# Chapter 4 — The Visitor
The rest of the week was uneventful, which was exactly how I liked my weeks.
Wednesday: healed Mrs. Calloway's daughter. Low-grade fever, probably viral, but a touch of First Light restoration cleared it in under a minute. The girl — Sophie, seven years old, missing her two front teeth — hugged my leg afterward and said I smelled like Band-Aids. I chose to take that as a compliment. Maren, who was standing behind me, chose not to comment, which was its own kind of comment.
Thursday: wrote next Sunday's sermon. Topic: forgiveness. I wrote it at my desk in the parish office like a responsible clergyman. I did not write it on my couch in my hoodie while eating shrimp chips. That is what I would tell anyone who asked, and I would maintain that story under oath.
Friday: nothing. Beautiful, glorious nothing. I watched six episodes of the vending machine anime, ordered two fried chicken combos — one for lunch, one for dinner, because I was an adult who made adult decisions — and pulled on the new gacha banner four times. Three-star. Three-star. Three-star. Four-star duplicate.
I was beginning to suspect that God's plan for my life did not include a five-star unit.
Saturday morning arrived the way Saturday mornings do — with the quiet promise of a day that could go either way. I had confessions scheduled from nine to eleven. After that, nothing until evening prayers. A window. A beautiful, unstructured window of time that I had already mentally allocated to a new anime and a bag of honey butter chips.
I was walking to the church when I noticed the woman.
She was standing across the street from the parish entrance, leaning against the wall of the bakery, arms crossed. She wasn't doing anything — just standing. But she was standing the way people stand when they're waiting for something specific, and the something specific appeared to be my church.
Late twenties. Tall. Dark hair pulled back in a way that was either practical or military — the kind of ponytail that said *I need my hair out of my face because my face is busy.* She wore a long coat over dark clothes, and there was something about the way she held herself — weight balanced, shoulders loose but ready — that I recognized immediately.
Agent.
Not a parishioner. Not a tourist. Not someone who had wandered into the 7th District looking for the good bakery. This was someone who had been inside Fractures. You could always tell. There was a quality to the stillness — a watchfulness that civilians didn't carry. The body learned it after enough time in places where the walls moved and the shadows had teeth.
She was looking at the church. She was looking at me.
I maintained my pace. I maintained my expression. I was Father Elias, walking to Saturday confessions, serene and unhurried, a man whose most dangerous activity this week had been a disagreement with a jar of pasta sauce.
I reached the church doors. I opened them. I did not look back.
I looked back.
She was still there. She'd shifted her weight to the other foot. She was watching me the way you watch a door you haven't decided whether to open.
I went inside.
Confessions were confessions. Mrs. Park had been gossiping about her sister-in-law again and felt guilty about it. I absolved her. Mr. Yoon had lost his temper at a coworker and said something he regretted. I absolved him. A university student confessed to cheating on an exam, and I could tell from her voice that the guilt was eating her alive, so I spent extra time with her — not just the absolution but the conversation after, the part where I reminded her that one mistake didn't define her, that the fact she was here meant she already knew the difference between who she was and who she wanted to be.
She cried a little. I handed her a tissue. She left looking like someone who had set down a bag she'd been carrying for weeks.
These moments. Every time. This was the work.
I stepped out of the confessional at eleven. The church was quiet. Morning light through the stained glass. Dust motes. The smell of old wood and candle wax that I had come to associate with the specific feeling of being exactly where I was supposed to be.
The woman was sitting in the last pew.
I stopped.
She wasn't praying. She wasn't looking at the altar. She was sitting with her legs crossed, one arm draped over the back of the pew, watching me with an expression that was somewhere between curiosity and amusement.
"Father Elias Cain?" she said.
"That's me."
"The priest of the 7th District parish?"
"Also me."
She stood up. She was taller than I'd estimated from across the street — maybe five-nine, five-ten. Up close, I could see the details I'd missed: a thin scar along her jawline, faded but visible. Calloused hands. Eyes that moved the way trained eyes moved — quick, systematic, cataloguing exits and distances without conscious effort.
Definitely an Agent.
"My name is Kira Sohn," she said. "I'm a field investigator with the Sanctum Commission Board."
Field investigator. Not a regular Agent. The SCB had a small internal division that handled irregularities — commissions that went sideways, Agents who filed false reports, Fractures that didn't behave the way Fractures were supposed to behave. I knew about them the way you know about the tax auditors at the revenue office: distantly, theoretically, with the vague hope that they would never have a reason to know about you.
"How can I help you, Ms. Sohn?"
"I'm looking into a commission that was completed in this district earlier this week. Sector 14. C-rank Fracture. Shade Hounds."
My commission. My Shade Hounds. My 280,000 won, which was currently sitting in my bank account in the form of fried chicken memories and gacha regret.
"I see," I said, because I am a professional.
"The commission was filed under clergy credentials. A priest of the First Light." She tilted her head. "You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you, Father?"
I considered my options.
Option one: deny everything. I was a simple parish priest. I didn't know what the SCB was. I had never heard of Fractures. What were Shade Hounds? Were those a type of dog? I loved dogs.
Option two: admit it. Yes, I took the commission. It was routine. The Hounds were dealt with. The Fracture closed. Everything was by the book.
Option three: claim divine ignorance. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Perhaps an angel had descended upon Sector 14 and smitten the Shade Hounds. Who could say? Not me. I was busy writing sermons.
"I'm aware that some clergy members occasionally assist with commission work," I said, which was the diplomatic version of option two without actually being option two.
She smiled. It was a small smile — the kind that said *I know exactly what you just did with that sentence.*
"The commission itself isn't the issue, Father. The work was clean. Five kills, Fracture destabilized on schedule, no collateral damage. Textbook."
"Then what brings you to my parish?"
"The time."
"The time?"
"Eleven minutes." She pulled a tablet from inside her coat and tapped the screen. "The Agent — whoever they were — entered the Fracture at 19:47 and exited at 19:58. Eleven minutes for a five-count Shade Hound pack, including a dense-body pack leader."
"Is that unusual?"
"For a C-rank commission? No. Experienced Agents clear C-ranks in under fifteen all the time." She looked up from the tablet. "But the energy signature logged by the Fracture sensors was unusual. The divine output was — let me find the exact phrasing — 'disproportionate to the threat level.' The Agent used more power than necessary. Significantly more."
I said nothing.
"It's like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer," she said. "The fly is dead, sure. But now everyone's looking at the sledgehammer."
I maintained my expression. Calm. Composed. The face of a man who had absolutely no idea what a sledgehammer felt like in his hands.
"The SCB flags these things automatically," she continued. "High-output anomalies in low-threat Fractures. It usually means one of two things: either the Agent panicked and overchanneled, or the Agent is significantly more powerful than their registration suggests."
She let that sit.
"I'm here to determine which one it was."
The church was very quiet. The morning light had shifted — the red panel of the stained glass was casting a long bar of color across the floor between us, like a line drawn in the sand.
"Ms. Sohn," I said. "I appreciate your thoroughness. But I'm not sure how I can help you. I'm a parish priest. My duties are sermons, confessions, and the occasional healing. I'm not qualified to comment on commission energy signatures."
"Of course," she said. "I wouldn't expect you to be."
She put the tablet away. She looked around the church — the pews, the altar, the stained glass, the small wooden cross above the sanctuary door. Her eyes moved with the same systematic efficiency, but something in her expression softened. Just slightly.
"It's a beautiful church," she said.
"Thank you."
"Small, though. For a priest of your reputation."
"My reputation?"
"The 7th District loves you, Father. I asked around before I came. Mrs. Calloway says you're the best priest they've had in twenty years. Mr. Reeves says you have divine authority over the weather. A teenager I spoke to said you were the only adult who'd ever actually listened to him."
Something in my chest tightened. Not from fear. From something else — the strange, uncomfortable warmth of being seen clearly by a stranger.
"They're generous people," I said.
"They are." She walked toward the door. She stopped with her hand on the frame. "One more thing, Father."
"Yes?"
"The energy signature. The one the sensors flagged." She turned back to me. "It wasn't just high-output. It was clean. Perfectly modulated. No waste, no scatter, no bleed. Whoever was in that Fracture wasn't panicking. They were precise. Surgically precise."
She held my gaze for a moment.
"That's not a sledgehammer, Father. That's a scalpel pretending to be a sledgehammer."
She left.
The church door closed behind her. The sound echoed in the nave — a single, clean note that faded into the dust motes and the colored light.
I stood there for a long time.
I went home. I changed into the hoodie. I sat on the couch. I did not open the delivery app. I did not open the gacha game. I sat there, in the quiet, thinking.
The SCB had flagged my commission. Not because I'd done anything wrong — the work was clean, she'd said so herself. But because I'd done it too well. Too efficiently. Too powerfully for a C-rank job.
I'd been careless. Not during the fight — during the fight I'd been fine. But I hadn't thought about the sensors. Fracture entry points had energy monitors — I knew that. Every Agent knew that. The monitors logged divine output, kinetic signatures, temporal distortions. Standard data collection. I'd just never considered that my standard might look unusual on a graph.
Disproportionate to the threat level. That was the phrase she'd used.
She was right. I had used more power than necessary. Not because I'd panicked — I hadn't — but because holding back required effort, and effort was the enemy of a man who wanted to finish the job and get home to his chicken. I'd used the amount of power that felt natural, and natural, for me, was apparently a red flag.
I pulled the hood up. I cinched the drawstrings. I became a small, worried lump on the couch.
Kira Sohn, field investigator. She was smart. She'd come to the church not to accuse me but to observe me — to see how I reacted, to measure the gap between what I said and what I didn't say. She'd complimented the church. She'd mentioned the parishioners by name. She'd built rapport before delivering the real information, the way a good interrogator does.
And that last line. *A scalpel pretending to be a sledgehammer.*
She knew. She didn't have proof — not yet — but she knew.
My phone buzzed. A text from Maren.
*You left the church without locking the supply closet. Again.*
I stared at the message. I typed a reply.
*Sorry. Got distracted.*
Three dots. Then:
*By what?*
I considered telling her. Maren already knew about the commissions. She'd bandaged my shoulder. She'd identified Hollow residue on sight. She was, whether either of us had planned it, already inside the secret.
But this was different. This wasn't a bruise or a shadow stain. This was the SCB sending someone to my church. This was the system noticing me.
*Nothing important,* I typed. *I'll lock it tomorrow.*
I put the phone down. I stared at the ceiling.
The vending machine anime was queued up on my tablet. The honey butter chips were in the cabinet. The evening stretched ahead of me, empty and available, the way I liked my evenings.
I didn't move.
For the first time in a long time, the couch didn't feel like enough.