Katherina tried to run. A miserable attempt, confused, more reflex than action.

  She didn’t manage two steps: a diagonal pillar burst from the ground beneath her feet — his usual trick, implacable and instantaneous — and struck her in the stomach so hard it made her spit blood on the spot.

  The tinnitus exploded.

  Her vision buckled, trembling, sliced by shadows.

  And yet she saw Micheal.

  Of course she did.

  It was impossible not to: he was already running along the pillar as if he’d put it there for himself, a private walkway traced a second earlier. He leapt. Passed over her.

  The punch came immediately after — mid-air — and sent her down headfirst. Her skull hit the ground with that full-bodied thud you feel inside your eye sockets.

  Tinnitus, even stronger.

  Scotomas vibrating like deranged insects.

  A diffuse, deep numbness, the kind of numbness that feels like a degenerated herniated disc with complications stacked on top of it.

  But she was conscious.

  Still.

  “I’m still conscious… why?” she thought.

  Her body tried to pull itself together — that quick, slapdash, almost irritating improvement she’d had ever since arriving in that world — but it wasn’t enough.

  Couldn’t be enough.

  It was just a hint of recovery, a patch slapped over wounds that were far too deep.

  And the damage was too much: it felt like smearing analgesic over a terminal illness.

  And that terminal illness was Micheal.

  Sitting astride her mons veneris. Heavy. Solid.

  He stared down at her with that unbearable smirk while he touched her tiny breast, as if checking whether it really existed.

  The fractures in her arms had begun to repair themselves at a speed unnatural for an ordinary human.

  Natural only for those who, in that world, were generally called mages.

  Cartilaginous callus.

  Fibrous callus.

  Bony callus.

  The various stages of reconstruction alternated in jolts, one after the other, overlapping, accelerated — a biological time-lapse that shouldn’t exist.

  The full set of healing-reconstruction processes her body needed to complete before Katherina’s powers could become usable again was immense.

  Immense.

  And still far from finished.

  It was only the beginning — a sketch, a rough outline of recovery that would never be enough.

  Not now.

  Not for what she needed.

  And meanwhile Micheal was there.

  On top of her.

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  Straddling her.

  Heavy.

  Solid like a verdict that allows no appeal.

  Dripping with sweat — the real kind, dense, the kind that smells of a body wrung down to the bone, of brutal effort pushed to the limit.

  Exhausted.

  In a position that didn’t really belong to him: not because of the posture itself, but because — looking at him — Katherina would have naturally imagined the opposite.

  A reversal that felt instinctive, almost iconographic, yet here, in that moment, seemed oddly out of place.

  And for that very reason, it humiliated her even more.

  One implosive implant would have been enough.

  Just one.

  To drive that monster off her — and maybe stun him long enough to attempt fleeing again.

  But her arms were still useless.

  And he knew it.

  Saw it in her eyes.

  That unbearable little smirk as he looked down at her, unmoving.

  As if he had all the time in the world.

  Then he placed his right hand on her neck and tightened slightly.

  The skin under his fingers flared with a sharp, immediate sting.

  In the air, the acrid smell of her urine was thickening, sticky, warm—a miasma rising from the ground like her own private fog. Micheal inhaled deeply through his nose, almost savoring it, then said — cheerful, pleased:

  “Such a lovely smell. Hahaha. Now these are exciting results.”

  Wretched, perverse, depraved, half-witted… Katherina listed mentally, the words tangling together in her skull as her hands — without her permission — clenched into fists.

  A bolt of pain ran up her arms like a burning shock.

  Micheal noticed instantly. Naturally.

  “Ooooh, you’re hurting a lot, aren’t you?”

  That syrupy little voice, disgusting, dripping onto her like rancid molasses.

  With his other hand he pinched her cheek, a gesture so childish it became obscene.

  She jerked her head back, teeth grinding.

  “What am I supposed to do with you?” he said, tilting his head slightly, as if examining a cracked toy. “I have so many ideas, but I don’t know where to start. Fuck, what a situation.”

  A second of stillness.

  Then the flicker in his eyes.

  Ah. The Eureka look, sharp as a light switching on.

  He snapped his fingers — tac — marking the spark of realization.

  Katherina stayed silent, pressed to the ground, folded into an impotent defiance that couldn’t even turn into real anger. Only friction, short breath, resistance without traction.

  “There is one thing about you that actually intrigues me. Something that doesn’t concern your body, of course.”

  A shadow of a smile crossed his lips — that tiny contraction that usually comes right before a gratuitous cruelty.

  “Because… I can’t understand why you sent me that letter if you had already evacuated the city.

  A bargain-bin saviour complex?

  Do you really think I need to be saved?”

  “Not you, asshole,” Katherina said, her voice scraped raw, as if sound had to grind through sand.

  “Oh, right.”

  He blinked with fake innocence.

  “You’re convinced there’s another Micheal in here. A good Micheal. Do you realize how stupid that idea is?

  I thought you were going to kill me.”

  A long pause.

  His eyes darkened, assessing.

  “I would have, if I had been some moralist piece of shit burdened with a useless power like yours… It was my last bullet.”

  “You’re lying. No one can act that well in a moment like that.”

  “The problem with people like you,” Micheal said, tilting his head like a bored teacher, “is that you don’t understand that you’re incapable of understanding what’s good and what’s not.

  What the fuck do you know about acting?

  How can you give a technical evaluation of my performance?”

  “You’re saying I tricked myself.”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled — that wide, empty smile, stripped of any real emotion.

  “And here are the consequences.

  Don’t you feel stupid? Hahahaha.”

  His grip around Katherina’s neck tightened, slow, progressive, almost affectionate in its cruelty.

  Her breath slipped out in an involuntary hiss.

  He loosened his grip just a little.

  “What are you waiting for? Kill me,” Katherina said — a fierce pride in her voice, sharp and brittle, almost stage-painted.

  “Slow down. Slow down,” Micheal replied. “You won’t die today. And maybe I won’t kill you at all. Depends. Today you’re an interesting toy… tomorrow, who knows.”

  “What does it feel like to have no fucking conscience, you bastard?” she snarled back.

  “Oh, but I do have a conscience.”

  He tilted his head.

  “It’s just trapped inside the weaker personality.”

  Then he brought a hand to his mouth with an exaggerated, fake femininity.

  “Oops. The truth slipped out.”

  “I know there’s another identity in there,” Katherina said.

  “You need to believe that. Otherwise your failure would be complete.”

  “If there isn’t, prove to me you can act like that.”

  “And why should I?”

  “What does it cost you?”

  She looked at him with a stillness she didn’t truly possess.

  “You want to dismantle my doubt, don’t you? And honestly… proving I’m just a failed moralist would be far more humiliating for me. And therefore more fun for you.”

  She gave him a slow, almost taunting smile.

  Micheal stared at her with a flicker of irritation.

  And a hint of confusion.

  “Well, I can’t just act on command,” he said at last. “In that moment, the improvisation came naturally.”

  “As I suspected: you’re not capable of doing it.”

  Micheal’s grin returned, slow and assured.

  “Believe whatever you want.”

  His hand tightened around her throat in an instant. Hard.

  Katherina’s arms — still aching, stiff, almost foreign — lifted to grab his forearm, but she couldn’t even close her grip.

  She wouldn’t have been able to push him away even at full strength.

  Her body writhed on its own, driven by a primal reflex.

  Then he eased the pressure.

  A few breaths — short, ragged — slipped back into her lungs like reversed blades.

  Micheal leaned down toward her.

  She thought he was going to kiss her and turned her head as much as she could, a weak and instinctive gesture.

  But he brushed her ear instead and whispered:

  “You know… this world was created to kill me.

  And I, instead, was created to destroy it.”

  Then he pressed a long kiss on her left cheek — slow, ambiguous, unsettling — and straightened back up in his straddling posture.

  Why is he telling me this? Katherina thought, dazed.

  “What do you mean by that?” she managed to ask.

  No answer.

  Just a silence heavy as a boulder.

  She tried again, almost to keep him engaged, almost to stop him from drifting into some new whim:

  “Why did you bring soldiers? And siege towers?

  What do you even need them for, with all that power?”

  “Scenery,” Micheal said with a shrug. “And a powerful man must be feared. And worshipped.”

  “So you’re telling me that even a psychopath like you is afraid of being alone?”

  “You really think I’d feel lonely without a few little worms around me?”

  “I don’t know. Would you feel lonely?”

  Her voice was almost calm, almost analytical.

  “For someone trapped in the aesthetic stage like you are — and psychopathic or sociopathic on top of that — I doubt you’d survive desolation—”

  He cut her off, sharp.

  “Aesthetic stage? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Irritation rippled through his voice, quick and poisonous.

  “It’s not my fault you’ve never read Kierkegaard,” Katherina said, a flicker of provocation slipping out almost automatically.

  “And who the fuck is that?” Micheal shot back. “Why should I care about the thoughts of some guy who’s too different from me to be of any use?”

  Katherina didn’t know how to answer.

  And she didn’t get the chance.

  Micheal grabbed her by the hair with the same hand he had pretended several times he wanted to choke her with.

  He yanked her upward — head and part of her torso — as if he were forcing her into the first repetition of a set of sit-ups.

  She let out a short, torn scream.

  “You’re boring me,” he said. His voice was tight, bruised by irritation. “Talking to you isn’t fun at all. You’re just a whore who hides her vagina behind a mountain of bullshit that only an idiot would think makes someone intelligent.”

  No grin.

  No theatrics.

  Just raw ferocity, disciplined into a perversely elegant expression.

  The comment hit her deeply — different from the others, different from the usual jabs.

  This one felt real.

  This one aimed straight at the center.

  And Katherina felt it sink in, sharp, before she could even process the jab at her baroque cognitive style.

  She didn’t get the time to.

  Micheal drove a straight punch into her face.

  Clean.

  Then another.

  And another.

  He kept hitting her until the world went dark.