Victor Vane didn't fight.
He never had. Not once in forty-one years of living.
Fighting was what people did when their thinking ran out.
The room was white.
No windows. One chair. A table with a single glass of water that had been sitting there for three hours, untouched.
Victor Vane sat in the chair.
His suit was grey. His tie was straight. His hands were folded on the table, completely still.
To anyone watching, he looked like a man waiting patiently.
What was actually happening was something different entirely.
Inside Victor Vane's mind, time moved at a different rate than it did outside. Not a power — not exactly. No energy. No suit. No formula.
Just a mind that could slow its own processing until one second of real time felt like forty minutes of thinking.
He used those forty minutes.
He had laid out the problem the way he laid out all problems: as a sequence of choices and their consequences.
Choice One: Let the hunters destroy the boy and take the Core by force.
He had run this option four hundred times in the last six hours of real time.
It failed. Every time. Not because the boy was stronger than the hunters — he wasn't, especially not with the broken arm.
It failed because of what happened to the Core when its host died under violent circumstances.
Vaunt's notes had been clear on that. Vaunt's notes that nobody else had read because Victor had removed them from the database three years ago and kept them in his own memory.
The Core didn't transfer. It didn't detach.
It detonated.
An energy release equivalent to removing a sun from the equation it was balancing. The resulting cascade would render the Core useless — to anyone — for approximately two hundred years.
So brute force was not a choice. It was a countdown to defeat.
Choice Two: Make the boy give it willingly.
This one didn't fail.
This one had exactly one path forward and Victor had found it forty minutes ago — which was to say, about ninety seconds ago in real time — and it was elegant in the way that true solutions always were.
Not comfortable. Not clean.
Elegant.
He picked up his phone.
He typed three words.
He sent them.
He put the phone back down.
He picked up the glass of water and drank it slowly.
Outside, the news was showing crowds celebrating in Neo-Tokyo.
Victor watched it with no expression.
The boy thought the retreat was a concession.
That was the most important part of the plan.
[To Be Continued...]