Chapter 66: Here’s Dorian Valeborn
Location: A City around the Upper District
The electronics district didn’t sleep.
It didn’t have a quiet hour, didn’t have a lull — just a constant churn of bodies and noise and light, the kind of street where every storefront competed for attention.
Screens stacked three rows deep behind glass windows. Display units running loops of advertisements nobody watched.
The scent of sweet street food cutting through the electrical hum that sat permanently in the air like a second atmosphere.
Different programes was playing on a screen the size of a wall.
One of the electronics shops had it mounted behind their front window — a promotional unit, the kind meant to show off picture quality more than content — and the anchor’s face was rendered in the kind of resolution that made every pore visible, her voice bleeding out through the external speaker mounted above the door in tinny, compressed audio that still somehow carried over the street noise.
Most people walked past it without looking up.
A man stopped.
He was ordinary-looking. Mid-thirties, maybe. Carrying a paper bag from somewhere, halfway through a thought about something else entirely, when a phrase reached him through the noise and made his feet stop working.
He stood in front of the window. Read the chyron scrolling at the bottom of the screen. Listened to the anchor’s voice reading from that page.
"We are not interested in where you came from. We are interested in what you can become. If you have the ability — if you have the will to develop it — we want to find you. We are coming to find you."
The man’s paper bag dropped about two inches in his grip. He caught it without noticing.
"No way," he said, to nobody. His voice came out low, genuinely stunned.
"Sounds like those cities are acting a drama scene...haha."
He stood there another moment, mouth slightly open, processing.
Then every hair on the back of his neck stood up at once.
It wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t a movement. It was something odder than both — something the body knew before the brain caught up, like the air around him had quietly decided to belong to someone else. His chest tightened. His feet, without receiving any conscious instruction, took one step to the side.
He turned.
The man standing behind him was enormous.
Not tall in the way that made people look twice on the street — tall in the way that made people recalculate the geometry of the space around them.
Broad through the shoulders in a way that a fitted red short-sleeve shirt did nothing to obscure, the fabric pulling clean across the chest and upper arms with the specific tension of muscle that had been built over years, not months. His trousers were black — wide-cut, the kind with tapered ankles and fitted bands at the calf that martial artists favored, practical and undecorated. His arms were folded across his chest. His hair was cut close, neat, unremarkable.
His face was still- the particular stillness of a man who had perhaps achieved all possible greatness.
And the aura coming off him was surreal.
The man with the paper bag didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t say anything. He looked at the figure in front of him for approximately one second, then looked immediately away, found a reason to be somewhere else, and left.
He wasn’t the only one. The foot traffic within a natural radius of this man had quietly reorganized itself — not in a dramatic way, not in a way anyone would consciously notice. People just found themselves choosing the other side of the pavement. Giving an extra foot of clearance.
This was not fear of a weapon. It was not fear of a threat.
It was the instinct of something small in the presence of something categorically larger — the part of the human nervous system that had not changed in ten thousand years and still knew, without being told, when it was standing next to an apex predator.
The man stood at the window and read the screen.
After a moment, he spoke. His voice was quiet, which somehow made it worse.
"The world cannot exist without the weak." He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. He was talking the way people talk when they’re thinking out loud and are so accustomed to being listened to that it’s become the same thing.
"It needs them. The structure depends on them. You remove the bottom of the hierarchy and the whole thing collapses — there’s no top without a bottom to stand on." He tilted his head slightly at the screen.
"So what exactly is Elias’ game?"
It came out flat, like a question that had already decided it deserved an answer.
"Sir."
The voice came from his right. Quiet, measured, entirely unbothered.
The man standing there looked like someone’s accountant. Medium height, fine suit, well-pressed, glasses that caught the light from the display window. He stood at a precise distance — close enough to be useful, far enough to be unobtrusive — with the particular posture of someone who had been doing this job long enough that obedience had become indistinguishable from personality.
"Even I am not certain," Walter said.
"His methods suggest genuine intent. If I were to assess from available information — he appears to be creating momentum. Building something. Whether there’s a strategic endpoint beneath the philanthropy —" A small pause. "I genuinely could not say."
Dorian looked at the screen.
"What makes you think there’s a game behind it?" Walter asked. Mild. Curious, even.
Dorian didn’t answer immediately.
Because this was Dorian Valeborn.
S-rank.
There were perhaps eleven people in the world who held that designation, and the gap between S-rank and everything beneath it was not a gap in the way that gaps between other ranks were gaps. It was a categorical difference.
The foot traffic avoiding him weren’t doing it consciously.
Most of them had never seen Dorian Valeborn before.
They didn’t know his name.
They didn’t need to.
Their bodies had already reached a conclusion their minds hadn’t caught up to yet.
This was what S-rank felt like from the outside.
From the inside, Dorian rarely thought about it at all.
"Because men like Elias Cross don’t do things without a reason," Dorian said.
"And the reason is never what they put on the screen." He unfolded his arms. Refolded them. "He’s monopolizing the lower district’s gates. Every clearance, every operation, every hunter he brings in under his banner — that’s territory. That’s infrastructure. He’s building a foundation and dressing it up as charity and everyone is applauding him for it."
"He may also simply care about the city," Walter offered. "It would not be the first time someone with means chose to use them this way."
Dorian’s jaw shifted slightly.
"Walter."
"Sir."
"Get me Elias on the line."
Walter received this instruction the way he received all instructions — without visible reaction, without hesitation. He reached into his jacket, produced his phone, navigated to a contact, and placed the call.
He held it to his own ear for a moment while it connected, then extended it toward Dorian with the same economy of motion he applied to everything.
"They’re connecting you now, sir."
Dorian took the phone. Held it to his ear. His gaze had drifted back to the screen — the anchor was still speaking, still reading, and the Cross Foundation logo sat in the corner of the broadcast like a quiet declaration of something.
The line picked up.
"Cross Foundation offices, transferring— You have been transferred!"
The main line connected.
"Elias Cross." Dorian’s voice was flat. "You have quite a lot to—"
The line went dead.
The clean, deliberate silence of a call that had been ended by the other party.
Dorian stood with the phone at his ear.
The disconnected tone played.
Doo. Doo. Doo.
He stood there for another three seconds. The tone continued. He lowered the phone slowly and held it out without looking, and Walter took it back with the same composure he’d offered it with.
"Is there a problem, sir?"
Dorian did not answer immediately.
His gaze was still on the screen. But something had shifted in it.The stillness hadn’t broken. But behind it, in the set of his jaw and the quality of his silence, something had caught fire.
"He hung up," Dorian said.
Quietly. Almost gently.
"Before I even spoke." A beat.
Walter said nothing.
Slowly, spreading across Dorian’s face like weather moving across a skyline, came a devilish smile.
"Walter."
"Sir."
"Book me a flight." He looked away from the screen finally, and there was something almost light in his expression now — the specific lightness of a man who has just decided to do something that he is going to enjoy.
"It seems I’ll be going to the lower district."
Walter paused. One beat, two. Then, carefully: "If I may ask — for what purpose, sir?"
Dorian turned to look at him.
"A friendly chat," he said. "Between two S-rank hunters." The smile stayed exactly where it was. "You have absolutely nothing to worry about, Walter."
Walter looked at him for a moment.
"Of course, sir," he said. "I’ll arrange it immediately."
He reached for his phone again, already dialing, his expression revealing nothing whatsoever about what he actually thought of that answer.