# Chapter 5 — The Restraint
Sunday mass went well. The sermon on forgiveness landed — Mrs. Calloway cried, which was how I measured success. Mr. Reeves told me afterward that it was "the best one yet," which he said every week, which made it meaningless and also somehow still nice to hear.
I shook hands. I blessed babies. I smiled the smile.
But the whole time, I was thinking about Kira Sohn.
*A scalpel pretending to be a sledgehammer.*
She'd left that line like a fishhook — something small and sharp that you didn't feel going in but couldn't pull out without tearing something. I'd been turning it over in my head all night, all morning, through the hymns and the prayers and the part where I held a newborn and said words about God's grace while my brain ran calculations about energy signatures and Fracture sensors.
I needed to be more careful. That was the obvious conclusion. If the SCB was flagging high-output anomalies, then the solution was simple: use less power. Match the output to the threat level. Be the C-rank priest the registration said I was.
The problem was that I didn't know how much power a C-rank priest was supposed to use.
That sounds absurd. It is absurd. But I'd never had to think about it before. When I channeled divine light, I used the amount that felt natural — the way you don't think about how hard to grip a cup. You just grip it. The cup doesn't break. Everything's fine.
Except my natural grip was apparently strong enough to set off alarms.
The new commission came on Monday evening.
I was on the couch — hoodie, sweatpants, the vending machine anime playing its third recap episode in a row, which I was watching anyway because I had no standards — when the SCB app pinged.
*Fracture — 7th District, Sector 9. Threat Level: C. Estimated Hollow count: 3-4. Type: Dusk Wraiths. Payout: 310,000 won.*
Dusk Wraiths. A step above Shade Hounds — slower, but tougher. They didn't hunt in packs. They drifted through Fracture corridors like fog with teeth, and their bodies were semi-incorporeal, which meant physical attacks passed through them. You needed sustained divine light to pin them down and burn them out. More effort than Hounds, but still C-rank. Still routine.
Three hundred ten thousand won. That was a ten-pull on the new banner and a week of fried chicken.
I stared at the notification. I thought about Kira Sohn. I thought about energy sensors and output graphs and a woman who could read the gap between what I said and what I didn't say.
I accepted the commission.
But this time, I was going to be careful.
Sector 9 was a residential block on the north side of the district — old apartment buildings, a shuttered convenience store, a playground with a rusted swing set. The Fracture hung between two lampposts like a curtain of broken glass, edges shimmering in the evening light.
I stood in front of it. I took a breath.
*Less power. Match the threat. Be normal.*
I stepped through.
The interior was different from Sector 14. Where the Shade Hound Fracture had been corridors of black stone, this one was open — a vast, dim space like the inside of an empty cathedral. The ceiling was lost in darkness. The floor was smooth and gray, stretching in every direction. Pale light drifted in patches, moving slowly, like clouds seen from below.
And in that light, the Wraiths.
I could see two of them immediately — translucent shapes drifting about thirty meters ahead, their bodies like smoke given form. They moved slowly, aimlessly, trailing wisps of shadow behind them. No eyes. No mouths. Just a vaguely humanoid silhouette that flickered at the edges.
I raised my hand. The prayer came automatically.
"Lord, grant me Your light."
The warmth flooded in. I felt it fill my chest, my arms, my fingertips — the familiar rush of divine energy, bright and clean and ready.
And then I did something I had never done before.
I held it back.
Instead of letting the light flow at its natural volume, I squeezed. I narrowed the channel. I reduced the output to what I estimated a mid-rank priest would produce — enough to fight, enough to win, but not enough to make a graph spike.
It felt wrong. Like trying to whisper when your body wanted to shout. The energy pushed against the restriction, pressing outward, looking for the space I wasn't giving it. My hands tingled. My teeth ached.
I ignored it. I walked forward.
The first Wraith noticed me when I was fifteen meters away. It turned — if you could call it turning — and drifted toward me, its translucent body rippling like heat haze.
I extended my right hand. A beam of divine light — thin, controlled, deliberately modest — lanced out and struck the Wraith center-mass.
It flinched. The light burned into its semi-incorporeal body, and I could see the shadow-flesh sizzling where the beam touched. But it didn't dissolve. Not immediately. The Wraith shuddered, pulled back, and then kept coming.
At full power, that beam would have erased it.
At this power, it was a flashlight against fog.
I fired again. And again. Each beam was precise, targeted, and frustratingly weak. The Wraith absorbed the hits, staggering but not falling, its body reforming around the burn marks like water closing over a stone.
I gritted my teeth. I walked closer. I poured more light into the beam — still restrained, still careful, but more. The Wraith finally began to come apart, its edges dissolving, its form losing coherence. It took thirty seconds of sustained fire to finish it.
Thirty seconds. For a single C-rank Wraith. At full power, it would have taken three.
The second Wraith was already moving toward me. I engaged it the same way — controlled beams, measured output, the divine equivalent of fighting with one hand tied behind my back. It took forty seconds this time. The Wraith was denser than the first, and my restrained light had to work harder to penetrate.
I was breathing harder than I should have been. Not from exhaustion — from the effort of holding back. It was like running with a weight vest. The energy wanted out. My body wanted to channel at full capacity. Every instinct I had was screaming *more, faster, finish it,* and I was saying *no, slower, be normal.*
The third Wraith found me while I was still catching my breath.
It came from above — dropping from the darkness of the unseen ceiling, its body spreading wide like a net. I saw it a half-second late. I threw up a barrier — restrained, measured, C-rank appropriate — and the Wraith hit it like a wave hitting a seawall.
The barrier cracked.
Not shattered. Cracked. A single fracture line running through the golden light, spreading outward from the point of impact. The Wraith pressed against it, its semi-incorporeal body seeping through the crack like smoke through a gap in a window.
I had never had a barrier crack before. Not once. Not against anything.
Because I had never used a barrier this weak before.
I reinforced it — still holding back, still careful — and the crack sealed. The Wraith pulled away, circled, came at me from the side. I pivoted, fired a beam, caught it in the flank. It shuddered. It kept coming.
This was taking too long. The fight should have been over in two minutes. It had been eight. My arms ached from the sustained channeling at restricted output. My head was starting to throb — the divine energy pressing against the bottleneck I'd created, building pressure like water behind a dam.
The Wraith lunged again. I sidestepped. I fired. The beam hit, burned, didn't finish it. The Wraith reformed. It came again.
*Just let go. Full power. Three seconds and it's done.*
No. The sensors were watching. The graph would spike. Kira Sohn would come back with her tablet and her small smile and her scalpel metaphors.
I fired again. The Wraith staggered. I fired again. It began to dissolve. I fired a third time, and finally — finally — it came apart, its shadow-flesh unraveling into wisps that curled and vanished in the pale light.
I stood there, breathing hard, hands shaking slightly. The divine light faded from my palms. The vast cathedral space was empty. Three Wraiths down. No fourth — the estimate had been generous.
I checked my phone. The SCB app logged the kills. Three confirmed. Commission complete. Payout pending.
Total time inside the Fracture: twenty-three minutes.
Twenty-three minutes for three C-rank Wraiths. A normal Agent would have taken about the same. Maybe faster, maybe slower, depending on experience. The point was: it was normal. Unremarkable. The kind of time that wouldn't make anyone look twice at a graph.
I walked out of the Fracture. The evening air hit my face. Cool. Real. The lampposts buzzed overhead. The rusted swing set creaked in a breeze I couldn't feel.
My hands were still shaking.
I looked down at them. The tremor was subtle — barely visible — but I could feel it in the bones. The restricted channeling had done something. Not damage, exactly. More like strain. The energy I'd held back hadn't disappeared — it had pressed against the walls I'd built, and the walls had held, but the effort had cost something.
My right shoulder ached. The same shoulder Maren had bandaged last week.
I pulled my hood up. I walked home.
The fried chicken arrived in thirty-one minutes. Three minutes over the estimate. I chose to view this as a personal attack.
I sat on the couch. I ate. The chicken was good. The chicken was always good. But I was eating mechanically, chewing without tasting, my mind still inside the Fracture.
Twenty-three minutes. A cracked barrier. Shaking hands.
This was the cost of being careful. Not the physical cost — that would fade by morning. The real cost was the knowledge that I had made myself weaker on purpose, and weaker meant slower, and slower meant more time inside a Fracture, and more time meant more chances for something to go wrong.
Today it was three C-rank Wraiths. Manageable. But what about next time? What if the estimate was wrong? What if there were six instead of three? What if one of them was denser, faster, smarter? At full power, it wouldn't matter. At restricted power, it might.
I was building a cage around myself to hide from a woman with a tablet.
My phone buzzed. Maren.
*You missed evening prayers.*
I looked at the time. 8:47 PM. Evening prayers were at seven. I'd been sitting on this couch for almost two hours, eating chicken and staring at nothing.
*Sorry,* I typed. *Lost track of time.*
Three dots. Then:
*Are you okay?*
Two words. Simple. Direct. The kind of question Maren asked when she meant it, which was always, which was the problem.
*Fine,* I typed. *Just tired.*
A pause. Longer than usual.
*You've been "just tired" a lot lately.*
I stared at the message. She was right. I had been. Since the commission. Since Kira Sohn. Since the couch stopped feeling like enough.
*I'll be at morning prayers tomorrow,* I typed. *Promise.*
She sent back a single period. Just a dot. The Maren equivalent of "I don't believe you but I'm choosing not to fight about it right now."
I put the phone down. I looked at my hands. The tremor was gone. The ache in my shoulder was fading. By morning, there would be no evidence. No shadow stain this time — Dusk Wraiths didn't leave residue. No bruise. Nothing for Maren to find.
Nothing except the thing she'd already found — the thing that wasn't on my skin but in my silence. The weight I was carrying that she could see from across a room, the way she saw everything, the way she always had.
I said my evening prayers at the altar. Late. In the hoodie. No chip dust this time. My hands were clean and steady and empty.
"Lord, thank you for today. Thank you for the commission. Thank you that nobody got hurt, including me. I know I'm being careful for the wrong reasons — not to protect anyone, but to protect myself from being known. I know that's not what You'd want. But I don't know what You'd want instead, and I'm too tired to figure it out tonight. So I'm just going to say thank you and trust that You'll show me. Eventually. Amen."
I made the sign of the cross.
I went back to the couch.
The anime was still playing. The chicken box was empty. The night was quiet.
But the quiet felt different now. Not like rest. Like waiting.