"Who are you, boy?" the man asked, his tone sharp.
"I'm here on behalf of Mr. Fournier."
Making no effort to hide his irritation, the man tilted his head and fixed Alphard with a heavy stare, thick with evident annoyance. He swept his eyes over every inch of him, from his top hat down to his polished shoes, with the cold, meticulous scrutiny of someone sizing up a criminal, or an intruder worth suspecting.
Nothing about the inspection was left to chance; it was a silent, defiant appraisal, as if he were calculating exactly what the boy might be hiding.
Finding nothing to hold against him, the man eventually gave way to the request, letting him through a door hidden from public view.
Walking with a firm, unhurried stride, they made their way down a long hallway that seemed to disappear into the dark. Partway through, the man leading him stopped and, without a word of explanation, turned back to his own work, leaving Alphard alone, adrift in the corridor.
Understanding nothing of what had just happened, Alphard pressed on into the deepest part of the hallway, and as he moved forward, the darkness thickened around him until his own shadow dissolved into the gloom.
"Why do you keep running from me, Alphard?"
A voice, deeply unsettling, rang out toward his ears, multiplying into a thick, unrelenting echo. Every syllable carried a sinister edge that smothered the noise around him, dragging Alphard's focus into a cold, frozen trance.
"What's going on? Who are you?"
Alphard had already suspected this would end somewhere terrifying, and now it confirmed what he'd feared — the letter had been nothing more than bait. Still, he had no way yet to confirm whether Mr. Blake was truly behind all of it.
The space around him seemed to lose its physical shape entirely. Before Alphard's eyes, walls he couldn't quite see began to contract, closing in on him with a suffocating slowness.
The gap between the walls shrank until it became an oppressive tunnel; the wood and brick seemed to lean toward his face, devouring the air around him and crushing his chest inside a claustrophobic vise that threatened to flatten him whole.
Feeling his lungs fight for every breath, the pressure kept building until the corners of the space rushed toward him with alarming speed. Then, as if snapped like a thread, the walls vanished, and Alphard found himself standing atop a tall building, looking down at the whole world spread beneath his feet.
His heart hammered with savage force, each beat a dull, punishing blow tearing through his chest. The pressure threatened to break him entirely, but Alphard clenched his jaw, refusing to let it show.
He forced his mind to hold its grip, smothering the alarm screaming through his senses by pure survival instinct.
That was when his eyes caught the scene ahead; deep within the warped space, framed against the glow of a crimson moon staining the darkness a bloody red, stood the dark silhouette of a woman. An impassive figure, watching him from the very center of the chaos.
"I'm not — we're not what you think, Alphard. We exist beyond human reason, and just like you, we're bastards fighting against fate, against madness, against misery itself."
"You... you're the woman who nearly killed me last night. Who sent you — was it Mr. Blake?"
Swallowed in a heavy, suffocating silence, the crushing weight of the emptiness confirmed the truth for him: this figure was the very same entity that had brought him to the edge of death the night before.
The certainty of it froze his blood, but his mind refused to stall there in panic. If this whole scene had been orchestrated by Mr. Blake, why go to such lengths to stage something this elaborate? The only logical answer left was unsettling in its own right — unless, of course, this was simply someone taking sadistic pleasure in watching their pieces suffer before breaking them entirely.
"It's me, yes. But Mr. Blake has nothing to do with any of this. All of this serves one purpose. The Lament Gem — and your strange survival of what happened at that cathedral."
At once, Alphard remembered something with that same name written in the diary, though he'd given it little thought or importance at the time.
"We're going to have to bring you with us."
Suddenly, morning light poured in through tall windows, flooding what looked like the main office of a police station.
As Alphard's vision finally cleared, the fog in his mind gave way to a striking sight: standing in the middle of the room was a woman whose presence filled the space entirely. Her long, raven-black hair fell in elegant waves over her shoulders, but it was her eyes — a crystalline blue, bright as pure water — that carried an unmistakable authority.
She radiated the unmistakable bearing of someone of high birth, paired with a beauty that bordered on disarming. It took Alphard only a second of clarity to place her — the same woman he'd seen days before at the bakery, the respectable Mrs. Charlotte. Mrs. Charlotte White, as it turned out.
"You're Mrs. Charlotte White?" Alphard said, rubbing his eyes, trying to shake off their sensitivity. The morning light was harsh enough that it bounced sharply off the floor.
"Yes. You're the boy from the bakery. Alphard, wasn't it?"
"Yes, that's me. What am I doing here?"
The woman fixed him with a steady gaze, a faint smile tugging at her lips, edged with a playfulness that bordered on provocation. She rose without hesitation, standing tall, unmistakably in command of the room. She wore an elegant tailored suit in dark tones, paired with a walking skirt whose design — free of petticoats or trailing hems — gave her an extraordinary freedom of movement, letting her react and move with total agility.
Every detail of her clothing, every line of her posture, projected that dangerous balance between a woman of high society and someone who wouldn't hesitate to act the instant the situation called for it.
"Don't worry, you're at the station. Now tell me — how did you survive whatever happened at that cathedral?"
Frozen between uncertainty and risk, he took a moment to gather his thoughts, sifting through the tangle of everything that had happened.
If I confess where I really came from, they'll probably kill me, or decide I'm too dangerous to let go. I'll stick with the job story.
"Before that happened, I was just walking around looking for work, and out of nowhere I ended up there. I don't know how I survived — I just woke up back home."
Despite his answer, Mrs. Charlotte's suspicion didn't waver, not even slightly. The intensity of her blue eyes felt almost tangible, sharp enough that Alphard got the distinct impression she could dig straight through to the depths of his mind and pull out his true thoughts simply by holding his gaze.
Setting herself in motion, Charlotte began pacing slow, deliberate circles around the room. She never once let him out of her sight, measuring every gesture from the corner of her eye, hands clasped in front of her waist, poised to loose her next question like a well-aimed dart.
"Do you know what the Lament Gem is?"
"No. I've never heard of it."
"It's an object of great importance to us, and we need to recover it — otherwise, it could cause a great deal of harm in the wrong hands. It's a category-one object. What we call an Axiom."
"I don't understand. What I want to know is why you're after me in the first place. I've already shown you there's nothing unusual about me, and besides, I need to know who that woman was — the one who nearly killed me."
Charlotte held his gaze without flinching, letting a heavy silence settle over the room before easing back into her chair. The atmosphere thickened, tense and speculative, both of them reading the other for any crack in composure.
Despite the crushing weight of the interrogation, Alphard carried himself with an almost unsettling calm.
He looked, on the surface, remarkably at ease, his posture loose and unbothered; but beneath that mask of total indifference simmered a deep irritation, a boiling frustration that threatened to snap his patience — not just from the memory of that silhouette, but from the entire situation he now found himself trapped in.
"That silhouette you saw — that was me."
A brazen smile crossed Charlotte's face, paired with a playful glint in her eyes that mocked him without any real malice behind it. The weight of her words left Alphard stunned; for a second, his throat burned with the visceral urge to shout at her. He held it back just in time.
He clenched his jaw, masking the tremor of his frustration, and answered in a serious, resolute voice.
"You're a terrible person. You nearly killed an innocent man, and that's how you decided to try and recruit me. You could have just approached me like a normal person, instead of putting me through that kind of fear — and embarrassing me in front of my own sister."
"If I had, you would have run. Or said nothing at all."
"And my sister — is she all right? My uncle too. They must be worried sick about me."
"Don't worry. We told them you were staying at your best friend's place. Marcel Rossi's."
Alphard looked away, trying to hide the frustration and irritation building against this woman.
Recalling his encounter with Marcel, Alphard didn't hesitate to file him away as, at best, a suspect, or possibly one of their allies. But the ease with which Charlotte spoke suggested that even Marcel himself likely had no idea he'd been dragged into any of this.
"Does he know about this?"
"No. You'll have to convince him yourself."
How is any of this possible? It's like they'd investigated everything about me before I even transmigrated. Do they already know I'm a transmigrator — is that why they've been chasing me down so urgently?
I need to find a way to confirm it without putting myself at risk.
"Whatever's going on, I don't know anything about this Lament Gem, or how I survived whatever happened at that cathedral. But — could it be they were performing some kind of ritual? Because the other night I recited a prayer, and something strange happened right after."
Listening closely to every word, Charlotte felt, for a brief instant, the reins of the interrogation slipping from her grasp. Still, she wasn't a woman easily fooled.
That Alphard would suddenly decide to cooperate, setting aside such obvious resentment, struck her as suspicious in its own right. And yet the weight in the young man's voice carried something real — dismissing his testimony outright as a clumsy lie could be a mistake she'd come to regret.
"What happened?"
"I wanted to go home. To my world," Alphard said, a note of genuine regret coloring his voice at having failed.
Charlotte arched her eyebrows, a poorly concealed confusion crossing her face at Alphard's bewildering words. Rather than press further or dismiss it as incomplete information, she chose to hold back, folding her hands again, adjusting her rings with slow, deliberate movements, and simply pressed on with her questioning, giving nothing away as to whether she believed him.
Alphard, for his part, glanced sideways with a faint, almost imperceptible smile. He knew she wouldn't fully believe him, which was exactly the point — he was slowly backing her into a corner where there was no absolute truth to find, only the fractured account of a disoriented, confused boy.
"Your world? What do you mean by that?"
"It's just something I saw. Maybe they drugged me, and I don't know what they actually did to me, or if any of it was even real — but it was a wonderful world. Completely different from this one."
At once, Charlotte turned the thought over against everything she already knew, considering whether he might simply be someone traumatized, or genuinely dangerous. Taking back control of the interrogation, she asked,
"Have you opened any Door?"
"What?"
"I've opened plenty of doors in my life. My own front door, for one."
"No — have you opened any Door?"
Alphard couldn't quite grasp what she meant by "Door," but in a world already so steeped in the supernatural, he understood instantly that this wasn't a simple piece of carpentry she was asking about.
The word carried a weight far deeper, far more dangerous than its surface meaning. Giving no sign of hesitation, careful not to let his ignorance show, he shook his head firmly, insisting he'd never opened anything of the sort.
Charlotte knew that, harmless as he seemed, she couldn't simply let him walk away — not when there was a chance he was hiding something more. She rose and crossed to her desk, pulling out a card bearing the address of a police station.
Walking back to him, she held the card out and said,
"If you decide to cooperate, go to this address. If you decide not to help us, we won't do anything to you — but you won't be left alone again either, not until this is over."
Alphard took the card and began reading over every detail printed on it.
Saint-Rémont Central Police Station, Vauclaire District, Rue des Veilleurs.