One Hour Before the Explosion. The Small Town of Morad, Fasheart State.

  This town is a sore that festers on the beautiful body of the Asnaven Kingdom. Here, streetlights are not made of crystals, but straw-fueled torches that have to be lit every hour. The lighting does not come only from that; there are also iron barrels filled with trash, burned by the homeless to warm their hands.

  Kars stood in a narrow alley behind a two-story wooden building whose red paint was peeling. The sign above the door read: "The Velvet Sun," but the letter 'S' had been stolen.

  He was still wearing his shirt, though his tie was gone, and his sleeves were rolled up. He did not knock. He merely released a little Intian—a specific vibration that could only be felt by the owner of this place.

  The back door opened. Not by a burly guard, but by a woman wearing a thin silk kimono patterned with dragons. The woman, Beth, was holding a long ivory cigarette pipe. Her face was beautiful in a dangerously alluring way; there was a sharp line to her jaw and a gaze that could rip a man's wallet in two seconds.

  "You have an unpaid drink tab from last month, Mr. Star," said Beth, her voice hoarse and heavy, the puff of cigarette smoke brushing Kars’ face. "And you came here reeking of cheap aristocratic perfume. Disgusting."

  "I didn’t come to drink, Beth," Kars replied. His face was serious. No 'trying-to-look-cool' smile this time. His eyes were dark and alert, continually scanning the rooftops of the buildings around them.

  Beth noticed the change. She pulled Kars inside and then locked the door with three layers of iron locks and a simple safety spell.

  "They found you?" Beth asked, her mocking tone disappearing instantly.

  "Not yet. But the scent is close. The Golden Angels Order," Kars hissed.

  Beth's face paled slightly under her powder. She knew that name. She was one of the few people in the underworld who knew who Kars really was before he became the ‘Fallen Star’.

  "What’s your plan? Run to the harbor? I can have a smuggler ship ready in ten minutes."

  "No. I can’t run this time. There’s... an anchor holding me back."

  Kars pulled out a bag of Kluppe platinum coins—not ordinary Kluppe, platinum. Enough to buy half of this slum district. He placed it on Beth’s cluttered vanity, strewn with powder and imitation jewelry.

  "I need you to get out of this dead-end hole, Beth. Clean yourself up. Use your old name, or a new one that sounds expensive."

  Beth looked at the bag, then at Kars. "For what?"

  "For teaching," Kars said. He walked to the window, peeking outside through the gap in the curtains. "There’s a girl. Rhea Ashart. She’s my student."

  "Ashart? You mean the highest second family of the kingdom?"

  "She’s going into the lion’s den tomorrow. The Royal Palace. Prince Arlen has set his sights on her," Kars turned, staring sharply at Beth. "I’m teaching her how to kill monsters. How to blow up rocks. But I can’t teach her how to kill with a smile. She’s too honest. Too transparent."

  Kars grabbed Beth's shoulder.

  "If I don't come back tonight... I need you to be her shadow. Teach him to be poisonous. Teach him how to manipulate a man's ego until they don't realize his neck is entangled."

  Beth brushed away Kars's hand, then took the platinum bag. He weighed it in his hand. "You talk as if you're going to die, boss."

  "I don't plan on dying. But this time the enemy... they were the masterminds of the Stealix massacre."

  Kars walked to the door. He paused for a moment, his hand on the doorknob. "Take care of her, Beth. She... important. Not just for a moment. But forever."

  Beth sucked on her pipe deeply, then exhaled it slowly. "Go. Die if you want to. But don't expect me to return this money if you survive."

  Kars grinned faintly—a glimpse of his old self. "It's nice to do business with you, Madame."

  Kars disappeared into the darkness of the night. Beth stared at the closed door for a long time. Then, she snuffed out her cigarette in the ashtray with a rough movement and opened her wardrobe. She pushed aside her cheap kimonos. From the very back of the closet, she pulled out a dusty box. Inside, neatly folded, was a formal black dress, covered in the style of a strict upper-class Governess.

  "Damn you, Kars," she muttered. "You always know I can't say no to you."

  ***

  After the Explosion. Under the Old Irongrey Bridge, 28 Kilometers from the Scene of the Incident.

  The world is spinning. Then stop with a painful jerk.

  Elodie de Valois coughed heavily, vomiting bile fluid mixed with dust. She was lying on her back on the cold, damp rocky ground. Above it, it wasn't the starry sky where she was fighting earlier. Rather, it is a curved rusty iron structure—the Old Irongrey Bridge that connects the slum district with the city.

  "Kars...?"

  Her voice was hoarse, swallowed by the sound of the frozen river flowing beside her.

  Elodie tried to sit up. Her whole body screamed in pain. Her pastel silk party dress, which she had already torn before, was now completely ruined. The fabric was burned in many places, tattered like an old mop cloth. Her left arm was bloody, scratched by sharp rocks when she landed here.

  But she was alive. She felt her face, her chest, her legs. Intact.

  Her memory spiraled back to that final moment. Kars's outstretched hand. The purple light shrinks into a black dot, then explodes into absolute white.

  Elodie was aghast.

  She stared at her own hands. A fine layer of silver-gray dust clung to her skin. It wasn’t soil dust. Elodie rubbed the dust with trembling fingers. The dust wasn’t coarse, but very fine, almost slippery. It was... disintegrated matter.

  The Kars technique didn’t burn its enemies. The technique broke the atomic bonds that held matter together. The Star Hunters didn’t die, leaving bodies; they were erased from existence. Transformed into the basic dust of the universe.

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  "But... the explosion..."

  Elodie crawled out from under the bridge, dragging her weak legs toward the riverbank. She looked east. Toward the Statue of the Kings.

  There was no fire there. No black smoke rising. All that was there was emptiness.

  From this distance of three kilometers, she could see the silhouette of the cliff where the statues stood. That hill... was cut. As if a giant spoon had scooped half of it away until it disappeared. A perfect semicircular crater, dimly glowing with remnants of white radiation. The statues of the Fourth and Fifth Kings were gone. Vanished without a trace.

  Elodie looked up at the sky. Searching for a sign.

  Among the thousands of stars resting in the winter sky, her eyes caught a single point of light in the Northern Archer constellation. The star was not still. The star flickered. Blink-Dead-Blink.

  It was not a natural star. It was the signature of God-level Space-Time Magic. A residual signal from the use of a long-distance portal. Singus.

  "Portal..." Elodie sobbed, hot tears finally spilling onto her frozen cheeks.

  Kars didn't just blow up the enemy. In the same split second the explosion occurred—when the matter began to collapse—he opened a one-way Singus and threw Elodie out of the death radius.

  But opening a portal in the middle of a sub-atomic explosion required impossible focus. That means the user had to lower their own defenses against the blast to calculate the teleportation coordinates.

  The flickering star gradually dimmed, then returned to normal. Its magical signal vanished. Kars, the Fallen Star, had disappeared along with the light of his own explosion.

  Elodie was alone by the dark river. Cold, injured, and left with choking guilt.

  She hit the ground with her bloody fists. Once. Twice. "Bastard. Supid bastard."

  Elodie roughly wiped her tears away, leaving silver dust stains on her face. She stared at the glowing crater in the distance. If Kars died, Elodie swore she would burn anyone who had sent that Hunters. Arlen. The kingdom. Everyone.

  But until she saw his corpse... she would assume that cunning bastard was still alive somewhere, perhaps thrown into another dimension, perhaps laughing.

  Elodie staggered to her feet. She had to return to the Vsnava embassy before anyone saw her in this state. She had to come up with a plan. This game had just shifted from politics to war.

  ***

  The pale morning sunlight streamed through the large dining room windows, illuminating the long marble table filled with an elaborate breakfast spread. Yet, not a single person had an appetite.

  Mira sat in her chair, wearing a simple cream-colored house dress. Her brown hair was loosely tied. In front of her, a plate of eggs and sausages had gone cold, untouched. Her feet tapped rapidly and anxiously against the floor under the table.

  "The seismograph in my lab recorded a 4.8 Richter scale tremor last night, at two in the morning," Lord Dalt said suddenly. He did not touch his coffee. He stared at the device printing lines on moving paper, a device that sat on the kitchen table.

  "A natural gas explosion?" Henesa asked, her voice sounding hopeful yet thin. Her face was pale, with dark circles under eyes that were usually flawless.

  "Natural gas doesn’t erase matter, Nesa," Dalt refuted softly, shutting off his hologram. "And natural gas doesn’t leave behind particles of light that make my measuring device nearly explode. That’s magic."

  Mira gripped her fork so tightly that the silver bent slightly. She knew. Since last night, while she was sleeping, she had woken up with a sharp jolt. The Igniter bracelets on her wrist buzzed loudly, responding to something. The stars inside her chest churned. And this morning, the chair across from her was empty.

  Kars never skipped Sunday breakfast. He always came asking for blueberry pancakes and complained about Dalt’s coffee being too strong. But today, his chair was empty. His plate was clean.

  "Where is he?" Mira asked. Her voice flat, cold.

  Henesa and Dalt looked at each other. An exchange of anxious glances is typical of parents trying to hide bad news.

  "Kars... left a message in the mailbox," Henesa said hesitantly. "He said he had urgent business at the Northern border. He has to leave before dawn."

  "Lies," Mira cut in sharply. She stood up. Her chair squeaked loudly.

  "Rhea..."

  "You felt it too," Mira urged, her eyes glassy with frustration and anger. "That vibration. That light. Who else could it be if not him? There are only two star magic users in this world, right? He fought last night. And he didn't take me along."

  Mira pushed her plate away. "He left me alone in this lion's den."

  "We're trying to find out, kid," Dalt finally admitted, his shoulders slumping. "I've already sent people to King's Cliff. But that area... that area is empty. No wreckage. No footprints. Like it was erased. And there’s a Royal Guard barricade there now."

  Erased. That word made Mira's blood run cold.

  "I’ll go there," Mira said. She turned toward the dining room door.

  "You can’t!" Henesa shouted, standing up quickly. "The palace is watching you, Rhea! You’re a Queen candidate now. Prince Arlen’s Shadow Guards must have surrounded this mansion. If you’re caught sneaking into the disaster site, they’ll accuse you of being the culprit!"

  "I don’t care," Mira said, touching one of the bracelets on her wrist. "I can go through the underground passage. I can—"

  "You’re not going anywhere, Little Princess."

  That voice did not belong to Henesa. The voice was unfamiliar. Heavy, firm, and cold like a prison floor.

  Mira spun around quickly, taking a fighting stance. At the threshold of the dining room stood a woman.

  She was tall and slender, wearing a long black gown that was very modest, with a stiff lace high collar that choked her neck. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight bun, not a single strand out of place. Her face... her face was firm, expressionless, with gold-rimmed chain glasses perched on her sharp nose.

  Mira squinted.

  "Who are you?" Mira asked cautiously.

  "Her name is Madame Arlene," Henesa replied, looking slightly relieved (or perhaps scared) at the sight of the woman. "She is... an instructor of ethics and psychology recommended by Kars."

  Madame Arlene stepped in. The sound of her high heels clicked against the marble floor with an authority that made Dalt reflexively straighten his tie. She walked straight toward Mira, then stopped right in front of that girl's face.

  “Kars told me that you are a blunt weapon,” Arlene said. Her voice sounded soft yet piercing. “You can snap someone’s neck in two seconds. You can blow things up. But you don’t have the brains for palace games.”

  Mira growled. “I don’t need a moral teacher. I need to find Kars.”

  “Kars is gone,” Arlene interrupted coldly. “And he paid me a very high price—money that could buy half of this city—to make sure you don’t die foolishly tomorrow.”

  Mira’s eyes widened. Very high price? Kars didn’t have that kind of money. Unless...

  Arlene produced a black folding fan from inside her sleeve. She opened it with a sharp motion.

  "You have 24 hours before you have to face Prince Arlen for a private interview," Arlene continued. She walked around Mira, inspecting her posture with a condescending gaze.

  "That prince is a predator. He eats naive, innocent girls like you for breakfast. If you go in there with that clearly murderous look on your face, he'll break you before the tea is served."

  Arlene stopped behind Mira, whispering something in her ear. "Kars asked me to teach you one thing: How to be sweet poison."

  Mira turned, meeting Arlene's eyes.

  "He planned it," Mira whispered, her voice trembling. "He knows."

  "He always knows," Arlene replied, her tone softening slightly, just for a moment. "He left the safety net. And that net is me."

  Arlene is back in her ruthless instructor mode. She pointed to the door to the living room.

  "Now, come with me. We don't have time to cry. We'll spend the next 24 hours dismantling your brain and putting it back together."

  "I don't want to," Mira clenched. "I want to go to the King's Cliff."

  "Go," Arlene challenged. "Go over there, be caught by Arlen, and let Kars' sacrifice last night go to waste. Let him die—or disappear—to save the disciple who couldn't even follow his final instructions."

  That sentence slapped Mira harder than a physical blow. Sacrifice. Kars sacrificed for something. Mira didn't know what or who. But if she acted rashly now, she would destroy everything.

  Mira stared at Dalt and Henesa. They looked helpless. Then she looked at Arlene.

  Mira took a deep breath, swallowing her fear and anger. She turned it into coldness. "Alright," said Mira. Her gaze shifted, from wild to focused. "Teach me."

  "What?"

  "Teach me how to bring down that Prince," Mira hissed. "Teach me how to make him regret saying my name."

  The corners of Madame Arlene's lips lifted slightly—very slightly, almost imperceptibly. A smile of satisfaction. "Good. Step one: wipe that vengeful expression off your face. A woman doesn't kill with a knife, dear. She kills with false hope."

  Arlene turned, walking out of the room with a proud stride. "Let's go. Lesson starts now."

  Mira followed the black-haired woman. In her heart, she promised the empty chair of Kars: I will play this game, Kars. I will survive. And when I find you later, I will hit you for leaving me with this expensive bill.