The order was simple. Two words, clipped and cold.
"Get him."
Frederick ran. But it was not a frantic, desperate sprint. It was a calculated, almost leisurely movement, a man out for a morning jog through a burning hellscape. He did not simply run; he scaled burning shelves with the ease of climbing a garden trellis. He leaped between crumbling archive towers as if stepping across puddles. His boots found itself on surfaces that should have crumbled, his body moving with practiced motion that mirrored years of discipline condensed into hardwork.
As he dropped from a high ledge, he spotted a girl with a dagger. She was crouched, ready to pounce, her knuckles white around the hilt. Frederick stepped to the side in a movement so casual it was almost comical.
"Whoops," he murmured under his breath, continuing his unhurried jog along the parallel shelf.
He called back over his shoulder, his voice carrying saint like patience.
"You need solid footing! A lunge without a stable base is just falling with intent!"
He was not sprinting. He was not even hurrying. This was light work compared to the endless battles against Miguel and his summoned legions. These were Latents at best, some completely unawakened. Children waving borrowed power.
He turned a corner.
Dead end.
'Shucks.'
He turned around slowly, arms crossing over his chest. Six of them had followed him initially. Three now stood before him. The others had split off after Ayame, and the leader's party had remained with Lucid. He wondered, briefly, if they had joined the pursuit. He set the thought aside.
"He is cornered!" one of them yelled, emboldened.
"Alright, kill him! With everything we have! Activate your spells and artifacts!"
Frederick looked at them. His voice was calm, almost gentle.
"Turn around. If you value your lives."
The girl with the dagger stepped forward. Her blade trembled in her grip, but her face was set with a desperate, brittle determination. She pointed the weapon at him, her voice shaking.
"Please... just make it easier for all of us..."
She lunged. "Die!"
Frederick didn't move. He simply looked down at her as her blade stopped a hair's length from his chest, her arms locked with fear and uncertainty.
"You are a second year," he observed. "A silver badge, too." His tone was not accusatory. It was curious, almost sad. "Why?"
Her hands shook violently. Tears welled in her eyes, but she did not lower the dagger. Many of them had reasons... wether there was a sick mother, a debt, a desperation that made this betrayal of everything they had sworn to protect a necessary evil. They had to do it. She nor they did not say any of this. However, it was written in their trembling of her faces, the frantic darting of her eyes, his scratches.
They were scared.
"What are you doing? Strike before he draws his sword!" a voice screamed from behind her.
Frederick's arms remained crossed. His sword stayed sheathed.
She braced herself, screaming as she drove the dagger forward with both hands. Behind her, a spell of sickly blue light arced toward him. Others followed, a hailstorm of desperate magic.
Frederick moved.
It was not fast. It was simply precise. He stepped inside her lunge, his elbow finding the soft pressure point beneath her ear. She crumpled instantly, her dagger clattering. Without pausing, he shifted his weight, a backhanded strike catching the swordsman charging at his flank. Cartilage crunched. The man spun, his greatsword carving a harmless arc through empty air.
Two more fell in quick succession. Subdued, not slain. Disarmed, not killed.
Only the spellcasters remained.
They stared at him, their hands shaking.
"Are you two planning on watching?" Frederick asked.
One of them dropped his staff. It hit the stone floor with a hollow clatter. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm—"
The other, a young woman, grabbed his collar. "What are you doing? Are you mad? They will hunt us down! Our families! Kill him!"
"I can't. I can't do it."
Frederick's arms were still crossed. He looked at them, black badges, third years, children sent to die for a cause they barely understood. He sighed, a soft exhale of pity.
"I will not kill you," he said. "The circumstances have changed. This is no longer a rift expedition. A terrorist attack has turned this Epsilon rift into a Beta class catastrophe. You are hereby under my protection."
His voice hardened, not with anger, but with absolute certainty.
"Please. Stop fighting. It is futile."
Behind him, a shadow moved.
The girl with the dagger had risen. Blood trickled from her nose, her eyes unfocused but burning with desperate purpose. She gripped her weapon with both hands and drove it toward his back, a wailing cry tearing from her throat.
"GYAAAGHHH!"
Frederick moved before thought could catch up. Instinct honed over thousands of hours of solitary practice guided his body. He sidestepped. The girl, carried by her own momentum, stumbled past him, her dagger screeching against the stone shelf as she collapsed to her knees.
He looked at her, his expression unreadable.
"I admire your dedication," he said quietly. "Truly. But I am afraid you will need to do more than that."
The other spellcaster, emboldened by the attack, launched a volley. Frederick weaved through the projectiles, his movements a dance of minimal displacement. Then a single, concentrated beam of searing blue energy lanced through the air. It did not target him. It targeted the two spellcasters who had hesitated from behind.
It caught fredrick off guard.
He made split second decision. Frederick moved. He grabbed the girl with the dagger and hurled her clear, his own shoulder taking the brunt of the blast. His pauldron shattered. His sword, raised in a desperate parry, cracked along its length.
The two spellcasters were dead. What remained of them were half-consumed forms, one still reaching with charred fingers for his fallen staff. It was grotesque. Obscene.
For the first time, shock and raw anger flickered across Frederick's composed features.
"Well done, Frederick."
A figure emerged from the smoke. Black hair. Red eyes. A third-year, familiar from shared classes and silent, resentful glances. He held a wand of polished obsidian, its tip still smoking with residual energy.
"You cannot protect anything," the man said, his voice dripping with contempt. "You never could."
Frederick said nothing. He simply looked at his former classmate.
A concentrated bolt of blue shot past his ear, shearing a thin line of blood across the cartilage.
He did not flinch.
"Geez. Nothing fazes you." The red-eyed man grinned, a predator's smile. "Come on. Beg for your life. You have no chance against me."
Frederick glanced to his side. The girl with the dagger was still alive, groaning, stirring. One small mercy.
In a single, fluid motion, he drew his sword.
Clang.
The parry was perfect. The blue bolt deflected harmlessly into the shelves. But the pristine blade, already cracked, shattered into a dozen silver shards.
Frederick dissolved into motion. He closed the distance in the span of a heartbeat, his broken hilt raised. The red-eyed man fired again, point-blank. The beam caught Frederick in the chest, sending him skidding backward, his ruined weapon flying from his grip.
The man laughed, a high, manic sound.
"Ahahaha! What can an unawakened person do without a weapon? You are up against an Awakened, knight. Tch. Screw the subdue order. I will just kill you."
His red eyes flared, enhanced with Fate Essence, a sickly blue aura bleeding from his wand. "Finders keepers, after all."
Frederick pushed himself up slowly. His chestplate was scorched. His sword was gone. He looked around the burning gallery, his expression distant, contemplative. Things had drifted so far from his plan. The princess was in danger. Students were dying. And he stood here, unarmed, facing a man who had been silently hating him for years.
He bent down. His fingers closed around a small, fallen twig, no longer than his palm. He held it gently, as if it were made of glass.
The red-eyed man laughed again, thinking it a joke, a final, pathetic gesture.
"Ah, you have finally accepted death! Good! Tell me, what did she see in you? I have hired every person, every resource to look into you. Where you reside. What name you carry. It always comes back blank. Blank! As if you do not exist."
His wand glowed brighter. His voice rose to a scream.
"Tell me, Frederick! Where are you really from? Every accident, every monster, every criminal that crossed your path—all of it was assassination attempts! Even poison! Even poison could not take you! So what are you? What monster spawned you?"
Frederick looked at the twig in his hand. He did not think of the man screaming before him. He did not think of the dead students, the burning shelves, the impossible odds. He thought of a single word.
Duty.
He raised his arms. His right hand, holding the twig, lifted slowly toward the smoke-choked sky. His posture was elegant, almost artistic—a conductor before his orchestra, a sculptor before raw marble.
The red-eyed man stopped laughing. His enhanced senses screamed a warning. Something was deeply, fundamentally wrong.
"Farewell," Frederick said, his voice soft as a prayer. "My friend."
He brought the twig down.
The air rippled. It did not break; it parted, as if reality itself had been sliced cleanly in half. A shockwave erupted from the point of the gesture, expanding in all directions at once. The slow, steady flames consuming the white shelves were extinguished instantly, snuffed like candles. A tremor, deep and primal, shook the entire gallery. Dust billowed upward in a great, choking cloud.
Frederick looked at the twig in his hand. It crumbled to fine, gray dust, slipping through his fingers like the last grains of an hourglass.
The girl with the dagger stirred. Through blurred vision, she saw the knight walk calmly into the roiling smoke, his silhouette firm and unwavering. Behind him, the red-eyed man lay crumbled next to the shelves, his clothes tattered, his face bloody. It wasn't fatal, but it was something you could never recover from. He had not been killed him. But he had shattered his very will.
Frederick did not look back. He had already moved on, his mind fixed on the next duty.
The smoke swallowed him whole.