Chapter 28 Episode 28: Take Me To Him

Kael’s POV

The quarterly council briefing ran two hours on a good day and three on a day when Councillor Maren had prepared slides which, judging from the huge stack on her hands, she had today, which also meant I had already adjusted my afternoon schedule before I walked into the room.

The meeting chamber was the usual configuration... long table, twelve seats, the particular quality of light that came through windows positioned too high to see out of. I had always suspected this was a deliberate action.

The council’s meeting rooms were designed to feel removed from the city they governed, which produced in certain councillors, a useful sense of authority and in me a mild, persistent irritation I had learned to run in the background without letting it affect my facial expressions.

I sat in my usual seat. Maren was already loading her slides. The others filed in over the following five minutes and the meeting opened with the administrative items that existed primarily to demonstrate that process was being followed, and I listened with the slight portion of my attention that such items warranted and used the remainder for the week’s remaining schedule.

The gate activity report came at the fifty-minute mark, which was standard. The monitoring network’s incident summary, cross-referenced against response times and hunter deployment logs, and presented in the format that had not changed in six years because the council had vetoed to standardize it and standardization meant it would not change until someone with sufficient standing proposed otherwise, and nobody with sufficient standing had found it worth the energy.

I for one couldn’t care less about what they decided to do so long as no one directly opposed me.

I read through the summary in the time it took Councillor Desh to finish his verbal summary of the same document, which he decided to do at every meeting despite the fact that everyone at the table had the document in front of them.

The incident flag was on page four.

Gate incident, residential zone, sector nine. B-rank team response, one member substituted at entry with D-rank support per emergency authorization protocol. Dungeon interior misclassified on entry, running high B to low A. Blood fiend encountered, level two. D-rank support hunter intervened in blood fiend engagement. Anomalous performance logged by team lead.

Team lead: Jen, A-rank transfer on main guild rotation. Her notation was brief and precise in the way of someone who documented what she saw without editorializing about it: D-rank support demonstrated mana output inconsistent with classification during blood fiend engagement. Defensive screen deployed successfully. Recommend performance review.

D-rank support hunter: Renshi, Akira.

I read it a second time.

Then I read it a third time, not because the words had changed but because the third reading gave me the moment I needed to determine what my face was doing and ensure it was doing nothing of interest to anyone at the table.

Desh was still summarizing the sector five incident. Maren was making a note. The others were at various stages of the document. Nobody was looking at page four yet.

I set the report down in the stack in front of me with the portion of page four face-down, which was not a move that would survive scrutiny but which bought me the window I needed to think.

Anomalous(1) performance. A defensive screen against a blood fiend. Successfully deployed.

I thought about the training room. About the sequence I had been building into the sessions, the redirect foundation that was the prerequisite for the screen technique.

I had introduced it two weeks ago, worked through the mechanical basis, identified the gap in his approach and started closing it. The screen itself I had shown him the mechanics of but had not expected him to run live for some time yet.

He had run it live against a blood fiend in a misclassified dungeon on what was apparently mission five of whatever the system had assigned him.

I thought about what it meant that it had worked.

Either the training had accelerated beyond the rate I was tracking, which was possible given that everything about Akira Renshi’s development operated at a rate that confounded the existing frameworks.

Or his internal capability had advanced further than the last time I had run an assessment of it, which was also possible and would explain the output Jen had logged.

Or both.

Probably both.

The thing I kept returning to, sitting at the council table with the report face-down in my stack while Desh worked through the sector seven summary, was not the technique itself.

It was the specific scenario in which he had deployed it. The blood fiend had contact on a team member. Akira had dropped his suppression and intervened and run a technique he had been working on for two weeks in a training room against a live blood fiend in a dungeon that was running a tier above its classification.

The screen had held.

But if it hadn’t held, if the technique had failed at that specific moment in that specific encounter, the blood fiend would have had a wound opened on him with all the follow-through that implied, in a dungeon that was running higher than expected, with a team that was already operating without their original fourth member.

I was aware that my relationship to this information was not the relationship I would have had to the same report about any other D-rank hunter on the main guild roster. I was also aware that this was not a productive thing to examine during a quarterly council briefing.

"Sector nine," said Desh, arriving at page four.

"Handled," I said.

He looked up.

"The performance flag from sector nine," I said, at a pace that communicated this was not the most interesting item in the stack. "I’ll review it directly. The team lead is a temporary rotation transfer, her notation protocol is different from the standard format, it needs context before it goes to the review board."

Desh looked at the page. "Blood fiend encounter, D-rank support..."

"I said I’ll handle it," I noted once more. My tone fierce. No one would get touch him. Not if I was still present.

Desh had been on the council long enough to understand that certain statements from me were invitations to continue the conversation and certain statements were not. He looked at the page once more and then moved on, and Maren turned to the next slide, and the briefing continued.

Nobody looked at page four for the rest of the meeting.

***

I called Reiss from the car afterward.

"The sector nine incident report," I said. "Jen’s notation. I want it pulled from the standard review queue before end of day."

"Already done," Reiss said.

I looked at the phone.

"The flag generated an automated notification to the performance review board when the report was filed," he said. "I intercepted it as soon as I saw the name."

I thought about asking him when he had developed the habit of anticipating which reports to intercept. I thought about the answer he would give, which would be accurate and would involve a timeline and a confirmation to what I was not certain I wanted confirmed.

"Pull the full incident log," I said instead. "Jen’s notation, the dungeon classification discrepancy report, the blood fiend engagement sequence if the mana monitors in that zone captured it."

"I’ll have it by six."

The car moved through the afternoon traffic. I looked out the window at the sector nine residential zone passing by, the ordinary buildings of an ordinary district that had had a gate in it this morning and didn’t anymore because a team of four, one of whom was running at a level that didn’t match his designation, had gone in and made sure of it.

The screen had held.

I thought about that in the specific way I had been thinking about Akira Renshi’s development since the training room, which was with more investment than the development of a hunter I was casually monitoring warranted and less distance than I was maintaining as a matter of professional practice. The two things were in tension in a way I had been managing with varying degrees of success for several weeks.

It had worked. The screen had worked, first live attempt, against a blood fiend in a dungeon running above classification. That was not luck. That was not the technique failing upward due to circumstance. That was something that had been built in a room on the fourth floor over the course of two Thursday afternoons and had been ready when it was needed.

I thought about what ready meant. About the specific version of ready that was the output of someone who had taken every piece of instruction and applied it with the kind of focused intensity that didn’t leave room for the instruction to be anything less than functional.

I thought about the fence post and the one word and the hour of silence and driving home afterward thinking about the way the silence had felt, which I had not successfully stopped thinking about since.

Reiss had the full incident log on my desk at six, as specified.

I read it carefully. Jen’s notation was precise and unsensational, the documentation of someone who wrote what she saw and trusted the reader to determine its significance. The mana monitor data from the zone had captured the engagement sequence at low resolution, sufficient to confirm the output differential but not detailed enough to be meaningful evidence of anything specific in the wrong hands.

I removed the mana monitor data from the incident file and marked the record incomplete pending resubmission.

The performance flag was reclassified as resolved, notation: output differential within acceptable variance for advancing D-rank hunter, no further review required.

Jen’s original report I kept, separate from the review queue, in the file I had been building since Reiss delivered the background report four weeks ago.

I looked at the file for a moment after I had finished with it.

Then I put it away and looked at the Thursday afternoon slot in the schedule.

The screen had worked. I thought I should probably mention that.

It then occoured to me that I had been thinking a lot since I met him. And then it also occoured to me that if the sequence hadn’t worked out, then he would have been blood fiend dinner.

This particular thought incited a deep rage within me.

"Take me to him"

Reiss didn’t need to be told twice about who I was talking about in context.