"Anyway, how do you two know each other?" Sneha asked, completely ignoring the heavy discomfort suffocating the table.
She already knew the answer. She had eavesdropped long enough to deduce that Yug was the only bridge connecting these two girls. But she needed to pry the conversation open smoothly, playing the role of an innocent friend to extract every last detail about him.
She bit down hard on the inside of her lip. It was a bad habit of hers. Whenever a plan fell perfectly into place, a wide, deeply satisfied grin would instinctively fight its way onto her face. Right now, she needed to keep that twisted thrill locked strictly behind a cheerful mask.
"We're actually just—" Nitya started, her polite, everyday persona automatically taking over.
"It doesn't concern you."
Kruti's voice sliced through the air like a guillotine, instantly decapitating the conversation.
"Get lost," Kruti said smoothly, not even blinking. "We are busy."
She leaned back, her cold gaze dismissing Sneha entirely. The brief flicker of fascination she had felt toward the intruder was already dead. Sneha's little parlor trick with memory was mildly amusing, but not nearly amusing enough to entertain. Right now, dissecting Nitya's hidden motives was far more interesting.
"You haven't changed at all, Kruti. You are just as cold and heartless as you were back then. You still don't care about anyone else's feelings," Sneha snarled.
Her cheerful facade instantly shattered, replaced by a flash of genuine anger. She despised that dismissive attitude; it made her blood boil. She had never met a girl quite like Kruti, someone so entirely, effortlessly unreachable.
Nitya sat in silence, quietly observing the sudden explosion. She was slightly taken aback by Sneha's outburst, though deep down, she completely agreed. Kruti was suffocatingly cold. Nitya had always considered herself the most ruthless, ambitious person in the room. But first Nitara, and now Kruti... compared to these two monsters, Nitya's own ambition almost looked like kindness.
"Why should I care?" Kruti replied, her tone dangerously flat. "I don't even know you. Get lost, before I—"
Kruti stopped. She didn't need to finish the threat. Her piercing gaze locked onto Sneha, carrying a silent, lethal weight. Sneha swallowed hard, reading the unspoken violence perfectly. A chill ran down her spine; she hadn't come here to provoke a physical fight she couldn't win.
Step. Step.
"Hey, Kruti. Don't bully a beautiful lady. She was just—"
Vidyut's voice trailed off as he strolled toward their table. He stopped dead in his tracks before he could even reach them. His casual demeanor vanished, his eyes widening as a sudden, heavy pressure washed over the area.
"A new... Essence of a Breath Born," Vidyut muttered, his voice tight. "Do you sense it, Kruti?"
Kruti's gaze snapped toward the adjacent building. Her carefully organized thoughts suddenly scattered.
Did Yug just awaken his Essence of Breath? she thought, her eyes narrowing into the darkness. I thought it would take him more time. It's far too early.
Every human in the world possessed the fundamental breath of life, but only a rare few were possessed by its true consciousness—an 'Essence.' And once a person learned to tame and control that wild Essence, it evolved into something far more terrifying: an Authority. A freak consciousness that imposed the user's will onto reality itself.
If a new Essence had just been born in that building, the board hadn't just flipped. It had shattered.
Yug gazed down at the trembling crowd, his mind still turning over the rules of his improvised game. He needed them busy. He needed to flush out the wolves hiding among the sheep.
"Clean up the bodies," Yug commanded, his voice cold and amplified. "Arrange them perfectly. Sync them with the others."
To solidify his absolute control, he fed them a terrifying lie to explain the suffocating silence.
"Don't bother trying to scream. I have already locked your throats," he told them, pacing slowly across the marble. "If you resist, if you even try to force a sound, your vocal cords will rupture. I can end any of you with a simple snap of my fingers."
The lie worked flawlessly. It bred absolute, unquestioning loyalty born of sheer terror. Women in the crowd wept silently, thick tears streaming down their faces, their bodies shaking with desperate sobs that simply could not be heard.
What can I make them do next? Yug thought, whispering softly to himself beneath the mask. Should I just throw a few guns into the center of the room and let them kill each other? It would be an easy way to finish this up... but a bloodbath wouldn't match the name of the game.
He scanned the room again. Through the sea of broken, terrified faces, he could still see those few calculating pairs of eyes. They were tracking his every movement, analyzing his posture like predators waiting for their prey to show a moment of weakness.
"What should I do with—"
Ugh.
A sudden, invisible wave slammed into him.
It wasn't physical. It was a stench. A sickening, suffocating, rotten odor of absolute death that bypassed his nose and clawed directly into his brain. It was the exact scent he had smelled right before he died in his past loops, but magnified a hundred times over.
This stench—!
"UGH—Yukkkk!"
Yug violently doubled over. He gagged, vomiting bile directly onto the polished floor. His vision blurred, his entire body trembling as the sheer, crushing pressure of a newly awakened Essence washed over the building.
It was a fatal opening.
The hidden fighters in the crowd didn't hesitate for a single second. The moment Yug's posture broke and his focus shattered, they struck.
BANG! BANG!
Gunshots erupted from the crowd, aimed straight for Yug's head.
Yug had expected an ambush, just not this soon.
Using the momentum from doubling over, he violently twisted his body to the side. BANG! BANG! The bullets whistled past his ear, missing his skull by mere inches. His reflexes were terrifyingly sharp, even while disoriented by the sickening pressure in the air.
"You bastard! Where do you think you're going?!"
The booming voice echoed across the hall. It belonged to one of the hidden fighters in the crowd. The man had accidentally crushed one of the tiny Vokal-Spiders beneath his shoe. Its camouflage had perfectly matched the marble floor, but the damage was done. The signal was broken, and his voice was completely restored.
Wiping the bile from his mouth with the back of his sleeve, Yug's cold gaze snapped toward the source of the noise. The man's face was red with fury, his weapon raised, and he wasn't alone. Several others were rallying behind him.
Fuck, Yug cursed internally as the situation threatened to completely unravel. He immediately tried to weaponize the remaining terrified guests.
"Listen to me!" Yug shouted over the rising chaos. "If you want to live, kill the people who just shot at me! Do it, or I will kill every single one of you right—"
"NO, YOU DON'T!"
Another voice ripped through the air—one of the hidden assassins. He, too, had broken free from the silence.
Yug's eyes widened beneath his mask. From his blind spot, the assassin lunged, a jagged combat knife slicing directly toward Yug's throat.
Fuck! If he had been a fraction of a second faster...
Yug felt the icy sting of the blade graze his skin. Relying on pure, violent instinct, Yug's hand shot up and clamped down on the assassin's wrist like a steel vice. In one fluid, brutal motion, he twisted the arm, seized the hilt of the knife, and reversed the blade. Before the assassin could even register the counterattack, his own throat was slit open in a fountain of red.
Yug grabbed the dying man by the collar, holding his bleeding body up like a twisted prop. He glared past the corpse at the trembling crowd.
"I gave you all an order," Yug commanded, his voice dripping with venom. "Follow it. Or die."
"YOU BASTARD!" the vocal fighter roared. His allies immediately formed a tight, protective circle around him, weapons drawn and locked on Yug.
Yug ignored the armed men entirely. His piercing gaze remained fixed on the terrified sheep of the crowd. Pushed to the brink of insanity by fear, a few of the ordinary guests actually started shuffling forward, desperately preparing to attack the armed fighters just to appease Yug's command.
Seeing his psychological control still holding on a few threads, Yug casually tossed the bleeding assassin's corpse onto a nearby velvet couch.
BANG! BANG!
The fighter fired two deafening warning shots into the ceiling, halting the advancing guests in their tracks.
"Wake up!" he bellowed, desperately trying to snap them out of their delusion. "I'll kill you before he does! Stop listening to his orders! He's lying to you! If he could really kill us all with a snap of his fingers, he would have done it the second we attacked him! Don't you understand? He's bluffing!"
The crowd froze, their terrified eyes darting between Yug and the armed fighter. The grand illusion of Yug's absolute power was cracking wide open.
Tch.
Yug clicked his tongue behind the mask. The fighter was standing his ground, fully confident, systematically dismantling Yug's psychological trap in front of everyone.
This guy is much smarter than I thought.
Yug didn't argue with the man's logic. He simply raised his handgun.
"Neck," Yug whispered. This time, he spoke just loud enough for the trembling crowd to hear it clearly.
Thwip.
"Neck."
Thwip.
"Neck."
Thwip.
Three of the armed men who had just circled to protect the smart fighter collapsed simultaneously, blood spraying from their shattered throats. They hit the marble floor with heavy, lifeless thuds, leaving their confident leader standing completely exposed and alone.
The silence that followed was absolute. The crowd's fleeting hope vanished in an instant.
"See that?" Yug said smoothly, the cold amusement returning to his voice. "If you don't do exactly as I say, you will join them. It doesn't matter where you run or who you hide behind. A bullet will find your neck."
He tilted his head, the glowing red smile of his mask burning into the paralyzed guests.
"So... think very carefully before taking your next action."