Chapter 385 — Five From Fianna I

Chapter 385: Chapter 385 — Five From Fianna I

James had expected to spend the morning in the operations room watching staff sort applications into piles.

He got as far as the lift.

Finn was standing outside it with his phone in his hand, and he did not say good morning.

"Founders’ room. Now. You need to see this before anybody else does."

---

It had come in at seven, from an address that did not go anywhere near the recruitment inbox. It was sent to James and Finn by name, with nobody else copied in.

It was from Fianna.

James did not need anybody to tell him what that meant. Fianna was a Dublin guild, the third-ranked in Ireland, and had been for most of the time James had been climbing. He had watched their clears on the national board when Team Zero was still a five-person party with no building, borrowing gym time. Fianna had never been the biggest guild in the country. It had never wanted to be. It did not run a dozen teams of mixed quality and sell the name. It ran one party at the top, and that party had sat near Ireland’s frontier, year after year.

They had cleared Floor 38 three weeks ago, while Team Zero was buying cars and going to the cinema. That made all five of them eligible for Floor 39.

The message was short.

Fianna’s Guild Master was not putting five people forward for recruitment. She was offering the whole core team, as Fianna, as a temporary allied unit for the expedition. She wanted a meeting between the two guilds, today if possible.

"It came to us, not ops," said Finn. "On purpose."

James understood why. He was Guild Master. Nobody brought another guild into a Guild Zero expedition without his say. And Finn was Raid Captain. If two five-person teams were going into a floor together, Finn was the one who would have to make them into one thing once they were inside.

"Alice said five," said Finn. "That’s five. Five who already know where each other are without looking."

"And half the raid answers to somebody else."

"And half the raid answers to somebody else," Finn agreed.

James read it again.

Five strangers from five different countries might each be stronger on paper than anyone in Fianna. But they would come with five different habits, and five different ideas of what a call meant, and five people who had all been the best in the room at home. Fianna came already built.

The question was not whether they were good enough. He knew they were. The question was whether two units could go into a floor and come out of it under one voice.

"This afternoon," he said. "Both teams. Tell ops to stop treating it as five vacancies until we’ve talked to them."

---

They came at two, all five together, through the front.

There was no entrance to it. They came in through secured reception the way any visiting Challenger did, and went through the building protocol at the desk without being asked twice. Blades were tagged and peace-tied, and the staff went over with a reader for anything that needed declaring. Then two of Guild Zero’s people brought them up in the lift.

James was at the top of the stairs with Finn when the doors opened.

He saw Ciara Keane first, because she was walking in front.

She was about his age. She had long dark hair down over one shoulder, and clear light eyes, very pale against it. She had an athlete’s build. Her fitted Challenger top did nothing to hide a curvy figure, and his eyes went to the full line of her chest before he brought them back up to her face, where she was already holding out her hand.

She was extremely attractive. He noted it, and shook her hand.

"Ganner."

"Keane."

He knew her ability the way everyone in Irish climbing knew it.

Spatial Anchor. Ciara could set up to three fixed planes in space anywhere within her range. Anything that hit one of those planes stopped dead, or went where the plane sent it. She could make walls out of them. She could close a route across a floor with a thought. But she had to set each plane before something crossed it. The harder a thing hit, the more mana it cost her to hold. And something strong enough could crack straight through.

He had always counted her as one of the most dangerous control Challengers in the country.

Two nights ago, though, he had watched an Echo walk through American gravity three times. He thought about a plane going up in its path, and what two or three seconds would buy you if you used them properly. That might be exactly the gap Alice had described.

The other four came out of the lift behind her. He knew all of them too.

Declan Byrne came next, lean and dark-haired, in lighter kit than the others, because he never let himself get close. He was a warlock, and his trade was curses. He did not do big damage. He laid a hex on a target and then another, slowing it and weakening it and wearing it down a layer at a time. The strong ones took a while to build, and the more marks he held at once, the thinner he spread. James looked at him and thought *something that hurts it without hitting it hard*.

Mara Doyle was tall and sharp-featured, carrying a tagged staff and wearing no real armour. She ran two states, fire and ice. She burned in fire, and she held, slowed and walled in ice, at the cost of some of the burning. She could not do both at full strength at the same time, so her whole fight was built around when she changed from one to the other.

Ren Mori was the quiet one. He was Japanese-Irish, and he had his katana at his hip, still sheathed and peace-tied with the building’s tag on the cord. Ren’s power lived in the scabbard. For as long as the blade stayed in, his ability built force behind it. When he finally drew, it came out as one cut faster and harder than anything else in Fianna. But if he missed, or was forced to draw too soon, the build was gone and he had to start again.

Darragh Nolan came last and filled the lift doorway on his own. He was broad and heavily armoured, Fianna’s Guardian. He put marks on chosen allies, one or two at a time, never everybody. A marked ally took part of a big hit into the mark instead of their body. Later, some of that came back to them as healing. He chose who got his best protection, and that choice was the job.

That was five people James had watched for years from the other side of a national board, and every one of them already fit a gap on Maeve’s pad.

Nobody said much on the landing. Ronan looked at Darragh’s shield arm, Darragh looked at Ronan’s, and they nodded once to each other. Then everybody went into the founders’ room.

---

Ten people and a Fallen Angel made the room feel small.

Alice stood against the window. Fianna had all seen her on streams, but James watched each of them look at her once in person, at the four folded black wings and the face, and then look away a little too carefully.

Ciara did not wait for anybody to start.

"We’d come as Fianna," she said. "We’re not transferring. Nobody signs with Guild Zero. And you don’t get to pick two of us and send the rest home. All five or none."

James was not offended. If anything, she had just answered his biggest question before he asked it.

"Fine," he said.

She had clearly expected more of a fight than that, and paused for half a second.

Finn moved it on. "Then command. We can’t have James calling one thing and you calling another in there. That’s how people die."

"Agreed," said Ciara. "But I’m not pretending I stop being responsible for my people because I’ve agreed to follow your call."

"Nobody’s asking you to."

It took about ten minutes. It was closer than either side had expected going in.

James wanted the final say inside Floor 39. Team Zero had fought the red for ten floors. They had Alice, and what Alice remembered, and nobody else did.

Ciara wanted authority over her own people when a call came down that touched something only she could judge. Darragh’s marks, Ren’s draw, how much Mara had left. James could not see those from where he stood.

Finn found the middle.

"James makes the expedition calls. I run the formation. Ciara owns the condition of Fianna’s five. If James calls something one of them physically can’t do, Ciara says so, straight away, and why. He takes that, and then whatever he decides is final."

Ciara thought about it.

"That works," she said.

James nodded. That was all it needed.