[Healing Litigated … process… healing continued… 15%]
Each breath was shallow. Each beat of his heart came with a whisper of pain. But pain was familiar now. Pain was just another tool, like memory. Like hatred. Like the cold silence he had learned to wrap himself in when the nights had grown too loud and Claire's arms weren't there to silence the screams.
A memory flashed through him—blood in the snow, Lara's voice screaming, and his hands too slow to stop it. "Too slow, too kind," she had whispered once. And yet now, he was neither.
He faced Number Five and Seven across the crater, their armor glinting, their mana humming like a storm held at bay. Ten was still down, his body stirring faintly, a broken tool not yet discarded. Atlas's hand gripped a crimson vial, his thumb brushing the trigger of another scroll—a bluff, a spark to keep their eyes on him.
