Garner Vale's grip was a force of nature. It wasn't aggressive, just… absolute. Noctar felt the entire landscape of the man's hand—the rough, topographic map of calluses, the unyielding tectonic strength, the bedrock-solid bones that had never known surrender.
It was the hand of a man who had literally stopped charging behemoths by bracing his palms against their skulls.
The silent standoff stretched, a battle of wills measured in micro expressions and unblinking eyes. Garner's gaze narrowed a fraction, ready to press further, to find the flaw, the crack in this enigmatic man who had appeared from nowhere and thrown his daughter's orderly, dangerous world into chaos.
He never got the chance.
With a fluid, deliberate motion, Ardyn stepped between the line of their locked gazes. Her own hand, strong and sword-calloused, yet infinitely softer than her guardian's came up not in protest, but in gentle, firm mediation.
She pried Garner's fingers away from Noctar's with a practiced ease that spoke of a lifetime of tempering his monumental strength. Then, in a move that made Garner's stern expression falter with pure, heart-struck surprise, she didn't release Noctar. Instead, her fingers slid between his, lacing them together, holding his wounded hand firmly, possessively, in hers.
A wave of warmth, entirely separate from the healing spells knitting his body back together, spread through Noctar's chest. It was a simple, profound connection that bypassed all his firewalls and threat assessments. He couldn't stop the gentle, unguarded smile that softened the harsh lines of his face as he looked down at their joined hands resting on the white sheet. It felt… correct. A successful handshake with reality itself.
But when his eyes lifted from that electric point of contact and met Garner's again over Ardyn's shoulder, the softness vanished, replaced by a respectful, neutral calm. He understood the silent message she had just transmitted. I care for him. This is my choice. But I also respect you. Stand down.
Garner's tactical mind, momentarily overridden by paternal surprise, rebooted into analysis mode. He observed the man on the bed. The data was a confounding paradox. Level 40. A number so low it was practically civilian in the high stakes world of A and S Rank threats.
A class called 'Debugger', a term that sounded like a technical support role from a pre-System IT department, not a combat designation. Yet, according to Ardyn's clipped, adrenaline faded report, this man had not only located a sealed A-Rank dungeon but had forged an entry through what she described as a 'spatial lock,' fought his way through a bugged ecosystem, and delivered the killing blow to a boss that had been undergoing a 'catastrophic malfunction.' A term, Garner knew, that didn't begin to cover the horrific reality.
His mind, a tactical supercomputer honed over decades of war and bureaucracy, called up the encrypted files on his desk. Five cases in the last year. They didn't call them 'malfunctions' in the official reports. The internal designation was 'Death Dungeons.' Instances where the World System's rules broke down, where monsters gained impossible, glitching abilities, phasing through walls, regenerating from nothing, attacking with skills that shouldn't exist.
The survival rate for any hunter team caught inside after the initial collapse was absolute zero. The only recorded survivors were those who had fled within the first sixty seconds or, in one legendary, tragic case, a high ranked team that had sacrificed three members to brute force a new exit spell.
The top guilds that is the Stormbreakers, the Gilded Hand and Abyss Dragons had lost entire elite strike teams to these anomalies. Veteran hunters, vanished. No bodies. No loot. Just static on the comms and a dungeon that eventually reset, scrubbed clean of all evidence.
The Developers Guild's preliminary remote scan of the Solarium had flagged the same corrupted, chaotic mana signature. When Garner had felt that spike on his office monitors, his blood had turned to ice water. He'd been in the process of mobilizing a desperate, likely suicidal rescue mission when the entire signature… normalized.
Not just weakened. Vanished. As if snipped from existence. And then the perimeter sensors showed two life signs emerging: his daughter, battered but walking, and this unknown man, unconscious, being carried on her back with a care that spoke volumes.
He had been the one to meet them at the shattered archway. He had taken Noctar's limp form from Ardyn, shocked by the heat still radiating from his skin and the blood drying under his nose. He had carried him to his own armored vehicle, barking orders for someone to retrieve that ridiculous, aggressive black car.
He had sat in the back with Ardyn, her hand clamped around Noctar's wrist as if to anchor him to the world, answering his questions with monosyllables, her eyes never leaving the stranger's face.
Now, staring at the living enigma who held his daughter's hand with such natural rightness, Garner Vale cut through the personal tension and went straight to the strategic heart of the matter. His voice was low, devoid of its earlier interrogatory intimidation, filled instead with the grave, exhausted weight of a commander who has seen an unsolvable problem solved and needs to know how, at any cost.
He leaned forward, just slightly, his massive frame casting a shadow over the bed.
"The Solarium became a Death Dungeon," Garner stated, watching Noctar's eyes for any flicker of recognition at the term. "The survival rate, once it flags, is zero. Not low but Zero."
He paused, letting the grim statistic hang in the antiseptic air.
"How," Garner asked, his sea-cliff gaze locked unwaveringly on Noctar, "did you close it?"
The question wasn't just curiosity. It was an assessment of the single most valuable strategic asset to appear in this war against a creeping, inexplicable chaos. And it was a father's demand to know what kind of power now held his daughter's hand.