It was a night so black you couldn't see your own hand in front of your face.
In the visitation room of the New Eridu police station sat the former representative of Vision Corporation, Charles Perlman - a middle-aged man who stood shorter than a Bangboo.
At that moment he was waiting on the only lifeline he had left.
"Too slow! Why isn't she here yet!"
Perlman still wore that same arrogance, though all it really did was expose the unease buried underneath it.
The Vision case had shoved him out front as the scapegoat, true - but that was also the very reason his safety was, for the moment, more or less guaranteed.
That quiet was about to shatter.
Tomorrow he would be escorted to the courthouse for trial, and the way things stood, every last charge would be hung around his neck before they locked him away for the better part of a decade.
That was not the outcome he wanted.
Click. Click.
The sharp knock of high heels on the floor pulled Perlman's head up. The person he'd been waiting for had come.
The iron door creaked open, and a tall woman in a fiery red coat stepped through. Perlman knew her all too well.
"Sarah Floren - so it's you! No, I should say, of course it's you!"
Surprise crossed his face first, then the smug look of a man who had expected nothing else.
After all, from the very start, the demolition project at Vision Corporation had been Sarah Floren's operation from top to bottom.
"Mr. Perlman, keeping well, I trust? Is the food at Public Security to your taste?" Sarah Floren settled into the chair across from him, her first words already sharpened into a jab.
"Hmph, you've got some nerve. All this time, and not one person from the company has come to see me. Aren't you afraid I'll air every last one of your secrets?"
Resentment churned in him. He was the one taking the fall, yes, but he was hardly ignorant of the dirtier workings behind the Vision case.
"Mr. Perlman, I'm afraid I don't follow."
Sarah Floren's expression dropped. Even now, this little runt in front of her still dared to threaten her?
But Perlman's words weren't spun out of thin air. He had something to stand on.
"Back then, that plot of land at the plaza was never on the demolition route, and yet you and the executives wrote it into the plan anyway."
He spoke slowly. Slowly enough that Sarah Floren's brows drew tight.
"And not long ago I heard some interesting news. About that monster that showed up in the plaza. And about the Rebel Soldiers inside the Hollow."
His mouth stretched into the smile of a man holding every card.
"Sarah Floren, you wouldn't want the judge finding out your real target was that monster in the plaza, would you? And you wouldn't want the media splashing your little arrangement with the Rebel Soldiers across every screen tomorrow either, would you?"
He had come expecting a lifeline thrown down to him. Now he meant to twist that straw into a rope and use it to haul himself back up out of the abyss.
"Mr. Perlman, His Honor isn't going to believe baseless fantasies like that."
Sarah Floren's voice had gone cold and flat. As far as she was concerned, Perlman had no room to bargain at all.
He only grinned wider, sly to the bone.
"Heh heh heh. And if I told you I have hard evidence that you and the man standing behind you were both involved in the Vision case—"
"Absolute proof, is it?"
Out in the corridor, Sarah Floren brushed a strand of hair back from her ear.
"Heh. I really did underestimate that little runt."
The easy, amused look she had carried into that room was gone without a trace, replaced by cold indifference.
Then she looked down at the purple gem resting in her palm - the core crystal of a Sacrifice.
"There are always people who imagine they can rewrite their own fate. They never realize it was written for them from the very beginning."
With that, Sarah Floren tucked the gem away and walked out of the prison without a flicker of concern.
There had been some deviation from the plan, but for now everything still fell within what she had foreseen.
Meanwhile, over at the Cunning Hares office, which hadn't been heard from in quite a while.
Nicole was happily sorting through outfits, fussing over every detail of her appearance.
At home, in her black-framed glasses, she carried a rare kind of ease.
"Boss, that's about enough, isn't it?"
Billy sat slumped on the couch, watching her fuss for over an hour now, and the exhaustion showed all over him.
Was there anything in this world more agonizing than waiting on a girl to get out the door?
That was exactly what Billy was thinking.
"What do you know? We're taking the witness stand for the Vision case. There'll be reporters everywhere looking for interviews. What if sloppy image management drags the Cunning Hares' good name through the mud!"
More than a month had passed since the Vision incident. After all that time spent gathering evidence and grinding through the legal work, Nicole and the others had finally arrived at the day of the trial.
Ding-a-ling.
The doorbell rang. Billy was on his feet in an instant, ready to ask his boss whether he should open it, but when he turned his head, Nicole had vanished.
"Where'd the boss go?"
"Hid in her room. She probably thinks it's a debt collector."
Anby answered him without inflection, relaxed enough to take another bite of her burger.
Which left Billy to drag himself up and go answer the door alone.
"Hello, who is it? ...Nobody?"
He pulled the door open to an empty hallway - and then pain shot through his knee.
"Oh ho~~ those are my brand-new second-hand hydraulic rods!"
Sitting on the floor hugging his leg, Billy finally got a look at who had been knocking.
"And here I was wondering. It's Nekomata. What, did Boss Nicole buy something again?"
Ever since Nekomata took up delivery work, the Cunning Hares and the Proxy siblings - old friends of hers, all of them - usually had her handle their packages. Partly to send business an old friend's way, and partly because Nekomata was willing to cut them a friends' rate, which a bargain hunter like Nicole was never going to let slip past her.
This time, though, things went nothing like Billy expected. Nekomata's face was grim, and the tail behind her whipped back and forth without stopping.
"We've got trouble, meow! Word just came from Public Security - Perlman is gone!"
"What?!"
Billy's eyes went round.
Perlman had broken out of prison?!
"What did you just say?!"
Nicole, who had been eavesdropping from her room the whole time, finally gave up hiding and came storming out, seizing Nekomata by the shoulders.
"What exactly happened? How does a man like that just disappear!?"
This was no small thing. Today the Vision case was going to trial, and at this of all moments the defendant - the mastermind behind the whole affair - had gone missing. It was a slap across the face of the entire New Eridu Public Security bureau.
And for the Cunning Hares, the hardest part to swallow was that their commission fee looked like it was going up in smoke all over again.
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