The aftermath of the Crimson Altar was a study in controlled chaos, and Zero was its most dedicated student. From the shadowed rooftops of the undercity, he became a ghost, a silent observer to the City Watch's blundering, heavy-handed investigation. He watched as Tarsus's men cordoned off the area, their yellow Watch lanterns a pathetic, flickering defense against the Altar's oppressive gloom. He saw them carrying the bodies of their fallen comrades, their faces a mixture of fear and grim determination. And he saw Tarsus, a figure of stoic, simmering fury, directing the scene not like a captain, but like a general surveying a lost battle.
Zero felt no satisfaction. He felt no fear. The [Callous] skill was a perfect, emotionless filter, turning the entire, dramatic scene into a simple collection of tactical data points. Tarsus is now personally invested. His focus will be absolute. The Altar is a compromised location. The beast will not return. It will need a new nest.
This was the new, central problem. The Glimmer-Hulk was wounded, its last known location now a hive of enemy activity. It would need to retreat, to find a new place to recover and feed. And when it did, Zero had to be there waiting. He could not afford another direct, unpredictable confrontation. His victory, when it came, had to be engineered, a flawless execution on a battlefield of his own choosing.
He retreated to the cold, quiet sanctuary of his dorm room. He did not rest. He began the hunt anew, not on the streets, but on paper. He unrolled a fresh sheet of parchment, the clean, empty space a stark contrast to the bloody, chaotic memories of the Altar. This was his true element. He was a theorist, a cartographer of not just land, but of behavior, of instinct. He was about to draw a map of the Glimmer-Hulk's hunger.
He opened the stolen grimoire, its worn leather cover feeling like a familiar, comforting weight. He ignored the chapters on brute force, on holy magic, on the things he did not possess. He focused on the ecology of chaos, the biology of the Unraveled.
The text was a revelation, the hard-won wisdom of a hundred forgotten hunters. Chaotic creatures are not truly alive in the conventional sense, one annotation read, the script a messy, practical scrawl. They are localized reality fluxes, pockets of dissonance that require a constant influx of ambient magical or psychic energy to maintain their cohesion. Deprived of a source, they will destabilize and unravel. They do not choose a lair for comfort or defensibility. They choose it for sustenance. A powerful enough nest is both their food and their anchor.
The Crimson Altar had been a feast. Now, crawling with the clean, orderly energy of Watch wards and righteous indignation, it would be a famine. The beast would be forced to move. It would be weak, desperate, and searching for the next closest, most potent source of its preferred food.
Zero's mind began to work, a cold, logical engine processing the variables. He needed a list of potential nests. Places of high ambient power. Places that were abandoned, untrafficked, where the beast could recover in peace.
He had some of this knowledge from his first life, from his obsessive study of the city's history. But he needed more. He needed the granular, up-to-the-minute knowledge of the undercity's secret geography. He needed Kael.
He sent the message, a simple, coded request dropped into the usual sewer pipe. He was not asking for gossip this time. He was asking for a specific, esoteric piece of real estate information. A list of the three most magically saturated, currently abandoned locations in the northern undercity, ranked by potency.
The price for this information was steep. Kael's reply, delivered a day later, was a demand for the full, detailed account of a coming schism within the Thieves' Guild, a piece of future knowledge that would allow the Rat-kin to position himself perfectly to profit from the chaos. Zero provided it without hesitation. The information was a triviality from a future he was actively unmaking. The information he received in return was the key to his survival.
Kael's list arrived that evening, a simple, unadorned scroll. It contained three locations.
The Sunken Crypt of Saint Elara: A holy site, sealed after a minor undead outbreak fifty years ago. Still saturated with divine energy.
The Spire of Whispers: The collapsed ruin of a mad archmage's tower. Riddled with unstable, wild magic portals. Extremely dangerous.
The Alchemist's Maw: The sealed sub-basement of the old Alchemist's Guildhall. Site of the infamous 'Reality Cascade' incident a century ago. Officially cleansed, but rumors persist of lingering, warped magical effects.
Zero stared at the list, his mind already deconstructing the options.
He dismissed the Sunken Crypt immediately. The grimoire had been clear: divine or "holy" energy was anathema to chaotic creatures. It was a poison, not a food source. To the Glimmer-Hulk, that crypt would be a starvation chamber.
The Spire of Whispers was a more tempting possibility. Wild magic was a chaotic cousin to the Abyssal Dissonance. But his own [Intuitive Analysis] recoiled at the thought. The place was too unstable. The wild magic portals were random, unpredictable. The beast might be drawn there, but the environment was too chaotic to control, too dangerous for him to set the kind of meticulous trap he envisioned. To enter the Spire would be to gamble, and Zero was not a gambler. He was a statistician.
That left the third option. The Alchemist's Maw.
He pulled a historical city map from his collection, one detailing the layout of the city from a century ago. The Alchemist's Guildhall had once been a grand, sprawling complex in the heart of the merchant district. The sub-basement, the "Maw," had been its most secret and dangerous wing, a place for experiments that bent the very laws of reality. The 'Reality Cascade' incident had been a catastrophic failure, a magical meltdown that had killed two dozen alchemists and warped a square mile of the surrounding undercity. The Guild had been dissolved, the Maw sealed with lead and wards, and the entire event stricken from the public record.
It was perfect.
It was not a place of wild, unpredictable magic like the Spire. It was a place of deep, stable, and profoundly corrupted magical energy. The residue of a thousand failed, reality-warping experiments. It was a buffet of the exact kind of dissonant, chaotic energy the Glimmer-Hulk would crave. It was abandoned. It was sealed. It was a self-contained, predictable, and, most importantly, defensible location.
He had found the nest.
He stood up and walked to his window, looking out over the moonlit spires of the academy. He could feel it now, a faint, distant, but undeniable thrum on the edge of his perception. The chaotic signature of the Glimmer-Hulk. It was weak, wounded, but it was moving. And it was moving with a new, desperate purpose.
He triangulated its position, using his own location as a baseline. The beast was several miles away, but its trajectory was clear. It was heading directly for the sealed, forgotten sub-basement of a building that had not been entered in a hundred years.
Zero allowed himself a thin, cold smile. The cartography was complete. The hunt was no longer a matter of tracking. It was a matter of preparation. He was not just a hunter following a trail anymore. He was an architect, and he was about to design a tomb.