Leon sat in a quiet coffee shop, a cup of tea cooling in his hands.
He didn't drink it right away.
The shop wasn't empty, but it wasn't crowded either, only a standard amount of customers. People drifted in and out in loose intervals—some staying just long enough to warm their hands, others settling in as if they had nowhere urgent to be.
Conversations overlapped without ever rising too high. Laughter surfaced, died, then gave way to murmured complaints about prices, routes, delays.
Leon ignored all of it.
He wasn't waiting for comfort, and he wasn't waiting for silence. He was waiting for a moment. He lifted the cup and took a sip.
'Bitter.'
The taste lingered longer than it should have. He swallowed it without reaction and set the cup down again. Through the window, the street moved the way it always did—uneven, impatient, unconcerned. Carriages rattled past unevenly. Guards crossed when it suited them. Merchants argued until someone paid or walked away.
Leon watched without interest. He wasn't measuring people or memorizing faces. He was letting the rhythm settle, every provincial city had one.
Once you felt it, you knew when something was about to break it.
A waiter stopped beside his table, posture polite, eyes scanning him.
"Will that be all, sir?"
Leon nodded his head slightly. "Yes, thank you."
The waiter hesitated, as if considering another question, then thought better of it and moved on.
Leon's eyes dropped to his wrist.
A watch rested there, worn thin at the edges. A crack ran clean across its surface, splitting the face in a way that caught the light at certain angles. He tilted his arm once, adjusted it, then let it fall back into place.
He reached into his coat, withdrew a small leather-bound book, and flipped it open. The pages were packed tight with names, symbols, short notes written in a precise, compact hand. No wasted space. No unnecessary marks.
His eyes found the entry he was looking for, he studied it intently before he closed the book and slid it back into his coat. The hum of the shop continued, oblivious. Cups clinked. Someone laughed loudly near the counter. A chair scraped as another patron stood to leave.
Leon rose from his seat, left a gold coin on the table, and walked toward the door.
The moment he stepped outside, the air changed. Not in sound, but in pressure. It pressed lightly against his senses, subtle enough that no one else would notice. The kind of sensation that came just before something decided to happen.
Leon didn't stop. He reached the edge of the street and the pressure sharpened. A tightening, like the air itself had decided to hold still.
Then it broke.
An explosion came without warning. Heat and force tore down the street in a violent wave. Glass shattered outward, windows bursting all at once, carriages and stalls were flonged aside. The shock knocked people off their feet, screams cutting through the air as smoke rolled in thick, choking clouds.
Leon didn't flinch. He walked towards where the explosion had come from.
People ran the opposite direction, panic fracturing whatever order had existed seconds before. Someone collided with him, stumbled, and kept moving without a word. A cart overturned, spilling crates across the street, horses screamed as their reins were yanked free.
Leon stepped around the chaos as if it weren't there.
Ahead, a manor burned. Flames climbed fractured stone, licking up broken walls as if trying to escape the damage that had birthed them. Part of the structure had collapsed inward, leaving its interior exposed. Soldiers shouted orders over one another while mages scrambled to respond, spells half-formed and unraveling under pressure.
Water slammed into fire and vanished in hissing bursts. Ice formed, cracked, and failed. Smoke churned upward, dark and restless. through all this Leon kept walking.
No one stopped him, no one even noticed him.
A spell brushed past him, a trail of purple light, thin and unfocused. It slid off whatever he carried with barely a ripple. 'Good enough....'. he thought.
Through the chaos, a soldier's eyes caught on him for half a second, brow furrowing as if trying to remember something important, then moved on
Leon crossed the broken threshold and stepped inside. The air was hotter here, heavy with smoke and the sharp bite of scorched stone. The mansion groaned around him, timbers shifting, masonry settling into new, unstable positions. Shouts echoed from deeper within, mixed with the crackle of flame and wooden structures breaking.
He moved through it without hesitation.
A corridor had collapsed ahead. Leon turned, took another route, and reached the great room just as part of the ceiling caved in behind him. Dust rolled across the floor in thick waves.
At the center of the room, the stone was blackened into a perfect circle.
He crouched, uncorked a vial, and poured its contents onto the scorched floor. The reaction was immediate.
Runes flared to life, burning briefly before sinking into the stone. The ground groaned, then split apart, revealing a stairway spiraling downward into darkness.
Leon stood and descended.
The stairs swallowed the noise above. With each step down, the heat thinned, replaced by something heavier. The air grew dense, layered with enchantments that had been laid carefully and never meant to be disturbed. Leon felt them brush against his skin. He moved forward unbothered by the feeling.
At the bottom waited a vault door set into the stone, thick and deliberate. Runes were carved deep into its surface, dulled by age but intact, woven together in overlapping patterns meant to slow, mislead, and punish.
Leon placed his palm against the metal. It was cold.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then a faint glow bled from beneath his hand. Not light—heat, controlled and precise. He traced a short symbol against the door, the motion small, almost casual, as if writing something he'd written a hundred times before. The runes reacted instantly.
They flared, clashed, and collapsed into one another, enchantments unraveling as the symbol cut through their structure. The metal softened unevenly, sagging inward as its support failed.
Leon stepped back and let it finish. When the door gave way, he walked through without pause. The vault beyond lay untouched. Gold and relics rested in orderly silence, preserved by wards that no longer mattered. Time had been stalled here by design.
At the center an amulet. It hovered unassumingly. Suspended perfectly still.
Leon approached it. The space around it felt compressed, as if the air itself were being held in place. He reached out, fingers closing around it as heat flared briefly against his palm—sharp, warning, then gone.
"Troublesome little thing," he muttered under his breath before slipping it into his coat.
Then, the sounds of footsteps echoed above. Voices followed, tight with urgency.
"Someone breached the treasury!"
"It's never easy is it." Leon sighed and turned. Soldiers rushed down the stairs, weapons drawn. A mage at the rear raised his staff, spell forming cleanly, focus intact.
The mage finished his casting cleanly. The spell locked into place, structure tight, mana cycling the way it was supposed to.
Leon watched it form. Then he shifted his stance and pressed two fingers briefly against his wrist. A faint distortion rippled outward—not power, but interference.
The spell stuttered.
Its flow lost cohesion, mana folding back into the casting circle instead of dispersing forward. The feedback detonated inward, slamming the mage against the wall and knocking him unconscious before he could sever the connection.
The first soldier reached Leon. He didn't finish the swing. Leon struck once clean and final. Another rushed in from the side. Leon stepped past him, hooked a leg, and sent him hard into the stone. He didn't get back up. Steel flashed too close.
Leon twisted aside. The blade grazed his sleeve.
He frowned.
The fight had already been included and the victor was already chosen. Some of the soldiers had fallen and didn't even think of rising. Others crumpled where they stood, breath knocked from them, limbs unresponsive. When silence returned, the vault floor was littered with bodies—some still, some breathing.
Leon adjusted his coat, eyeing the torn fabric with irritation.
"Darn!...My favourite one." He turned toward the stairs.
Leon climbed back into the ruined mansion. Fire had taken hold of the upper halls now, crawling along beams and devouring what remained of the structure's spine. Stone groaned as weight shifted, cracks racing through walls already weakened by the blast.
Shouts echoed from somewhere deeper inside. Someone was giving orders; Leon moved through it without urgency.
A section of ceiling collapsed behind him, sparks and dust chasing his steps. Heat pressed in from every side, smoke thick enough to sting his eyes. He reached the center of what had once been a wide hall and stopped. The floor there was fractured, rubble scattered unevenly where the blast had done its worst.
Leon knelt down and from his coat, he produced a single black coin and placed it among the debris. No markings caught the light. No inscription announced its purpose. It simply rested there, dull and ordinary.
The air around it darkened.
A circle formed soundlessly, lines folding in on themselves, light bending instead of glowing. The heat pulled away from it, fire recoiling as if instinctively unwilling to cross the boundary.
Leon stepped into the circle.
For a brief moment, the flames surged higher, the mansion shuddering as if resisting the loss.
Then he was gone.
The structure continued to burn. Stone collapsed. Water spells finally found their mark, steam rising as the fire was driven back piece by piece. When the smoke thinned and the worst of the damage was contained, soldiers began searching the ruins in earnest.
They found signs of a breach, with bodies in the vault.
And at the center of the wreckage, untouched by ash or heat, they found the coin.
No one knew how long it had been there or what it meant.
But no one thought of moving it.