Chapter 146: Enemy of System

The hospital assigned Damien a private room and two armed guards.

Doctor Smoke dismissed both guards, locked the door, and removed the front of the Nightglass Armor one plate at a time.

"The good news," she said, "is that the armor kept your ribs out of your lungs."

"There’s bad news too?"

"You consider that a normal enough question to even ask?"

Varek had opened him from shoulder to sternum without fully cutting through the plating underneath. The wound needed healing magic, ordinary stitches, and a potion that tasted like hot iron going down. She refused to numb him, since she needed him conscious while she checked for internal bleeding.

Daria stood by the window. Grace paced. Hamari sat on the floor with Eli’s inactive membership panel open in front of her.

➤[Eli Mercer]

➤[Nova Corps Status: Provisional]

➤[Condition: Unknown]

’Fortunately, he is not dead.’

The system hadn’t confused Unknown with Deceased. That distinction was the whole hope sitting in the room right now, and it was thin enough to cut all of them on the way past.

"Rook’s funeral is tomorrow," Martin said through the wall display. He’d refused treatment himself until every surviving officer had gone first. A bandage crossed his forehead. "The rest of the services start at noon."

"And Eli?" Grace asked.

"Search teams found part of his cloak. No body. No mana trace."

"Then he doesn’t get a funeral."

Martin didn’t argue with that.

The damage from the operation kept spreading well past the dead. Neva had emptied seven loan offices before dawn, burned two evidence stores, and moved hundreds of contracts onto a ledger nobody could trace. Benny Korr had escaped during a coordinated power failure at his detention center. Six officers guarding him were alive, but none of them could remember the previous hour.

Worse, Nova Corps had lost its anonymity entirely.

Their real names were already circulating through Neva’s channels. So were their classes, their preferred weapons, their families, their homes, every known ally attached to their names. Daria’s apartment had already received a package holding four dead flowers, one for each element she commanded. Grace got a loan offer addressed directly to her mother. Someone had bought Hamari’s old school records off an anonymous account.

Doctor Smoke got a carton of cigarettes.

"Were they poisoned?" Damien asked.

"Cheap." She lit one anyway. "More insulting than dangerous."

Martin offered protective relocation to every relative any of them could name. Daria accepted it for two cousins and refused it for herself. Grace spent ten minutes convincing her own mother that an armed guard wasn’t "a nice young man the government sent to court her." Hamari found out her parents had already left home on their own, switched vehicles twice, and booked a hotel under the name of a fictional manga character.

"They taught me caution," she said.

"They taught you that specific alias?" Daria asked.

"No. That part was independent talent."

Damien had fewer people to protect. John was more dangerous than any security detail the government could assign him. Rahul and Imran already lived in Region 7 behind guild and military walls of their own. Still, Martin posted observers around the penthouse.

Neva photographed those observers within the hour.

The message is clear enough, Damien thought. They can see the shield, even if they can’t get through it yet.

He didn’t order anyone out of Nova Corps. He did offer every member the option, no penalty attached.

Nobody took it.

"You could at least pretend to weigh your own safety," he said.

Grace folded her arms. "You first."

That landed worse on him than he expected.

His own file, it turned out, was different. Nothing had been sent to him at all.

Martin pulled up a message recovered from a minor Neva relay. Seven words, total.

Do not approach Damien. Report and observe.

"They’re treating you separately," Daria said.

"Varek noticed his strength," Grace offered.

"That explains caution. It doesn’t explain an order reaching outside Region 21 within four hours."

Hamari looked up from Eli’s panel. "Someone above Varek already knew him before tonight."

Damien thought of the Riddled Dungeon, the patch number, the string of system errors that had followed him since the day he woke up. He didn’t say any of it out loud. Martin already knew fragments. Neva shouldn’t have known any of it at all.

"Can we trace who issued the order?"

"The relay deleted its own source," Martin said. "Mina recovered the timestamp, at least. It went out nine minutes after the bank collapsed."

Fast enough that whoever sent it was already watching.

He filed that fact away and said nothing.

Doctor Smoke finished the last stitch and pushed him flat the second he tried sitting up.

"Six hours."

"We have a spy somewhere."

"The spy will still be corrupt after sunrise."

"Eli might not still be alive after sunrise."

Her hand tightened on his shoulder. "Opening your chest back up won’t find him either."

That actually stopped him.

Martin promised the search would keep running. Damien ordered Nova Corps into separate secure rooms, told everyone to change every contact method they used, and to tell nobody where the next meeting would happen. Grace objected right up until he made it a formal order through the party interface.

"Using leadership permissions to enforce bedtime," she said. "Tyranny arrives quietly, apparently."

"Go to sleep."

"There it is again."

They left, reluctant about it.

Damien stayed awake, because staying awake was the one thing his body had always done best. He set Eli’s coin on the table and watched it sit there, refusing to move.

Somewhere beyond the hospital walls, the news called the raid an unspecified structural accident. Elias couldn’t reveal Neva’s involvement without warning every branch still standing. Families of the dead got the truth under a secrecy oath. Everyone else got smoke.

At 03:17, word of the order concerning Damien finally reached the highest channel inside the Neva Order.

There was only darkness there. No wall, no chair, no face, no location visible in it at all. Even the report itself arrived without revealing who’d carried it in.

"The Region 21 cell failed to kill the new team." An unseen voice, flat. "Varek Morn survived. He reports Damien holds attributes that shouldn’t be possible at Level 37."

Silence answered that.

"The name matches the irregularity flagged previously."

The darkness didn’t change at all.

Then a second voice spoke.

"Damien."

The single word carried real recognition.

"He cleared the Riddled Dungeon. He survived a gate that should have rejected him outright. The patch followed his own warning, and now he’s cutting straight into my lowest roots."

The reporting voice waited.

"Should the Region 21 branch kill him?"

A quiet laugh moved through the dark. Not amusement. Something closer to anticipation, sharpened until it resembled hunger.

"No."

Gentle, the way the word came out.

"Let him grow. Let him believe every answer he finds belongs to him."

The subordinate said nothing back.

The voice in the dark laughed again, louder this time.

"Enemy of the System." The True God let the words settle. "At last. You’ve begun walking toward me."