Chapter 924: Vex was kidnapped.
The afternoon in Asgard remained cold, but alive, when Strax and Vex left the railway station to cross one of the nearby commercial avenues. The outing had lasted longer than he had planned, partly because Vex had stopped in front of every detail of the train as if she were facing a discovery capable of changing the very structure of the world. She did not merely want to know how it worked; she wanted to understand why it worked, who had built it, how many wheels it had, why it released steam, whether it could become faster, whether it might fly someday, and, most importantly, whether anyone had ever tried talking to it to check if it was perhaps a living creature disguised as a machine.
Strax answered almost everything with patience, though some of the questions clearly demanded more philosophy than engineering. The disguise remained active over both of them, keeping them as ordinary faces in the middle of the crowd. Even so, despite not knowing who they were, people naturally opened a little space around Strax. There was something about him that no magic could completely erase. It was not appearance, nor an explicit aura, but a silent gravity that made common instincts step back before the mind could even understand why.
Vex walked beside him holding a small paper bag of sweets bought from a confectionery near the station. She had chosen three different things without properly understanding what they were, simply because all of them looked interesting. Now she slowly ate a piece of filled pastry while observing the shop windows covered with a thin layer of snow. Her initial excitement had turned into focused attention, as if she were trying to store everything in memory before the world changed again.
"Father," she said, after a few minutes of unusual silence. "Is Asgard always this noisy?"
Strax looked at the busy avenue, where carriages, vendors, workers, and small trams created an organized confusion that seemed natural to the city’s inhabitants. To someone who came from the silent fortresses of the North, that constant noise probably seemed impossible to ignore. He smiled faintly before answering.
"Almost always. It gets calmer at night, but never completely silent. Cities grow like this. The more people live in one place, the more sounds appear."
Vex chewed slowly, thoughtful, while a group of children ran by on the other side of the street. She followed their movement with curiosity, but did not let go of his hand. There was something different in that gesture. Before, she held his hand out of excitement or impulse; now, she held it as if she were beginning to understand that that bond was something concrete, something that could exist in the middle of unknown places.
"I like it," she finally said. "But I think Mother would go insane here."
Strax let out a low laugh, imagining Mercedes trying to maintain her composure in the middle of vendors shouting prices, machines releasing steam, and clerks running around with reports. The image was too amusing not to be appreciated for a few seconds.
"She would probably freeze half the streets just to get some silence."
Vex smiled with her mouth full, clearly thinking that was possible. Before she could answer, a commotion rose a few meters ahead. A frightened horse was pulling a small fruit cart, while the merchant tried to control the reins without success. Some people quickly moved back, and crates began to topple onto the street covered in dirty snow. The animal was not truly bolting, but it was close enough to injuring someone if it continued moving forward like that.
Strax looked at the scene with a short sigh. He did not like getting involved when he was trying to remain discreet, but he also was not the kind of person who stood still and watched civilians be run over by something so simple. He lightly squeezed Vex’s hand and guided her closer to a shop window, placing her out of the way.
"Stay here for a moment," he said. "Do not leave this spot."
Vex nodded quickly, still holding the bag of sweets. She did not seem frightened, only surprised by the sudden movement. Strax kept his gaze on her for half a second longer, making sure she had understood, then turned toward the street. He did not need to run. It was enough to step forward at the right moment, hold the side of the cart with one hand, and touch the horse’s forehead with the other. The animal stopped almost immediately, not because of force, but because of a calm pressure of mana that silenced its panic.
The crowd around them released sounds of relief. The merchant began thanking him over and over, nearly bowing, while Strax set the cart back into balance as if it weighed nothing. Some fruits rolled across the street, and nearby children began picking them up to return them. It was a small urban confusion, ordinary and quick, exactly the kind of thing that should not have meant anything.
But that was the instant when the failure happened.
A group of people passed between Strax and the shop window. Not many. Just enough to break his line of sight for two seconds. A man carrying fabrics piled too high. A woman with a dark parasol open against the snow. Two workers pushing a long crate on wheels. Nothing seemed threatening. Nothing sounded strange. No hostile aura stood out in the middle of the crowd, and that, later, would be the detail that irritated Strax the most.
When he finished stabilizing the horse, he turned his face back to where Vex had been.
The shop window was empty.
The bag of sweets lay fallen in the snow.
For half a second, the world remained normal. The merchant was still thanking him. The children were still laughing while returning fruit. The horse breathed heavily, but calmly. The city continued functioning as always.
Then the air changed.
Strax did not move immediately. His eyes fixed on the fallen bag, on the small sweets scattered over the snow, and on the confused footprints around it. The magical disguise over his face remained active, but something beneath it began to crack. The temperature around him seemed to waver, not toward cold or heat, but toward a pressure so dense that some people nearby stopped speaking without understanding why.
"Vex," he called, low.
There was no answer.
He took a step toward the shop window. Then another. The crowd began to move away instinctively, though no one knew exactly what they were fleeing from. Strax bent down, picked up the paper bag, and observed the mark of small fingers on its crumpled edge. She had not dropped it willingly. Not calmly. Not without reason.
The merchant, still not understanding, approached carefully.
"Sir? Is everything all right?"
Strax slowly raised his gaze.
The man immediately stepped back.
Even beneath the false appearance, even without seeing his true golden eyes, he felt that something terrible was looking through that ordinary face. Strax did not answer. He only breathed once, deeply, and released the sensory magic he had kept compressed since the start of the outing.
Asgard opened before him.
Thousands of presences. Humans, demi-humans, mages, guards, workers, children, animals, machines, traces of mana, scents, heat, movement. Everything emerged as a complex and brutally living network. He ignored almost all of it, searching for only one signature: Vex’s young, dense, unstable, draconic mana.
He found it.
But she was far too distant for such a short time.
And she was moving fast.
Too fast.
Strax closed his hand around the bag until the paper tore.
The disguise vanished.
His hair returned to white. His eyes regained their monstrous gold. His presence collapsed over the avenue like a storm without wind. People fell to their knees. Windowpanes trembled. Horses reared. Even the steam coming out of the nearby pipes seemed to hesitate.
"Guards," he said, without raising his voice.
Even so, everyone on the street heard him.
Two soldiers who had been at the crossing immediately ran to him, pale as snow. One of them almost stumbled when he realized who was standing before him.
"Lord Strax!"
"Close the city’s exits. Now."
The guards did not ask why. There was no room for questions in that tone. One of them brought a hand to the runic communicator attached to his belt, while the other sprinted down the avenue toward the nearest post. Strax was already moving before they had even finished obeying.
He crossed the crowd, following Vex’s mana trail. The problem was that the trail was not clean. Someone had scattered fragments of similar energy in several places, small lures thrown into alleys, carts, and corners to delay any ordinary tracker. It was a competent trick. Not brilliant, but prepared. That meant planning. It meant prior observation. It meant someone knew exactly what they were trying to do.
And that made his anger become far too silent.
On top of a nearby building, a hooded figure watched Strax turn his head in his direction. For an instant, the assassin believed he was protected by distance, snow, and the crowd. Then he realized Strax’s eyes were fixed exactly on him.
Strax disappeared.
The figure barely had time to step back before he was yanked from the rooftop by the neck and smashed against the side wall of a building. There was no scream. Only the dry impact of cracking stone and air escaping the man’s lungs.
"Where is she?"
The assassin tried to bite something hidden beneath his tongue. Strax noticed before he could finish the movement and squeezed his jaw with two fingers, breaking the mechanism and part of his teeth in the process. The man choked, trembling with pain and terror.
"Where is she?" Strax repeated.
The assassin did not answer with words. His eyes shifted for an instant toward the east. It was little. Almost nothing. But it was enough.
Strax dropped the body to the ground and turned.
In the distance, above the rooftops, magical signals began to light up at Asgard’s gates. Silent alarms, designed by Monica for emergencies, propagated orders between barracks, mansions, and checkpoints. The city had not yet entered panic, but its rhythm was already beginning to change. Guards closed streets. Knights sealed passages. Mercenaries received orders. Asgard’s machine awoke with frightening precision.
But Vex was still getting farther away.
Somewhere beneath the city, perhaps through service tunnels, perhaps through old routes, perhaps through limited displacement magic, someone was carrying a dragon child away from him.
Strax raised his hand and crushed one of the false mana trails in the air. Then another. Then another. The lures went out like candles.
One direction remained.
East.
He smiled.
There was no humor in that smile.
"I understand."
The snow began to evaporate around his feet.
Then his voice crossed the city through his mana itself, reaching every ally marked by his presence.
"Vex has been kidnapped."
Strax’s voice did not sound like a shout.
It did not need to.
It crossed all of Asgard like a sentence.
The message traveled through streets, walls, towers, barracks, factories, administrative halls, and the mansion’s corridors with a force that did not depend on sound. It was mana. It was authority. It was fury compressed into words too simple to carry something so monstrous.
"All of you, start searching for her."
In several places across Asgard, the world stopped.
At the mansion, Kali stood up so quickly that the chair toppled behind her and broke against the floor. The playful smile disappeared from her face as if it had never existed, replaced by a fierce and fully awakened expression.
At the administrative center, Monica dropped her pen.
For the first time in days, she did not finish the line she had been writing. She did not organize the paper. She did not align the report. She merely remained still for a single second before raising her eyes with a coldness that made any bureaucracy seem irrelevant.
At the barracks, Xenovia slowly turned her face.
The soldiers around her felt the change before they even understood the reason. The knight’s posture hardened, and a single order from her made dozens of men run to seal gates, lock down streets, and block escape routes.
On a distant street, Scarlett stopped walking.
The smile that appeared on her lips had no humor at all.
It was thin.
Cruel.
Dangerous.
In another part of the city, Tiamat opened her eyes.
The pressure around her distorted the air for a few instants, and the people nearby felt their knees weaken without knowing that a calamity had just awakened.
Ouroboros went completely still.
There was no visible reaction.
No expression.
No word.
But everyone near her felt the temperature of the environment change, as if something ancient had slowly turned inside reality.
And it was not only them.
Even those who were far away heard it.
Beatrice stopped what she was doing.
Samira tightened her fingers around the nearest weapon.
Belatrix raised her gaze with a murderous gleam in her eyes.
Cassandra closed the book she was reading without marking the page.
Daniela rose in silence.
Rogue stopped in the middle of the guild, her tail motionless for the first time that day.
Kryssia, Agnes, Xyn, Cristine, and Yennifer felt the call like a blade cutting through the distance.
Lithara smiled without joy.
Albedo froze in place, eyes wide, before her expression twisted into absolute hatred.
All of them felt it.
All of them understood.
It was not merely a missing child.
It was a daughter torn from Strax’s hands.
And that meant war.
Strax remained standing in the middle of the snow-covered avenue, still holding the crumpled bag of sweets Vex had dropped. The torn paper was stained by the moisture, and small pieces of sweet pastry lay scattered on the ground, crushed beneath unknown footprints.
He looked at it.
Then at the horizon.
The east.
The direction where the trail led.
For an instant, all of Asgard seemed to hold its breath.
Then his aura exploded.
Not like an ordinary wave of mana.
Not like a display of power.
It was something worse.
It was the naked truth of the monster he was escaping through a single crack in his control.
The entire city trembled.
Windowpanes cracked.
Chimneys released uncontrolled jets of steam.
The snow around him evaporated in a growing circle, while the stones of the street cracked beneath his feet. People fell to their knees. Others simply fainted where they stood. Horses collapsed. Guards lost consciousness before finishing the orders they were shouting.
Across all of Asgard, even the strongest felt the weight.
And the weakest blacked out immediately.
The sky above the city darkened as if obeying his fury.
Strax slowly raised his face.
His golden eyes no longer seemed human.
They did not even seem like eyes.
They looked like two openings into a living catastrophe.
When he spoke again, his voice did not merely travel through streets and walls.
It crossed the air.
The ground.
The mana.
The soul of everyone who could still hear him.
"And I will destroy this entire world until I find my daughter."
The sentence was not a threat.
It was a promise.
