Listening to the quiet young man speak with his proper voice, safely within their bubble of silence, the taller young man finally felt himself relax somewhat. Just the slightest softening of his posture for the first time since he'd found himself forced to break into the cathedral. He let out a breath he wasn't even sure he'd been holding while he listened to his hooded acquaintance. His grin faltered ever so slightly, however, when the quiet young man mentioned that he'd acquired fourteen, just like they'd talked about. He accepted the plastic cards quietly, pushing them deep into an inner pocket within his coat. He wouldn't say a word about them, or inquire as to the nature of the recent Eufi and Dave. He understood, already. [color=BC8F8F]"I was going to get some food, before meeting up with you. It's been a little while since we've sat down for a meal together. Gives us time to talk some things over. I don't think tonight is the right night to put things into action."[/color] He allowed those last few words to hang in the air, feeling them reverberate in the spaces between the silence, spaces only his ears could hear. It was like the sound of the organ echoing throughout the Cathedral, undulating repetitions of the original sounds that folded upon themselves and wove a tapestry of discordant overtones - a true cacophony, but an effect he'd always found to be calming and grounding. His rêverie lasted but a moment before he took in a breath and answered in a more subdued, hushed tone than before. [color=dodgerblue]"It's... interesting you should say that, actually,"[/color] he began, pausing to glance over his shoulder in a rare display of nervousness. [color=dodgerblue]"It was to be my unhappy duty to inform you that tonight couldn't be the night, at all. I only have-..."[/color] This time, his voice cut off sharply, and he visibly stiffened. Far behind them, at the entrance to the alleyway, he heard the sound of trainers - footsteps upon the cement. It was a minuscule sound, barely perceptible to the ear, but the vibrations produced by those footsteps carried far enough to intersect the edge of his bubble of silence. The folding reverberations in the spaces between the silence produced in his ears a sound more like someone scuffing their shoes right next to him. He slowly lifted a single finger and pressed it to his slightly-parted lips, narrowing his eyes briefly at the quiet young man. [color=dodgerblue][/color] He nodded at the other before turning swiftly on his heel, his longcoat flourishing about him without a sound. At this point, his every move was silent, even unto his own ears. He locked his gaze upon the corner of the alleyway, near the street he'd left just moments ago. The footsteps were getting closer, and something about them suggested that they weren't those of a simple passerby. They were slow, measured steps; he could tell by the rolling sound of leather and polyester against cement that each step was weighted toward the front. Whoever was approaching did so very carefully, on the tips of their toes. [color=dodgerblue][i]That's definitely someone sneaking around,[/i][/color] he thought warily. [color=dodgerblue][i]Did I cock this up? Did someone actually [b]hear[/b] me?[/i][/color] He mentally kicked himself as the person slowly stepped into view. It was the student-looking guy he'd passed a little too close to earlier - the one who'd almost glanced back, as though he'd noticed him. [color=dodgerblue][/color] he virtually shouted in the voice only he and his companion could hear. Realizing just how badly he'd slipped up, he felt a burning rush of heat colour his pale cheeks a sharp crimson as anger welled up within him. Being noticed by someone at all was bad enough, but to have been [i]followed[/i] thereafter? It had never happened. Not once, in Lightbridge. He clenched his jaw, grinding his molars together in a terrible habit he'd developed in recent years as a stress response. His grip on his pocketwatch tightened as he raised it up before him, flicking the cover open to reveal the multi-faceted acrylic crystal window and the three hands ticking their lives away beneath. The window of the watch had fourteen individual facets; of them, thirteen seemed to glint even in the minimal light of the alleyway. One facet remained dull no matter the angle of the light striking it. The dapper young lad glanced down at that narrow, triangular glass edge briefly, and nodded to himself. The student at the entrance to the alleyway was a tall young man in his early twenties - about the same age as the one he thought he was following. He was exceptionally tall and had an athlete's build. The weight of tumultuously mixed emotions was set upon his brow; uncertain scrutiny flirted with a kind of confused fear as his eyes danced around his surroundings on high alert. He took extremely slow steps, and stood in a defensive posture, arms up and knees bent slightly as he rounded the corner into the alleyway. The dapper young lad waited until he'd taken two full steps towards them before making his move. He suddenly sprang forward, his feet propelling him up the alleyway noiselessly. He allowed the silence to linger behind him in his wake, keeping his quiet young companion in its grasp as he rushed the approaching student. The twenty-odd yards between them closed quickly. As the silence moved along with him, it pushed out before him, stretching out like the wretched claws of Death itself. Three seconds before he struck, the unfortunate student first became aware that something was wrong. He felt as though his ears suddenly needed to pop; a half-second later, he realized that the odd sensation was actually his apparently having suddenly gone deaf. He spun around wildly, his heart pounding - an incredibly unsettling sensation when [i]felt[/i] in one's ears, but not [i]heard[/i]. He raked wild eyes around the alley, the street, the nearby buildings. He could feel the spectre of his final breath approaching. He just didn't know how to identify that feeling. The dapper young lad took the final sprinting stride and skidded to a halt mere inches from the still-unaware student. He was so close that as he exhaled, his next exhalation warmed the back of the taller man's neck. To him, the next few seconds seemed to go by with all the haste of a stone making its way up a hill. His soon-to-be-victim bristled at the sensation of breath upon his nape, hunching his shoulders and whirling around so quickly that he stumbled. He took in a sharp, soundless gasp of air as he lost his footing, and finally saw the dapper young lad he thought he'd noticed before. He only saw him for a fraction of a second, though. As his centre of gravity shifted and he began to fall back, his vision was obscured by the attacker's palm. The black-coated lad's fingers dug into the student's temples, cheekbones, and hairline, gripping tight enough to cause a flare of pain, as well as hold him awkwardly upright, unable to fall or to regain his footing. If he'd had a second more, perhaps he could have steadied himself. Instead, the shorter yet somehow so very much stronger young man depressed the dial atop his pocketwatch and held it down; the effect of this simple action was swift, and severe. The student's entire musculature contracted in a massive seizure, his jaw flying open in a gut-wrenching screech that would never be heard by anyone - not even himself. Beneath his captor's thin, graceful, yet powerful grip, his skull was buzzing, vibrating at such a high frequency that human ears couldn't have picked it up even outside the silence. In that split second, every atom that made up his head had been forced to vibrate at frequencies exponentially higher than nature ever intended. The molecular bonds that made up the cells of his pia mater began to degrade as hypersonic waves pulsed out of the dapper young hand. In essence, his head itself had shifted quantum states, each subatomic particle being vibrated across the quantum spectrum from singular particles into wave-forms. The only particles known to exist that exhibit both particle and wave-form states were photons - light itself. No solid matter could withstand such a feat. The dapper young man closed his eyes, feeling the undertones to the vibrational matrix he'd just set up in the space around his victim's head. He let out half a breath, relaxing the deluge a fraction of a second after it had begun. A tiny spasm tickled the outer edge of his left eyebrow as he focused on the undertones, using them to guide the vertices of the three-dimensional field of hypersonic, changing its shape. His pocketwatch audibly ticked the first full second since he'd breathed on the back of the hapless student's neck. That normally tiny sound was deafening in the spaces between the silence. As that tick reverberated around him, through him, he took in a sharp breath. The shape of the sound waves coalesced, finally; he'd targeted the vertices of the virtual polygon of sound waves to intersect with specific anatomical features - or at least, their general locations. The next tock of the pocketwatch smashed through the spaces between the silence as the student's pia mater was lacerated in a dozen places, the delicate membrane ripped apart by the intensity of its own atomic vibration; the same process ripped through several arteries, and turned the cerebellum and brain stem into a liquid mix of all the component matter that it used to be. The student stopped seizing as he hemorrhaged; he stopped breathing as his brain stem, the centre of the brain where the most basic bodily functions were kept going, liquified. He went limp in the young man's grasp as the third second ticked out of the watch, and it was over. He fell into a crumpled heap on the pavement below, dark rivulets of blood streaming from his ears and nostrils. The dapper young lad let out a half-annoyed, half-satisfied huff as he dropped his arm to his side, opening and closing his hand. It would tingle for a few moments. As he turned around, he turned his gaze back upon the glinting surfaces of his pocketwatch, allowing himself a half-grin as the one dull facet joined the other thirteen in bright reflection of even the softest light source. He strode casually back over to his quiet young friend and held his pocketwatch up for the other to examine. As he spoke, neither his voice nor posture seemed to give any indication that he was in any way concerned by what had just transpired, or that he particularly cared about the corpse lying in a heap just within the boundaries of the silence. [color=dodgerblue]"Well, with that done, it turns out I don't have to give you bad news tonight, mate,"[/color] he quipped in light but restrained tones. [color=dodgerblue]"That makes fourteen apiece. However, this is my fifteenth corpse. We, erm... well, we certainly have some things to discuss over food. Did you have anything in particular in mind? My treat."[/color]