The living room was lit by a variety of candles, standing separately on tables and nightstands, and in the horns of candelabra. Like it was not an ordinary apartment building, but a church during Sunday prayers. Homer and Ofir were sitting on a sofa in the center of the room, leaning on a padded back made of microfiber, a very expensive new material. Guillotine decided to stand and, crossing his arms, leaned his right shoulder against the wall, which was covered with standard orange wallpaper without any drawings. Egon was sitting in an ordinary wooden chair, directly opposite the chair where they had placed Roderick, whose old and weak eyes were adapting to the light after hours of darkness. At first, the old man could see almost nothing, but the temporary blindness began to pass, and the objects in the room, exactly like the figures of people, became accurate and clear. After thirty seconds, the light stopped blinding his eyes, and Roderick could see the four friends looking at him as if he was a great enemy of the people, and he sighed heavily.

"Can I have some water?"

"Homer, get him some water."

Homer reluctantly got up from the couch and walked back to the hallway, and then to the kitchen. He picked up a container of spring water, poured it into a glass he'd taken from the top shelf above the stove, and returned to the living room.

Roderick took a few sips, relaxed a little, and leaned back in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest, his palms tucked under his arms. He lowered his head and stared at the floor, not looking anyone in the eyes.

"Roderick," Egon began, "do you remember the book you told us about, the one about the VV crystals?"

“I do.”

"Do you know exactly in what moment they work and in what moment they don't?"

"I've already told you. What do you want to do with me?"

"Just answer the questions and everything will be fine."

"All right."

Roderick felt a genuine fear for his life, similar to the fear he had felt in the war. And the four boys he hadn't taken seriously at first, looking down on them, had changed since their first meeting. There were wrinkles on their foreheads, tension radiated from their voices, fear for their lives was evident in their eyes, their clothes were dirty and rugged, and there were dark circles under their eyes due to the lack of sleep. In that brief silence, he thought that Ofir, Egon, Guillotine, and Homer were just as afraid as he was, and were just trying to escape.

"The VV crystals," Roderick said, "hold within them what is called vitavis, a blue substance that helps the metentises use metovis, but vitavis itself is nothing without the element. For such cases, there are blacksmiths, based on the book – this is a separate type of metentises, which from ordinary VV crystals, make modified VV crystals, while they themselves cannot use metovis. They encrust the resulting modified crystals into clothing, weapons, and anything else. And as soon as someone is in danger, the crystals immediately trigger, using the element that the blacksmith gave them."

"There's something you're not telling me, Roderick."

"You don't believe me?"

"I had a chance to put your theory to the test today, and nothing happened."

Roderick tensed.

"What do you mean?"

Egon explained what had happened in the square. Roderick asked to see the crossbow from which the shot was fired, and Egon showed him after pulling the arrows out of the magazine.

"It's a multi-shot hand crossbow, sold without a license. And they are sold without a license because it is very difficult to kill someone with such a weak weapon."

"I didn't want to kill Constar."

"It's your mistake."

"My mistake?"

Roderick nodded toward a bookcase in the corner of the living room and asked for the thickest book on the bottom shelf. Homer was about to get up when Guillotine grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back down: «I'll take it, sit down»

He went to the bookcase, bent down, and saw a thick book, with yellow wavy pages and a black, battered cover. Guillotine was already reaching for it when Roderick asked him to be careful, as the book might fall apart due to the weak binding.

When the ancient manuscript was in the old man's hands, he opened the last page, looked at the table of contents, then smoothly flipped to the page he needed and handed it to Egon.

“Read it.”

Egon looked at Roderick, then looked down at the book.

"Read it aloud," Ofir said. "We want to know, too."

"All right, all right, I'll just find the right paragraph."

Roderick raised himself a little in his chair and pointed to the place where he should have started reading. Egon quickly ran his eyes over the paragraph, said:

"The book is written in the first person."

"Yes."

"Was it written by the metentis of those times?"

"Most likely."

"Read what it says already."

Egon cleared his throat and began to read:

…At a time when our great civilization was not yet formed and every metentis was for himself, how many in those bright days I came to fight, I cannot count, there were more than enough enemies. And as I write this book, I can tell you with confidence that I won all the fights, except for one. That very day, I went alone to a town called Pordaus. The path was not close. Halfway across the rolling plains, a man attacked me out of nowhere. He tried to cut me down with his long sword, but I managed to break the distance and immediately attacked in response. This is where the most interesting part begins. All of my fourth-rank killing spells were reflected by four elements of the same rank: water, earth, fire, and air! I've never met a metentis capable of such a thing. All four elements, at such a high level? You've got to be kidding me. Now I would like to make a small digression and say: based on my personal experience, I have divided the metentises into two types. The first type included those who perfectly possessed one element. The second type included those who possessed two. But the four elements? It was beyond my comprehension. From the first minute of the fight, I tried to analyze the strength of the enemy, but he just stood there, and his metovis, living his own life, repelled my attacks, like there was an invisible guardian angel next to him. All my attempts to deal with the enemy quickly exhausted only me. And, as an obvious consequence, I was getting tired, he wasn't. The assassin noticed that I was at my limits and rushed forward and made several chopping blows and managed to cut me in the neck area. It was only a scratch, though. Then came the stabbing blows, but I managed to dodge them as well. When I broke the distance again, my vitavis was almost gone, and I had no choice but to use weak spells. At that moment, I no longer believed that I would get out alive. But it's not my way to give up without a fight. I used a first-rank "fire needle" and to my surprise, it hit the enemy! It went right through his shoulder. But before I realized what had happened, the metentis disappeared and I never saw him again.

A few days later, I tried to analyze our fight, but each time I could not understand how it happened that a fire arrow wounded him? I know that when the metentis runs out of vitavis, he can hardly stand on his feet, because metovis spends not only vitavis, but also the physical strength with which he had everything in order. When I came to Pordaus, I told a good friend of mine about this incident, and he suggested me to go with him to a blacksmith shop nearby, and so I did. The local blacksmith turned out to be a metentis and said that they were able to modify VV crystals in such a way that they could protect their master from deadly attacks, but not from any others. "Apparently the assassin was afraid that you would understand this and ran away," the blacksmith told me. Then he bared his shoulder and showed the numbers 3 and 4...

Roderick interrupted Egon with a gesture and asked:

"Did you realize your mistake?"

"If I had taken a weapon that could kill and fired, my plan would probably have worked."

"Exactly.

"What do these numbers mean?" Homer asked.

"Which ones?"

"The ones you read at the end."

Egon ran his eyes further and said that there was no explanation. Roderick exhaled and said:

"I've read this book inside out. But many things are still unclear to me, since a metentis, who wrote this, thought that some points are clear even to beginners. To read this book to an ordinary person today is the same as if Guillotine was reading hilosophical treatise."

"What do you mean?" Guillotine asked.

"Nothing, just an example."

"So, there were metentises all over the world then?"

"According to the book, yes. However, the numbers occur more than once, and it seems to me that all these ranks, which the author writes about, are directly related to the metentises. The author uses the ranks from the first to the fifth when talking about spells or VV crystals. But with the rank of metentises, everything is a little more complicated. I read about one fight in which the author did not know what level of metentis he fought against, then at the end he would definitely checks the shoulder. Apparently, spells, like metentises, like VV crystals, have their own ranks, and if there is a metentis in front of you, then he will have numbers on his shoulder showing his strength or something like that."

"Why are there exactly two numbers?"

"There are two numbers and an element sign. Most often, the first number was either one or two. The second is three or four, very rarely five or one. However, the blacksmith's first number is three, which I have never seen before."

"Maybe different classes of metentises have different numbers, ordinary ones, for example, one or two, special ones, such as the blacksmith number three. Were there any other numbers?"

"I don't remember. The book has 800 pages! Maybe there were, but I did not attach much importance to this, for me this book until recently was more like a historical collection of myths."

"I think we should ask the Inquisitor about that; he'll tell us a lot of interesting things."

"All right. Does anyone else have any questions for Roderick?"

"I just remembered «Grandfather» told us about Metyr's experiments twenty-five years ago. Have you heard anything about it?" Ofir asked.

"I have no idea."

"Was «Grandfather» somehow connected with the Inquisition?"

"I don't know. If he was, it was only in the role of an intermediary."

"Did the book say anything about Gennox?" Egon asked, without much hope of an answer.

"I don't recollect."

"All right, Roderick. We'll let you go now and we'll apologize. Do you promise to forget everything that happened here?"

"W-w-what the fuck? Hey! Hey! He actually wanted to blow me up in his bunker, and then get out of town, we’ll just let him go and also, we'll apologize? That's fucking ridiculous."

"And we imprisoned the old man in his own house and kept him in a dark room for several hours."

"These are not equivalent things, Egon."

"So, you want to kill him?"

"I already apologized, said that I acted in a state of panic!"

Ofir fell silent.

"Yes, or no? If you want to kill him, do it now or shut the fuck up."

Ofir didn't say anything. Roderick looked into Egon's eyes for the first time and knew he was more than serious.

"Please give me your promise that we will never meet again or better yet, yeah, just kill me now. My old heart won't stand the next time anyway."

Egon looked at Ofir once more, then turned to Roderick back again.

"I promise you. We'll be interviewing the inquisitor in your parlor right now, and then we'll leave."

"Can I go to the kitchen?"

"Yes, go and close the door behind you. If you do anything strange, Roderick, I'll break all your bones myself."

"And I'll bury your half-dead body in the sand and throw stones at your empty head."

"Oh, my God!"

"Guillotine," said Homer, "this is too much."

"And blowing up my friend isn't too much, is it?"

"Everyone, shut the fuck up. Roderick, please go out already."

Roderick snorted and left the living room, closing the door behind him.

"Do you think the Inquisitor wields metovis?"

"Very likely."

"Then we'll interrogate him in a dark room to protect ourselves."

"Egon, you do realize that the Inquisitor can't get out of here alive, right? We've been conferring and the voices are divided. Pussy Ofir and Sweet heart Homer wanted to keep him alive, which is ridiculous to me."

"He's just a hard worker, we can't just kill him. He was following orders and did nothing illegal."

"Ofir, you didn't fall off the oak tree on your way here, did you? He fucking saw our faces. If we let him go, it would be tantamount to suicide. You sent me on a fucking torture to that fucked in the head girl, and now you want to put us all on a bonfire? What’s wrong with you?"

“Fuck off.”

“Calm down, both of you! Let's talk to him first. Then we'll decide.”

"Idiocy."

Egon extinguished all the candles in the living room except for one. He went to the closed door that led to Roderick's parlor, opened it, and went inside. The others followed him. Broken glass flasks cracked under the soles of their shoes as they stumbled over the wreckage of shattered tables and chairs. The Inquisitor was frowning at the room's only light source under his brows. He didn't say anything and waited for what would happen next.

If only they didn't kill me right away, it would take a few more minutes.… Just a few minutes for my life…