Novel Full Chapter 985 - Taming Bargains
“This chamber has today documented a series of rewards regarding ownership, leadership, and resources that have been extensively disputed between the Day faction and the Night faction of the Starweaver family.” Luna uttered it with the voice of someone carrying responsibility that exceeded her years, and not with performed gravity, just the tone that came from meaning what you were saying. “Many of those disputes have their origin in my father’s absence and in the management of family resources during that absence. But primarily in your desire to control the family entirely.” The hall was completely still.
“So I suggest to resolve now the majority of those disputes, and in a single exchange.” A meaningful pause, during which she raised the sealed document she had just received. “I offer Lord Orion Starweaver the leadership rights over the Day faction and the associated territories I received in this session.”
The silence changed in nature.
Not the silence of a room waiting for the next procedural step… But the silence of a room that had just processed something unexpected and was still deciding what it meant.
“In exchange for one thing.”
Luna looked at Orion not just with hate for the first time since they had entered the hall. Not even with the cold temperature she had maintained throughout the session, with something different. Something older than politics and simpler than any argument that had been formulated in the last several hours.
“The white crystal… My mother’s heart.”
Orion didn’t respond immediately.
The hall broke into murmurs, not the discreet kind, the kind that happened when a room stopped being able to manage its reaction.
Julius had the expression of someone who hadn’t expected that something as extreme as what Larissa had suggested was actually possible to be something that would happen, who was processing the tactical implications simultaneously, and something else that wasn’t tactical implications at all, something that took longer to process precisely because it didn’t belong to that category.
If Orion actually released the white crystal, then…
Arturo was looking at Luna with a face that was difficult to read because it had too many things on it at once, layers that hadn’t finished sorting themselves into an order.
“Everything non-budgetary that they gave me today,” Luna repeated, with the same flat voice, the same precision of placement for every word. “In exchange for the crystal.”
Orion looked at her.
Luna held his gaze. Somewhere in the hall, someone who was not part of this specific conversation breathed in a way that did not correspond to the state of someone sleeping.
♢♢♢♢
The hall processed Luna’s offer for exactly as long as Orion also needed to read what the hall was processing.
Julius had tensed… Visible only to someone who had been watching him long enough to know the baseline, a minimal adjustment in the shoulders and the position of the hands that wasn’t nervousness but preparation. The kind of stillness that comes before movement rather than the kind that comes from the absence of it.
Arturo was less subtle… He had the posture of someone who has decided they can move in under a second if the situation requires it and is measuring distances without appearing to measure them, the geometry of the room, the positions of the people in it, the space between where he was and where he might need to be.
The high-level fighters stationed at the margins of the hall had shifted their atmosphere in a way that wasn’t action but was no longer the quiet of before. Something in between, the specific state that precedes movement when movement hasn’t received an order yet but the order could arrive at any moment and the body knows it.
Orion registered all of it.
He registered what it meant, too. Without the barrier, he was in a hall where the numerical advantage was not his, where Julius and Arturo in fusion represented opponents of a category that didn’t settle easily without his crystal defense, where the distance between him and any exit depended on how many bodies were willing to put themselves in the way.
Every calculation pointed to the same conclusion: without the barrier, the room’s danger level changed entirely. With it, nobody in this hall could touch him. Without it, they could treat him as a traitor before he had finished consolidating the political position he had come here to build…
And “traitor with consolidated political and military position” was an entirely different problem from “traitor with political and military position still under construction”.
So Orion laughed.
Not the kind of laugh he used to diminish people. The laugh of someone who has found something genuinely amusing in a situation they hadn’t expected to find entertaining, unguarded, briefly, the real thing.
“If you want to set a trap for me so everyone can pile on,” he said to Luna with the calm of someone enjoying the conversation, “you’re going to have to try harder than that…”
The hall waited for what everyone knew was coming. The blatant refusal.
The reaffirmation of the value and advantage his crystals gave him. The reminder that the technology he carried under that cloak had changed the rules of the game from this point forward, and that nobody in this hall was in a position to ignore it ever again.
Orion let them wait exactly the right amount of time before mocking them.
“I’m willing to give it to you… But we need to raise the stakes.”
The chance had arrived.
♢♢♢♢
‘Hey, I was supposed to be the one sleeping, not YOU…!’
‘Even if I’m always keeping a slight eye on you, but this is costing me energy that you’ll have to pay for. How dare you collapse right after the stress was gone when you needed to keep circulating our flow to let me finish rebuilding the cyst around the seed…’
‘And now I even have to use your lanky and ‘small’ body as a puppet… You’d better wake up soon, or I’m going to faint too; the crack is almost completely closed again as well so I don’t have much more time!’
‘If we fail to close it again it will be YOUR fault!’