Chapter 153: The Spy At The Table

Corvin Hale exposed himself at 16:20 by trying to save the Prime Minister.

The emergency alert claimed a Neva assassin had entered the western residence. Corvin reached Elias before the protection detail received the warning, footsteps unhurried despite the words coming out of him.

"We must move immediately," he said. "The eastern tunnel remains secure."

Elias looked at Damien.

Damien shook his head once, small enough that only Elias would catch it.

The eastern tunnel was the location Mina had inserted into Corvin’s false evacuation plan. If Elias entered it, Neva would control both ends.

"We shelter here," Damien said.

Corvin’s hand moved toward Elias’s shoulder, calm and almost gentle.

Damien caught it.

The perfectly fitted uniform tore at the wrist. A thin black contract needle slid from Corvin’s sleeve and struck Nightglass Armor instead of the Prime Minister’s skin, the tip skating off with a small metallic shriek.

Two security investigators drew their weapons.

Corvin spoke one word.

"Late."

Both men froze mid-motion.

Red clock faces bloomed beneath their feet. The first investigator aged through sixty seconds of wounds all at once, every old scar tearing open in reverse. The second managed to fire, but his bullet moved as though caught in thick water, drifting rather than flying.

Corvin crossed the room and killed them both before anyone else took a single step.

His level became visible.

➤[Corvin Hale, Level 56] ➤[Class: Minute Hand (Elite)] ➤[Designation: Murderer] ➤[Player Killer activated.] ➤[All attributes increased by 10% against the designated Murderer.]

The world slowed around Damien.

Not because Corvin controlled time. His Class imposed schedules on actions. Anything begun outside its assigned second suffered delay; anything performed on the chosen beat accelerated instead.

Corvin had spent years training people to obey his timing, because obedience made his Class stronger every time it worked.

"16:21," he said. "Prime Minister dies."

The room clock changed.

Elias had forty seconds.

Damien pushed him behind the table. Corvin’s needle struck the wood and converted its remaining lifetime into decay in an instant. The table collapsed into a soft heap of brown dust.

Martin entered through the northern door with Grace and Mina behind him. Corvin pointed at the threshold without even looking at it directly.

"16:20:30. Door closes."

The steel frame slammed shut between them with a finality that echoed through the room.

Damien and Elias remained inside, alone with him.

"Can you disrupt his schedule?" Elias asked, voice tight.

"Probably."

"That did not sound confident."

"I’m experimenting."

Damien stepped in the exact Walk of Night sequence. His feet produced no sound, but Corvin did not track sound at all. He watched the second hand instead, predicting when a movement should complete and striking exactly there.

Damien deliberately stumbled.

The mistimed step slowed beneath Corvin’s field, dragging like his foot had caught in mud. Corvin attacked the place where the recovery would end.

Damien did not recover.

He fell completely instead, used Shadow Imitation in the sudden darkness beneath the ruined table, and vanished into it entirely. Corvin’s needle pierced empty floor with a dull thud.

"A wasted second," Corvin said.

Damien emerged from the shadow cast by his own uniform and cut the small clock device sewn into its collar in one motion.

Every schedule in the room skipped at once, stuttering like a dropped record.

Elias reached the emergency lock in that gap. The northern door opened. Grace hit Corvin hard enough to send him through a wall in a spray of plaster.

The Wrathbound Bangle remained dark on her wrist; she had not protected anyone from a strike this time. She looked down at it, almost surprised.

"I did that myself."

Corvin rose with blood at the corner of his mouth, unbothered. "16:21."

The death schedule activated.

A black line appeared across Elias’s throat without any weapon ever touching him.

Mina threw a blank contract page over the clock. Doctor Smoke, arriving right behind her, pressed both hands against Elias’s neck. Daria flooded the room with earth mana to ground the signal. Hamari fired through the broken wall and shot the final needle clean out of Corvin’s fingers.

Damien reached him before he could assign another second.

Corvin blocked the dagger with his forearm and drove a knee into Damien’s stitched chest. Pain tore the wound open fresh. Damien’s next breath simply failed to come.

The spy smiled for the first time all evening.

"You cannot even breathe correctly."

He had read the surveillance report from the broker archive. He knew the second half of Walk of Night remained incomplete.

Damien abandoned the manual’s rhythm entirely. He fought with an ugly, uneven breath and movements Corvin couldn’t place on any schedule at all. Hidden stats and Player Killer supplied the rest of the difference.

He broke Corvin’s knee, removed the second collar device, and held the First Blood Dagger against his heart.

For one moment, killing him would have been easy.

Corvin had just murdered two innocent investigators without so much as a change in his breathing.

Damien saw Silas Vane falling in the locust field again, and remembered the name he had used afterward.

Skinwalker.

But Corvin carried routes to hundreds of prisoners. Dead, he would answer nothing at all.

Damien struck him unconscious instead.

The death line faded from Elias’s throat with two seconds remaining.

The Prime Minister sat on the floor while Doctor Smoke repaired the cut that had not quite happened, hands steady despite everything.

"I dislike intelligence work," he said.

"It is usually quieter," Mina replied.

Corvin’s personal contract opened under her Class, unfolding page after page into the air. It contained the entire Region 21 loan structure: twelve collection houses, Reserve Nine, and the Ledger Citadel where Mordecai Sorn stored the regional authority contracts.

It contained his payments too. Corvin had not joined Neva for survival or under threat. Over fourteen months, he received six million Gold, an Elite time device, and a promise that his family would be moved into a protected enclave after Region 21’s government fell.

He had sold schedules gradually. The first led Neva away from an audit. The next exposed a witness. By the time people died, the distinction between information and murder had become convenient enough for him to ignore entirely.

The two investigators on the floor had worked beneath him for three years.

Martin knelt beside them and closed their eyes with careful, unhurried hands. "Their names are Oren Pike and Lysa Sen."

Damien repeated both names silently. Corvin had reduced lives to seconds on a clock. They would not be reduced any further than that.

Mina found one final clause: if captured, Corvin’s Class would erase the regional map at the next full hour. She froze the contract with twelve minutes remaining. Daria grounded the device while Hamari destroyed its remote receiver.

The map survived because every member performed a different part without waiting for Damien to explain any of it.

It also confirmed that Varek was holding Eli as bait.

Martin looked at the two dead investigators for a long moment. "We move now."

Damien wiped blood from his reopened armor seam.

"No," he said. "We move everywhere."