Somewhere In New York
The room cracked.
It wasn't an explosion. It wasn't a quake.
It was pure rage.
Malakov slammed his fist into the arm of his obsidian chair, and the reinforced alloy fractured down the middle. The veins on his hand bulged, glowing faintly violet—his synthetic blood reacting to emotional overload.
The monitors in front of him flickered.
Each one showed a different angle of the failed ambush—the ghouls shredded, the Crimson Grimoire ripped from Calen's corpse, Lucifer walking through the smoke untouched. Unbothered. Victorious.
Mocking him.
Malakov's eye twitched.
He stood suddenly.
The chair scraped violently against the polished steel floor.
"He took it…" he whispered. "He took it like it was nothing."
His voice wasn't calm.
It trembled.
Not with fear.
With insult.
He turned to the central screen and hurled the nearest metal datapad at it.
CRACK!
