070 Conspiracy on the Works - Part 3 - Merrick’s POV

  I woke up.

  The light filtering through the blinds was warm, golden, impossibly soft. For a second, I thought I was still dreaming. But the weight beside me was real. The warmth. The scent of lavender and static.

  Evelyn.

  She lay there, her naked form barely veiled by the thin bedsheet tangled around her hips. Silver hair cascaded across the pillow like moonlight turned tangible. Her crimson eyes opened slowly, catching the light like garnets, and she smiled… sleepy, sly, content.

  I had seen albinos before. People with pale skin and pale lashes. But Evelyn... Evelyn was different. Not an absence of color. She was a defiance of it. She wasn't washed out… she was sculpted from a palette the rest of the world hadn't earned the right to see. Her beauty didn’t whisper; it demanded reverence. It was the kind of beauty that toppled kingdoms and turned wars into poetry.

  She tilted her head. “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re pretty,” I said, because there was no use pretending otherwise.

  “I know,” she replied, with the confidence of someone who didn’t need to be flattered to believe in her power.

  I lay back, staring at the ceiling. My chest felt hollow. Not empty… wrong. As though a piece had been removed and replaced with a slightly ill-fitting part. I tried to grasp it. The feeling. The doubt. But it slid out of reach like fog through fingers.

  This was my boardroom. Or at least, it used to be. The one back in the ESPer Association. Polished wood desk. Reinforced glass windows. A rack of ceremonial cloaks in the corner. Everything perfectly arranged as if nothing had changed.

  But everything had changed.

  I used to be an assassin. I worked alone. Killed for credits. Slipped into shadows without a second thought. Then I ended up at the Academy. A teacher. An instructor. Someone whose hands were supposed to nurture, not break. I remembered that much. I remembered the shift. I remembered deciding it was time to stop killing.

  But here?

  Here, Evelyn and I lived together.

  “Where are we?”

  “We live here,” she answered, brushing her fingers down my arm. “You forgot?”

  I frowned. “No… I… something’s off.”

  “You’re just tired,” she murmured, and kissed my cheek. “You’ve been working so hard.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Missions came and went. Espers to train. Students to monitor. Villains to subdue. Evelyn would vanish for stretches of time, always with a reason, always with a kiss goodbye and a cryptic smile. Then she came back with news. Excitement. Plans. A future.

  And one day, she brought a boy home.

  His name was Mark.

  She told me he was her son. And I looked at him… his hair, his face, the way he looked at the world with that mix of suspicion and hope… and I saw something familiar in him. Something I couldn’t quite name. But it made me stay. Made me teach him how to fight. How to survive.

  Made me love him like my own.

  Time passed. Or at least, something that resembled time. The sense of wrongness I’d once felt dulled at the edges. Life fell into rhythm. Missions, dinners, briefings, family. I told myself I was happy. I believed it. Or wanted to.

  Eventually, we became a family.

  We were eating dinner when it happened.

  Evelyn was laughing at something Mark had said… something about a failed academy mission that ended with him face-down in a pond… and I found myself smiling, genuinely smiling. The lighting was warm, the food was hot, the moment was… perfect.

  Too perfect.

  Mark reached for the mashed potatoes, Evelyn scolded him for using the wrong spoon, and I just sat there, watching. Not them, but the world. The edges of the room. The way the shadows didn’t move quite right. The sound of the cutlery didn’t echo naturally. It was as though someone had rendered reality from memory, not experience.

  I didn’t know what triggered it. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was everything.

  But right then, I realized it.

  This wasn’t real.

  It was a dream. An illusion. The ideal future I had always imagined, crafted in those rare quiet moments after joining the ESPer Association. My fantasy. A perfect life with Evelyn. A family. Peace.

  I let out a long, disappointed sigh and murmured, “It was fun while it lasted.”

  My ESP, Grand Magus, was a technique-intensive ability. At its core, it was a variant of telekinesis… manipulation of force, motion, and structure. But the true brilliance of Grand Magus was its flexibility. If I understood something well enough, its function, its principle, I could replicate it. Reshape it. Create new abilities from scratch, as long as the logic held. It was more than ESP. It was a framework.

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  And in that moment, I understood the illusion.

  With a thought, I dismissed it.

  I woke up to the sound of a soft, feminine giggle. “Don’t kiss me there,” a voice teased. “It’s ticklish.”

  My lips were on someone’s neck. I froze, confused, repulsed, and pulled back immediately. What the hell?

  I shoved her away.

  My gun was in my hand before I even processed the movement. I pulled the trigger on reflex.

  Click.

  No shot.

  “Wow, someone’s firing bla~nks~!” The woman smiled and held up my magazine like a magician revealing the final card in a trick. “Missing something?”

  I glanced down.

  I was half-naked.

  My shirt was gone. My pants were unzipped. She was wearing my suit jacket… and shirt underneath it… far too big for her slender frame. The collar hung off one shoulder. My tie was looped loosely around her neck like an accessory. Her skin smelled like perfume I didn’t own.

  I scowled, abandoned the empty gun, zipped my pants, and slowly raised both hands.

  “Disappointing,” she said, pouting. “We were almost getting to the fun part.”

  I knew she didn’t mean anything sexual. Not really.

  She wanted my clothes. My belongings. My presence. It was probably all part of her ESP… something that required physical contact or proximity. Or maybe clothes? She was trickster-type, maybe. Displacement. Illusion. Seduction was a tactic, not an interest.

  “You’re Merrick, right?” she asked, tilting her head, her brown curls bouncing with the motion. “Name’s Selena. I’m a member of Arcana… representing the Fool. And you… you’re the former loner assassin with the moniker Magician. So what do you think? Want to join the club? I can show you a real fun time.”

  She struck a pose, one hand on her hip, the other twirling her hair. The oversized jacket slipped, exposing the swell of cleavage and a teasing hint of thigh. She was toying with me. Trying to destabilize me. She didn’t know me very well.

  I stared at her, deadpan. “I don’t do sluts.”

  Her smile cracked.

  Her eyes turned cold.

  And just like that, the aura around her changed.

  I kept my eyes on her, even as her flirtatious grin began to sour under the weight of my silence.

  “How do you know I’m a former assassin?” I asked plainly. “And what’s your connection with the ESPer Association?”

  Selena raised an eyebrow, caught somewhere between amusement and offense. She stretched, languid and cat-like, as if this conversation were just a brief intermission between games.

  “Ouch,” she said with exaggerated drama. “No warm-up? No flirty banter before the interrogation?”

  I didn’t answer. My stare was flat. I had killed for less than this.

  She sighed. “Fine. I’ll give you the short version, since I like you.”

  She placed a finger on her lips as though recalling a distant memory, then smirked.

  “Of course you’ve never heard of us before. That’s the whole point.” She threw her arms wide. “Arcana doesn’t do the whole flashy ESPer Academy branding. We don’t strut around like noble heroes or tyrant lords. Most of the time, we’re inside the rifts… conquering, slaughtering civilizations, claiming lost relics, waking up ancient nightmares… you know. Tuesday stuff.”

  “Sounds charming,” I muttered.

  She grinned wider. “Oh, it’s a blast. You’d love it.”

  She spun around once and then stopped, fixing her sharp hazel eyes on me. “The ESPer world’s expanding, Merrick. The Association thinks it owns everything, but new forces are taking root. Forces that don’t give a damn about their little ‘balance.’ The rifts change people. You either evolve, or get buried.”

  Her voice lost its usual teasing edge when she said that last part.

  I narrowed my gaze. “So the job to kill Lady Enoch came from the Association?”

  “Job’s a job,” she replied, shrugging as if we were talking about groceries. “And yeah, it came from them. Can’t really say who specifically. That’d be bad for business. But let’s just say some of those folks in the high towers don’t mind outsourcing when they want something dirty done.”

  “And yet you’re telling me this. Why?”

  Selena leaned in, resting her hands on her thighs. “Because I hate the damn place. Always did. All that fake order, fake ethics, fake peace. Bunch of hypocrites playing god behind golden desks.” She stood up straight, her smirk returning. “Besides, I figured you deserved a heads-up. You were one of theirs, after all. And you’ve still got that whole tall-dark-and-grim thing going for you.”

  I didn’t flinch. “That all you have to say?”

  “Nope,” she said cheerfully. “Stayed to have fun, mess with your head, maybe get a little kiss, steal your wardrobe, and bail.”

  Then, in one smooth, practiced motion, she undid the buttons of the stolen shirt and jacket… her current attire… and tossed them toward me. The garments barred my line of sight.

  “Buh-bye,” she sang sweetly.

  And just like that, she was gone the second the garments landed at my feet in a soft heap.

  No ESP signature. No scent trail. Not even the shift of air.

  Vanished.

  I stared at the spot where she had been.

  I picked up the gun I had let go of, my fingers wrapping around the familiar grip like a returning thought. The weight of it gave me clarity… but only for a second.

  Pain exploded in my side, sharp and immediate. I staggered. One of my ribs cracked like dry wood under pressure.

  “What the—” I hissed. Ah shit, I let my guard down.

  Instinct overrode pain. I spun and struck out with the butt of the gun toward the direction the blow had come from. But I hit nothing… only air.

  Then her voice came from my left, melodic and smug.

  “Do you know the story of the Invisible Man? Well… in this case, it’s the Invisible Woman!”

  I growled, “It was a trashy movie.”

  I launched a kick toward the source of the sound, a snap-arc aimed to crush whatever jaw might be lurking unseen.

  I missed.

  She caught my leg midair, and before I could react, she yanked, hard. I landed awkwardly, and then…. A hand gripped my crotch.

  “I’m quite the martial artist myself,” Selena announced, far too cheerfully. “Here’s a fun little move I call Plucking the Plums of the Monkey!”

  Pain flared again. It wasn’t enough to incapacitate me, but it was enough to piss me off.

  Before she could finish her bizarre technique, I activated my ESP… Grand Magus. My telekinesis shot out like a net, wrapping around her body in full. The moment I made contact, I locked her joints and froze her mid-motion.

  “You touched me,” I growled.

  My power compressed like steel bands, and I grabbed the first solid point I could feel… her shoulder, maybe, or her neck… and kneed her with force meant to put down a charging bull.

  She coughed out a shocked breath.

  I followed with an elbow to her gut, clean and sharp.

  Selena tumbled backward, hitting the ground hard and rolling away. I closed the gap fast and stomped at her.

  This time, I connected.

  “Ow, you freaking hit my boob, you cunt!” she shrieked, less graceful now and far more pissed.

  I didn’t care. I was done playing her game.

  I expanded my telekinetic field and kept tracking her… a soft signature, invisible but distinct. My ESP wrapped around her like a second skin, calculating every vector, measuring resistance, syncing with heat and pressure displacement.

  I blasted her position with a rapid series of pinpointed telekinetic shots, each one meant to break bone or rupture organs.

  But none of them hit.

  Mid-barrage, her signature vanished. Gone.

  As if the air had swallowed her.

  I frowned. Either she had suppressed her entire presence down to a molecular level… or something had disrupted my telekinesis. Both options were… concerning.

  I scanned the area, breathing through the sharp pain in my ribs.

  This wasn’t just stealth. This was ESP-enhanced invisibility. And worse, she was a sadist with a taste for surprise attacks and theatrical bullshit.

  But I wasn’t new to this game.

  “Come out, Selena,” I called. “We’re past the foreplay.”

  Silence answered me.

  Then a whisper, close and mocking, as if from every direction at once:

  “Foreplay? Darling, I haven’t even undressed the second act yet.”