Raff began to explain all the plans he would make to conquer the state of Quariz. Aniel and the others seemed to listen attentively. After a long night they rested.Raff also returned to his apartment to rest. But soon there was a bell ringing along with the sound of knocking at the door of his apartment. Raff immediately opened the door to his apartment to find Nella standing outside."Come in, Nel," Raff said as he closed the door after Nella had entered."I'm sure you'll have some questions for me," Raff said after they sat down."What's really going on, Raff? Why do you suddenly want to take over the state of Quariz?" asked Nella."I was given a mission to do so. It's good that we have to take action against the government of the State of Quariz, which is getting worse every year. The suicide rate is also increasing in this country. The future of the State of Quariz is definitely very bleak, more so than we have ever felt," Raff replied."Impossible. You have such a mission from y

Arnold's face had gone the color of old paper, and for a moment he simply stood there between his two guests, one hand still resting on the hood of the classic car he'd been describing a moment before. His mouth opened, then closed. The two clients glanced between him and Raff, sensing something they weren't part of. Raff let the silence stretch. He remembered this about Arnold from school how he used to go quiet right before he lied, how his eyes would flick sideways as if searching the air for a script. Nothing about him had changed except the suit. The clerk who had escorted Raff up excused himself quietly, sensing the tension, and slipped back toward the elevator. Arnold recovered enough to force a laugh, telling his guests that Raff was an old friend from school days, an unexpected surprise, nothing to worry about. He asked them to give him a few minutes. The two clients an older man with a gold watch and a younger woman scrolling through car specs on a tablet exchanged

Six months into his term, Alfred Timothy no longer flinched when strangers recognized him on the street. Louge City had rebuilt itself around him in ways that still surprised even Raff, who had engineered most of it from behind a curtain nobody in the city government had ever thought to pull back. Alfred's approval numbers, according to the last independent poll Nixia had shown him over breakfast, sat somewhere north of eighty percent, a figure unheard of for any sitting official in the state of Quariz. Raff arrived at the mayor's office in the early afternoon, riding his motorcycle through streets that no longer needed his interference to run smoothly. The potholes Nichol had left unrepaired for a decade were gone. The old municipal building had a new water system, paid for out of a budget that no longer bled into private accounts. None of it required magic. It only required someone willing to stop stealing. Alfred's secretary waved him through without an appointment, a courtesy

The first attack came through a video that surfaced on every major platform in Hound Province within the space of a single morning. It showed Alfred, or someone who looked enough like him from a distance, taking an envelope from a well-dressed man outside a restaurant in Tyrant City. The caption claimed the envelope contained a bribe from a construction conglomerate looking to win contracts once Alfred took the governor's seat. Aniel brought the video to Raff's attention before breakfast, her tablet already loaded with three different versions of it circulating under different account names, each with slightly different captions but the same doctored footage. Raff watched it twice, then asked her to slow down the frame where the envelope changed hands. The man's face was blurred just enough to make identification difficult, and the timestamp in the corner didn't match the shadows falling across the restaurant awning. Whoever had made it knew what they were doing, but they hadn't

The first person to notice the pattern was not a spy or a soldier but a mid-level analyst in the Ministry of Internal Affairs named Priscilla Doane, a woman who had spent eleven years cataloguing corruption cases that never went anywhere and had grown so used to filing them into drawers that opening a new one barely registered as work anymore. She had been assigned, almost as a formality, to compile a retrospective report on the collapse of the Nichol family's political machine, meant for an internal briefing nobody expected to matter. It was only while cross-referencing timelines that she noticed the shape of something underneath the surface noise. Every scandal that had toppled a powerful figure over the past year followed the same rhythm. A video or document would surface from an untraceable account. It would be timed to land just before some public moment that made the damage irreversible. The evidence, when checked, was never fabricated, only devastatingly complete, as if some