Chapter 263: New Place

The angel thrashed.

It clawed at its own face, trying to force the sand particles back out, but they didn't stop. They pushed deeper, navigating inward with deliberate precision, tearing through everything they reached. The angel flooded the damage with holy light, waves of it, trying to close what Adam was opening, but the repair couldn't keep up. Every time it sealed one point, the particles had already moved on to the next.

The angel's body wasn't built like a human's. The internal structure was different, organs that didn't follow any normal layout, systems that didn't operate on the same logic. It didn't matter. Adam read it as he moved through it, adjusting, and finding the points that caused the most disruption regardless of what they were called or where they sat.

The thrashing got worse.

Then the angel reached a conclusion. It couldn't reach Adam, not now that he was this far inside. Forcing him out wasn't an option it had access to anymore. The entry points were compromised and bleeding, and every attempt to push him toward the surface just gave the particles more to work with.

So it changed targets.

Its eyes locked onto the group standing at a distance, Remedy, Felecia, Scott, Ivy, Abigail, Dickson, still watching from the safe distance Remedy had pulled them to. The angel launched itself toward them despite everything, its movement ragged and bleeding, its gaze fixed and bloodshot. It had made a calculation: if it couldn't remove Adam, it would remove the people Adam would move to protect.

Everyone saw it coming.

Nobody had time to respond before the sand erupted from the angel's back.

The particles tore through from the inside, bursting outward through the wing joints and flooding the feathers with fine, cutting grains that wrapped, compressed and locked. The wings seized. The angel's flight cut out instantly, momentum gone, and it crashed hard into the ground with an impact that cracked the remaining pavement across the block.

The sand didn't stop there.

It poured out from every exit point and reformed around the angel's body, thickening into chains that drove into the ground and hooked it in place, locking the limbs, pinning the wings and anchoring it against any further movement. The creature strained against them and got nowhere.

Then Adam materialised outside.

The sand flowed back out through the angel's wounds and reformed into him standing a few feet away, solid again, both feet on the ground. The War and Famine markings were still active across his skin, flickering at the edges. His injuries from the palm strike were already closing now that the holy light interference had been removed from the source.

In his hands was the white angel totem.

The angel stared at the totem in Adam's hands.

"How did you get that?"

The words came out as pure disbelief. It wasn't a simple retrieval, the totem had been fused into the angel at a fundamental level, bonded in a way that made removal effectively impossible. Even death wouldn't have separated them. If the angel had been destroyed, the totem would have simply returned to its master automatically. There was no conventional method that should have worked.

And yet Adam was holding it.

The angel's energy began failing the moment it registered what had happened. Without the totem, the power sustaining its form had no anchor. It strained against the sand chains as the light in its frame started dimming, steadily, with the certainty of something that knew it was already finished.

Adam watched it and said nothing for a moment.

He understood the confusion. When he had entered the angel, his goal had been exactly this, find the totem, remove it, cut off its power source the same way taking the core had ended the lich. But once inside, he had found nothing he could locate or grab. The totem wasn't sitting somewhere accessible. It was woven into the creature at a level that search alone couldn't reach.

So he had tried something that made no logical sense.

Using [Equip] On a living being.

The ability was designed for the dead, that was its entire foundation. Only after death did a being's talents, bloodlines, and physique become something another could take hold of. Using it on something still alive was categorically wrong by every rule governing how the talent worked. Adam had known that. He had tried it anyway, because the alternative was watching the angel tear through everyone behind him while he was stuck doing internal damage with no endgame.

He had willed it to happen and something responded.

Not the equip itself, something deeper than that. Something that had been sitting dormant, waiting at the edge of its own limits. His second special talent, Connect, stirred. Then it cracked open entirely, reawakening with a force that hit him like a physical jolt from the inside. The retrieval completed in the same instant and the totem came free.

Adam understood what had happened as he materialised outside.

Rankless special talents worked differently from everything above them. Where ranked abilities hit ceilings defined by the system, rankless talents had no such cap, nature had given them unlimited potential in exchange for the limitation of their starting point. He had already reawakened Equip once before. That reawakening had changed everything about what he could do. Now Connect had followed.

And with the reawakening came something new.

A notification opened in front of him, clean and unhurried.

[Origin: You are one with the universe]

The Origin talent had been the bridge.

With it active, Adam had been able to latch Equip directly onto the totem through the reawakened Connect and make, a clean retrieval that bypassed every protection the angel had built around it. He didn't bother explaining that to the creature. There was no point. The angel dissolved into motes of light a few moments later, the last of its energy gone, and then the street was quiet.

Adam deactivated both bloodlines.

The brown and black markings faded from his skin simultaneously, the lightning and sand dissipating with them. The sudden absence of that much active power left the air feeling strangely still. He straightened up, rolled one shoulder, and looked at what the fight had left behind.

A significant portion of Tristan looked different than it had an hour ago.

The others crossed the distance toward him, Remedy first, then the rest, with Abigail and Dickson trailing slightly behind. Nobody said anything immediately. There wasn't much to say when you were standing in the middle of what used to be a street and was now something closer to a geological event.

The Mission Hall Manager arrived shortly after. Larry, a composed man under normal circumstances, gave Adam a full martial salute as he approached. The gesture was deliberate. A salute like that meant one thing: acknowledgement of a superior. He held it for a beat before dropping it.

"Mr. Adam," he said carefully. "I need to understand what happened here. What was that creature?"

Adam was quiet for a moment. "It was formed from the remains of the Faraday family and a powerful artefact they were carrying."

Larry's expression shifted. He knew about the Faradays. He knew the history, the barrier, Sector 418, the bad blood that had followed Adam out of that situation. The pieces connected quickly, and with them came the guilt.

"If we had implemented better security measures," he said, "something like this wouldn't have reached this point. I apologise."

Adam waved it off. "Don't be too hard on yourself. These things happen even with the best preparation in place."

Larry nodded, visibly relieved not to be receiving a different kind of response. A few more details were exchanged, enough for him to put together a coherent report, and then he excused himself. He had to approach the higher-ups about emergency funding for the damage across the district. The thought of billing Eden for any of it never entered his mind. Getting on Adam's bad side was not something anyone in his position would choose voluntarily.

The team made their way back to the manor.

What was left of it.

Felecia stopped at the edge of the property and looked at the damage with the expression of someone doing very patient arithmetic. Several sections of the outer structure had been dissolved by the Famine bloodline during the fight, the building material fed into the sand constructs without Adam having had much say in the matter.

She turned to him. "You really did a number on our place."

Adam scratched the back of his head. "I had limited control over the situation."

Remedy sighed beside him, looking at the same wreckage with considerably more composure. "I suppose this means we move into the new estate sooner than planned."

Every head turned toward her.

Ivy spoke first.

"New estate?"

****

Remedy answered Ivy's question by pulling out her phone and making a single call.

A vehicle arrived within minutes, sent over by one of Eden's security personnel without any fuss. Remedy took the driver's seat. Adam settled into his seat and watched the familiar streets of Tristan give way to roads he didn't recognise, winding steadily upward toward the mountain range at the sector's edge.

Nobody spoke much during the drive. The damage back at the manor was still settling in everyone's heads.

Then the vehicle rounded a pass in the cliffs, and the conversation stopped entirely.

The estate had been carved directly into the granite face of the mountain peak. It sat high above the shoreline, the ocean churning far below, mist from the summit drifting across the upper tiers in slow, rolling waves. Dark basalt and massive spans of floor-to-ceiling glass rose in stacked levels that defied the cliff face they occupied, each terrace cantilevered further out than the last, hanging over the drop with the confidence of something that had never considered falling.

Iron gates guarded the perimeter, heavy and old, the kind that suggested the mountain itself was doing the locking.

The cobblestone driveway had been cut directly into the cliffside, winding toward a grand entrance where two-storey oak doors waited, reinforced with blackened steel along every seam. The setting sun caught the glass across the full facade and turned the entire mountainside gold, blazing from top to bottom like something lit from within. Far below, a private cove sat tucked into the base of the cliff, its white sand barely visible under the shadow the structure cast down onto it.

Adam stared at it in silence.

Felecia did not.

"You were holding out on us, princess."

Remedy said nothing, but the faint curve at the corner of her mouth as she pulled toward the entrance said everything that needed saying.