Ironseat Grand Hall, The Palace Complex of the Kingdom of Carta.

  The Ironseat Grand Hall was not merely a lobby; it was the anatomical heart of Carta’s power. The ceiling soared fifteen meters high, supported by pillars of black iron forged with carvings depicting the history of the kingdom's conquests. The floor was gray marble polished so slick it reflected the shadows of the people upon it like turbid water.

  Noel stood silent near one of the pillars, blending with the shade. His eyes scanned the crowd. A sea of black suits.

  At a glance, everyone appeared uniform. Yet, for Noel, who was accustomed to reading micro-details, the caste differences in this room were as stark as day and night.

  He observed the group on the left.

  The Nobles:

  Their posture was relaxed yet domineering. Chins lifted fifteen degrees—the optimal angle to look down on others without appearing excessively haughty. Their black suits were crafted from the highest quality wool-silk blend, absorbing light rather than reflecting it.

  No wrinkles at the elbows or knees. At their wrists, cufflinks glinted—gold or silver engraved with their respective House sigils. They carried nothing. Their hands were clean, skin smooth, fingers slender because the only heavy object they had ever lifted was a wine glass.

  He shifted his gaze to the group rushing through the center of the room.

  The Officials:

  Their steps were quick, the rhythm erratic, driven by urgency and fear of superiors. Their black suits were made of synthetic blends or stiff cotton that shone slightly at the back and elbows from too much friction against office chairs. They always carried something—leather folders, tablets, scrolls.

  Their backs were slightly hunched, the burden of bureaucracy pressing on their spines even while standing. Their faces, whether twenty or sixty years old, shared a common trait: deep eye bags and skin pale from a lack of sun.

  Noel glanced at his watch.

  09:15.

  Fifteen minutes before the throne room doors opened. Enough time for one more analysis.

  His eyes caught an anomaly.

  In the quietest corner of the lobby, far from the chaotic sycophants and narcissistic nobles, stood a young man.

  Age peer to Noel.

  Noel narrowed his eyes, his analysis mode engaging automatically, dissecting the subject from ten meters away.

  Subject: Foreign Youth.

  Status: Unknown.

  Physique: Skin tanned, not the exotic brown of a salon tan, but an even bronze from hours of vertical sun exposure daily. Likely highlands. His hands... Noel looked at the hands folded across the youth’s chest. Significant calluses between the thumb and forefinger, as well as on the palm pads. Those were not writer’s hands, nor the hands of a common laborer. Those were hands accustomed to gripping hilts—weapons, horse reins, or heavy tools.

  Appearance: Black hair, cut neat but the texture slightly messy, as if he had just combed it with his fingers after dismounting an open vehicle. His black suit... Perfect fit. Bespoke tailoring. Shoulders aligned, waist not baggy. This was not a borrowed suit. He had money, or someone bought him these expensive clothes.

  Traces: This was the interesting part. As the youth shifted his feet, Noel saw a faint stain on the edge of his polished shoe sole. Mud. Reddish in color, the type of wet clay commonly found in the northern forests or mountains, not the dust of Carta’s capital streets.

  The wind from the air conditioner carried a thin scent toward Noel.

  Pine.

  The smell of fresh pine sap and ozone—mountain air—clinging stubbornly, as if the scent had seeped into his pores, not merely perfume.

  Then, Noel’s eyes caught the smallest detail.

  On the calf of his expensive trousers, a few short hairs remained, perhaps missed during cleaning. Silver-gray with black tips.

  Texture too stiff and thick for dog fur.

  Too coarse and 'wild' for a house pet.

  Wolf? Noel guessed. Or a young bear?

  The youth was clearly not an official, and he was too "feral" for a capital noble. He was a predator forced into a human suit, looking uncomfortable yet remaining vigilant.

  Just as Noel’s analysis concluded, the youth suddenly turned.

  His eyes—sharp and wild—slammed directly into Noel’s gaze. Animal instinct. He knew he was being watched.

  Noel broke eye contact first. Not out of intimidation, but efficiency. He had no time to play staring contests with a "forest child" in the palace lobby.

  He turned, boot heels pivoting on the marble, and strode confidently through the giant double doors toward the main hall of Ironseat.

  This room was the belly of the titan beast. Rows of seats were arranged in a precise semicircle, facing a high podium where an empty throne waited. Noel walked straight ahead, passing the back rows beginning to fill with low-level officials, continuing forward to the Main Row.

  There, on a black velvet chair with a high back, lay a thick card with golden calligraphy:

  [Representative of House Sanjaya]

  Noel stared at the writing for a moment. Three words carrying the burden of hundreds of years of history, ancestral sins, and choking expectations. With minimal hand movement, he took the card. His fingertips felt the texture of expensive linen paper. He did not crumple it, merely folded it once neatly and slipped it into the inner pocket of his jacket, as if keeping the identity for himself.

  He sat.

  Back straight, hands resting calmly on his thighs. He did not lean back lazily, nor was he rigidly tense. He sat with the composure of a stone statue just moved from a temple to the middle of a market.

  The corners of his eyes, now operating in wide-angle mode, caught the blurred shadows of other guests beginning to flood the room. Black suits, formal dark gowns, military uniforms. They moved like a slow stream of ink, seeking the vessels of their respective seats.

  And the sound.

  Zzzzzzzzz...

  The hum.

  The acoustics of the vast and high Ironseat Grand Hall created a unique echo effect. Hundreds of whispered conversations, the friction of fabric, and the sound of footsteps merged into a constant low frequency. Like the sound of a million bees trapped in a giant glass jar.

  Noel closed his eyes for a second, letting the sound waves crash against his eardrums.

  This was different.

  In the Old Mansion of House Sanjaya, silence was a predator lurking in the corner, broken only by the brutal sounds of nature—thunder, rain, wind. There, sound was a threat.

  But here... this was the color of crowds.

  This sound was human ambition, political falsehood, and fear hidden behind pleasantries. It did not smell of rain and wet earth, but of expensive perfume mixed with the cold sweat of nervousness.

  For Noel, accustomed to living in "muteness," this social noise felt alien, slightly dizzying, yet strangely... far safer than the silence of his own home. Here, there were no killer arrays beneath his feet. Only a collection of humans with their respective agendas.

  Noel shut his eyes briefly.

  The visual world extinguished, replaced by a complex scent map. His nose dissected the dense air of the Grand Hall. There was the sting of synthetic musk—a sign of expensive cologne used excessively to mask the scent of anxiety. There was a soft floral sweetness, likely from the wives of young officials. There was also the smell of metal and starch from the stiff uniforms of the generals. All blending into one olfactory fog: the scent of hypocrisy.

  The buzzing "bee" sound dampened, becoming boring static background noise.

  Noel opened his eyes. His focus locked straight ahead.

  Lord Gavin Singh stood on the stage.

  Gavin’s voice did not boom like a cheap political orator seeking validation through applause. His voice was flat, dry, and sharp—like sandpaper dragging across the surface of a wooden coffin.

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  "We are not here for a long-winded seminar," Gavin spoke without preamble, flaying the fifteen minutes of obligatory state greetings usually required.

  "I will get straight to the point. All of you—policyholders sitting in those soft chairs—already understand the Dark Star Protocol distributed some time ago."

  Instantly, Noel’s skin sensors caught the change in air pressure within the room.

  Oxygen seemed forcibly sucked out by that sentence. Hundreds of audience members—ministers, generals, and expert staff—bowed their heads in unison. Their shoulders slumped, spines curved. A gloomy aura exuded from the bodies clad in expensive suits, creating a thick fog of depression. They were no longer state leaders; they looked like death row inmates listening to the reading of their execution warrant in the final minute.

  Noel did not bow. He observed.

  Gavin’s old hand moved beneath his heavy royal robes, withdrawing a round metal object.

  A compass.

  Noel’s eyes narrowed sharply. His pupils contracted, focusing his gaze like a telescopic lens on the small object in Gavin’s hand twenty meters away.

  The object was made of brass blackened by the oxidation of ages. The lid had a unique double hinge. Its protective glass was slightly convex, refracting the stage spotlight into a strange spectrum.

  Noel’s heart beat one tempo slower.

  Impossible, he thought.

  The processor in his brain replayed photographic memories at high speed. He pulled visual archives from the heirloom room in the basement of House Sanjaya. He recalled a bulletproof glass case housing the most sacred artifact of House Sanjaya: The Shadow Navigation.

  The compass in Gavin Singh’s hand... was identical.

  Noel scanned the details with terrifying precision.

  Not just the shape. The serrated pattern on the outer rim. The release button. Even the way the magnetic needle quivered nervously—not pointing North, but spinning wildly seeking a magnetic anomaly—everything was the same.

  Exactly the same.

  Did Gavin steal it? No, the Sanjaya security system was impossible for this old grandfather to penetrate without triggering a civil war. Was it a replica? No, the patina on that metal took hundreds of years to form naturally. That was not factory-made.

  A logical conclusion formed in Noel’s mind: So there are two.

  Two identical compasses in this world. One in the hands of the Dark Lord of Sanjaya, one in the hands of the King’s Spiritual Advisor.

  This fact disturbed Noel. There was a historical variable missing from the intelligence data he had collected thus far. What kind of connection did Gavin have with the Sanjaya ancestors?

  On stage, Gavin opened the compass lid. The needle stopped spinning, pointing straight to a harrowing imaginary point.

  "Based on my calculations..." Gavin’s voice returned, this time heavier, as if every word possessed a specific gravity that crushed bone. "The culmination point will fall on December 13th."

  Murmurs began to rise. An anxious sound, like bees whose hive had been torched.

  Gavin gave no pause. He dropped his final sledgehammer.

  "...At 13 hours and 13 minutes."

  BOOM!

  Not the sound of a physical explosion, but a blast of mass panic.

  The room, previously gripped by tense silence, now shattered. Hundreds of people jerked. Several officials stood from their seats, faces deathly pale. Voices of fear, denial, and panicked prayers buzzed, filling the hall with its poor acoustics.

  "Impossible!"

  "It shouldn't be this soon..."

  For them, December 13th, 13:13 was not merely a meeting schedule. It was a death sentence read by a supreme judge.

  Noel remained seated calmly in the eye of the panic storm. His face remained flat, ice-cold, but his eyes did not leave the old compass in Gavin’s hand.

  The vocal clamor of the officials slowly decayed, replaced by a more unsettling sound.

  Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack!

  Noel turned slightly to the left wing, the lower tribune area reserved for technical teams and data analysts. The sound came from there. Hundreds of fingers were hammering laptop keyboards in unison, creating a mechanical roar like hail striking a tin roof.

  They were panicking.

  Noel dissected the faces of the expert staff. Their skin was gray, decorated with thick panda-eye circles—signs of chronic sleep deprivation for weeks. Cold sweat dripped from temples, soaking already crumpled shirt collars. They were not typing reports. They were shoveling data, searching for an exit that did not exist. Their fingers struck keyboard keys with frustrated violence, as if trying to dig a foxhole inside the digital screen.

  Suddenly, a chair was shoved back roughly. Scriiit!

  A young staffer stood. His shirt was untucked, hair disheveled. He held a rapidly printed sheet of paper, the ink likely not yet fully dry.

  "Interruption!" he shouted, voice cracking from excessive adrenaline.

  All eyes fixed on him. The youth trembled, but his wild eyes stared at the giant screen on the wall displaying complex orbital graphs.

  "The Professor is right..." he said, breath hunting, lungs struggling to pump air. "According to our astrophysics modeling just finished running..."

  He pointed to the graph with a shaking hand.

  "When fourteen planets align... and the gravity of the Giant Comet Enregar enters our galaxy's outer orbit..."

  The youth swallowed, staring at Gavin on stage with fear mixed with horrified awe.

  "Our supercomputer model added the calculation variable from Your Grace Singh..."

  Silence hung for a moment. Suspended. Waiting for the final verdict.

  "Date: December 13th. Hour: 13. Minute: 13..." The youth paused for one second. "And Second: 13."

  "Ten days from now..."

  BAM.

  The second sledgehammer fell. This time pulverizing the remnants of calm in the room into dust.

  Modern science had just confirmed ancient prophecy. Billion-dollar satellite technology had just bowed to a rusted compass.

  The hall broke. Utterly destroyed.

  Noel watched the scene before him with a bored gaze. The room, once filled with the nation's elite, now looked like a luxury cruise liner whose hull had just been torn open by an iceberg.

  Ministers shouted orders at aides who were equally panicked. Military generals busied themselves yelling into satellite phones, neck veins bulging. Young staffers wept in front of their laptops. Top-secret state documents scattered on the marble floor, trampled by expensive loafers running aimlessly.

  Pathetic, Noel thought coldly.

  He was the only passenger on this sinking ship still sitting calmly in his seat, legs crossed, enjoying the spectacle of the mental collapse of the world’s rulers.

  Second 13... he mused. A pretty number for an apocalypse.

  On stage, Gavin Singh stood motionless. He made no attempt to calm the masses with panicked hand waves or futile shouts of "Order!" He simply... waited.

  Like an ancient reef letting waves break against its feet, Gavin waited. As the King’s spiritual advisor, he understood the anatomy of human fear better than anyone in the room. Fear was like a wildfire; it would burn itself out if not given new oxygen.

  Noel glanced at the chronograph on his wrist, the second hand ticking staccato. He began a countdown in his head.

  Three... two... one.

  Silence.

  The commotion died on its own. The tie-wearing bees finally exhausted their buzzing. They sat back in their respective chairs, breathless, faces puffy, eyes begging for direction like chicks who had lost their mother.

  Noel stopped his internal count.

  7 minutes 14 seconds.

  Exactly as per statistical estimation. The average time required for a group of cowards to realize that panic solves nothing, merely burns unnecessary calories.

  Once silence was absolute again, Gavin’s voice returned to fill the void. Heavy, authoritative, and manipulative.

  "The Dark Period..." he began softly, yet the room’s acoustics carried every syllable clearly to the listeners’ ears. "...is a cycle that arrives once every 500 years."

  Those old eyes swept the room, as if staring at their sins one by one.

  "The world descends into chaos. In the history books you studied in school, this period is recorded under other names, more 'reasonable' names. They call it the Black Death. They call it the Eternal Drought. The Burning Sun. World War."

  Noel saw the corner of Gavin’s lip lift slightly. The grim smile of a secret keeper.

  "Humans always attempt to rationalize their fears. Natural disasters, plagues, political conflicts... those are all merely masks. They are euphemisms—polite words to cover the brutal truth that darkness is harvesting souls."

  The officials gaped. World history was being rewritten before their eyes, and they had no choice but to believe it.

  "However," Gavin’s voice rose, injecting adrenaline of courage into the veins of the withered audience. "The Kingdom of Carta has stood for 3,500 years."

  The number hung in the air, solid and irrefutable.

  "We have faced this dark period six times. Six times the apocalypse came knocking at our gates, and six times our ancestors kicked it back to hell."

  Gavin spread his arms, the tattered royal robes billowing as if he were the fortress itself.

  "The proof? We still exist. This kingdom still stands. I still breathe, and you still sit in those plush chairs. The ancestors won their war."

  He leaned forward, staring at them sharply.

  "And so shall we in this time. Believe it. We can too."

  His voice turned into a hypnotic persuasion.

  "We have learned much from the blood spilled in the past. We are not as weak as before. We have compiled hundreds... thousands of protocols. We possess technological readiness and strategies far, far more mature than our ancestors who had only spears and obsolete mantras."

  Noel felt the shift of energy in the room.

  The air pressure that had been choking them slowly loosened.

  He heard a long intake of breath from his right—a Ministry official who had nearly fainted earlier now began to straighten his back. Oxygen flowed back into their lungs. Color began to return to those pale faces.

  They found hope. They found a logical "anchor": Ancestors could do it, we have technology, we will surely win.

  Noel observed their chests rising and falling more regularly. The mass heart rhythm began to stabilize.

  Good, Noel thought coldly. Breathe.

  Their brains needed sufficient glucose and oxygen to remain sane so the wheels of government didn't stop completely. Panic had receded, replaced by the illusion of competence.

  Noel looked at the straightened backs in front of him. Ministers began nodding solemnly, jotting down Gavin’s points in their leather agendas as if it were divine revelation. Generals began whispering tactics to aides, their faces turning hard and authoritative once more.

  They had found their grip again. The words "technological readiness" and "thousands of protocols" were potent tranquilizers. It gave them a false sense of control. They thought they were chess players, when in reality they were merely pawns unaware they were about to be sacrificed.

  Gavin’s voice on the podium still droned, entering technical details about logistics and civilian evacuation. Long, complex, and boring explanations.

  Noel shut off his auditory function regarding the speech. He had read the draft of the Dark Star Protocol from the first page to the last three days ago. He didn't need a bedtime story.

  His black eyes shifted, seeking a more interesting object of analysis.

  His gaze landed on a figure sitting two rows ahead of him, slightly to the left.

  Subject: General Garreth Stone.

  Position: Minister of Defense.

  The man was large, a retired four-star general with a concrete neck and graying buzz cut. His service uniform was laden with colorful service ribbons glistening under the hall’s crystal lights.

  Noel narrowed his eyes slightly. Analysis mode active.

  There was an anomaly.

  While other officials began to breathe relief and smile optimistically, Garreth’s shoulders grew stiffer. The trapezius muscles in his neck tensed hard like steel cables pulled to the breaking point.

  Noel saw Garreth’s right hand hidden under the table. The hand gripped the armrest with unnatural force. His knuckles turned white, veins bulging, trembling as he held back something explosive inside him.

  Cold sweat soaked the back collar of his shirt, far more profusely than during the mass panic earlier.

  Ah, Noel thought, the corner of his lip lifting in a thin, barely visible smirk. I understand.

  While the Minister of Economy busied himself thinking of inflation, and the Minister of Social Affairs busied himself thinking of refugee tents, the Minister of Defense knew a more brutal truth.

  He had just realized the "portion" placed on his plate.

  If "technology" failed—and Noel was 99% certain it would—then "meat" would have to step forward. Troops. Humans.

  This old man was not listening to defense strategies. He was calculating how many millions of young soldiers’ lives he would have to throw into the mouth of darkness as bait, just to buy a few minutes for these elites to escape.

  He knew he was no longer the Minister of Defense.

  From this second on, his title changed to Head of the Sacrificial Division.

  Enjoy that burden, General, Noel whispered internally, his eyes glinting coldly as he flayed the general’s fear. Someone has to dirty their hands with blood so we can stay alive.