“Never,” the trickster swears, meaning it with every inch of his wicked soul.

“I wanted…to be a leaf,” she whispers, clearly delirious as her eyelids flutter shut. “I wanted to be…a leaf…but I never meant to fall…” Her soft, nonsensical words trail off as her eyes shut.

A moment later, the elevator begins to move slowly upward once more.

Seokga stares up at the mirror above and wonders what in the seven hells just happened.

The body is a fucking mess, slumped on the navigation console in the ship’s bridge, a bloody, heartless slab of unmoving flesh. Seokga stares at it in disgust and pity as Yeomra—having kept his word and descended “very dramatically” onto the ship an hour before like it “was the plan all along” to “deliver divine justice”—secures the skeletal chains around Soo-min. The bonds are unbreakable, forged in Yeomra’s death magic, the bones sourced from corpses of long-dead prisoners who died within penitentiary walls. Only gods can remove the shackles, as long as they are not the one imprisoned within them.

It looks as if Captain Lee put up a fight. One of the bridge’s long, horizontal windows has a crack down the middle. The navigation console’s many levers are all—according to Yeomra—disarranged. Somewhere in the struggle, Captain Lee must have hit the ship’s intercom. His impressive leather seat is on its side, and the wheels had still been slowly spinning as Seokga (after setting Kisa gently on his bed under the watchful eyes of Hajun and Somi) sprinted into the room. Bloodstains splatter the floor, although Soo-min’s hands and clothing are almost impressively tidy. The captain himself is slumped over the console.

Soo-min’s typically unruffled hair is a mess, her lipstick smudged around the gag stuffed in her mouth. “I didn’t do it!” she had been wailing to anyone who had listened. “I didn’t! I-I would never—he was—we were—I didn’t do this!” Unfortunately for her, Soo-min’s voice exactly matches the voice broadcast over the entire ship. Yeomra had stuffed the gag in her mouth with gusto when he caught her running to the I-95, presumably to hide in the midst of the chaos.

Hwanung, unsurprisingly, is nowhere in sight. The god fled directly after the murder—Seokga has spent the past hour making various lengthy calls to the other deities, recapping everything from Hwanin’s murder to today’s events. There’s a watch out for him, and once Seokga wraps up this fucking nightmare, he’ll hunt his nephew to the ends of the fucking realms.