On the Path of Eternal Strength.

Dawn arrived with a strange, almost solemn weight over Helena's mansion. There was no birdsong, no diaphanous rays breaking the curtains, but a gray clarity that filtered like dust over marble. She opened her eyes in silence, without Selena's presence by the door, without the usual sound of twin footsteps that accompanied her routine. She rose alone, leaving behind the sheets that still held a contained chill, and made her way to the window that overlooked the gardens. The glass returned the reflection of a woman whose discipline had never allowed cracks: Silver-gray hair gathered firmly, pale Sky-blue eyes deep where fatigue was invisible, posture as straight as the wall that had sustained her entire life.

That day, however, something had changed. She did not wait for the routine to lead her to share a car with Selena. She had decided, with the precision of a sentence, to walk the route of her day without company. Dressed in her usual sobriety —dark suit, clean lines, a fitted sash that marked authority— she crossed the halls with steps that seemed to resonate more loudly in Selena's absence. The echo was different: they were no longer two shadows, but one. One shadow enough.

Upon leaving the mansion, the city air greeted her with an acrid breath: smoke from clandestine factories, soot embedded in the walls, the metallic smell of a dawn where dogs fought over garbage. She climbed into the armored vehicle without visible escort and did not look back. She did not need company, not that morning. Every second was hers, and she was not going to mortgage it even to habit.

The office awaited her like a cold temple. A modern building, raised on columns of blackened glass, a beating heart of files, computers and subordinate faces. Helena did not walk: she paraded. The employees lowered their gazes, some barely breathed. She opened the main door of her office and closed it with a soft gesture, as if inside the silence she felt more comfortable than under a hundred applauses.

There the reports awaited her. Stacked folders, documents sealed with red and blue ribbons, screens lit with maps of the city blinking in dim tones. Helena took the first file, and the word cleaning headed the cover. She opened it without emotion, only with the certainty of someone dissecting another piece of her mechanism.

The data was clear: the gangs had turned entire sectors into lairs of rot, feeding a stream of drugs that ran down to the students. Intoxicated youth, schools stained by cheap powders and needles hidden among desks. The city was rotting not for lack of power, but from excess abandonment. Helena read, underlined with black ink, and in a cold voice dictated orders into the communicator:

—West Neighborhood. Meeting point marked at Ninth Corner. Neutralize them before midnight. Silently. No spectacle.

Pause. Another document.

—University District. Infiltration in three student centers. Break the supply chain from above, not on the street. The head, not the pawns.

Her words were knives that no one dared to question. Each order was taken down by secretaries who trembled as they wrote, because they knew that an error in transcription could cost them more than their salary: it could cost them their name, or their life.

But the work did not stop there. Helena slid another report across the table. In the upper corner a new, false name awaited birth. Virka. She reviewed the data in silence, then took up a pen and began tracing the outlines of a life that had never existed.

Orphaned since 2017. Parents dead in a clash between smugglers and local forces, an episode so common on the margins of the city that no one would ask too many questions. Raised in an unregistered orphanage, hidden in a neighborhood where poverty is another chain. A childhood erased in silence, molded to justify the presence of a young woman who would soon enter the most prestigious institution in the country without raising suspicion.

Each stroke was a new scar on the paper. Helena signed with initials that were not her own, sealed with stamps created that very dawn, and by the time she finished, the file already breathed like a true ghost. Virka existed, and at the same time, did not exist. A solid identity to deceive ministries, directors, bureaucrats. A perfect mask for a beast that could not be recognized.

The morning was consumed in that sway of papers, of orders, of silences that seemed to breathe with her. Until the door opened softly. Selena entered without announcing herself, as always, but this time there was a different edge in her gaze. It was not reproach, it was not judgment: it was curiosity.

—You weren't there when I went to pick you up —she said, her voice cold, precise, without adornment—. Today you came alone.

Helena barely lifted her gaze, holding the Sky-blue stare of her companion. The air between them seemed to tense like thin glass.

—I wanted to do it alone —she replied, without nuance, without justification.

A brief silence. Selena took a few steps inside, observing the office saturated with reports and falsified papers. She leaned a little, almost as if she wanted to read what Helena was writing.

—And why? —she asked at last. Not as a complaint, but as a genuine, almost human doubt.

Helena set the pen down on the table and reclined in her seat. Her eyes shone with a hue she rarely let show: not tenderness, not weakness, but memory.

—Because after so many years I want to begin again as at the start.

Her voice sounded grave, cadenced.

—That's how I got here. Strategy, discipline, firm steps every day. It wasn't company, it wasn't chance. It was will, Selena. I built a company from nothing, pushed it until it became one of the largest on the continent. And now, after Sebastián gave me back my health, I felt I had to return to that woman who did not depend on habit or routine.

Selena observed her in silence. Her face did not change, but her cold eyes reflected a barely perceptible spark, a recognition.

Helena continued, without need of adornment:

—I don't do it to push you away. I don't do it because your shadow weighs on me. I do it because time does not forgive, and I don't want it to find me motionless. I need to keep moving forward, no matter how much I've gained. If I stop, I rot. And I don't intend to rot, not now.

The office was wrapped in a silence heavier than any report. Selena remained standing, her back straight and her gaze fixed, as if she wanted to measure every word. In the end, she nodded slightly. Not with sweetness, but with respect.

—I understand —she said. That was all.

There were no hugs, no smiles, no further explanations. Selena turned, looked at the city for a moment from the window, and then took a seat on the other side of the desk. Nothing more was needed: both had found a new balance. One advancing in discipline, the other observing in silence.

The clock marked the hour with a muffled tick. Outside, the city continued to consume itself in soot and gangs. Inside, Helena signed Virka's file, ensuring that a new life existed on papers sealed in red ink. Selena crossed her legs, took a report, and opened it without permission. There was no reproach, no distance. Only two different sisters, working together in the echo of an empire already breathing under their hands.

And so, the morning of the new day was marked not by Sebastián —sealed in Closed Gate—, but by the calculated coldness of two women who moved destinies through papers, numbers, and decisions. The city did not yet know it, but in that office the future of Virka had already been signed, and the path sealed toward the school where the Crimson Emperor and his Queen would take the next step.

The office remained saturated by the murmur of papers and the dry tick of the clock on the wall, a rhythm that reminded that time advanced even in that sanctuary where power was woven through ink and silence. The gray light of the morning fell filtered through the curtains, casting a dirty glow over Helena's desk, where falsified reports breathed like corpses animated by the will of her hands. There still lay Virka's file, fresh, with its invented story of orphanhood, its scars on paper that turned her into a legitimate ghost.

Selena, who until that moment had read without uttering a word, broke the stillness with the restrained violence of an unsheathed knife. She did not raise her voice; she did not need to. Each syllable carried the weight of a sentence.

—Sebastián and Virka have requested something more. —She closed the report with a sharp thud and left it on the desk—. They want to adopt the girl.

The air hardened. Helena lifted her eyes slowly, as if the very gesture were a way of dissecting the statement. Selena did not stop; her sky-colored gaze sharpened, and the venom of incredulity slid into her voice.

—Three monsters asking for a child.

The phrase hung suspended, repeating in the silence like an impossible echo. Helena, who so many times had dissected battles, figures, and treaties, did not respond immediately. She allowed herself to weigh the gravity of those words, and in that pause the magnitude of what she understood became clear: it was not just a whim, but a rupture with everything they represented.

—It goes against the nature of what they are —Selena continued, without blinking, with the frozen exactness of someone who does not allow emotions to sway her—. And yet… there will be no obstacles on my part. Not when agreements weigh more than any definition.

Helena nodded slightly, a brief, calculated movement. Her voice emerged grave, deep, with that cadence that seemed to dictate strategies rather than emit opinions.

—I agree. It is not a normal event, and it should not be treated as such. But a girl under their roof… —her eyes gleamed, cold and lucid— cannot be left to chance. What that creature becomes does not depend on games or luck. It depends on vigilance. It depends on discipline.

The silence that followed was not empty; it was glass about to shatter. Selena held it, her face immutable, until she decided to lean forward, as if delivering another piece of a secret board.

—Besides —she said dryly—, Sebastián is no longer just a peripheral partner. Part of the Night Club's money circulates in here. Around one hundred and eighty million units. —Her fingers brushed the edges of the report—. Five percent is under his name. Enough so that, even if he doesn't sit here, he already has an invisible seat at this table.

Helena did not respond immediately. The revelation did not surprise her, but in her eyes a spark of recognition reflected. Sebastián was no longer just a fierce fighter on the periphery of her plans: he had embedded himself into the machinery that moved her empire, and he had done it with the same silent brutality with which he had survived his own hell.

Selena then opened another file. The folder did not carry the same invented weight as Virka's. In its pages lay raw mud, a rotten truth still unshaped. The name written above was brief, fragile: Valentina.

—What we know is this —she began, with a tone that made no distinction between merchandise and a military report—. Sector: the Rotten City, in the lower part, where even censuses do not dare to enter. Father: disappeared, no legal traces. Mother: living prostitute, anchored in misery. The girl lives with her, marked by hunger and beatings. —She paused briefly, as if to let the images sink in—. The mother would sell the rights for money. Without resistance.

Helena tilted her head slightly, like someone preparing a scalpel to enter living flesh. Her voice came out like a whisper of steel.

—What is the girl's condition?

Selena did not blink.

—Severe malnutrition. Small scars, poorly healed bruises, skin prematurely worn. She lives like a castoff, and yet… —she paused, searching for the exact words—. There is something else. A spark in her gaze. Not tenderness, not sweetness, but obstinacy. A resistance that does not correspond to the misery she drags.

Helena listened with absolute attention. She did not interrupt. Each word sank into her like an inevitable calculation. Her fingers, resting on the edge of the report, seemed to tense beneath the skin.

—Then we are not talking about a transaction —she said at last, with the gravity of a sentence—. We are talking about a risk. And a bet on the future.

Selena watched her in silence. There was no immediate assent, no reply. Only the weight of two minds that knew exactly what it meant to let that girl cross the threshold of a house guarded by three monsters. It was unnatural. It was unspeakable. And, nevertheless, it was inevitable.

—If Sebastián has asked for it —Selena dictated at last, closing the file with a thud that resonated like a seal—, it must be fulfilled.

Helena did not take her eyes off the closed file.

—Yes —she said, firm, without adornment—. But under total surveillance. Not only to protect her. To understand what will be born from that impossible union.

The silence that followed was not empty, but decree. Outside, the Rotten City continued devouring itself with hunger and soot, ignorant that in that office another destiny had already been written. Inside, two cold women, sisters in calculation more than in blood, sealed with papers and resolutions what would soon be flesh, breath, and memory.

The clock struck again with its muffled tick, marking the inexorable cadence of a future that no longer belonged to Helena or Selena. Valentina, although still lost in the entrails of misery, had just been dragged onto the board where empires are forged and monsters decide who deserves to exist.

The previous conversation had sealed the decision: the adoption must take place, even if the world could not understand the union of three monsters with a girl. But for Helena, decree alone was not enough. Words, by themselves, were weak if they were not anchored in plans that breathed control.

She closed the report and opened another record, different: an incomplete map of the Rotten City. Nameless streets, neighborhoods turned into gray stains, spaces where the law existed only as a broken whisper. There, in the middle of that chaos, she had to ensure that Valentina survived long enough to cross the threshold into a different future.

She took the pen with a measured gesture and wrote a name in the upper margin: Cyano.

—He will be in charge of surveillance —she said, without adornment—. The girl must be watched from now on. Every step, every corner. I want to know what she eats, who she talks to, when she sleeps, when she tries to escape. If death surrounds her, let us know in advance from which direction it will come.

Her voice was not a request: it was a sentence.

Selena, who listened with her body straight and eyes icy, tilted her head slightly.

—And how do you intend to do it? —she asked. It was not a challenge, but a calculated edge.

Helena slid the map toward her.

—With what the City already offers. Drug addicts, prostitutes, beggars, the poor. The needy are the most extensive network; when you buy them, their hunger binds them stronger than any contract.

Selena placed a finger on the paper, tapping gently.

—But they are also the most volatile network. An empty stomach changes loyalty in a second. Do you want constant surveillance? Then eliminate the most unstable. Replace them with our own men, but disguised. Let it seem natural, let no one notice the change. Only then will the City become what we need: an invisible domain under our jurisdiction.

Helena nodded slowly. The plan strengthened, becoming broader than she had imagined.

—Then we will not only watch the girl. We will turn the Rotten City into an extension of our network. Every corner, every cursed corner, breathing to our rhythm.

Her pen traced the map with red strokes: surveillance routes, infiltration points, coded names. In the center, written in black ink and underlined in red, a name: Valentina.

But the plan did not end there. Helena, with the gesture of someone tying a thicker thread, linked the surveillance to a larger project.

—This also ties into the cleanup —she said, grave—. The drugs cannot keep running among the young. The smiths are behind it. Sebastián showed us: they are the ones who manufacture, who distribute. If we control this network, we not only secure the girl; we weaken the very root of the plague.

Selena remained silent for a moment, evaluating the implications. The memory of Sebastián, reporting with that brutal coldness what he had discovered, still floated between them. Yes, they knew what he had seen among the smiths: laboratories disguised as workshops, covert routes in the entrails of the City. What they did not know —and what neither dared to ask— was why he was there in the first place, what had led him to that place.

—One move, two results —Helena said, with the cadence of a final calculation—. We watch Valentina and, at the same time, we cleanse the City.

Selena let out a dry murmur.

—Then what's missing is the essential: capital.

Helena turned her gaze toward her, without losing composure.

—We already have it. Five percent from the Night Club. Sebastián moves it on our behalf.

Selena raised an eyebrow.

—All of it?

—No. Half —Helena replied, curt—. Two point five percent straight to surveillance, protection, and control in the Rotten City. The other two point five, invested in my company, to strengthen the base that will allow Sebastián to integrate as a partner.

Selena rested her chin on her hand.

—And to what end?

Helena held her gaze.

—So that he is not only a partner, but a guardian. My guardian. Yours too, if you accept it.

The air tightened. Selena slowly looked away, as if she needed to measure every word before letting it go.

—I already have my own security teams. Trained, armed, efficient.

—And yet —Helena interrupted her in a grave, incisive voice—, none of them can do what he does. Sebastián is not a common guard. He is a variable that defies logic. When what we know fails, he will remain standing. It's not about replacing what you have. It's about adding what cannot be bought.

Selena let the silence hang between them like a red-hot iron. Her cold eyes reflected the spark of recognition she rarely granted.

—I admit it. No calculation can anticipate what he is capable of. And if one day what we haven't contemplated arrives, it will be better that he is on our side.

Helena returned to the map. The red strokes were new arteries, spreading over the rot of the City. The names noted were interchangeable pieces, expendable. Everything moved toward a single end: keep the girl alive, pull her from her mud, and at the same time conquer a territory that until now had breathed free in its misery.

The clock struck again, relentless, and that tick marked the closure of the plan. Outside, the Rotten City continued sinking into its own muck, unaware that it was already being mapped as a subdued domain. Inside, two women signed in silence what would soon be an irreversible fate.

Valentina had not yet appeared, but her name was already written on maps, plans, and capital. She was not just a girl. She was the core of a surveillance that would be born from the shadows, and the echo of a larger project incubating in the entrails of the City.

The section closed there: not with her voice, not with her gaze, but with the cold weight of the plans that had turned her, unknowingly, into a central piece on a board where monsters, empires, and entire cities were at stake.

The day did not end; it settled into the office like a guest who asks no permission. The light coming through the curtains was a pale nurse that revealed the dust on the wood, the initials of recent seals, the small wrinkles of ink that betrayed the morning's hurry. The clock on the cabinet marked with a dry tick that seemed ripped from a sentence: each hour was another decision pinned into the world's file. Papers piled; folders open like mouths; stamps that still smoked official ink. Helena and Selena had not interrupted the office's breathing all day; now, without haste, they did so out of the need for some things to only struggle to show themselves to the other in a low voice.

Helena let the pen hang for a second, weighing the air like someone weighing a knife before using it. Her question was soft, but the intonation loaded the place with gravity: it was not a reproach, nor a sermon; it was an ancient insistence.

—Have you thought about what I told you? —she murmured—. I'm not referring to balances or the company's positions. I'm talking about you. About that which cannot be bought with signatures.

Selena took as long as a calculator needs to recalculate a matrix: she held her breath in the same place on her body where she kept her figures, and answered with the precision of one who measures consequences.

—I thought about it superficially —she said—. Things have happened. It's not that I've forgotten; it's that urgency devours everything. Also… I don't need someone to tell me what I'm missing. I have goals, results. That is enough for me.

It was not vain arrogance. It was a pact with the solitude she herself had signed long ago: the idea of not depending, of being column and not shadow. Helena looked at her without forcing a smile. She knew how to read Selena's mettle: that iron autarchy that allowed no cracks. Still, she did not withdraw the word; she drove it in delicately.

—I'm not saying marry the world —she replied—. I'm saying don't let your life pass as if it were a blank sheet that others fold. Think about it seriously. Don't let work monopolize everything and one day remember that there were holes left unfilled.

Selena rested her chin on her hand and, among the papers, spoke with that voice that seeks not consolation but verification. She unfolded her parameters with the coldness of one who dictates combat rules.

—If I ever think about companionship, it will not be for consolation. I don't seek someone to hold me. I seek an equal: competent, self-sufficient, who understands structure and does not require guardianship. Someone with whom you build and not with whom you patch pieces. Someone who does not depend on me, nor I on him; mutual recognition, logical collaboration. No sentimentality that erases strategy.

And she added, with the same almost cruel clarity she used to reproach projects:

—In my position, people with those characteristics are usually arrogant, contaminated by power, or corrupt. Keeping standards high is dangerous because then you end up alone. But lowering the bar means accepting the mediocrity of others. I won't do it.

Helena let the sentence strike the room and amused herself with Selena's profile: there was no maternalism in her gesture, only cynical care. Gently, she commented in a low voice a truth that demanded no concessions.

—Waiting is not a sin if you wait well —she murmured—. But don't let waiting turn into forgetting.

Something then occurred inside Selena: a fissure, small as a silver thread in the armor. It was not repentance —that word did not fit—; it was silent recognition. In her mind appeared the figure of Sebastián, not as a lyrical vision, but as an anomaly that defied any classification. He was not, in her calculations, a candidate; he was a phenomenon.

Sebastián was fifteen years old and, nevertheless, stood in Selena's logic as an exception that broke matrices. It wasn't that she felt attracted to him or imagined him as a partner; the very idea seemed absurd to her because of his age and the context. But what was in him —that distance from the rule, that capacity to hold what formulas could not foresee— provoked in her something like vertigo. She wanted to close it, file it away, give it no more space than necessary to be an uncomfortable datum. She could not. The admission was mute, a line crossed beneath her certainties.

Helena saw the minimal tremor at the corner of Selena's eye. She did not name it. She did not need to. In the absence of words, she recognized that even the most rigid strength holds unseen wounds. She approached just enough and, this time, spoke with another texture: soft, firm, from someone who already knew what is lost for fear.

—You are young —she said—. You are at the age where urgencies become memories if you do not look at them. You have beauty and reason, and opportunities of both will come. I am not saying you must renounce your rigidity; I am saying think about what you want to accompany you. If you let life pass in front of you without deciding, someone will write for you.

Selena swallowed the sentence, let it settle in some fold that Helena did not reach to name. She did not change her expression or profile; she accepted, without grandiloquence, like someone who acknowledges advice that does not need immediate follow-up. In her silence there was something like gratitude, contained and peculiar, an intimate appendage that would not show itself in the office but that would settle in the night when the lights went out.

For long minutes the two continued with their work: Helena signing orders, Selena reviewing movement sheets. Efficiency was their natural language; the intimate conversation must not break it. But before the night fully closed, Helena closed a folder and pronounced the last clause of the day with the same coldness she used to issue life-or-death orders.

—I have notified Cyano —she said, drying the pen with the back of her hand—. They mobilize today: infiltration, replacement of unstable elements, placement of undercover operatives at the points we marked. They begin by buying loyalties —addicts, pimps, beggars with names—; then they will replace those who do not serve with our disguised agents. Everything will be gradual. No one must notice the swaps. Phase one: direct observation of the girl. Phase two: control of movement routes. Phase three: consolidation of the domain. And we will do it discreetly.

She broke down concrete orders: schedules of shifts, keywords for encrypted communication, discretion in the delivery of payments, staggered elimination protocols —no abrupt cleanups—; the idea was that the city would readjust without visible tension. Selena listened, taking in each detail with the exactness of an accountant who tolerates no deviations. She did not interrupt; she only nodded when appropriate.

The afternoon fell like damp wool that extinguishes glimmers. Outside, the Rotten City did not know it was already a board with pieces moving beneath its skin. Inside, Helena and Selena ended the day without drama: they signed one last sheet, stored folders, sealed destinies as if it were a daily ritual. The personal talk remained open, unresolved; Helena's warning stayed like a seed; the fissure in Selena remained planted, ready to grow where it must.

And while the lights went out in the dead city, a first report sent by one of Cyano's contacts was already traveling encrypted through the network: a name, an address, the shadow of a small, hungry figure. The machinery had begun to turn without clamor. The office breathed, for an instant, like the chest of an animal waiting. The clock, relentless, struck again, marking the inexorable cadence of what was to come.

The city was an animal that in the afternoon folded upon itself, curling its wounds under the crust of smoke and soot. The light waned like a spent coin and the shadows deepened in the folds of the streets. From the office, Helena closed the folder with the precision of one who knows the value of silence; the orders were no longer loose papers, they were nerves directed into the flesh of the city. The envelopes departed with discreet couriers; the voices that uttered the last names were cold and short. No one shouted. Everything began with steps that no one would remember.

The first wave arrived in sequence: not en masse, but in drips. One appeared as a customer in a tavern where beer was sold by cuts of meat; another crossed paths in the lair of a delivery man with the same bag; another let himself fall in the doorway as a beggar with a credible story of sorrow and loss. Each arrival was an act of camouflage. They came in the afternoon, one after another, like those who place the pieces of a loom without anyone noticing the movement. The plan demanded there be no ostensible synchrony: the city had to believe nothing was changing, that the rhythm of its misery continued intact.

With each arrival followed the gradual extension of the network. The newcomers settled in strategic points and began to weave: they observed corners, remembered faces, offered minimal favors. The network was not seen; it was felt. A man offered a small box of medicines to a broken mother; another left money under a door; a woman handed out cigarettes. Nothing extraordinary. Everything necessary. Those who accepted those scraps became links: today a ration, tomorrow information. The mesh grew slowly, by layers: periphery, neighborhood, street, doorway.

And with the city's hands occupied in surviving, the disappearances began in the shape of the usual. There were no noisy executions; the exits disguised themselves as everyday disorder. A staged confrontation, a nighttime brawl that seemed to arise from drink and rage; a false police check at night after a bribe; an urgent treatment that ended with a transfer to the other side of the line. In each episode there was something that fit the dirty logic of the place: fights believed to be real, arrests that no one Remember, small fires in containers that forced an entire gang to move. No one in the neighborhood lifted their gaze looking for conspiracy. The city swallowed the prefabricated explanations and everything seemed like just another accident. This was how the dangerous spaces were emptied, one by one, without rumor being able to trace a map.

Where darkness left a gap, new faces entered. They did not arrive as heroes; they arrived with know-how: they knew the gesture, the tone, the word spoken at the right time. A substitute beggar began controlling the entrance of an alley; a woman with a scar worked her way into the trust of the girl's mother; a doorman with a weathered face started keeping track of comings and goings. These faces, though equally broken, carried awareness: micro-codes in their clothing, signals in the way they tied a scarf, a button bent in the right direction. No one noticed the replacement because the newcomer assumed the daily discourse with naturalness; the city kept its rhythm and, thus, the surgery was undetectable.

With the faces in place, the network began to establish nodes: a streetlamp hiding a micro-camera, a pot of soup serving as a relay antenna, a fruit stand where a cup worked as an encrypted mailbox. Schedules of change were fixed, keywords that sounded no more than common insults, a slight hand movement at the moment of shift. The nodes were not just eyes; they were channels that transformed the neighborhood's chatter into legible information: movement patterns, food routes, sleeping hours. The technical camouflaged itself in the domestic: no one looked at the lamp, no one suspected the smoke from the stew, and that was its strength.

The tactical approach to Valentina was a geometry of progressive rings. First they placed themselves in the peripheral ring: street vendors who, by chance, saw the mother buying bread; a child who let a ball roll near the doorway; a woman offering work to the neighbors. Then the circle closed: faces who knew the exact hour the girl went out to look for scraps, who knew the path where the mother left the basket on her return. There was never haste. They did not attempt to seize the girl; they traced her; they marked a shadow on the network's maps. Contingency routes were calculated: silent exit paths, meeting points, back doors that worked at dawn. Everything prepared, nothing rushed.

Meanwhile, a parallel team tracked the routes of the poison: the smiths who, according to Sebastián, operated as factories and distribution points. It was not a public investigation; it was hands sifting names on folded papers, marking workshops, following carts with the patience of one who knows how to listen to a workshop's rhythm. Some leads came from furtive conversations, a badly handled payment, the casual mention of a piece that had nothing to do with weapons but with wrappings. The network wove a map of traffic points that would later be delivered in code to Helena: coordinates, loading schedules, names with aliases. It was the other face of the siege: not only watching the girl, but striking at the knot of drugs poisoning the schoolchildren.

Time marked its presence: afternoon stretching, dusk turning to shadow and then closed night. The colors of the city shifted; the neon acquired a putrid varnish, sirens drifted distant like a rumor from another life. In that transition, the network solidified. The maneuvers were not melodramatic; they were surgery without visible blood.

The atmosphere smelled of burnt oil, rancid soup, tire smoke; the city seemed not to notice that its veins were being cut.

At key points communication returned to the office: encrypted messages, brief as blows, sent from buried phones or from the voice of a messenger who no longer belonged to anyone. Positions occupied, one envelope wrote; Nodes active, was the second. Helena, from the office, laid down final directives: approach through trust, not force; win the mother's protection with small favors; do not expose the girl; collect data on the smiths and send proof. Selena received the reports with her usual calm and declared the thresholds of intervention: Only if life is in danger, she said, do we act. The directives were clear, Helena's tone admitted no doubt.

The direct observation phase closed the day. An agent, hidden behind a pile of boxes, recorded a minimal scene that would be enough: Valentina, a small figure, bent over a can, picking up crumbs. A lock fell over her forehead; the light from a broken lamp traced for an instant the curve of her nose. The image was sent in an encrypted envelope: Located. Maintain surveillance. Prepare silent extraction. No one shouted. The report was read with the composure of someone ticking boxes on a list that decides destinies.

The city did not notice the change. At the dawn of the days to come, the new faces would already walk as old ones; the food routes would have another rhythm; the smiths would receive glances that no longer went unnoticed. The network breathed. The net advanced without stridency. In the office, Helena and Selena knew the machinery was working: Helena's voice, Selena's dry exhalation, the confirmation that hung with the precision of a seal. Everything was in motion.

And in the half-light, before the night fully shattered, a small image remained in the memory of the watcher: the girl lifting her gaze for a second, as if she had felt a murmur. Nothing more: a gesture, barely a shadow that held in the memory of the network. That gesture was enough to make the world plotting over her tighten a little more. The operation continued; the city did not know it. The clock, always the same, struck a new tick, and silence returned to its place, with the promise that, when the time came, no one would say they hadn't seen it coming.

Night descended over the Dark City like a shroud of smoke and soot. The neon lamps flickered with a dirty glow, incapable of illuminating beyond the grime stuck to the walls. The air smelled of rancid grease, stagnant urine, soup boiled too many times in rusted pots. Amid that labyrinth of garbage and half-light, Valentina walked alone, small, fragile, barely a specter of five years old who seemed to blend with the shadows of the street. No one looked at her twice; she was just another broken child in a city that devoured childhoods like crumbs.

She knew what she was doing. Her walk was not erratic or insecure: it was the calculated walk of one who repeats a routine learned by force. First she went by the metal bins behind the taverns, where sometimes there were pieces of damp bread or fruit peels still edible. If she found nothing, she approached the poorest stalls, where men left soup remnants in dented cans; with cunning, she pulled them aside when no one was looking. And if luck still failed, she slipped through the side doors of small

Restaurants that smelled of burnt oil, where she picked up whatever the floor offered: a gnawed bone, a hardened tortilla, pieces of chicken with cold grease. Her gaze was quick; she did not beg with her voice, she begged with the movement of her hands: she took the minimum, just enough not to draw attention, enough to survive.

There was no crying on her face. There was no plea. There was habit. Since she had seen her father collapse under the claws of a Profane, she had understood that waiting for compassion was useless. She had learned to rip life from the lowest corners, to gather what others despised. That night was no different. Among beggars and prostitutes who laughed with broken voices, among drunkards who fought over coins, Valentina moved like a trained ghost: invisible, patient, cold in her smallness.

When at last she gathered a handful of scraps —half a hardened loaf, a greasy bone, a piece of vegetable someone had stepped on but was still usable—, she began her return. Her bare feet barely sounded against the wet pavement. She knew cold walls and a shaky roof awaited her; her mother would be there, perhaps asleep, perhaps lost in another corner of the rot, more attentive to men and drugs than to the girl who called her mother only out of habit.

Before entering, Valentina stopped in an alley where she had left an old plastic container. The rains of the last few days had filled it halfway, and though the water was gray, it was better than nothing. She leaned in, took a piece of used soap —just a damp bar, worn down to half— and stepped into the container as if entering an imaginary river. The water was icy, but she made no grimace: she let herself be soaked in silence. Her white hair, inherited from trauma, stuck to her face, mixed with brown strands that still remembered her father. The soap squeaked against her skin, raising a scant foam, more ash than cleanliness. She scrubbed her arms, her neck, her legs thin as branches. It was not hygiene; it was dignity: a minimal act that kept her human in a world that wanted to turn her into waste.

The water slid down her back, running over the marks of poorly healed blows, small scars that did not ask for compassion. She did not stop: she rubbed until she felt her skin burn, as if with that she could erase the stench of the city that covered her. When she finished, she stepped out of the container, dried herself barely with an old rag, and picked up her scraps to return to the room she called home.

Inside, the darkness was denser than in the street. There was a broken bed, a wobbly table, and a corner piled with empty bottles. Her mother slept somewhere with her face turned to the wall, indifferent, sunk in her misery. Valentina did not look at her. She sat on the floor, placed the leftovers on a rusty can, and began to eat. She did not chew with eagerness; she did it calmly, almost solemnly, as one who fulfills a nightly rite. There were no tears, no gestures of pain. She was used to it. Each bite was the confirmation that she still existed, that her body still answered hunger.

When she finished, she gathered the bones and set them aside. Her gaze drifted for a moment to the broken window, where the wind carried the echo of distant screams. No one would have said a child could grow used to so much loneliness without breaking. But she was not broken: she was hardened, like the bread she ate.

And without her knowing, invisible eyes were already recording each of those movements. From alleys, from shuttered windows, from shadows disguised as beggars, Cyano's network observed her. They noted the hour when she bathed, the moment she entered, the way she chewed without sound. She did not know it, but her entire life had become a file breathing in another office.

Valentina leaned against the wall, closing her eyes at last. Outside, the city burned in miseries; inside, the silence weighed like a shroud. And far away, in an office where time was counted with seals and clocks, two women had already decided that the girl, without knowing it, was the central piece in a game she never chose.

Dawn in the Dark City did not rise: it rotted. The air was thick, laden with ash, as if each breath left a black residue in the lungs. The alleys still trembled with the echoes of the night: fights that ended without victors, screams no one answered anymore, and the dry snap of rats disputing wet bones among torn bags. The sky brought no clarity, only a sickly pallor stretched across rusted rooftops, a reminder that even the day here was born defeated.

There, in a room that was not a room, Valentina opened her eyes. There was no alarm, no voice calling her. The sound that tore her from sleep was the drip of water falling from the ceiling to the floor, again and again, forming a murky puddle beside her collapsed mattress. She sat up slowly, and her body seemed to creak as it moved. The taut skin, ribs marked like inner bars, and the sensation of hunger that had never disappeared for years: that was her routine.

The mattress where she slept was nothing but a crust of torn foam, covered with rags hardened by filth. At one side, in the shadow, was her mother. But she was not there. She breathed, perhaps dreamed in her wreckage, but she did not exist for the girl. She did not look at her. She did not move. For Valentina, that figure in the half-light was only another wall that offered no shelter. The father, long ago, no longer existed. And it was not absence that defined him, but certainty: Valentina had seen him die, had seen him fall under the jaws of a Profane. The memory was a scar that did not hurt because it never healed.

She sat and let the cold soak into the soles of her feet. There were no shoes by the bed. No clean clothes waiting. Only her own exhausted body. She ran her small hands through her long hair, white from trauma, streaked with brown strands inherited. Her fingers caught in hard knots. She pulled hard, and one of those strands tore loose, left trapped between her fingers. She looked at it for a second, expressionless, before letting it fall to the floor.

From a corner, she picked up her treasure: a huge jacket, torn in several places, with dark stains that no clean water could erase. She put it on slowly, sinking into the rough fabric. It hung large on her, but it was the only thing she had to hide the famished body. She did not do it for vanity. She did it because she knew. She knew that if she showed too much weakness, if she let the fragility of her flesh be seen, she would become easy prey. That jacket was her mask.

She crossed the door without looking back. There was no one to say goodbye to. Outside, the Dark City woke with the same violence with which it slept: prostitutes dragged broken heels of She returned to houses without windows, staggering men searched in empty bottles for the last sip of a broken dream, skinny dogs buried their snouts in torn bags, growling at each other. Valentina walked without hurry, but with certainty. Her steps were those of someone who had already learned where to avoid a puddle, which corner to avoid, which gaze not to hold.

As she advanced, the landscape changed. The crumbling walls gave way to less-wounded facades, complete windows, firm doors. It was not wealth, merely stability. But that small change said everything. There, other children appeared. Valentina watched them from the opposite sidewalk. New backpacks hung from their shoulders, clean uniforms shone in the pallor of dawn, freshly combed hair glistened with drops of dew. She heard them laugh, argue about teachers or games, complain about sleep. Some walked hand in hand with their parents, others moved in groups. And some bit into fresh bread as they went, with the naturalness of those who had never known hunger.

Valentina observed them in silence. She did not ask for anything, did not extend her hand, did not cry. But inside her, the question was born that would not fade:

Why them and not me?

What makes them different?

Why am I here, and not there?

Her stomach growled, but she ignored it. Hunger was a habitual guest. What hurt was not the absence of food, but the difference. The world divided in two: some with new shoes and warm bread, and she with her torn jacket and a body sustained by scraps. She did not understand the reason. No one explained it. No one answered. She only walked, head lowered, until the children disappeared behind the walls of the schools.

She thought she was alone. But she was not. From rooftops, from alleys, from shuttered windows, Cyano's network watched. Every movement had been recorded since the night before. Every gesture—the improvised bath in rainwater, the food gathered from trash, the contrast with the other children—was already described in cold reports, delivered to another part of the city.

The scene shifted.

In an office of glass and steel, far from the soot, the morning entered clean. Selena's office was the counterface of chaos: absolute order, austerity, a polished desk, papers aligned with mathematical precision. From the window, the city seemed different, as if it were made of straight lines and not of miseries. There, she read.

The reports arrived with military discipline:

— Subject observed: bath with rainwater, metal container.

— Subject observed: nourishment through recovered scraps.

— Subject observed: movement toward outer zones, contrast with children in school transit.

Selena read each line without blinking. Her face was stone, her voice silence. When she finished, she spoke with the coldness only she could sustain:

— Maintain constant surveillance.

— If faced with critical danger, intervene.

— Let her survive, but without raising suspicion.

— Provide food from the shadows.

It was calculation. But in that calculation there was something else. Not tenderness. Not compassion. But the cold recognition that the girl had to reach alive the destiny already being woven for her.

Selena set those papers aside and took others: reports from the blacksmiths. The picture was clear: after Sebastián and Virka's strike, the drug traffickers had changed patterns. Routes sealed. Guards reinforced. Movements slower, but more solid. No progress. No cracks. It was a growing wall that only awaited another onslaught.

The woman signed the reports with a minimal gesture. She ordered the tightening of the net around the girl and her mother. To watch them without raising suspicion. To ensure no mistake left gaps.

The city still roared outside, with its miseries and contrasts. Valentina walked unaware that every breath was recorded, every step anticipated. And Selena, at the top of her glass office, closed her eyes for just a second before opening them again.

The girl believed she walked alone. But her destiny was already in the hands of invisible shadows. And those shadows had no intention of letting her go.

The girl believed she walked alone. But her destiny was already in the hands of invisible shadows. And those shadows had no intention of letting her go.

She entered without a sound, like someone who possesses the craft of not disturbing the world. The door closed with its usual creak and left behind the street that still smelled of soot and burnt bread; something in her body, however, was already in the space where things repeated until they became ritual. She leaned the bread bag against the wall and touched it with an automatic gesture: the crumb soft on one side, hard and dusty on the other. That inglorious piece was her afternoon loot, her minimal payment to the continuity of life.

In the corner where the mother dozed, the woman muttered something meaningless and sank back into the mattress as if she were part of the stuffing. Valentina passed by her with the calm of one who knows the geography of scorn. There were no greetings, no new reproaches. The house demanded no words; it demanded survival. The girl left the bread on some rolled-up rags and, without sitting yet, took out from the hem her true treasure: a broken crayon, a crumpled paper with blurred letters, and a smooth stone she had found the previous week in a puddle. They were small possessions no one would claim. They were remnants with which she wove the fiction of something of her own.

She stood in front of the wall where the cement was less punished by dampness, where the texture allowed the crayon to leave a mark. She opened her hand and let the memory come to occupy it. Virka was not a luminous apparition; in Valentina's memory, she was the absence of rejection. She recalled the gesture, not the voice: the way Virka once looked at her, without averting her eyes in disgust, without moving her lips in judgment. That gaze in the half-light was, for the girl, a kind of clandestine refuge—not the warmth of an embrace, nor the promise of care—but the confirmation that there existed a place in the city where her existence was not a problem.

The crayon brushed the wall. The first lines were hesitant: short strokes to calm the trembling need for precision. She drew the outline of dark hair with clumsy movements; the eyes came out large, too large for the childlike face she tried to represent, because in them she wanted to leave the intensity of memory. She did not draw a smile; she drew a restrained mouth, like that of someone who knows more of silences than of words. The result was disproportionate and moving: a figure that did not seek beauty, but the confirmation that something different had passed through her life.

The mother, at some point, sat up with the slowness of one who wakes to a threat. She did not see the drawing at first; what woke her was the sound of the room—a minimal scrape, a different breath. When her eyes reached the shape painted on the wall, something cracked across her face. The reaction was not maternity, nor curiosity; it was an erosion of anger that no longer sought reasons. The insults leapt like springs, worn words that scratched more than any blow: nonsense, trash, wasted time. Her hands reached out with the brusqueness of one who unloads years of defeat onto a small body.

The blows were not spectacular; they were practical, measured, familiar. Each strike seemed to repeat a lesson learned: that the girl must disappear into her insignificance. The wall trembled with the violence of hands that sought to tear away what the girl had left. The strokes were erased with scraping, with the dirt of fingernails, with the fury that confuses erasure with justice. Valentina shrank, armored herself with her body into a shell, and let the world strike her. Her eyes, showing the heterochromia that made her fragile and singular, remained fixed on what was being undone: she did not focus on the pain but on the loss of the image.

When the noise subsided and the house's breathing returned to a murmur closer to abandonment than to peace, the mother made a movement that did not fit her previous rage. With hands still trembling, she picked up from the floor scraps of torn paper, fragments where the wax had bled figures. She folded them with clumsy gestures and hid them beneath a tarp, among damp clothes and empty containers. She did it in secret, without the sweetness of a little box nor the tenderness of an embrace; it was an act in shadows, a private gesture mixing guilt with something akin to protection. No one, she thought, must see that; no one must suspect that within her there was a human ember still capable of understanding that, in those scribbles, lived the persistence of a creature.

Valentina knew nothing of that hiding place. Her world was still limited to what she could touch. Still aching, with an inner crackle that reminded her of the blow, she arranged the shiny stone in her palm as if it were a talisman, nibbled on a piece of bread and let the taste of flour and dirt mix in her mouth. She did not cry out loud; her tears were internal, brief like spent coins. She breathed deeply and reached again for the crayon, for the wall that still preserved, at its edges, remnants of charcoal that allowed reconstruction.

The lines emerged again, but this time not from naivety: they were strokes of one who refuses to give up. With the crayon's chipped tip she added minimal details: a curve that had not been there before to suggest the contour of a neck, a deeper stroke to give weight to the eyes. She drew with a firmer cadence because she had understood that the drawing was neither pastime nor comfort; it was resistance against the erasure imposed by the house. Each line drawn was a small rebellion against the idea that her story could be torn away without leaving a trace.

The room breathed in a dense silence. Outside, the city continued with its noises and footsteps; inside, the girl lay among shadows of dampness and the mark of her own persistence. There was no promise in that instant—no angels came, no rescues—; only the immutability of an act: the insistence on tracing to sustain an identity that misery sought to dissolve. The bread was finished, the stone remained in her palm, the crayon became an object of daily use, and the wall treasured yet another layer of marks.

Before leaving, with the oversized jacket like a shell, she gathered her small belongings. She did not hide them out of fear; she carried them practically, like someone storing tools. Continuity pushed her toward the door: there were no farewells, no dramatic tears. She left at dawn with the city breathing a gray air that promised no changes. Turning the corner, she saw the children going to school, their backpacks full and their voices different; for an instant, the world she knew pierced her with a cold pang. She did not ask further. She had learned that questions brought no answers, only more empty stretches of time.

In the distance, the shadows that held her destiny once again recorded that movement: the departure, the poorly worn coat, the way she clutched the bag against her chest. They were neither charity nor displayed vigilance; they were a machine of calculated care that had decided, for reasons still unnameable, that this girl had to remain alive. Valentina, unknowingly, walked once more within a net that began by watching and that later, when the world became intolerable, would know how to intervene.

The narrative of the room closed without melodrama, but with the same harshness with which its lines had been lived: the mother in shadow with her hiding place, the girl with her obstinacy, the wall with its new layer of memory. It was not an ending, but another link in a chain that stretched on. And while the city advanced, the drawing of Virka—clumsy, disproportionate, essential—remained as proof that something small, insistent, and human resists even when everything else strives to erase it.

The city continued beating with that sick pulse, an organism that never slept, and in the midst of it, Valentina remained trapped in the prison she still called home. The passage of time was not measured in days, nor in clocks marking dawns; it was measured in the repetition of the unbearable: in the smell of liquor that seeped into the walls, in the harsh sound of a glass shattering on the floor, in the echo of insults that became routine. Each moment was another brick in the construction of a world where childhood was rubble without an owner.

At first, the mother still showed certain intervals of silence, lapses when exhaustion dragged her to bed and Valentina could breathe in the half-light. But over time, those spaces shrank until they vanished. Liquor began to fill the gaps of the day; prostitution, the blows received from clients, the accumulated frustration, became chains the mother unleashed without mercy. She no longer needed to be drunk to strike. She no longer needed to be ruined by drink to shout. It was enough to see her, enough to see her exist, for contempt to find in Valentina its immediate target.

The contrast with the father was cruel: he, in his alcoholic misery, only sought her when liquor clouded his senses. There was violence, yes, but it was intermittent, a lightning bolt announced by the smell of aguardiente and one that could be foreseen. With the mother, on the other hand, there was no warning and no truce. Aggression became a constant flow, like a drip that does not cease until it pierces stone. The blows were shoves when passing through a narrow hallway, hair pulls to drag her from the corner where she tried to sleep, quick slaps like corrections without cause. And always, the words: those blades of saliva that said nuisance, useless brat, trash.

Valentina endured with a silence she had learned, not crying aloud so as not to feed the fury further. Her mismatched eyes carried an obstinacy no one acknowledged. Hunger kept biting at her body, bones protruded shamelessly beneath her skin, and scars multiplied like a cruel alphabet written on her flesh. More than pain, what she bore was habit: she knew where to curl up so the blow would hurt less, she knew how to tense her neck so as not to leave visible marks. She knew how to endure.

Time—that gray, nameless time—pressed the walls until the bond, already rotted, snapped. One night, the mother returned with her face marked by the violence of another man. Split lips, a swollen eye, skin still burning from others' insults. She did not cry: she discharged. She discharged on the girl the rage she could not return. She dragged her by the hair, slammed her against the damp wall, kicked her with blind fury. Valentina did not scream; she shrank as always. But that time, when the mother ended exhausted, there was no silence. There was a shout colder than all the blows.

—Get out, brat! —she bellowed, her voice broken by liquor and weariness—. Don't ever come back! I don't want you in this house!

The air trembled with those words. They were not just insults. They were a sentence. They were the definitive dissolution of the last bond that could still be called home.

Valentina, with her cheek still burning and her breath ragged, understood what they meant. There was nothing to wait for there. No refuge, no respite. Only blows and words that sought to erase her. She took the little she had: the oversized jacket that served as her shell, the smooth stone she had kept as a talisman, the worn crayon hidden in her hem. She pressed them against her chest and ran.

The cold pavement struck her bare feet, but she did not stop. She did not look back. Her mother's voice still echoed behind her, not pursuing her with footsteps, but with that last scream that expelled her as one throws refuse into the trash. There was no chase, no attempt to hold her back. The woman had ceased to see her as a daughter. She had reduced her to a nuisance. And in her fatigue and defeat, she had decided to drop her as one lets fall a useless burden.

Valentina ran through the blackened streets, her heart beating to a rhythm not of fear but of rupture. Each corner she turned was a step further from what once could be called home. The echo of insults blended with the noises of the city: dogs fighting over bones, drunkards' voices, the whistle of a dirty wind. The girl did not stop. In her ears still burned the condemnation: Don't ever come back!

And so, with no way back, the minimal illusion that still sustained the idea of belonging was shattered. There was no home anymore. No mother anymore. Only her remained, a small body, marked and obstinate, moving forward into a world that devoured her with hunger. The Rotten City received her as a beast receives a lost cub: without tenderness, without shelter, only with the edge of its teeth hidden in every shadow.

What until then had been a routine of resistance became definitive expulsion. Valentina was no longer a prisoner of a broken home; she was an absolute orphan, cast into the open of a city that forgives no one. And in that flight, in that fracture, a bitter certainty was born: the only roof she had ever known had collapsed, and there would be no return.

Valentina ran until her throat was dry and her chest burned like an empty furnace. The echo of her mother's last cry—that "never come back again!"—still vibrated in her head, not as a wound, but as an irrevocable seal. The house had closed behind her with the same violence with which a coffin is sealed: it was no longer home, no longer refuge, it was a cast-off that had vomited her. She understood it without needing to think. The cold, damp pavement beneath her bare feet confirmed the new reality: the open sky was now her roof, and the city, in all its rottenness, her only witness.

There was no first night different from the next, nor a dawn announcing a new beginning. Time began to pass like a rough rope burning against her skin. There was no talk of days, because days had ceased to exist. What existed were fragments: a damp piece of cardboard found in an alley, a corner where the wind blew less harshly, a nook beneath a rusted marquee where the rain did not fully seep in. There she curled up, wrapped in her ruined jacket, with the worn crayon and the smooth stone as her only belongings. She slept halfway, with one eye open, because the city allowed no full rest.

Hunger was the first constant bite. What had once been scraps gathered behind restaurants now turned into disputes with others: skinny dogs growling over a bone, rats leaping for crumbs, beggars shoving her aside with a kick. Sometimes she managed to steal a piece of hard bread, other times she limited herself to chewing the illusion of holding it in her hands. The empty stomach became a drum, marking the cadence of each nameless day.

Danger, however, came in human form. Men with glassy eyes watched her from dark doorways. Vagrants, drunk on rage and defeat, approached with intentions Valentina understood immediately, though no one had ever explained them to her. Their filthy hands sought to touch what must not be touched, to take what must not be taken. She learned to flee: to slip through alleys, to run under the rain, to hide in dumpsters that smelled of rot but at least offered a refuge. Each attempt at capture was another blow against her innocence, a reminder that the street had neither mercy nor limits.

But she was not entirely alone, though she never knew it. Shadows different from the common ones followed her. Agents disguised as beggars intervened when a man tried to drag her behind a wall. They did not defend her with tenderness, but with dry violence: a short knife gleamed in the gloom, a cry of pain, a body thrown into a puddle. Valentina only saw that her attacker disappeared, that a beggar pushed him into the darkness, and that, in the silence that followed, she was able to escape. They never gave her a word of comfort. Never a gesture of affection. Only the sudden absence of danger.

Other days, while she rummaged through garbage, a vendor would "accidentally" drop a piece of bread or a bitten apple. She picked it up without thanking; no one demanded gratitude. Other times, a clean piece of cardboard appeared in the corner where she tried to sleep, or an unknown beggar settled nearby, scaring off others who came too close. It was protection, but not affection. It was aid, but not compassion. They were invisible hands fulfilling cold orders from distant offices.

Time kept dragging on, and with it the harshness of the trials. Different scenes, never the same, followed one another like beads on a dark necklace. One afternoon, she was nearly run over by a horse-drawn cart loaded with barrels; she managed to dodge the blow by hurling herself into a puddle, and there she stayed, covered in mud, while people walked around her without looking. Another dawn, she awoke with her face covered in ash, because someone had lit a fire a few meters from where she slept and the sparks had flown toward her. One night, a group of drunkards chased her amid laughter, calling her white rat because of her hair; she ran until she was lost in a labyrinth of stairs and damp walls, and only survived because a shadow—one of her unseen guardians—stopped them in an alley with a violence she never witnessed, but whose echo of broken bones vibrated in the gloom.

The city showed no mercy. Passersby walked past her as if she were part of the rubble landscape. Well-dressed children walked hand in hand with their parents, laughing, biting fresh bread; some looked at her with curiosity, but their parents turned their faces away as if watching her were indecent. Merchants swept the sidewalk while she curled into a corner, and the dust they raised fell upon her as a reminder that she was nothing more than refuse. No one stopped. No one offered help. The world kept moving, indifferent, confirming the bitter truth: in misery, most men do not see monsters, but invisibles.

Amid all this, Valentina hardened. Not by choice, nor by desire, but because existence itself forced her. She learned to measure the streets with her gaze, to recognize which corner hid the most danger, to anticipate the movements of drunkards, to walk close to the walls to be less visible. Her silence grew denser: it was no longer only keeping quiet not to cry, it was keeping quiet to think, to resist. Her gestures became tempered, and although she was still a child, there was in her an obstinacy that did not belong to her years.

The passing of time was not marked by calendars, but by new scars: a wound on her knee from fleeing through broken glass, a bruise on her arm after being shoved by another beggar, a scab on her face that took long to close. Each mark was a record of what she had lived, an archive in her body confirming she still breathed. And although everything seemed to sink her further, she remained standing. Not because anyone lifted her, but because the city, with all its violence, had not yet managed to break her.

Meanwhile, Cyano's net tightened its grip. Each report sent to Helena and Selena detailed the girl's movements: she slept on corner X, was chased by three men, received food left by the vendor. They were dry phrases, stripped of emotion, yet every word was another strand in the web that kept her alive. It was not compassion that sustained her, but calculation. And still, that calculation was enough to prevent her from falling into the abyss.

Valentina did not know. To her, the world was only hostility and abandonment. Yet within that abandonment, her character was being forged, just as iron hardens under fire and hammer. Her body remained fragile, her hunger kept gnawing at her, her nights remained damp and cold. But her will began to temper deep within, invisible even to herself.

And so, in the absolute open, while the city kept devouring itself in smoke and soot, the girl endured. Not because of rescue nor tenderness, but because an invisible net pushed her to survive, and because within her chest, though small and exhausted, there was a heart that had not yet learned to surrender.

The air that night seemed to carry something different, as if the Dark City had decided to close its jaws around a single creature. The sky, starless, was a dead sheet weighing upon rusted rooftops. The silence was not silence: it was a muted rumor, a dull tremor crawling through alleyways. Valentina felt it before she saw it, that invisible shift dividing common fear from fatal omen.

Her body, accustomed to blows and hunger, sensed the threat as a wild animal senses its predator. There was no wind, yet her skin bristled. There were no footsteps, yet the shadow behind her grew denser than any darkness. She turned instinctively and saw it.

The man looked like a man, but he was not. His human shape was twisted in proportions that betrayed the impossible: arms too long, skin too taut, an animal gleam in the eyes that knew no mercy. His lips curved into a smile showing uneven teeth, and in that smile there was hunger—not for food, but for something more intimate, more absolute: flesh, soul, essence.

—You are mine… —he murmured, and the voice sounded like bones breaking beneath the earth.

Valentina ran. She ran with the instinct of one who has fled all her life, but this time the very air seemed to close her path. The Profane moved behind her with unnatural speed, gliding as though he needed no ground to advance. She turned into an alley, stumbled over rubble, tried to climb a rusted fence. She did not make it: a blunt strike stopped her.

The edge of his hand pierced her side and lung as if they were wet paper. The pain was a white explosion that tore her out of herself. She felt the air turn to blood inside her throat; she fell, gasping, eyes wide upon the dead sky. Her small body convulsed in spasms, unable to hold the life that slipped away drop by drop.

The monster bent over her, breathing in her fear like perfume. But it had no time to feast. From the shadows surged knives, shouts, hooded men who hurled themselves with restrained fury. Cyano's net had awaited this moment, and it would not let it pass.

The clash was immediate and brutal. Blades stabbed into its human flesh, but the Profane's laughter shattered the alley. With bare hands it tore off heads, broke spines, hurled bodies against walls like broken dolls. Blood pooled into puddles, mingling with rotten water. Every second cost a life, but every life bought another second for the girl.

—She's wounded! Lung punctured! We need immediate extraction! —shouted one of the agents through the communicator, dodging a blow that ripped half a wall apart.

Half-unconscious, Valentina felt herself being lifted. A man carried her against his chest, pressing an improvised bandage over the wound. He ran with her in his arms, leaping over the corpses of his own comrades, while others kept fighting to hold the monster back. The girl barely breathed, her lips tinted blue, her eyes half-open in a void of pain.

—Don't die… —the man muttered through clenched teeth—. Don't you dare die here.

He reached the extraction point: an armored vehicle waited in the shadows, with a small armed team prepared to receive her. They laid her on improvised stretchers, connecting bandages and tubes at once. The engine roared, but the danger was not over.

The Profane appeared again, drenched in blood, its eyes blazing with demented fire. It walked slowly, but each step was a sentence.

—She is mine! —it roared, its distorted voice tearing the air—. She is my prey!

The team did not hesitate. A rain of tranquilizer darts sank into its flesh, while trained dogs lunged with ferocity. The Profane bellowed, tearing two animals apart with a single swipe, shattering bones and hurling lifeless bodies to the ground. But the poison began to take effect: its movements grew clumsy, its legs gave way, its fury became trapped in a body that no longer obeyed.

—Move, now! —shouted one of the agents, hauling Valentina into the vehicle.

The armored truck roared away, leaving behind the monster still crawling among pools of blood. Inside, the agent who held her kept pressure on the wound, murmuring like a prayer:

—Hold on, little one… hold on.

The route was short and eternal. The vehicle cut through the dead city until it stopped at a private clinic where a team was already waiting. Selena and Helena were there, standing upright like statues of ice, receiving the girl without ornament, without visible tenderness, but with the firmness of those who decide who lives and who dies.

Valentina was handed into medical hands, wrapped in tubes and bandages. The armored truck drove away, and in the distant passages of the city, the broken voice of the Profane still echoed, claiming what it could never possess.

The armored vehicle screeched to a halt before the private clinic. The doors swung open, and a cold, sterile, cutting air escaped into the night. Inside, Valentina clung barely to life: blood gushed from her side in torrents, soaking the improvised bandage until it was useless. Every breath was a spasm that pulled more blood from her lips; the hemorrhage obeyed nothing. A dark pool marked the metallic floor where the girl lay, her small chest trying and failing to rise and fall.

The agents carried the stretcher inside, and there stood Helena and Selena, rigid as statues of iron. Neither hid the gravity in their eyes, though their faces remained impenetrable. The operating room door opened with a hiss, and the girl was delivered to the medical team waiting with gloves gleaming beneath the white lights.

The respirator was placed immediately. A tube descended into her throat, inflating the famished chest with an artificial breath that sounded more like machine than life. The girl arched in spasms, coughing up even more blood, but the flow of oxygen held what remained of her against the slope of death.

The surgeons activated the surgical hall. It was no ordinary operating theater: it was a sanctuary of steel and glass, where three-dimensional holograms projected Valentina's organs, stripping her fragility into blue light. Minuscule drones, suspended in the air, manipulated instruments with inhuman precision. The scalpels were not blades but calibrated beams of light that opened and sealed flesh in mathematical silence. It was the year 2027, and yet this technology was no promise of miracles, only an extension of an unequal struggle.

Helena and Selena remained to one side, watching with the stillness of those who decide fates rather than heal wounds. The monitor pulsed with a broken rhythm; each beep sounded like a nail driven into the room.

—The hemorrhage is extensive —said one of the doctors, his voice trembling beneath the mask—. The left lung is perforated. The cavity is filled with blood.

Hands moved, draining, suturing, attempting the impossible. For an instant, it seemed the machine responded, that the airflow stabilized. But then the drones froze, the holographic lights flickered, and a murmur of unease rippled through the surgeons.

—What is happening? —asked Selena, her voice colder than the steel of the room.

A doctor lifted his gaze, pale, holding a sample in a glass tube. Valentina's blood, already dark, bubbled with an anomalous tint, a latent poison that resisted every technique.

—It's not just the wound —he answered—. The attacker injected her with something… a toxin. It's spreading through the blood. The wound can be closed, but if we don't eliminate this poison within hours, the girl will not survive.

Helena fixed her eyes on him. Her voice emerged grave, relentless:

—How much time?

—Six hours, maybe less.

Silence became a wall. Only the irregular beeping of the machine filled the air.

Selena did not stay still. She stepped forward, her icy eyes like blades:

—Get everything necessary. Every resource of this clinic is to be put at disposal. No matter the cost.

The team obeyed, but in their gestures lingered the helplessness of those who know science can stop bleeding, but cannot extract a venom born of something inhuman.

Meanwhile, Helena pulled out a communicator. Red lines across the screen marked failed attempts, unanswered calls. Sebastián's name, repeated again and again, remained silent.

—He doesn't answer —she said, with a calm that concealed the edge of her frustration—. He hasn't answered all this time. No report, no signal.

Selena turned her head. There was no anger on her face, only resolve.

—Then I'll go —she said firmly—. If he doesn't answer, I'll drag him out from wherever he hides.

Helena nodded slowly.

—There's no time to waste. Go.

Helena remained in the clinic, watching the instruments and the poisoned blood, while Selena left the room.

The highway was a dark scar in the middle of the night. Seven hundred kilometers from the city, Sebastián's mansion awaited like a distant refuge. Selena gripped the wheel with the coldness of an executioner. The engine roared and the needle of the speedometer tilted to the limit. There was no traffic. Nothing but the blackness and the headlights tearing through the gloom like knives of light.

The landscape dissolved around her: sleeping ruins, twisted posts, kilometers of emptiness. The world seemed reduced to two things: the girl dying on an operating table, and the man who had to be torn from his seclusion. Time, on that road, was not minutes: it was an enemy breathing over her shoulder.

The mansion finally emerged, standing tall in the solitude of the fields. Selena stopped the vehicle with a sharp screech, stepped out, and struck the doors with contained force. She did not wait to be received; she entered with steps that asked no permission.

There was Virka. She did not wear the dark dress of ordinary days, but her ceremonial attire of the Martial Art of the Beast of Destruction: black fitted garments embroidered with crimson that resembled flames, a belt woven with fibers like claws, stylized pauldrons projecting the shadow of the beast that slept within her. Her red eyes burned beneath the dimness of the entrance.

—What do you want? —asked Virka, her grave voice heavy with immediate tension.

Selena did not circle her words.

—The girl you want as a daughter is dying. A Profane pierced her, poisoned her blood, and punctured her lung. The doctors can barely hold her. If nothing is done immediately, she will die. Sebastián doesn't answer. I came to drag him out.

Virka's silence lasted a moment, long enough for her breath to turn into a contained growl. Then she turned, her steps echoing against the mansion floor.

—Follow me.

The cultivation hall was closed, its doors sealed in the ritual of Closed Door. Virka struck the frame with an open palm; the vibration made the walls tremble. Then she released a fragment of her aura, and the entire mansion seemed to shudder with the shadow of her inner beast.

—Sebastián! —she roared, her voice piercing wood and stone—. Come out now! There is no time!

The silence broke. From within came a crack like bones expanding, a burst of energy seeping through the seams. The door opened slowly, revealing Sebastián.

His body, upright, emanated a silent heat, a pressure that was not human. His red eyes spun with greater violence, as though the tornado in his irises had found a new rhythm. He had changed—more than himself, confirmed: he had reached Level 8 – Basic Qi Master, Initial Stage.

Sebastián did not proclaim that victory. He did not need to. It was a secret the world itself could perceive in the gravity of his presence.

—What happened? —he asked, his voice rough from seclusion.

Virka leaned toward him, her face alight with urgency.

—The girl… Valentina. She was attacked. She's dying. Poison in her blood. Lung pierced. If you don't come, she won't last.

The echo of those words was enough. On the floor, Narka had already appeared, his golden eyes glowing in the dimness. With the calm of one who always waits, he perched upon Sebastián's shoulder.

There was no more. Sebastián turned, Virka at his side, Narka on his shoulder. They opened the mansion doors and stepped together into the night. Destiny awaited in a clinic bathed in white light, where a child fought against an impossible poison.

The fragment closed with that movement: three shadows departing into the darkness, carrying in silence the certainty that they did not yet know if they would arrive in time.

The air of the surgical room was laden with unbearable silence, broken only by the irregular beeping of monitors and the hum of medical drones circling above the stretcher. Valentina seemed more fragile than ever, barely a thread of breath sustained by tubes and machines. The poison coursing through her blood was neither slow nor discreet: it was a dark river devouring every minute of her life.

The holographic graphs displayed the accelerated descent: the first estimate had been six hours, then four, then two… now scarcely one remained, and soon the digital line dropped further, marking forty minutes. The doctors murmured among themselves, each intervention crumbling against the raw cruelty of the poison.

Helena observed from a corner, erect, with her arms crossed behind her back. She did not intervene with shouts or trembling hands: every order she gave was dry, exact, unquestionable. She had demanded more sedatives, additional drains, adjustments to the oxygenation machine. She was not trying to save; she was trying to buy time. The calm in her eyes was sharper than any scalpel, though inside she knew she was only prolonging an agony.

A doctor turned toward her.

—Madam… the poison accelerates faster than expected. Not hours, only minutes…

Helena silenced him with a glance that forced him to shut his mouth. And, as her gaze slid toward the metal door, a thought cut across her mind like a mute blade: how much longer will they take to arrive?

Elsewhere in the city, the roar of the vehicle's engine barely managed to impose itself over the urban chaos. Sebastián sat in silence, his gaze fixed forward; Virka at his side, fierce in her calm, and Narka reduced upon his shoulder, heavy as an invisible mountain. Selena drove, every turn of the wheel a cut of urgency against the tangle of narrow streets, flickering traffic lights, and improvised barricades that seemed to rise only to steal their seconds.

The clinic was no longer far, but the city itself was a hostile labyrinth. The traffic, the blocked alleys, the suffocating architecture reduced their speed to an agony. The clock was not mechanical: it was Valentina's body in another room, losing life second by second.

—We won't make it like this —Sebastián growled, his voice like stone breaking.

No one contradicted him. He opened the door of the moving car, and with a monstrous gesture, prepared to bear the impossible.

The decision was immediate, leaving no space for debate. Sebastián took each one as though they were pieces of a destiny already written.

—Narka —he said, placing him firmly on his left shoulder, where ancient claws seemed to embed themselves into his hardened skin.

—Virka —he lifted her into his arms as though she weighed nothing, with the solemnity of one carrying something that was part of himself.

—Selena —he glanced at her for only a second. She understood. Without words, she climbed onto his back and wrapped her arms around his neck, driving her firmness into him as the only way to hold on.

—This will suffice —Sebastián decreed, and his voice was not a comment: it was a verdict.

The air around his body changed. His breath tightened like a war drum, and in the next instant, the street became a blurred line.

The monster of the indomitable body tore into the city. His steps were not running—they were detonations that split the air. Each stride hurled him forward at impossible speeds: 400, 420, 450 kilometers per hour sustained. Asphalt cracked under his contact, windows shook, shadows warped in his wake.

Sebastián did not run only through avenues: he leapt over buildings, metal rooftops, worn balconies. Every landing was a blunt strike that made the concrete tremble. No vehicle, no machine, no beast could follow him. He was a fragment of pure violence in motion.

From his back, Selena felt the inconceivable. The wind ripped tears from her eyes, the roar of speed was a continuous lament in her ears. No car, no machine of this world could maintain such constancy. No logic could explain what it meant to ride upon a human body that should not exist.

For an instant, she clung tighter around his neck, and inside her burst an impossible thought: it is monstrous… but fascinating. Fear and admiration intertwined like poisoned veins within her chest.

Virka, in his arms, remained firm, wordless, as though this speed were nothing more than a natural echo of what she already knew of Sebastián. Narka, on his shoulder, opened his golden eyes in dense silence, as if none of this were new to him, but simply inevitable.

Guided by Selena's precise voice, marking each turn, each darkened street, Sebastián tore through the final stretch. The clinic emerged on the horizon, bathed in white lights that seemed to mock the city's gloom.

The landing was brutal. Sebastián struck the ground before the entrance with a blow that made the earth vibrate. Virka descended from his arms without hesitation, walking like a steady shadow toward the doors. Selena took a few seconds longer: her body still trembled from the inhuman experience, her legs resisting to hold her.

The guards advanced, raising their arms to stop Virka. But Selena, still catching her breath, spoke with an authority that froze the entrance:

—Let her pass. There is no time. The girl is dying.

The men hesitated, and before that voice there was no possible resistance. Virka crossed the doors, followed by Sebastián, whose presence needed no explanation: it was a physical weight in the air that no one dared to restrain.

The operating room waited like an open pit. The doctors stepped aside as soon as they saw Helena, Selena and Sebastián enter with their own. The girl remained lying there, the respirator fighting against a poison that had already reduced life to minutes.

Selena stepped forward, her lips tense and her eyes fixed on the small figure under the surgical lights. Her voice emerged like an edge of ice:

—Is there any way to save her?

The silence was unbearable. The doctors looked at each other, trembling. Then Sebastián stepped forward. His red eyes, spinning with an internal storm, left no room for doubt.

—Yes. —His voice thundered like a judgment—. But not with them here.

There was a murmur among the surgeons, but one look from Helena was enough for them to understand. With a severe gesture, she ordered them to withdraw. One by one, the doctors left, the doors closing behind them with a metallic echo.

The room fell into a deadly stillness. Only five remained: Sebastián, Virka, Narka, Helena and Selena.

The respirator emitted an irregular beep, the poison advanced through the girl's blood, and what Sebastián was about to do was still a secret locked in the gloom.

The chapter ended there, the suspense hanging like a guillotine in the air.

The room had fallen silent after the doctors withdrew, a dense silence that felt more like a weight than an absence. Only the machines remained there, the respirator marking an irregular rhythm, and Valentina's small body under the white light, her skin translucent from exhaustion and the poison spreading like a dark river through her veins.

Helena, rigid as always, was the first to speak.

—How do you intend to save her?

Selena stepped forward, her voice sharp as a knife.

—We have no time to lose, Sebastián. How are you going to do it?

Sebastián looked at her in silence for a moment, his red eyes turning with that tornado that brooked no doubt. Finally, he spoke in a deep voice, as firm as a sentence.

—With my blood… and with Virka's.

The world seemed to stop. Helena and Selena exchanged a glance, but there was no room for rebuttals: there was no other choice.

Sebastián approached the stretcher. His hands tore away what little remained of Valentina's clothing, exposing her sunken chest, fragile skin, and the improvised bandage over the pierced side. The air in the room grew even heavier.

Without hesitation, he lifted his wrist to his mouth and bit down hard. Flesh split, and from the wound flowed thick, dark blood, almost black beneath the surgical lights. It was not a reckless torrent, but enough: a dense, vital stream dripping in a steady course into the hole of the damaged lung.

Each drop seemed more than liquid: it was a fragment of pure force, of vitality contained within the essence of an indomitable monster.

Virka, seeing him, did not hesitate. She too bit her wrist. From her flowed a different blood: a dusky crimson, like a fading sunset, which fell alongside Sebastián's, mingling with it and entering the child's body.

Helena and Selena watched, unable to comprehend what they were witnessing.

—How…? —Selena whispered, incredulous.

It was Narka who answered, his voice deep, like an echo of ages.

—Sebastián's blood is not like that of others. It contains a vitality that can expel poisons, regenerate tissue, even restore lost functions… But that very abundance can kill the one who receives it, if not controlled.

The golden eyes of the being shone for an instant as he clung to Sebastián's shoulder.

—That is why Virka is here. Her blood is a buffer. Her nature balances, calms, regulates. Sebastián's overflowing force, combined with Virka's essence, allows the fragile body of the girl to endure without disintegrating under the weight of that vital energy.

Helena gave no reply. Selena pressed her lips tight, her gaze fixed on the wound that was slowly transforming into an impossible scene.

The monitors reacted first. The line that showed the spread of the poison began to fall, slowly but steadily. The bars marking toxicity dropped. In the holograms projected above the stretcher, Valentina's lungs appeared as a reconstructed image: the hole began to close, the inner fibers to regenerate. Pulmonary tissue, once collapsed, showed signs of healing.

It was not instant. The process was slow, laborious. The regeneration would extend for hours, perhaps until the following dawn. But the impossible had begun: the girl was resisting.

Then, Valentina's body arched. A violent spasm ran through her torso, the monitors erupting in red alarms. The girl convulsed.

Sebastián, with brutal calm, held her head with a firm hand, brushing her damp hair with the back of his fingers.

—It's alright —he murmured, his voice deep, restrained.

Narka descended from his shoulder to Valentina's forehead. He placed his paws upon her, pressing with a strange rhythm, regulating the surge of energy racing through the small body. The convulsion slowly eased, the trembling diminishing until the monitors stabilized once more.

Selena clenched her fists at her sides. There was no fear in her eyes, but a silent recognition that what she witnessed was beyond any technology, beyond anything she had ever considered possible. Helena, by contrast, maintained her unshakable serenity, though in the depth of her gaze lingered a shadow of astonishment.

Time passed like an underground river. For half an hour, Sebastián's blood and Virka's continued dripping into the wound, feeding the regeneration. Then Sebastián pulled back his wrist; the torn skin closed on its own within seconds. Virka did the same, and the wound on her arm also sealed.

The monitors gave the confirmation:

—Toxin levels: continuously descending.

—Left lung: 70% regenerated, active scarring.

—Vital functions: stabilized, though weak.

The process was not finished yet. The regeneration would continue throughout the night. Valentina's body would need hours to absorb, adapt, and survive the overload.

All fell into silence, watching the small body under the lights. There was no victory yet, but neither was there defeat. Only the sharp edge of waiting.

The girl did not wake, and dawn was still far away.

____________________

END OF CHAPTER 37

The path continues…

New chapters are revealed every

Sunday, and also between Wednesday or Thursday,

when the will of the tale so decides.

Each one leaves another scar on Sebastián's journey.

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