He turned his attention to Ingvild.
The compass swung, hesitated, and gave him: insufficient reference points.
Her thread exists but is not in range of the current probability horizon.
He tried to push further, and received the sensation of searching for a specific face in a crowd while standing on the wrong side of a wall.
More context needed.
He took this in with the resigned feeling of someone who had been hoping for good news but got the plain truth instead and jotted in his journal: Karma confirms Ingvild’s fate-thread is active.
Can’t pinpoint her yet.
Need more details or to be closer to her territory.
Priority stays high.
Moving on.
Moving on was: Next highest-probability concentration of something I should care about in the next seventy-two hours.
Karma pondered this with the slow, methodical air of someone sifting through an enormous filing cabinet.
Then it gave him Georg.
Dimention Lost.
Probably the most important piece.
He knew True Longinus and Zenith Tempest were out of reach, both wielded by highly capable users.
But Dimension Lost was the Longinus that could turn his already impressive abilities into near invincibility while stripping the Hero Faction of any tactical advantage.
Combine AM with DL, and that’s just plain unfair.
He knew Georg the way he knew all of them—role in a story, not a person.
Dimension Lost was the Longinus in question: a spatial manipulation ability that could create pocket dimensions, remove a space from normal reality, fold distance in ways that made it practically useful in both combat and intelligence contexts.
Strategically, it was arguably the most versatile Longinus in existence.
Georg was going to waste it on the Khaos Brigade.
Lucian lingered on that thought for a moment in the stillness of the shrine hall, as the November light outside made its slow, final descent into evening, reflecting on the different ways he’d found to use Dimension Lost, which he’d been jotting down in the margins of his journal over the past two weeks.
Store things in private pocket space, undetectable.
He could move entire operations through dimensions Georg hadn’t built yet.
Train his future peerage in a controlled environment.
Custom gravity.
Custom time dilation if he pushed the Gear hard enough.
No interference from the outside world.
Travel.
Instant, trace-free, no transport gate signatures.
Trap.
Put a threat somewhere it could not leave.
Walk away.
Deal with it later or never.
Contain extractions.
The moment he pulled a Longinus from a wielder, there would be a power signature—possibly significant.
Inside a pocket dimension, that signature went nowhere.
No one detected it.
He might as well be invisible.
He underlined that final point while sitting on the floor of a Kyoto shrine, jotting it down in a notebook that was quickly turning into the most dangerous document in the Underworld—if anyone managed to find it.
Dimension Lost makes everything else safer, he wrote.
Georg is the most important acquisition after Karma.
Do not delay.
Karma sent him a location probability: eighty-three percent, this city, seventy-two hours.
He added the city to a fresh page.
Below it, something that was almost a note to himself, almost an acknowledgement: Georg is seventeen.
He’s going to be confused and then angry and then—if I do this correctly—he’s going to wake up somewhere quiet with no memory of any of this.
He’ll probably become a perfectly decent person and a proper magician.
A pause.
He would have become a perfectly decent person with Chaos Brigade too, just—in the wrong direction, for the wrong reasons, with worse outcomes for everyone in a ten-kilometer radius.
Another pause.
I’m doing him a favour.
He looked at what he’d written.
Added: I’m aware I would say that regardless.
Moving on.
The matter of Momiji Nakiri took one more hour.
The memory adjustment was the part he’d wrestled with the most in the days leading up to this.
Talking about it in theory—a clean wipe, she goes home—was one thing, but sitting across from someone who had made a real choice, fully aware of what it meant, and knowing exactly how the next few minutes would undo that choice was something else entirely.
He’d told her it would be clean.
He intended to make it clean.
What he gave her, woven into the adjustment, was the real sense that she’d decided for herself she wanted something calmer.
The comfort of choosing to go home.
The sweet relief of putting down something heavy.
None of it made up—every bit drawn from what she’d said in the last hour, shaped and resolved instead of left as the frayed, unfinished thing it had been.
She would remember Takeru, and how she wanted to shield him from the arguments about her.
She’d believe she’d found a way to do it that made sense to her alone, and the details had simply faded, like decisions do once they’ve settled into fact.
She would go home with her shoulders lower than they’d been in years.
He made sure of it.
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