Welf was waiting in the corridor when Rayleigh stepped out.
He had clearly been pacing, though he stopped the moment the door opened and tried to pretend he had simply been standing there. It was a terrible performance.
Rayleigh decided not to comment, mostly because the boy looked genuinely unsettled.
Tsubaki walked ahead, leaving the two of them a few steps behind.
Welf looked toward the private ward door.
"Was it a weapon?"
Rayleigh handed him the sealed case, both to give his hands something to do and to see whether he would accept the weight without complaint.
Welf took it carefully.
"I don't know yet," Rayleigh said. "It could be a trap, a tool, a changed monster, or some leftover thing from people who had too much knowledge and too little sanity. What matters is that it touched the person underneath the flesh. That kind of damage does not happen by accident very often."
Welf stared down at the case in his hands.
"The Crozzo Magic Swords burned everything in front of them. People feared them because they could see the fire. Something like this feels worse."
Rayleigh walked beside him, slowing his pace a little. "Fire is honest. Cruel, but honest. Whatever did that to Lott made his own body feel wrong to him."
Welf's fingers tightened around the handle.
For a while, he said nothing.
When he finally spoke, the anger in his voice sounded younger than he probably wanted it to. "I hate weapons like that."
Rayleigh did not tell him that hatred was childish.
It's not.
Hatred could be useful when it knew where to stand.
"Then remember that feeling," he said. "Just do not let it decide every answer before you know what you are looking at."
Welf looked at him, frustrated because the advice was reasonable and he clearly hated that.
Rayleigh smiled faintly. "Annoying, I know."
"Very."
"That means it will probably stick."
Welf clicked his tongue, but the tension in his shoulders eased a little.
They stepped out of the clinic into Orario's busy morning.
The streets looked normal. Adventurers shouted about supplies, merchants argued over prices, gods wandered through the crowd with too much free time and too little shame.
None of them knew that two men were lying in a sealed ward with wounds that did not fit normal monsters.
Rayleigh looked toward Babel in the distance, then down at the folded map in his coat.
Knossos was not a place one entered casually.
Even knowing of its existence did not mean understanding its current shape.
Old Evilus routes, hidden branches, sealed doors, Daedalus's madness, remnants who might have learned to use what they did not build; there were too many possibilities, and every one of them was ugly.
Tsubaki glanced back at him. "How bad?"
Rayleigh thought of Lott's shaking voice, the way his body had rejected the brush of Reiatsu, and the crack in the wall that breathed.
"If we are lucky, a small group of remnants found an old route and started using something they barely understand," he said. "If we are unlucky, something in Knossos has been waiting for people to forget it."
Tsubaki's face darkened.
Welf said nothing, but he held the case more tightly.
Rayleigh kept walking toward the forge.
'Fine.'
If the evilus wanted to breathe again, he would at least make sure they regretted doing it near his people!
...
Rayleigh did not head straight to Ouranos after leaving the clinic.
Eina would probably have preferred that he did.
The Guild side of her was already thinking about restricted notices, witness protection, route records, and all the paperwork needed to stop Orario from turning one whispered rumor into a citywide disaster.
Rayleigh understood the urgency, but walking into a meeting with only a shaken survivor's story and a bad feeling was asking to be questioned into the ground by people smarter and older than him.
So he returned to the forge first.
Tsubaki walked ahead of him with her usual heavy steps, though she was much quieter than normal.
Welf followed with the sealed case in both hands, his face tense and his mouth shut.
That alone said plenty.
The boy usually had something to mutter when he was uncomfortable, but the clinic had left him with too many ugly thoughts and no clean target for them.
By the time they reached the workshop behind Hephaestus Familia's main forge, Hephaestus was already waiting.
The goddess stood near the main worktable with her arms folded, and the apprentices had all developed a very sudden interest in being elsewhere.
Even the older smiths gave the room a wide berth, which meant Tsubaki's messenger had told Hephaestus enough to make her stop smiling.
Rayleigh took the case from Welf and set it on the table.
"The survivors are alive," he said before she could ask. "Airmid stabilized the conscious one enough for sleep, and she's staying with both patients for now."
Some of the tension left Hephaestus's face, though the worry remained.
"Then tell me what scared the Guild enough to call you before they even finished their own report."
Rayleigh opened the case and took out the small cloth bundle Airmid had allowed him to keep.
Inside was a strip of bloodstained bandage, along with a little stone dust scraped from Lott's armor where the attack had left its strangest trace.
It looked unimpressive on the table, almost insulting when compared with the fear it had caused, but Rayleigh had learned long ago that danger rarely cared about looking impressive.
"The cuts and bruises were not the problem," he said, taking out the tools for a spiritual trace reading.
"Something interfered with the deeper flow around his Falna and senses. When my Reiatsu got near him, his body reacted like the attack was happening again. I used Kaidō to calm the feedback, but I didn't try to close the damage properly. Without knowing what caused it, that would have been a good way to make myself feel useful while making the patient worse."
Hephaestus nodded.
She liked that answer, or at least liked that he had stopped himself before doing too much.
Tsubaki leaned against the side of the table, eye narrowed. "So it's not a normal monster wound."
"No. A monster can crush, burn, poison, curse, tear someone apart, or traumatize them badly enough that they shake for a month, but this felt more deliberate. The wound kept telling his own body the wrong timing."
Welf stared at the bandage.
Rayleigh noticed the look, but did not tell him to step back.
Welf needed to see this.
If he wanted to understand what kind of tools deserved hatred, he could not only look at clean steel and finished blades.
Rayleigh held two fingers above the sample and let Reiraku perception sharpen.
The first things he felt were ordinary enough: blood, fear, pain, Airmid's healing touch, and the faint thread of his own Kaidō from earlier.
He separated those traces carefully, working through them the way he would separate impurities from metal before forging.
Underneath it all, something thin and stiff remained, like a line of instruction burned into the residue.
He frowned.
Hephaestus noticed at once. "What is it?"
"Something artificial, or close to it." Rayleigh drew a small binding square around the sample with Reishi and trapped the trace before it could fade.
"It does not feel alive, and it does not cling like a curse with intent. It feels like a command left behind after the thing that issued it moved on."
Tsubaki's expression grew darker. "A trap?"
"Could be. Could also be a tool, a room effect, or part of the passage itself." Rayleigh adjusted the binding square, and the trace twisted inside it with an unpleasant stiffness.
"Lott said the wall had a crack that breathed. He said his body felt late, and that looking at the enemy made distance stop behaving properly. If that story is even half accurate, the route may have helped the attack."
Welf finally spoke, voice low. "Could a Magic Sword do that?"
Rayleigh looked up.
There was fear under the question, but not fear for himself.
Welf was looking at the sample like it had reached out and dragged the Crozzo name into the room with it.
"An ordinary Magic Sword would have a hard time with something this delicate. Crozzo Magic Swords are terrifying because of output. Fire, lightning, wind, that kind of direct destruction. This is different. It makes the person mistrust their own body."
Welf looked down at his hands.
Rayleigh continued, because leaving the answer there would only let the boy imagine worse.
"That does not mean a weapon cannot be involved. A cursed tool, a mechanism built into the wall, an altered monster carrying a pattern like this inside its body... any of those could fit better than a sword someone swings by hand."
Hephaestus's visible eye sharpened. "Daedalus's work."
"That is where my thoughts keep going."
The name made the workshop feel smaller.
Daedalus had built Knossos like a madman trying to carve obsession into the bones of the city.
His descendants had continued the work through blood, sin, pride, and whatever else kept that disgusting labyrinth alive beneath Orario.
Rayleigh knew enough about the place to hate any problem that pointed in its direction.
He drew a Kidō array on the worktable with spiritual ink and placed the bandage at the center.
"Bakudō #58: Kakushitsuijaku."
The array lit up, numbers and directional marks forming in the air above the sample.
For a moment, the spell tried to settle into a normal tracking pattern. Then the lines bent, crossed, and folded into each other.
Three directions appeared at once, rejected one another, then collapsed into a tangled shape that made Welf lean closer despite himself.
"Is it working?" Welf asked.
Rayleigh stared at the result for several seconds before answering. "The spell is working, the target is the problem."
Tsubaki cursed under her breath.
"The trace does not point to one stable location," Rayleigh explained, copying the twisted coordinates before they faded.
"Either the source moved through hidden routes after the attack, or the route itself changed enough to confuse the tracking. That confirms Lott did not imagine the distortion, which is useful, and also means our enemy can make a tracking spell argue with itself, which is annoying as hell."
Hephaestus rubbed her temple. "Only you would call that annoying."
"I am trying to stay professional."
"You're failing at it~"
"Then I am staying emotionally stable through sarcasm."
Tsubaki snorted at that, though the sound carried little humor.
Rayleigh sealed the sample again, wrote a shorter report, and removed the more useless guesses from the page before the Guild could mistake them for conclusions.
Hephaestus watched him work in silence for a while, then looked toward Welf, who had not moved from the side of the table.
The boy's frustration had changed shape.
It was no longer the sharp, defensive anger he showed whenever Magic Swords came up. This was quieter, heavier, and more useful if handled properly.
Hephaestus spoke before Rayleigh could decide whether to risk saying something.
"Welf, you are not going into those tunnels just because the matter touches weapons and old sins. If your hands are needed, they are needed here first. A smith does not become useless because he stays at the forge while others carry the blade."
Welf's jaw tightened, but he did not snap back at her.
With Hephaestus, his pride bent in a different direction. He respected her too much to turn every wound into rebellion.
After a moment, he nodded.
Rayleigh picked up a fresh sheet and began writing a list. "Help Tsubaki prepare what we need before I return from the Guild. Metal route markers that can be detected, lantern stones with covers, rope that can handle heat, smoke markers, anti-curse tags, and something simple enough that even an idiot adventurer can use it while panicking."
Tsubaki took the list and grinned a little. "That last one is the hardest request."
"Then make several."
Welf accepted the work without complaint.