaped, built to unravel into a humanoid form when needed.
This time it was a ring of almost black metal, fitting for a Gear that commanded dimensional space.
Dimension Lost behaved differently from Karma.
While Karma had resisted before eventually yielding, Dimension Lost was immediately cooperative—almost eager, like a tool long pushed to its limits now being handled gently.
It slipped into the ring without fuss.
The memory adjustment took just thirty seconds.
Georg’s skills, knowledge, and sense of self were left untouched—only the specific feel of the past few weeks was removed: the restless pull of the Gear, the nagging sense of absence that might have led him toward reckless choices.
Once finished, he was returned to his seat at the café.
Georg sat still for a moment, set his spoon down, and glanced at his hand.
The truth was, he was still extraordinary—the bloodline was genuine, the talent undeniable, and the instinct for spatial logic that made him a natural Longinus wielder ran so deep no extraction could erase it.
In any life he stepped into next, he’d remain a truly remarkable magician—just a magician, not a weapon.
Lucian thought that was a fair outcome.
What was left was a young man, worn from his travels, who would finish his soup and then head home—wherever that might be—and discover that the urgency he’d been feeling had quietly faded away overnight.
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