Western Addus, Dorsa.
Night had fallen over Dorsa. Darkness and silence settled across the city as the evening breeze blew gently. The entire city was shrouded beneath the shadow of night, with only a few scattered lights still flickering.
While most of the city lay in this quiet gloom, in a house at the edge of town, a light still burned. Inside, a rhythmic tapping sound echoed steadily. At a long table in the corner of the room, two North Ufigardian men in robes sat hunched over various wires connected to a mechanical device laid across the tabletop. The two men busied themselves with adjustments, while behind them stood a young white man from the Central Continent, also in a robe. He remained standing in place, wearing a tense expression, clearly waiting for something.
“Mr. Khurashi… a reply from Karnak has arrived.”
Suddenly, one of the robed men at the table stood up, holding a sheet of paper, and turned to address the young man. Hearing the message, the youth named Khurashi lit up, then immediately asked:
“What did they say?”
“Karnak’s reply confirms they’ve received the intel about Adan’s movements tomorrow morning. They’ll prepare a corresponding ambush. Also… regarding your spirit messenger, Karnak reported that no spirit arrived there this afternoon. It seems your messenger didn’t reach its destination.”
The robed man continued his report. Hearing that Karnak had received his intel, Khurashi visibly relaxed, exhaling slightly. But when he learned his spirit messenger never arrived, a frown immediately furrowed his brow.
“Didn’t reach Karnak…? That means something went wrong midway. What happened? Was it attacked by a soul-form creature in the Ethereal Realm? Or did Adan discover spies in the city and plant spirits in the Ethereal Realm as a countermeasure?”
As he pondered, Khurashi ran through all the possibilities in his mind. He was convinced something had happened to the spirit in the Ethereal Realm—either intercepted by Adan’s spectral agents, or attacked by some malevolent entity lurking in the void.To Khurashi, it seemed unlikely that Adan himself had intercepted the messenger. Dorsa’s projection within the Ethereal Realm was vast, and a single ghost’s perception range was limited. Monitoring such a wide space would require deploying a large number of ghosts. But Khurashi had already surveyed Dorsa’s Ethereal projection and found no such signs. Adan certainly didn’t have the capacity to deploy that many.
Thus, he concluded his messenger had likely fallen victim to a hostile Ethereal aberration—some wicked spirit wandering the cracks between the physical and spectral planes.
“So, it was probably just an accident… The messenger must have been ambushed by some malicious specter along the way. It shouldn’t be Adan’s doing. If it were, he would’ve had to either flood the entire Ethereal projection over Dorsa with surveillance spirits—or know my exact real-world location and map it precisely onto the Ethereal layer, then lie in ambush…”
“But if Adan did know my exact location in Dorsa, there’s no way I’d still be standing here. He’d already have stormed this place with his troops.”
Khurashi reasoned as such, then slowly walked to the side and picked up a cup of tea. But just as he raised the cup to his lips—suddenly, a sharp change occurred.
“———!!!”
Without warning, Khurashi’s Silence-path spiritual senses were assaulted by a piercing, high-pitched shriek. This was a sound no ordinary person could hear—the alarm cry of a sentinel ghost he had stationed outside the safehouse. It was his personal ghost sounding an emergency alert!
Hearing this, Khurashi’s heart sank. His expression changed drastically. His jaw twitched, and without a second’s hesitation, he turned sharply and shouted at the two robed subordinates.
“We’ve been exposed! Burn the files! Evacuate! Scatter and flee separately!”
As soon as he spoke, Khurashi dashed to the table, grabbed a bottle of kerosene, and splashed it across the stack of documents atop the table. He then pulled out a matchbox from his robes, struck a match, and tossed it onto the soaked papers. In an instant, flames erupted and began to spread rapidly.
With the fire lit, Khurashi sprinted to the wall, flung open a window, and leapt out—disappearing into the night.
The two robed men in the room exchanged a brief glance, then sprang into action as well, each diving out separate windows. Behind them, the fire quickly engulfed the room.
One of the robed men landed in a narrow, filthy alleyway and didn’t hesitate. Upon hitting the ground, he immediately took off running. But just as he turned a corner—a tall, dark silhouette emerged from the opposite side and lunged straight at him. The man had no time to react and was tackled hard to the ground by overwhelming force.
Pinned beneath the figure, the robed man struggled frantically to break free. But then a sensation of excruciating pain unlike anything he had ever felt shot through his body. His entire frame convulsed uncontrollably. Within moments, he began to foam at the mouth. His head lolled to the side, and he passed out completely.
After the man lost consciousness, the towering figure slowly rose from atop him. Gazing down at the unconscious man, the figure rummaged through its own robes and drew out… a stamp.
…
On the other side, Khurashi, after leaping out the window, immediately broke into a sprint, dashing with all his might toward the city outskirts. Due to widespread poverty, few lamps were lit throughout Dorsa at night, and Khurashi found himself running through dim streets, the moonlight overhead his only real illumination.
With swift strides, he dashed through the narrow alleyways, heading rapidly for the city edge without encountering any obstacles. Yet even as he ran, his mind was filled with frustration and confusion— how had his location been exposed? Where had the breach occurred?!
The road ahead remained open and unblocked, but Khurashi didn’t lower his guard. He remained fully alert, watching for any sudden attacks—and rightly so. Before long, he was indeed ambushed.
Just as he reached a four-way intersection, a figure that had been lying in wait suddenly sprang from the right and lunged toward him. Khurashi reacted instantly, sidestepping the attack. Then, without hesitation, he drew two daggers from his coat pocket and flung them toward the attacker—both landing precisely at fatal points. The figure let out a cry and collapsed to the ground, motionless.
Though he had successfully neutralized the assailant, Khurashi had no time to breathe a sigh of relief before a much larger silhouette suddenly appeared behind him and lunged. This time, he failed to dodge and was seized in a powerful bear hug from behind, completely immobilized. He tried to break free, only to realize the grip around him was far stronger than expected—his struggles were useless.
Reacting quickly, Khurashi grabbed the attacker’s arms. The moment he did, his Silence-path abilities activated, and black specks began to spread rapidly across the attacker’s arm, crawling over their body like a creeping sickness. As the specks took hold, the attacker’s strength waned, weakening visibly.
Sensing the grip loosen, Khurashi renewed his efforts to break free. But at that moment, several other large figures rushed in from other directions at the intersection. Khurashi, on the verge of escaping, was instead overwhelmed, pinned to the ground by multiple attackers, completely restrained. No matter how he struggled, it was futile.
“Damn… How can there be so many of them?!”
Pressed flat against the ground, Khurashi felt the crushing force of hands gripping his back. The pressure was immense, so much so that his skin split, and blood trickled from deep gouges. The pain was intense.
Helpless and pinned, despair welled up inside him—when suddenly, a sharp, deafening sound rang through the night.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Gunshots echoed across the crossroads. One after another, the figures restraining Khurashi were struck down, collapsing with groans. Freed from their grasp, Khurashi immediately stood up and spun around—amid the lingering scent of gunpowder—to see a familiar robed man standing on the far side of the intersection, a smoking revolver in hand, aimed at Khurashi’s attackers.
It was one of his own subordinates—the very man who had just shot down all the assailants restraining him. Khurashi looked at the figure in surprise.
“Run! There’s more of them! Split up!”
The robed man shouted before bolting toward one direction of the intersection and vanishing into the shadows. Khurashi froze for a moment, then turned and fled in the opposite direction. His figure quickly disappeared into the darkness at the end of the street.
Once Khurashi had completely vanished, silence fell over the crossroads. All that remained were several corpses on the ground and splattered blood—nothing seemed to set the scene apart from what it had been just moments before.
But then, from one end of the street, a figure reappeared. It was the same robed man who had just "fled" the scene. After aiding Khurashi, he had run off—only to now return at a leisurely pace, strolling back toward the intersection.
When he arrived, he stood with his hands behind his back, calmly surveying the scene. Before him, the "dead" attackers began to rise—resurrected and unharmed.
The man’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. Instead, he smirked faintly. The reawakened attackers returned the same smile, identical in every detail to his.
After a brief, silent moment of mutual recognition, they all turned in unison, staring down the path where Khurashi had disappeared. Their expressions remained fixed, unchanged and unwavering.
…
Having been "rescued" by his subordinate, Khurashi fled without pause. He bolted out of Dorsa and reached the city’s outskirts, where a secluded, prearranged stable awaited. There, he retrieved a prepared horse, mounted swiftly, and under the cover of night, rode off at high speed, away from Dorsa.
Out in the open desert, the wind howled. Khurashi galloped through the darkness, leaving the city’s glow behind him as it quickly receded and disappeared from view.
After riding through the empty night wilderness for the better part of the night, he began to slow down. Gazing up into the desert sky, he used his spiritual sight to observe the floating wraiths drifting in the air.
Seeing them brought him relief. The tension that had gripped him all night began to fade. He reached into his clothes and pulled out a bone token, then urged his horse onward, straight into the undead-guarded wilderness.
Yet the dead did not bar his way. The undead standing watch over that region seemed oblivious to his presence. They gave him no warning, no hostility.
And so, Khurashi rode among the dead, uninterrupted, straight toward Karnak, the city they protected.
What Khurashi didn’t know, however, was that he was not alone.
Beneath his clothing, on the skin of his back, were a few faint scratches—small, almost unnoticeable marks made earlier during the assault in Dorsa. When several attackers had pinned him down, one had used a sharp needle-like object to etch these into his skin. Amid the chaos and panic, and amid the many wounds on his back, these tiny marks had gone completely unnoticed.
And so Khurashi rode on, unaware, through the boundless dark desert, traveling side by side with the dead, toward the city of Karnak they guarded. And everything he saw along the way was being transmitted directly to Dorothy’s eyes.
At that moment, Dorothy sat atop a tower in Dorsa, gazing out toward the distant nightscape. Khurashi, far beyond her line of sight, was unknowingly carrying her vision with him, bringing her perception to a place she could not otherwise reach. Without realizing it, he had become the perfect infiltrating agent.
What Khurashi could never have imagined was this:
He may have been a spy in Dorsa. But he would remain one in Karnak.