The Insane Regressor: Throne of Pride

At first, Lysandra didn’t know what it was about him that had caught her attention.

She hadn’t seen the man’s face, and his hair was almost completely covered. His clothes were no different from those worn by the hundreds of displaced people inside the enormous warehouse.

But the way he moved didn’t match his appearance.

Lysandra had spent the past eight days among the wounded and displaced. She had grown familiar with the way exhaustion and fear manifested in their bodies: sunken shoulders, unsteady steps, and reactions that came either too slowly or all at once.

That man, however, seemed to be deliberately making himself look tired.

His back was bent and his steps were slow, but his center of balance never wavered. He didn’t stumble once, and his body made no unnecessary movements. Every step landed exactly where it should, with the precision of someone whose body had been trained with extraordinary care.

While she was watching him, a child came running around a nearby corner and nearly crashed into his leg.

The man shifted half a step aside before the child reached him, as though he had predicted the boy’s path, then returned to his slow, heavy gait.

Lysandra narrowed her eyes.

When he passed beneath the light streaming through one of the high windows, a small part of his eye caught the sunlight and gleamed through the gap between his hood and the strip of cloth.

Then she saw it.

Crimson.

Her memory caught on that color.

She remembered another young man with crimson eyes and white hair—one who had moved in much the same way around the camp at the City of Light, as though he were observing everything around him even when he appeared lost in thought.

But the rest of the details didn’t match.

This man was taller, his shoulders broader, and his build entirely different. Even his physical presence bore no resemblance to the relatively frail soldier who had left for the forest several days earlier and never returned.

’Ravian went missing near the City of Light,’ Lysandra reminded herself.

’There’s no way he could have reached the capital and changed this much within a matter of days.’

She had probably imagined the resemblance. Or perhaps her failure to protect one of her squad members was still weighing on her. It felt like the first real failure she had ever suffered, even if it hadn’t been entirely her fault.

Even so, Lysandra set down her pen.

”Finish sorting the papers without me,” she told the clerk as she walked away. ”I want to speak to one of the displaced.”

She was already moving before he could ask why.

...

Ravian heard footsteps striking the floor behind him, drawing closer from the direction of Lysandra’s table.

But she wasn’t heading directly toward him.

She was moving toward the corridor leading to the main exit, intending to cut off his path rather than pursue him from behind.

’She hasn’t confirmed anything yet. Otherwise, she would have called the others or confronted me directly. She only wants a closer look before I can leave.’

He glanced at the dark glass of one of the side windows and caught the reflection of her movement across the hall from the corner of his eye.

’Good move, but...’

A faint smile crossed Ravian’s face for the briefest moment.

He allowed a slight tension to appear in his shoulders and quickened his pace toward the main exit, deliberately confirming her assumption that he was trying to slip outside before she reached him.

Lysandra immediately adjusted her path to arrive at the door first.

But Ravian had never intended to reach it.

From the moment he entered, he had been tracking the movement of the workers and carts throughout the warehouse.

Two workers were carrying a large cauldron toward the rows of displaced people, while a cart piled high with blankets entered through the loading dock. At the same time, a family began stepping out of the small area they had created behind one of the cloth partitions.

Ravian waited until their paths converged.

As he passed beside one of the ropes, he moved it with only two fingers.

The partition didn’t fall, but it swayed enough to make the family stop for a moment, while the blanket cart passed behind them and the two workers carrying the cauldron crossed in front.

Ravian disappeared from Lysandra’s line of sight behind three separate obstructions at the same instant.

The opening lasted no more than a second.

But it was enough.

Ever since awakening, Void Shadow had concealed his soul energy and life force from the senses. It didn’t make him invisible, but it ensured that Lysandra would have no spiritual trace to follow the moment she lost sight of him.

Ravian slipped behind a cluster of crates, summoned the Mask of Loftiness from the internal space within his Void body, and fitted it beneath the cloth covering his face and hair.

[Mask of Loftiness—First Ability activated: Exalted Identity.]

[Stored identity applied: Sherlock Holmes.]

Everything others could perceive about him changed.

His long white hair shortened and turned a dull brown. The crimson drained from his eyes, replaced by an ordinary gray, while his features, voice, scent, soul-energy signature, and life-force signature all changed with them.

His height remained the same as when he had saved the identity, but his shoulders and musculature no longer appeared as pronounced. His physique ceased to draw the eye, leaving him looking like an ordinary tall man worn down by years of manual labor.

Ravian stored the gray coat, the strip of cloth that had covered his face, and the wooden token inside his body’s internal space. Once the transformation settled, his Void body concealed the mask as well, while the selected identity remained active.

He then eased Void Shadow just enough to allow the weak, unremarkable soul-energy and life-force signatures created by Exalted Identity to take its place.

Afterward, Ravian lifted a sack of barley from beside the loading dock and bent his back beneath it farther than its weight required.

He didn’t continue running toward the exit.

Instead, he walked back into the hall alongside the workers entering from the loading dock.

...

Lysandra reached the main exit but found no sign of the man.

She stopped and swept her gaze across the hall.

She saw the blanket cart, the two workers carrying the cauldron, and the family still struggling to return the cloth partition to its original position.

But the man in the gray hood was gone.

She extended part of her spiritual perception into her surroundings, but couldn’t find any energy she could connect to him. In truth, she had never sensed his soul energy in the first place. She had noticed him solely through her ordinary senses.

Now, the warehouse was filled with countless weak and unremarkable signatures, none of which she had any reason to associate with the man she was seeking.

Lysandra stopped one of the volunteers near the door.

”Have you seen a tall man in a gray coat with his face wrapped in cloth?”

The volunteer looked around.

”There are dozens of people who fit that description, my lady.”

She approached the clerk at the entrance.

”Did a man in a gray coat just pass you on his way out?” Lysandra asked.

The clerk looked up at her, exhaustion plain in his eyes.

”There are too many people here, my lady. I don’t have time to study everyone who comes and goes,” he said before returning to his figures.

Lysandra remained in the corridor, watching the faces, clothes, and movements of the people around her.

A tall worker carrying a sack of barley over his shoulder passed close beside her.

He had short brown hair, gray eyes, and a plain face whose details were difficult to remember. One side of his body dipped beneath the sack’s weight, and his steps were slightly uneven. His faint soul-energy and life-force signatures were no different from those of an ordinary laborer.

Lysandra’s eyes rested on him for a second.

At that exact moment, the sack slipped from his shoulder and nearly fell. The worker fumbled to catch it and staggered half a step.

”F*ck!” he muttered in a rough voice before continuing on his way.

Lysandra looked away and allowed him to pass.

She returned her attention to the place where the hooded man had disappeared.

’All I saw was part of a crimson eye and a gait that seemed familiar.’

’Was I merely imagining the resemblance?’

It was possible that exhaustion and her concern for Ravian had pushed her into connecting the two.

Even so, one question continued to bother her.

How had he disappeared so quickly?

She returned to her table and sat in front of the report, but she didn’t immediately resume writing.

She had no evidence she could include in an official report, so she kept the incident to herself for now.

At the loading dock, the brown-haired man placed the sack of barley atop the pile indicated by one of the workers, then left the warehouse through the rear entrance without looking back at her even once.