Murmurs.

  Hurried footsteps.

  The rustle of fabric against old theater seats.

  From the wings, Kein listened to the theater filling up. He didn't count the voices —that was impossible from his position— but he calculated the density of the sound. Between 60 and 80 people. More than enough.

  He was sitting on a plastic chair near the dressing room, under a yellowish light that flickered every 2 minutes like an erratic pulse. The script lay open on his knees. His eyes scanned the lines with controlled speed, memorizing without apparent effort.

  'Act One, Scene Two. Claudius justifies his marriage to Gertrude.'

  The words burned into his brain with ease. Each line had a purpose, a function. Claudius spoke of mourning and celebration in the same breath. A political tightrope walker. An assassin dressed as a king.

  'I know him,' Kein thought.

  He closed his eyes briefly.

  In NEXARA, he had played dozens of identities. Never on a stage, always in undercover operations. He had been an oligarch's personal driver, a maintenance technician in corporate towers, even a medical assistant in an illegal implant clinic. Roles where people didn't look twice. His acting was functional: believable enough to go unnoticed for the necessary time, insufficient to stand out.

  But this was different.

  Here, he couldn't be invisible. He had to be seen. Observed. Judged.

  'I'll use what I have,' he decided, opening his eyes again.

  He had no formal technique. He hadn't studied in conservatories or drama academies, nor techniques like Stanislavski or Meisner. Those were unknown to him. But he had experience. 117 years of observing facets of thousands of humans like layers of an onion. He had seen authentic guilt in the eyes of targets who knew they were going to die. He had witnessed naked ambition in executives who sacrificed subordinates like disposable tiles.

  Claudius was the sum of both.

  He turned the page of the script.

  'Act Three, Scene Three. The monologue.'

  He had already rehearsed that scene in front of Marcus hours before. He knew the weight of every word, how they resonated in his throat, how they settled in his chest. But now he had to go further. It wasn't about convincing a skeptical director; it was about convincing dozens of different people.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  Someone tapped the wooden frame behind him.

  "5 minutes," a female voice said. Ana, the actress playing Gertrude.

  "Understood."

  Kein closed the script and stood up. He adjusted the dark suit they had provided: heavy, with velvet embroidered details on the shoulders and sleeves. A monarch's suit. It fit him almost perfectly, just a bit tight in the chest.

  He walked toward the side of the stage. Other actors were preparing their final positions. Some did diaphragmatic breathing exercises. Others whispered their lines like private litanies. Kein simply waited, motionless, with his hands relaxed at his sides.

  The auditorium lights went out.

  The murmur of the audience gradually dissolved.

  Expectant silence.

  *Chiiiic! Chiiiic!*

  The curtain began to rise with a soft metallic squeak.

  ———//————————————//———

  Act One - Scene One

  Dim lights bathed the stage, revealing the battlements of Elsinore. Two guards stood under artificial torches, their shadows projected long and distorted against the fake stone walls.

  "Who's there?" the first guard asked with a tense voice.

  "Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself," the other replied, a hand on the hilt of his sword.

  "Long live the King!"

  "Bernardo?"

  "This is he."

  The scene progressed with the rhythm of a night vigil. The guards spoke in low voices, restless. It was cold on the battlements. It was always cold when something bad was about to happen.

  Then Horatio entered, played by a veteran actor with a gray beard. He brought with him skepticism and logic.

  "Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy," one of the guards commented, "and will not let belief take hold of him touching this dreaded sight twice seen of us."

  "Tush, tush, 'twill not appear," Horatio replied with academic sufficiency.

  But it appeared.

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  A bluish spotlight illuminated the stage and fog machines covered the back of the stage like a mantle. A tall figure, dressed in full armor, advanced slowly. The Ghost of King Hamlet. His face was hidden behind a helmet, but his presence filled the space with a tangible weight.

  The audience collectively held their breath.

  "Peace, break thee off! Look where it comes again!" Marcellus exclaimed, pointing with a trembling hand.

  "In the same figure like the King that's dead," Bernardo murmured.

  Horatio, now stripped of his intellectual arrogance, approached with wavering steps.

  "What art thou that usurp'st this time of night, together with that fair and warlike form in which the majesty of buried Denmark did sometimes march? By heaven, I charge thee, speak!"

  The Ghost looked at him in silence. A silence that weighed like lead. Then, without a word, it retreated into the shadows.

  "'Tis gone and will not answer," Marcellus said with a broken voice.

  Horatio was visibly trembling now, all his scientific certainty shattered.

  "Before my God, I might not this believe without the sensible and true avouch of mine own eyes."

  The scene ended with the guards agreeing to inform Prince Hamlet of the appearance. The curtain fell briefly while the stagehands reorganized the set.

  From the wings, Kein watched everything with analytical attention. The play established the tone perfectly: something was rotten in Denmark. An unsolved crime. A ghost demanding justice.

  It was his turn.

  ———//————————————//———

  Act One - Scene Two

  The curtain rose again, now revealing the throne room. An imposing space with fake columns and banners hanging from the ceiling. The court was gathered: nobles, advisors, courtiers.

  And in the center, the empty throne.

  Kein entered from the right side.

  He didn't run. He didn't hesitate. His steps resonated with measured authority against the wooden floor. He reached the throne and, before sitting, scanned the room with his gaze. Evaluating. Possessing.

  He sat with the confidence of someone who has taken something that did not belong to him and must now convince the world otherwise.

  When he spoke, his voice filled the theater with perfect clarity.

  "Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death the memory be green, and that it us befitted to bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe..."

  He didn't shout. He didn't need to. The projection was enough, without apparent effort. Each word came out with precise intention.

  From the third row, a theater critic adjusted his glasses and leaned forward.

  'This actor... I don't know him.'

  Kein continued without hesitation.

  "...yet so far hath discretion fought with nature that we with wisest sorrow think on him together with remembrance of ourselves. Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen, the imperial jointress to this warlike state, have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy, taken to wife..."

  The words flowed like poisoned honey. Claudius justified the unjustifiable: marrying his brother's widow barely two months after the death. He spoke of "defeated joy," of "an auspicious and a dropping eye," of "mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage."

  He was a verbal juggler, balancing opposite concepts with the skill of a consummate sophist. He was the perfect politician.

  The actress playing Gertrude, sitting next to the throne with a regal bearing but an evasive gaze, watched Kein with barely contained fascination.

  'He isn't acting differently than in the rehearsal... but something changed. It's more... Vivid.'

  Claudius dispatched kingdom matters with bureaucratic efficiency. He sent emissaries to Norway. He granted travel permits to Laertes. All with the ease of someone who had already rehearsed his role outside the stage.

  Then, his attention turned toward a figure dressed completely in black at the edge of the stage.

  "But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son—"

  Hamlet —played by a Twenty-two-year-actor with a carefully trimmed dark beard— looked up with deliberate slowness. His face was a mask of barely contained contempt.

  "A little more than kin, and less than kind," he murmured with subtle venom.

  The exchange that followed was tense as a cable about to break. Claudius tried to be paternal. Hamlet rejected every gesture with cutting sarcasm.

  Gertrude intervened with maternal pleas.

  "Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off, and let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not for ever with thy vailed lids seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die..."

  "Ay, madam, it is common," Hamlet replied with glacial coldness.

  "If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?"

  Hamlet straightened, and his voice rose with indignation held back for too long.

  "'Seems,' madam? Nay, it is. I know not 'seems.' 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, nor customary suits of solemn black, nor windy aspiration of forced breath, no, nor the fruitful river in the eye, nor the dejected 'haviour of the visage... these indeed SEEM, for they are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passeth show!"

  The audience felt every word like a whip. Hamlet accused without accusing directly. He pointed out hypocrisy without naming it.

  Kein, as Claudius, listened to all this with a carefully calibrated paternal expression. But for a microsecond —so brief that only the most attentive observers caught it— his fingers tensed against the arm of the throne.

  'Guilt,' mentally recorded a woman in the fifth row who studied psychology. 'That gesture was pure repressed guilt.'

  The scene concluded with Claudius succeeding in convincing Hamlet to stay in Denmark instead of returning to Wittenberg. The court withdrew. The curtain fell.

  ———//————————————//———

  Kein returned to the wings as Act Two unfolded on stage. Hamlet feigned madness. Polonius theorized about the causes. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrived as spies disguised as friends.

  But then, while he acted briefly in the acts, something happened.

  Midway through Act Two, while waiting for his next entrance, Kein felt that fleeting sensation, like a tingling. It wasn't physical. It wasn't visible in any known spectrum. But it was absolutely real.

  'The unknown energy.'

  It was filling him. Drop by drop. Second by second. He didn't feel it in himself, but he was sure that it was so.

  And as he filled up, his perception of the audience sharpened. He didn't see them —the stage lights blinded him— but he felt them. Their collective attention. Their growing discomfort. Their involuntary fascination.

  'Mmmh, it seems the more I impact them... the more I receive.'

  An obvious conclusion, but now empirically confirmed. Before, he didn't even feel the interaction so firmly; after all, the extra role lasted 5 minutes and its impact was fleeting. But now he was sure.

  Kein made a decision that would change everything.

  'I'm not going to hold back anymore.'

  In the audition in front of Marcus, he had carefully measured the intensity. He had kept the full registry back so as not to terrify the technical team or the director.

  But here, under the implacable spotlights, in front of strangers who had paid admission to witness a tragedy...

  He could release himself completely. He needed to commit.

  ———//————————————//———

  Act Three - Scene Three

  The play had progressed inexorably toward its emotional climax. Hamlet had confirmed Claudius's guilt through the "mousetrap" —a play within the play that recreated the king's murder. Claudius had fled the performance, unable to bear seeing his crime reflected on stage.

  Now he was alone.

  Kein entered the stage transformed into an improvised chapel. A wooden bench. A cross hanging from the ceiling. Cold, almost bluish lights that turned the space into something oppressive and claustrophobic.

  He knelt slowly in front of the bench.

  The theater's silence was so dense you could hear the audience's collective breathing.

  Kein didn't speak immediately. He let the silence stretch. Two seconds. Five seconds. Ten seconds.

  When he finally opened his mouth, his voice emerged broken, harsh, as if each word tore away a piece of his soul.

  "O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven."

  The audience tensed involuntarily. Several spectators leaned forward without realizing it.

  "It hath the primal eldest curse upon't... a brother's murder!"

  Kein let the images invade him. Not from Shakespeare's text. Not from Claudius.

  From Kael.

  Blood on his hands. Not metaphorical. Real. Hundreds of contracts fulfilled. Thousands of bodies falling. The existential weight of 117 years compressed into a single instant of naked confession.

  "What if this cursed hand were thicker than itself with brother's blood, is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow?"

  He brought his hands to his face. His fingers trembled —not by acting technique, but by muscle memory of a past the audience couldn't even imagine.

  A young woman in the second row squeezed her companion's arm until she left marks. A man in a suit at the back stopped breathing completely for several seconds.

  Kein raised his hands toward the light, as if trying to clean them of something invisible but permanent.

  "I stand in pause where I shall first begin, and both neglect... I stand in pause!"

  His voice rose, not in volume but in desperation. It was the voice of a man trapped in a cage of his own making.

  From the wings, Marcus watched, paralyzed. Ana, beside him, had a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide.

  "That boy... he's not human," she whispered.

  Marcus couldn't respond. Because he knew she was right in a way he couldn't articulate.

  On stage, Kein continued his descent into the core of human guilt.

  "May one be pardon'd and retain the offence? In the corrupted currents of this world, offence's gilded hand may shove by justice..."

  He paused. A pause so long and heavy that the air itself seemed to solidify.

  Then, almost in a whisper that somehow reached every corner of the theater:

  "But 'tis not so above; there is no shuffling, there the action lies in his true nature; and we ourselves compell'd, even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, to give in evidence."

  He dug his fingers into his chest, as if trying to physically tear out his heart.

  "O wretched state! O bosom black as death! O limed soul, that, struggling to be free, art more engaged!"

  The theater critic in the third row had stopped taking notes. His pen hung uselessly between numb fingers.

  'This is not acting,' he thought, dazed. 'This looks like an... Expiation.'

  Kein let his arms fall heavily, as if all his muscles had lost functionality. His head hung forward.

  The last verse came out like a final exhalation:

  "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

  The lights went out abruptly.

  Absolute darkness.

  For three full seconds, no one in the theater moved. No one coughed. No one breathed audibly.

  When the lights came back on for the next scene, Kein was no longer on stage.

  But everyone in that room —audience, technical crew, actors— knew they had witnessed something that transcended Shakespeare's play.

  It wasn't Claudius repen ting for killing his brother.

  No one knew. But it was something much older and darker.

  A ghost from a world of steel and blood that no one in that room could understand.

  And that ghost had just confessed his crimes through the borrowed body of a 24-year-old young man named Kein Adler.