The corridor between the eastern academic wing and the main combat block was, at most hours, a perfectly unremarkable stretch of Nightblade Academy architecture. Stone floors worn smooth by years of foot traffic. High windows admitting thin columns of midmorning light. The distant, institutional hum of a building going about its business.
Between the second and third period, it filled with students moving in both directions — a dense, purposeful flow of uniforms and concealed weapons and the particular ambient noise of several hundred people navigating shared space with varying degrees of grace.
Sieg Brenner moved through it the way he moved through most things — without hurry, without announcement, occupying exactly as much space as he needed and no more. His ninjato rested at his left hip. His Desert Eagle is at his right. His tactical manual was tucked under one arm, half-read, destined to be finished during whatever class turned out to be least demanding.
He was thinking about nothing in particular.
This was, in retrospect, the last moment of the morning that could be accurately described that way.
He noticed them the way he noticed most things — not with alarm, but with the quiet, automatic registration of a mind that had been trained to catalogue threat before conscious thought caught up.
Four students. Grey Scythes insignia on their jackets, subdued but present. They had positioned themselves with the careful, practiced spacing of people who had been told exactly where to stand — two ahead, cutting across the natural flow of corridor traffic to create a soft blockage, two flanking from side passages that fed into the main artery at precise intervals. The surrounding students, picking up on something they couldn't quite name, had begun drifting to the corridor's edges with the instinctive self-preservation of people who recognized the shape of trouble without needing to identify its specifics.
The corridor thinned. Then emptied. The distant sound of a door closing somewhere upstream.
Sieg stopped.
The four Grey Scythes stopped.
A beat of silence, clean and absolute, in which both parties acknowledged what was happening without the indignity of pretending otherwise.
Then, from a recessed alcove near the corridor's high window, a fifth figure stepped forward. She moved with a deliberateness that marked her immediately as the one who had arranged the others — a tall girl, perhaps seventeen, with close-cropped dark hair and the flat, assessing eyes of someone who had been briefed thoroughly and intended to execute precisely. A collapsible baton hung at her hip, extended and locked. Her four subordinates carried an assortment of blunted training blades and weighted clubs — weapons designed to disable, not to kill. Apparently the Grey Scythes had received that particular instruction.
Vera Krauss, Sieg noted distantly, had at least sent people with some sense of proportion.
Not enough sense. But some.
"Sieg Brenner." The tall girl's voice was level. Professional. The voice of someone reciting a prepared statement rather than picking a fight. "You are requested to stand down and submit to voluntary withdrawal from active faction engagement at Nightblade Academy. This request is being made on behalf of the established order. Compliance is strongly encouraged."
Sieg looked at her.
Then, at the four behind and beside him.
Then back at her.
"No," he said.
The tall girl sighed — a small, professional exhale that suggested she had anticipated this answer and had already moved past it. "Subdue him," she said.
They came in coordinated pairs, which was the right instinct. Two from the front, closing distance quickly with the practiced synchronization of people who had drilled this exact approach — the left one drawing high, aiming for the shoulder, the right dropping low for the legs, each movement designed to complicate the other's defense.
Sieg let them come.
Not passively. Actively — reading the geometry of their approach with the particular, unhurried attention of someone doing arithmetic. The left one was half a step faster. The right one telegraphed his low sweep with a slight forward lean of the left shoulder, three paces out.
He moved at the last possible moment.
Not back. Forward — into the gap between them, where neither weapon had the angle to connect cleanly. His left forearm intercepted the high strike at the wrist, redirecting its momentum sideways. The rotation carried him past the sweep entirely. He was behind the right one before either of them fully processed that the geometry had changed.
His elbow found the base of the right one's neck — a precise, measured strike, nerve cluster over brute force. The boy's knees went out from under him without drama, folding inward as the signal died, and he was on the floor before his weapon finished clattering.
The left one spun, already recalibrating, and Sieg met him with a palm strike to the sternum that used the boy's own turning momentum against him. The impact was sharp and deliberate — not enough to damage, enough to stagger. The boy stumbled backward into the corridor wall, arms windmilling for purchase, and by the time he found it Sieg was already elsewhere.
The two flankers had moved to cut off retreat.
Sieg hadn't been retreating.
He covered the distance to the nearer flanker in four steps — quick, low, economical — and the boy barely got his weighted club up before Sieg was inside his guard. Close enough that the club was useless, close enough that what happened next was entirely a matter of leverage and timing. Sieg's hip rotated. His hand found the boy's leading wrist. The throw was clean and short and deposited the flanker face-first against the stone floor with a sound like a heavy book being dropped.
The fourth one hesitated.
One second. Perhaps less.
It was enough. Sieg closed the distance before the hesitation resolved itself into action, caught the boy's weapon arm at the elbow with both hands, and applied precisely the pressure required to produce a sharp, involuntary release. The blunted blade skittered away. Sieg stepped through, hooked the boy's ankle, and guided him to the floor with a controlled efficiency that looked almost gentle until you noticed the boy's expression.
Four seconds. Four opponents.
The tall girl with the baton had not moved.
She stood at the corridor's center, baton raised, and looked at what was left of her unit with an expression that managed to be both unsurprised and deeply unhappy. The professionalism was still there, intact, because people like her kept their professionalism precisely when it was hardest. But something had shifted in her flat, assessing eyes — a recalibration, rapid and thorough, as the gap between what she had been told to expect and what she was currently observing finished resolving itself.
She looked at Sieg.
Sieg looked at her.
"You got two choices," he said. His voice carried the same flat, unhurried quality it always carried — devoid of threat, devoid of performance, the voice of someone describing a weather forecast. "You can try and join your friends, or you can be the only one who walks to the next class period without assistance."
The baton was lowered by approximately three inches.
Then three more.
The tall girl straightened. She was a professional, and professionals knew when a variable had been correctly assessed and found to exceed projected parameters. She retracted the baton with a sharp, metallic click and clipped it back to her hip with a precision that was, in its way, a small act of defiance — refusing to be rattled even in defeat.
"Withdrawal acknowledged," she said, as though this were a formal procedure.
She turned. She walked.
She did not run.
Sieg watched her go, then looked down at the four students in various states of recovery on the corridor floor. None of them was seriously hurt. All of them were going to be extremely sore by the afternoon, and two of them would probably have interesting bruises to explain to their respective housemates.
He picked up his tactical manual from where it had landed, brushed the cover off, and tucked it back under his arm.
He sighed.
Then he kept walking.
From the upper corridor gallery — a narrow walkway that ran above the main artery and was technically reserved for faculty use, but had never been effectively enforced as such — Vera Krauss watched him go.
Beside her, Dmitri Volkov said nothing. He rarely did. His sledgehammer rested against the railing, its worn, dented head touching the stone with a faint, resonant contact that seemed to hum in the gallery's quiet. His broad frame carried itself with the same unhurried, immovable weight it always did — amber eyes quiet, expression as unchanged as it ever was, as though inconvenient information and comfortable information arrived at the same temperature.
On Vera's other side, Elsa Brandt had her hands folded on the railing. Her straight black hair, threaded through with natural grey streaks that had been there since anyone could remember and that no one had ever been comfortable enough to ask about, fell loose to her shoulders. The collapsible scythe at her side remained untouched. Her cold teal eyes tracked Sieg's retreating figure with the particular blankness she brought to everything — not vacant, not indifferent, but deliberately absent, the expression of someone who had chosen not to answer the door. She followed him until he rounded the far corner and disappeared.
"Five seconds," Elsa said.
"Four," Vera corrected, quietly.
A pause.
"Send the second unit," she said. "Between third and fourth period. Western stairwell." Her pale eyes did not move from the now-empty corridor below. "And tell them not to hesitate."
Dmitri Volkov pushed off the railing without a word and went to deliver the message.
Vera remained where she was, her steel grey eyes resting on the empty corridor. Her long platinum hair hung straight and severe past her shoulders, catching the gallery's thin light without warmth. The sniper rifle across her back was still. Everything about her was still — the particular rigidity of someone who had processed emotion as inefficiency for long enough that stillness had become indistinguishable from her natural state.
Not what I expected.
Adjust.
Across the academy grounds, Wei Xiu would be where she always was between periods — composed, dark hair pinned immaculately with its jade pin, dangerous warm smile arranged on her face like a piece of furniture that had always been there. Thinking in months. Already several moves past this.
Third period was Applied Tactical Theory, which Sieg found tolerable. The instructor covered ambush geometry with the dry, efficient competence of someone who had stopped finding the subject exciting approximately fifteen years ago but had never stopped finding it useful. Sieg took notes in the margin of his tactical manual and did not think about the four Grey Scythes currently occupying the infirmary.
When the period ended, he collected his things, filed out with the corridor flow, and turned toward the western stairwell.
He stopped at the top of the stairs.
Looked down.
The western stairwell was a wide, double-banked structure that connected three floors, lit by tall narrow windows on each landing. At this hour, between periods, it should have held a moderate stream of students moving between levels.
It held six.
All Grey Scythes. All very still. All looking up at him with the expressions of people who had been told, specifically and in detail, not to hesitate.
Behind them, the stairwell's lower doors had been closed. Through the window glass, Sieg could see the silhouettes of students on the other side, milling with the confused, slightly indignant energy of people who had found a door unexpectedly locked and hadn't yet decided how to feel about it.
Sieg looked at the six.
The six looked at Sieg.
He exhaled through his nose.
Then his hand went to his right hip.
The Desert Eagle cleared the holster in one clean motion.
The six Grey Scythes had been briefed on his hand-to-hand. They had not, evidently, been briefed on this.
The first rubber round crossed the distance between the top landing and the first student before the sound of the shot had finished echoing off the stairwell walls. It caught him precisely in the shoulder — not the chest, not the face — and the impact spun him sideways into the railing hard enough to produce a sound that made the two students nearest him flinch.
Sieg was already descending.
Not retreating down. Moving — using the stairs as terrain, taking them two at a time in a controlled descent that closed distance faster than any of the six had planned for, the Desert Eagle tracking and firing in the measured rhythm of someone who had done this in spaces far less accommodating than a stairwell.
Second round. A girl on the mid-landing, who had been raising something that looked disturbingly like a modified stun baton, took it in the thigh. She went down hard, the baton clattering three steps before it stopped.
Third round. The student who had been trying to flank along the inner banister received it in the knee, and the sound he made was sharp and immediate and caused the student directly behind him to stop advancing entirely.
Sieg reached the mid-landing.
The Desert Eagle had accounted for three. Three remained — close now, close enough that the geometry had shifted from ranged to something else entirely. The nearest one came in fast and low with a blunted short blade, taking what he clearly thought was an advantageous angle while Sieg's gun arm was extended.
Sieg holstered the Desert Eagle in the same motion he used to sidestep.
The short blade passed his ribs by four inches.
He caught the boy's extended arm at the wrist, let the momentum continue past him, and introduced the boy's own forward drive to the stairwell wall at the exact velocity required to produce a controlled, unharmful collision that nevertheless removed him from the equation completely.
Two left.
They came together — the last coordinated thing the unit managed, driven by some combination of training and the particular desperation of people who had watched five colleagues go down in the space of twelve seconds and understood, viscerally, that their odds had not improved.
Sieg stepped between them.
Not through. Between — the narrow corridor of space where neither of their weapons could swing without risking the other, a gap that existed for approximately half a second and required both correct reading and correct timing to use. He found it, occupied it, and from inside it the fight resolved itself with the blunt, efficient finality of a mathematical proof reaching its conclusion.
Two strikes. One each. Carefully placed.
The stairwell went quiet.
Six Grey Scythes occupied the landing and the stairs in various configurations of incapacitation. None of them were going to be doing anything requiring significant physical effort for at least the next hour. Several of them were going to have very specific bruises in very specific locations that a good combat medic would immediately recognize as deliberate.
Sieg stepped over the last one, descended the remaining stairs, and pushed open the lower door.
The knot of students on the other side parted around him with the instinctive, wide-berth deference that had become, over the past two days, something approaching a consistent social phenomenon.
He holstered the Desert Eagle. Adjusted his tie.
Sieg kept walking.
The news reached Vera Krauss four minutes later.
She received it without visible reaction, which was her custom. Processed it with the methodical thoroughness of someone who had long since learned that the first response to unexpected information was rarely the correct one and always the most expensive.
Elsa, beside her, said nothing. She was good at that — the blank teal eyes forward, grey-streaked hair falling straight to her shoulders, the collapsible scythe folded and clipped at her side as though it were simply part of the uniform. She occupied space with the ghostlike quality that made people remember she had been there only after she'd already gone.
Vera looked at the report. At the timeline. At the specific, precise nature of the injuries — calibrated, controlled, none of them accidental, none of them excessive.
He's not fighting defensively.
He's sending a message.
She folded the report. Put it in her pocket. And went to her next class, because whatever came next required thought, and thought required time, and time required the appearance of normalcy.
The Grey Scythes would not be sending a third unit today.
The corridor between the library annex and the north gymnasium was longer than it looked on the academy map — a consequence of the building's original architecture, which had been designed by someone with strong opinions about dramatic sightlines and very little regard for efficient pedestrian routing. It ran nearly forty meters from one end to the other, its walls lined with display cases containing trophies and historical photographs of Nightblade Academy's more presentable alumni.
Between fourth and fifth period, it was, briefly, almost entirely empty.
Sieg walked it at his usual pace.
He was three-quarters of the way through when the display case to his left reflected, in its glass, the shapes of people emerging from the parallel service corridor behind him.
He counted reflections without turning.
Five. Moving with the particular quiet of people who had been trained specifically in the art of quiet movement, which was a different and more concerning quality than people who were simply trying to be sneaky. These were not brawlers. They moved like the Crimson Daggers' insignia suggested — bladed, precise, and entirely comfortable with the idea of getting very close to someone before they knew the distance had closed.
A sixth reflection appeared ahead.
She had been waiting in an alcove beyond the trophy cases — positioned at the corridor's far end to cut off the forward exit while the five behind compressed from the rear. A girl with wavy dark auburn hair falling loosely past her shoulders, iron ring blades held loosely between her fingers with a deceptive casualness that made them look almost decorative — right up until the moment they began to move. She stood with the particular quality of someone who found the situation privately amusing and was doing a professional job of not showing it. Her hazel eyes caught the corridor light with a sly, knowing gleam.
Sieg recognized her.
Hui Lin. One of Wei Xiu's lieutenants.
So the Crimson Daggers are sending named assets.
Interesting.
Behind him, the five had stopped moving. The corridor was sealed — forty meters of trophy cases and stone floor, one exit blocked by Hui Lin and five trained Crimson Dagger students behind him, and no service door within reasonable distance.
Hui Lin looked at him down the length of the corridor. Her expression carried the particular quality of someone who respected what they were about to do and expected to be respected in return.
"Brenner-san," she said. Her voice was measured, carrying the same musical grace her movement did. "I would ask you to reconsider your position at Nightblade Academy. For your own sake."
"I don't know you," Sieg said. "My answer is a no."
Something shifted in Hui Lin's eyes — not surprise, not disappointment, but the quiet settling of a decision already made, finding its final form.
The iron ring blades sang against their mounts as her wrists rotated.
"Then we begin," she said.
The five behind him moved first.
Sieg drew the ninjato.
The blade cleared the saya in one clean arc that caught the corridor light and held it for a fraction of a second — a brief, bright line in the narrow space — and then it was moving, and the fraction of a second was over.
The lead student of the five had a paired set of short blades, which he brought to bear with the practiced speed of someone who had drilled the opening sequence hundreds of times. The sequence was good. Technically sound, well-coordinated, the kind of attack that succeeded against opponents who fought within expected parameters.
Sieg's ninjato didn't meet the blades.
It went between them — a narrow, precise insertion that found the gap in the paired-blade guard with the clinical accuracy of someone who had spent years studying exactly this problem — and the pommel, following through, found the student's chin with a short, sharp impact that snapped his head back and ended his contribution to the proceedings immediately.
The second student, a boy with a short straight blade, came in hard from the right with a horizontal sweep that had real commitment behind it — the kind of strike that accepted the risk of overextension in exchange for genuine force. Sieg let it come. At the last moment, he dropped low, below the sweep's arc, felt the displaced air move over his head, and drove his shoulder into the boy's leading hip. The impact redirected his momentum sideways. He hit the trophy case with a sound of rattling glass and did not immediately recover his footing.
Third. Fourth. They came almost simultaneously, which was brave and also the wrong choice in a corridor this narrow — the width didn't support two people attacking abreast without interfering with each other's lines. Sieg used the interference. Stepped into the pocket where their combined attack created its own obstacle, and from there the ninjato worked in short, controlled movements — not slashing, not striking to injure, but deflecting, redirecting, using the blade the way a river uses its banks: to send things where it wanted them to go.
The third student went into the fourth. The fourth went down. The third stumbled over the fourth and caught himself against the wall, and Sieg was past them before either recovered.
The fifth had hung back — a deliberate choice, the kind made by someone who had been watching the first four and updating their approach accordingly. They held a weighted chain, coiled and ready, and they knew how to use the corridor's length as a weapon in its own right. The chain came out fast and low, aimed for the ankles — a sweep designed to create a fall rather than a cut, because falls were what chains were best at producing.
Sieg stepped onto the chain.
Not over it. Onto it — planting his boot on the leading arc mid-flight, pinning it to the floor and killing its momentum completely. The student on the other end felt the sudden, jarring stop and had approximately half a second to process what had happened before Sieg's free hand caught the chain three links up and pulled. The student came forward, off-balance, into a throw that deposited them against the corridor wall with controlled, unharmful force.
Four seconds. Five opponents.
Hui Lin had been moving.
She was fast.
Faster than the five behind him, faster than the Grey Scythes in the stairwell, fast in the particular way of someone whose weapon was built into her body and required no draw time, no adjustment, no gap between intention and execution. The iron ring blades moved with her wrists in fluid, continuous arcs — not the linear strikes of blade-based combat but something more circular, more rhythmic, the geometry of a weapon that was always already in motion.
Sieg met the first arc with the flat of the ninjato, turning the ring blade's edge away from his forearm.
The impact ran up both their arms.
She didn't stop. The arc continued, became the beginning of the next arc, and the next — a continuous, linked sequence that offered no clean breaks, no moments of full extension where the defender could find their opening. Each deflection demanded the next. The corridor narrowed the available response geometry. The trophy cases on either side imposed limits.
Sieg gave ground. Deliberately — not retreating but repositioning, drawing the exchange down the corridor toward the window at its far end where the morning light came in at an angle. Hui Lin followed, pressing, reading his adjustments and answering them with the focused intensity of someone fully engaged in the problem.
She was very good.
Good enough that for eight full seconds — an eternity in a real fight — the corridor held only the clean, metallic conversation of ring blade against ninjato and the sound of two people moving at the edge of their capabilities.
Then Sieg stopped giving ground.
The shift was subtle — a slight change in the weight distribution of his footwork, a half-step forward instead of the expected half-step back. Hui Lin read it and adjusted, committing to a double-arc combination that her training had correctly identified as the right answer to that particular footwork pattern.
It was the right answer to that footwork pattern.
It was not the right answer to what came after it.
Sieg let the double arc come, deflected both with crossed wrists — a technique that accepted the full force of both strikes simultaneously and redirected them outward, opening a gap in the center of her guard that lasted less than a second.
He stepped into it.
The ninjato's pommel found her solar plexus — short, precise, the kind of strike that bypassed armor and technique entirely and addressed the fundamental human problem of needing to breathe. The air left her in one sharp, involuntary expulsion. Her arms dropped. The ring blades, still technically in motion, lost their direction and fell into the loose, uncoordinated arcs of someone whose central engine had just stalled.
Sieg caught her before she fell.
It was an instinctive movement — one hand at her arm, steadying, keeping her on her feet rather than letting her go down onto the stone floor. He held her there for the two seconds it took for the initial shock to pass and for something approaching functional equilibrium to return.
Hui Lin looked up at him. Her eyes, closed now, held the particular expression of someone who had been entirely committed to a course of action and had arrived, with great speed and great surprise, at an outcome they had not planned for. Not defeat, exactly — or not only defeat. Something more like recognition.
"You held back," she said. Her voice was still controlled, even with the breath still catching.
"Yes," Sieg said.
A pause.
"Why?"
He considered the question with the brief, genuine attention it deserved. "Because you're good," he said. "Besides, this clearly wasn't your idea."
Hui Lin looked at him for a moment longer. Then, with the careful dignity of someone reclaiming their footing in more than the literal sense, she straightened. He let go of her arm. She stepped back. The iron ring blades settled, still, at her wrists.
She said nothing further.
She turned, walked to where her subordinates were in various stages of recovering themselves from the corridor floor, and began the quiet, professional work of getting them mobile.
Sieg sheathed the ninjato.
He picked up his tactical manual — it had, again, ended up on the floor — and tucked it back under his arm.
I really need a bag.
He kept walking.
From the library annex doorway, held slightly ajar by a hand that had not moved for the duration of the exchange, Nadia Burns released a breath she had not been aware of holding.
Kirika Matthews stood beside her, both pistols still holstered, her usual grin present but quieter than normal — the grin of someone who had just witnessed something that had rearranged several of her working assumptions and was in the process of filing the update.
"He caught her," Kirika said.
"Yes," Nadia said.
"That wasn't necessary. Tactically speaking."
"No," Nadia agreed.
A pause.
"Huh," said Kirika.
Nadia watched Sieg's retreating figure until it turned the corner at the corridor's far end and disappeared. Her pale eyes were doing what they did when she was thinking past the immediate information — moving slightly, fractionally, assembling something larger from smaller pieces.
"He told her she was good," Nadia said, almost to herself. "And that it wasn't her idea."
Kirika considered this. "Is that significant?"
"It means he already knows who gave the order." Nadia let the door close. "It means he's been paying attention."
She turned from the door.
"It also means," she added, with the quiet, careful tone of someone revising a long-held position, "that Yumi Hasegawa's instincts were not entirely wrong."
Kirika raised an eyebrow.
Nadia said nothing further on the subject and walked away, which Kirika recognized as the loudest possible confirmation.
Yumi Hasegawa arrived at the library annex corridor at a pace that was technically not running, in the same way that a controlled explosion was technically not a fire.
Serena was three steps behind her, green eyes sharp and scanning. Ayaka flanked left with the coiled readiness of someone who had been prepared to fight since the moment they'd heard the word ambush and was experiencing some frustration at the possibility that the opportunity had already passed.
They turned the corner.
And stopped.
The corridor presented them with: six Crimson Dagger students in various stages of picking themselves up from the floor, one of them — Hui Lin, unmistakably — standing upright but still with the careful stillness of someone whose body was conducting an internal audit.
Trophy cases intact.
Windows intact.
Stone floor scuffed in four specific locations that told, to the trained eye, a very clear and very recent story.
No Sieg Brenner.
Ayaka looked at the fallen students. Looked at the scuff marks. Looked at the specific, targeted nature of the damage, which told the same story the Grey Scythes' infirmary report had told earlier that morning, which she had not yet heard but would, and whose conclusion she was already intuiting from the available evidence.
"He already —"
"Yes," Serena said.
Yumi said nothing.
She stood at the corridor's entrance and looked at the aftermath of a fight she had arrived too late to witness, let alone influence, and felt — underneath the frustration, underneath the territorial heat that rose automatically at the sight of Crimson Dagger insignia in her academy's corridors — something that took her a moment to correctly identify.
Relief.
Unwelcome. Complicated. Real.
She pushed it down, because this was not the moment for it, and turned her amber eyes to Hui Lin, who had looked up at their arrival with an expression that was professional and carefully neutral and giving nothing away.
"Hui Lin," Yumi said.
"Hasegawa-san," Hui Lin replied.
A pause. The kind that held an entire conversation between two people who understood each other's positions completely and were deciding how much of that understanding to acknowledge out loud.
"Tell Wei Xiu," Yumi said, and her voice had lost the theatrical edge it sometimes carried — what was left was quieter, and in some ways more dangerous for the quiet, "that the next person she sends into my corridors is going to have a much less comfortable morning."
Hui Lin held her gaze for a moment.
Then, with a precision that was its own form of response, she inclined her head — minimal, exact, carrying within it the acknowledgment of a message received and the promise of its delivery.
Yumi turned.
Serena and Ayaka fell into step beside her as she walked back the way they'd come — back toward wherever Sieg Brenner currently was, blissfully unaware or simply unbothered, which amounted to the same thing.
"He didn't need us," Ayaka said, after a moment. Not sadly. Observationally.
"No," Yumi said.
"He handled the Grey Scythes too, apparently. Twice."
"I know."
"So technically —"
"Ayaka."
"Yes, Yumi-sama?"
Yumi's jaw was set. Her eyes were forward. The wild smile was absent, replaced by the particular expression she wore when something had reorganized her thinking and she was still in the process of deciding what to do with the reorganization.
"Find him," she said. "Before anyone else does."
Ayaka's brass-plated gloves creaked as her hands closed.
"On it," she said, and meant it.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)