Heishi Kyu

Kael read the pipework like a second language, tracing the dump line by eye while ND-E got lost in the noise. He put two daggers into Cinderwalker on the first exchange and kept finding the gaps after, sneak attack after sneak attack chipping the thing down while everyone else argued about wrenches. When the server room cracked open, his instinct was pure heist logic: subvert the security system, make the smuggling job trivial, worry about St. Crow later. He lost that argument gracefully enough, mostly because information turned out to matter more than he expected — especially once Now's real name hit the table.

Mistarion sat out the puzzle entirely, meditating through the argument over wrenches and welds until the portents told him, with real confidence, that the plan on the table would work. In the fight he leaned on witch bolt, arcing lightning through Cinderwalker's superheated frame again and again, calm and mechanical about it even as the thing nearly cooked three of his crewmates. He showed no particular reaction to St. Crow's name or Heishi Q's unveiling — whatever is buried in his own past, it didn't surface tonight, not even as a flicker.

Now took the brunt of Cinderwalker's attention from the moment the doors opened, armoring up, swinging her blade, and finally going down hard, thrown clear and unconscious as the floor caught fire around her. But the fight wasn't the thing that hit her. When ND-E read the salvaged name off the corrupted server — Heishi Kyu — she went still and then said it plainly, for the first time, in front of everyone: that's her real name, Now was a name she took to disappear, and someone dangerous enough to be worth vanishing for might already be looking.

Verum hung back and did what he does best — guidance on Kael's throwing arm, a shared healing word that caught both Now and Kael at once, a timely Gust of Solar Radiance to soften Cinderwalker up. He stayed quiet through most of the planning, content to let the group's indecision be its own kind of answer, the way his soulborn's old habit of "I don't care" let other people pick the restaurant. When Heishi Q's name came out, he offered the only thing that fit: that the threads of fate seem to have pulled all of them together for a reason nobody's found yet.

ND-E spent the puzzle chasing pipe runs through the clutter, distracted half the time by the thought of St. Crow's fingerprints all over this place, then redeemed it by cracking the exploit on Cinderwalker's damage type and landing the killing information the crew needed. In the server room he did what he does best — stabilized a dying system, salvaged what the virus hadn't already eaten, and read St. Crow's name straight off the evidence. Finding out that St. Crow had been hunting for Now's real identity didn't shake him; if anything, it was the first solid trace of his nemesis he's had in longer than he'd like to admit, and he said so, almost pleased.

Velveteen tasted the wheels — obviously — and got the blue one right before snapping it clean off the axle on an overenthusiastic crit, a fact nobody is going to let him forget. He spent the Cinderwalker fight getting shot at from across the room no matter where he stood, loudly cataloguing the injustice of it, before finishing the thing off with a vault over its back and a paperclip jammed into the right socket at exactly the right moment. When the talk turned to Heishi Q and dangerous people hunting Now, he sat down in the middle of the group and meditated, unbothered, more interested in where the information points next than in what it means for anyone's feelings.