BANG!
At that critical moment, a gunshot shattered the tension. Old Master Timefield and the others had scrambled to pick up the firearms the Public Security officers had dropped, and now they were unloading everything they had into the Giant Hand.
The Hand seemed more annoyed than hurt. With a flick at its base, it batted the bullets straight back — sending everyone diving for cover.
And in that single instant of distraction, Geno found his opening.
He Etherealized a section of his chest — and from within, he drove out a spike of crystallized Ether, thrusting it directly into the eye embedded in the center of the Hand's palm.
In the blink of an eye, the balance of power had flipped.
"!!!"
The moment the Ether crystal spike pierced the Hand's eye, Geno seized on the connection it formed and began fighting to reclaim his stolen Ether from within the creature's body.
The Hand was having none of it. What it had taken was its — there was no universe in which it was giving anything back.
So instead, it simply redoubled its pull — draining from Geno at an even more savage rate.
Back and forth it went. Between the two of them, a perfect closed loop had formed: Ether flowing out of Geno and into the Hand, then ripped back out of the Hand and into Geno.
To anyone watching, it looked like a storm of multicolored light — Ether particles bursting free from the Hand, only to be immediately yanked back to Geno's body, and then sucked right back into the Hand again.
The bracelet on Geno's wrist stopped blinking red. Now it flickered endlessly between red and green, red and green — unable to settle on either.
The Ether kept cycling. But neither of them was a perpetual motion machine — endless exchange meant endless loss. Attrition was the name of the game now.
What it came down to, in the end, was willpower.
As it happened, willpower was Geno's single greatest specialty.
"I am a man who grinded Blue for an entire month!!"
With a roar, Geno shoved — driving the spike deeper into the eye, just a fraction further than before.
That fraction was all it took.
It was the final straw that broke the Hand's endurance.
In its complete, disembodied form, the Hand burned through energy far faster than Geno did in his human-suppressed state. Now that the equilibrium between them had shattered, the Hand began to shrink — rapidly, visibly — contracting in on itself.
Its stolen Ether bled away, flooding back into Geno. The indicator on his bracelet steadied at last, locking firmly into the green.
The first thing Geno did with his recovered strength was pry the Hand's crushing grip open with sheer force. The second was to snap the crystal spike connecting them — severing the Ether loop between them entirely.
"Now," he said, "it's my turn."
The blinded Hand seemed to sense that something had gone very wrong. On instinct, it tried to do what it had done before — reach for the other people nearby and drain their Ether.
Geno gave it no such chance.
"I won't give you the same opening twice. Thanatos — Ambush!"
He blinked — a single instant of motion — and snatched his greatsword up from the ground where it had fallen. Then he drove it straight into the Hand's already-shattered eye.
"MRRRRREEEEE—!!"
As the blade sank home, the entire Hand let out an unearthly wail.
It sounded like an infant sobbing. It sounded like a beast in its death-throes. It sounded like nothing that should exist.
And then — stranger still — the Hand began to convulse. It writhed like a rubber tube twisted beyond breaking, twitching and spasming in place. Then, gradually, it began to melt — dissolving into a thick, viscous liquid that splattered across Geno in a wave.
The eye shattered completely, and what remained of it dispersed into the air as drifting Ether.
"Hah... finally."
With it over, Geno let the tension drain out of him all at once. Without a care in the world for how it looked, he dropped straight onto his back — hitting the ground with a splash of milky-white fluid.
From the moment the first gunshot had sounded to the moment Geno landed the killing blow: mere seconds. That was all it had taken.
The others, who had only just managed to process what had happened, let out a collective breath of relief.
Arnold pulled himself together first. He was already moving toward Geno to check on his condition before the relief had even fully settled in.
"Mr. Geno!"
But the moment he reached him, what he saw stopped him cold.
Geno was a wreck. His entire body was filth-soaked and battered, the front of his shirt torn to rags. Ether crystals had formed in clusters across his skin, and across his face — those vivid, multicolored fractures, unmistakably identical to a severe Corruption reaction — spread like cracks in broken stained glass.
"Quickly! Get him to a hospital! Someone save Xiao Jie for me — now!"
Old Master Timefield arrived just after Arnold, took one look at Geno — and immediately began issuing frantic orders for the servants to rush him to medical care.
But the head butler, Arnold, remained motionless. His expression had gone still and grieved.
"Master... Mr. Geno, he is already..."
At those words, Old Master Timefield's composure gave out completely. His legs buckled beneath him — a stumbling, lurching collapse — and only Arnold catching him kept him from hitting the ground.
His face, in that moment, seemed to age by years. The color left it entirely, replaced by something hollow and leaden.
He was no amateur — as a veteran scholar of Ether studies, he had seen enough to know that Geno's condition was already beyond saving. He had known it from the first glance. He had clung to hope anyway.
But Arnold's words stripped that hope away. And the grief the old man had been holding back broke free at last.
"What a child... what a good child..."
The regret that tore through Old Master Timefield in that moment was devastating. Why had he dragged this boy into his war with the Ravenlocks?
He had taken a liking to Geno from the very first time they had crossed paths at the Yincha Tea House. At his age, at his station, he had long since learned to look past raw talent when sizing a person up.
Geno was polite. He knew when to push and when to hold back. And at his age, he had been able to produce a small fortune to pay for his own mistake — that alone spoke volumes about the kind of person he was.
At the time, Old Master Timefield had thought: this is someone I can use as cover in my conflict with the Ravenlocks. A man like this would never ignore a debt of gratitude. That had been his cold, calculating first impression.
But the second time he had seen Geno — that calculation had crumbled. He had found himself genuinely wanting this boy as a grandson-in-law.
Courageous and shrewd. Principled. Honest to a fault — that stubbornness was his only real flaw, and it barely counted as one.
And now, within a single day, Geno was dead. Killed by a Ravenlock attack while protecting them. The blow that landed on Old Master Timefield was not a small one.
Because if Geno had wanted to run, he could have. Even against a monster he couldn't overpower, a man with his ability could have escaped with his life intact. Instead, he had stayed.
Old Master Timefield felt, with a certainty that cut all the way through him, that he was the one who had gotten this fine young man killed.
But he was still the patriarch of the Timefield family — one of New Eridu's oldest clans. He gathered himself with a speed born of long practice. He straightened, brushed Arnold's supporting hand aside, and walked toward Geno on his cane.
He knelt. He gathered the boy into his arms.
"Child — don't you worry. Uncle Timefield will not let you die in vain. I promise you — those Ravenlock dogs will pay for this with everything they have."
He looked at Geno — eyes closed, the fractures across his body still flickering — and his voice was iron. In that moment, he set aside every scheme and calculation he had ever carried. He held Geno simply, the way a grandfather holds a grandson.
However —
While Old Master Timefield was steeling himself in solemn resolve, the Geno cradled in his arms was, frankly, at a complete loss for what to do.
____
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