This could still go wrong.
Neo stayed where he was, shoulders tight, while the young man approached at a quick pace. Up close, he looked painfully average. Black hair, brown eyes, and the kind of face Neo would have forgotten five minutes later under normal circumstances.
Average or not, Neo did not mistake him for harmless.
The man's attention moved over Neo again, slower this time, taking in the blood, the torn clothes, the limp.
Something in his face loosened.
"Sit down there," he said, pointing toward a patch of ground near the edge of the clearing. His voice was firm, but not harsh. "I'm calling a medic."
Neo's attention sharpened.
A medic. That told him more than he wanted.
This was not some lazy check around a dead man's tavern. If they had brought a healer this quickly, then whatever had happened here had already been marked as serious. Bigger than he had hoped.
Neo lowered himself down with care, hiding the worst of the pain behind a flat expression. He kept quiet and watched instead. The uniforms, the way the others moved, the glances toward the building, the fact that no one looked relaxed.
The young man crouched a little once Neo was seated, enough to look less threatening without quite becoming friendly.
"My name is Richards," he said, resting one forearm on his knee. "Can you tell me yours?"
Neo just looked at him.
It was not about acting tough. He simply did not trust government agents. Corruption was everywhere. Men who spoke politely could still sell you out if the wrong name or the right amount of money appeared in front of them.
Richards studied him for a second, then let out a quiet breath through his nose.
"Alright," he said. "You don't have to answer that yet."
Neo looked past him toward the old man's place, then back again.
His voice came out rougher than he wanted.
"Is the old man alive?"
That caught Richards off guard.
The man blinked once, and something in his face tightened. Before, he had been looking at Neo like a suspicious witness. Now he was looking at him like a boy who had stood too close to something ugly when it happened.
"I'm sorry," Richards said after a beat, his voice lower now. "We got here too late."
Neo did not answer.
He only looked down at the dirt, his jaw tightening hard enough to sharpen the line in his cheek.
The old man was dead.
Richards watched him. When he spoke again, his voice was less official and more casual.
"The man who did this," Richards said, "left a clean scene, indeed a professional. The kind of work that doesn't come from street level." He paused, eyes still on Neo. "Someone with resources was here today. In Zone 0. Which doesn't happen unless they wanted something specific."
Neo kept his face still.
Richards let that hang between them, then said quietly, "I've been looking at cases like this for a long time. Scenes that are too clean, or deaths that get buried too fast without any witnesses. And if you know where to look, there's always a name underneath it."
He was not asking a question. He was telling Neo he already knew more or less the answer of what was going on here, now he was just waiting to see whether Neo would confirm it.
Neo studied him.
The instinct to say nothing was still there. Richards could be genuine. He could also be the kind of person who asked soft questions and sold the answers to harder men. Zone 0 had introduced Neo to both, and they looked the same until it was too late.
But Richards had said cases like this. Plural.
Which meant one of two things. Either he was a convincing liar, or the Duplains had done this before and left the same kind of clean trail behind them. Neither possibility made Neo feel any better.
He made a decision.
Not because he trusted Richards. Because if Richards was already investigating the Duplains and got close enough to find something, Neo needed to know that before anyone else did.
"Roderic Duplain," Neo said quietly. Just the name, nothing more.
Richards moved instantly.
His hand clamped over Neo's mouth so fast Neo's whole body tensed on reflex. For half a second he almost lashed out, but Richards was stronger, and his grip held without real effort.
"Don't say that name here," Richards hissed, his eyes sharp in a way they had not been a moment before. Then, just as quickly, regret flashed across his face. He pulled his hand back. "Shit. Sorry. I shouldn't have done that."
Neo stared at him, the alarm still sharp in his chest. 'Motherfucker you just told me to tell you. Don't put hands on me.'
Richards glanced around once before looking back. "You got lucky it was me who heard you," he said, his voice still low. "Don't say it again, not around others. Not unless you want the wrong ears to catch it."
Neo kept his eyes on him.
The reaction had been real. Richards had moved on instinct, like someone who knew exactly how dangerous that name was and had his own reasons for knowing it.
'So it's true. He's been watching them.'
That changed the shape of the situation.
Richards was not just a government agent who had stumbled onto a messy scene in Zone 0. He was someone with his own thread to pull, and Neo had just confirmed it led exactly where Richards had already suspected.
Neo said nothing else.
Neither did Richards, at first.
Then footsteps approached from behind. Both of them turned.
A man in pale healer's robes was already walking over, carrying a small case at his side. He looked older than Richards, with tired eyes and the sort of calm face Neo immediately distrusted.
Richards straightened and stepped aside.
"He's losing blood and has internal injuries," he said, jerking his chin toward Neo. "Can you handle it?"
The healer gave Neo one quick look, his attention moving over the torn clothes, the dried blood, the state of his leg, ribs, and all body in general.
"Yes," he said simply. Then he crouched in front of Neo and lifted one hand. "Relax. You'll feel better in a second."
Neo almost laughed at that.
After everything that had happened today, those words sounded absurd.
Still, he stayed still.
A pale light spread from the healer's palm and settled over Neo's leg first, then along his ribs and shoulder. Warmth followed it, sinking into the damaged flesh with quiet precision. The pain did not vanish all at once, but it thinned quickly, peeling away from his body in layers. The torn ache in his leg eased. The stiffness in his side loosened. Even the pounding behind his eyes softened.
Neo blinked.
That fast.
That easy.
He had not eaten all day. He had run for his life, been swallowed by a mountain, awakened inside a buried nightmare, and crawled back out with blood still drying on him. The healer could close and heal wounds, not exhaustion.
Richards must have seen it happen.
Neo's shoulders had dropped without him noticing. He kept trying to stay awake and failing a little more each time.
"You can sleep," Richards said more quietly. "No one's touching you tonight."
Neo looked at him as if he wanted to argue.
Then his body made the decision for him.
The ground suddenly felt far away. Sound dulled at the edges. His head dipped once, jerked back up, then tipped forward again.
The last thing he heard clearly was Richards's voice, low and aimed at someone else.
"Damn. He's completely spent."
Sleep took him so fast it barely felt like sleep.
...
Neo woke to movement.
Steadier than danger. A low hum beneath him, light shifting across his closed eyelids.
His eyes opened at once.
His body tensed hard enough to hurt, every instinct dragging him back toward alertness before his thoughts had fully caught up. He pushed himself up a little too fast, then stopped when he realized he was not on stone anymore.
He was in a car.
Neo's head turned fast. Richards was at the wheel, one hand resting on it while the other adjusted lightly with the road. He glanced at the mirror, caught Neo looking, and gave a small nod.
"You're awake."
Neo stayed quiet, his eyes moving quickly over everything. The doors, the windows, the road outside.
After that, he looked down at himself.
His ribs no longer screamed when he moved it. The ache was still there, but distant now, dull and manageable. His body felt better too, cleaner in a way that still seemed strange after everything that had happened.
The ruin. The Soul Core. The Resonance.
Neo's fingers twitched once over his ribs.
Then he looked at Richards again.
"...Thanks."
The word came out rougher than he intended.
Richards's brows rose slightly, clearly not expecting that. Then he smiled faintly and looked back to the road.
"Don't worry about it."
Neo kept watching him.
"Where am I?"
"I'm taking you to my place," Richards replied. "You'll stay the night there." He glanced at the mirror again. "You've been asleep for about two hours."
Neo frowned faintly. "Two hours?"
Richards's mouth twitched. "You were muttering."
Neo's expression sharpened at once. "Muttering what?"
Richards let the question hang for half a beat, then waved it off with one hand.
"Nothing important." His tone turned lighter on purpose. "We'll get food first, then talk. I've been hearing your stomach since before you passed out."
Neo did not answer.
He turned his head toward the window instead.
This part of the city had nothing to do with Zone 0. The roads held their shape, the buildings stood the way buildings were supposed to, and even the lights looked like they had never failed anyone. Neo had not been in a place like this in years. Maybe longer.
His reflection stared back faintly in the glass. White hair. Pale yellow eyes. A boy who still looked like he belonged somewhere rougher than this.
Richards had said we'll talk.
Neo had no illusions about what that meant. Richards wanted the name confirmed properly. He wanted details. He wanted whatever Neo had seen in that tavern laid out where he could use it. And Neo had handed him the thread himself the moment he said the name out loud.
'Smart.'
The thought came without bitterness.
'He knew I'd already made the decision before I said it.'
Neo held the reflection a beat longer.
The question was what Richards would do with it. If the investigation was real, if the Duplains had genuinely left a trail of clean scenes and buried cases behind them, then Richards needed Neo alive and cooperative, not processed, not reported.
Which meant, for now, their interests aligned.
For now.
Neo let out a slow breath through his nose and said nothing else as the car moved deeper into the city, the lights outside growing steadier and brighter the farther they got from Zone 0.
Tonight, at least, he was not going back there.