Chapter 20 - 19 — The Five Who Returned [II]
"Do you have more than one Ability?"
"I told you what I’m willing to place on record."
He looked at me for a while, and then he moved on, because there was nothing further he could prove sitting in that room.
"Then tell me how five rookies killed a Level 24 boss."
I gave him the fight without giving him the six years.
"We damaged the tail first, because that was the thing that could reach all of us at once. Bria reinforced her shield and pinned a segment against the floor, and Tomas put a mana-compressed arrow into the joint while it was held."
"Go on."
"After that we stopped spreading damage around. I burned open the inner joint of its left foreleg, and Idris put his blade into the same wound every time it opened, because his sword could not cut the untouched hide."
"And the collapse?"
"The wall it came through had already taken part of the roof down. I burned one support and it charged into the second one, and the ceiling came down across its hindquarters and trapped the tail."
"And the kill?"
"Tomas took its left eye, which took its balance. Bria held the forepaw off me and Idris kept the leg from straightening. I went in under the jaw and put everything I had through the throat."
I stopped there.
"Nia kept three of us conscious through all of it. Nobody in that room was standing at the end without her."
He compared it against something on his tablet for a long moment.
"For what it is worth," he said, "your four teammates all say you gave the warnings and directed the fight. They also all say, independently and without being asked, that the thing would not have died without every one of them."
"That’s accurate."
"It is also the only reason this file is going upstairs as an extraordinary clear and not as a fabrication."
He closed the tablet.
"You should know what we currently think happened, since you will hear a version of it anyway."
The Bureau’s working theory was that the Manticore had been dormant in a sealed secondary chamber that was not connected to the dungeon’s active mana circulation.
The scans had measured the Goblins, the Hobgoblin, and the accessible mine, and those readings had genuinely been Green, because that was genuinely all there was to measure.
When the Hobgoblin died, the chamber opened. The Manticore woke, its mana entered the active structure, and the Gate recalculated within seconds.
"That is preliminary," he said. "We need the stone, the corpse samples, and the full Gate record before anyone signs it. What it looks like today is a rare failure of a system that lowers risk and has never once removed it."
A communications officer was waiting for us in the corridor afterwards.
Half the region had noticed by then. You cannot put ambulances, an Orange-response unit, and a lockdown into a compound where ten new Players were supposed to be doing routine registration and expect nobody to ask about it.
"The Bureau is releasing a preliminary statement within the hour," she said.
"One Gate reclassified from Green to Orange. The second team completed their Green Gate normally. All ten rookies are alive. Five members cleared the Orange Gate before the response team entered. Cause under investigation."
"That’s all accurate," Bria said.
"It is. I should also tell you that most of the headlines will be about the SSS-ranked son of Christopher Nolan, whatever we put in the release."
I looked at the four of them first.
"Use all five names."
"The full clearing party appears in the official report. I can promise you that. I cannot promise you what any outlet does with it afterwards."
"Then put all five names in the first sentence."
She held my eye for a second, and then she wrote it down.
I was not naive enough to think it would change what ran tomorrow. I just was not going to let the Bureau do the erasing for them.
Beyond the secured line, the other five were still waiting for their transport with their Green-grade stones logged and their statements taken.
They had cleared a dungeon on their first day. Twelve hours ago that would have been the entire story out of this compound, and now not one person in the corridor was looking at them.
Then the outer doors opened, and the sound in the corridor changed.
PSB staff straightened where they stood. The communications officer stopped mid-sentence. Several people moved out of the centre of the floor without anybody telling them to.
My father had arrived.
He did not run and he did not call my name. He came through with two clan security officers behind him, still wearing what he had been wearing when the Bureau’s call reached him.
He was walking at a completely normal pace right up until he saw the blood down my clothes and the hand bound against my chest.
Then he stopped.
His eyes went over me, the side, the hand, the burns along my fingers, before they came up to my face.
His fingers closed once at his side, and a thin line of lightning crawled across his knuckles and was gone before anybody else could have caught it.
He did not ask me anything.
"Is any of it permanent?" he asked the healer.
"No, provided he follows the treatment. The hand will come back."
"And the cause?"
"He drove considerably more power through his own body than his body was built to carry. The equipment performed correctly, and he is the part that failed."
The healer said it without any softening at all. "If he repeats that output at this stage, I would not expect the same answer."
My father listened to all of it without interrupting once.
Only when the healer finished did he look at me properly.
I did not say anything either.
He had come here believing he had nearly lost his son today, and I was standing in front of a man I had watched die on a chamber floor six years from now.
There was no version of any of that which fitted into a corridor full of Bureau staff.
So neither of us said it.
He turned to the field officer instead.
"Explain to me why a rookie team was inside an Orange Gate."
The officer did not get defensive, which I respected.
He brought up both pre-entry scans, including the second one, and showed the timestamps against the moment of reclassification, and he did not try to make any of it sound better than it was.
"Both readings were Green. We ran them twice. It changed after they were inside."
My father looked at the second scan for longer than the first.
"Twice."
"Your son requested the recheck, sir. Before entry."
He turned to me.
"Why?"
"Because ten rookies were going inside. Checking twice cost nothing."
He kept looking at me. My father has spent his entire life standing next to powerful people, and he can tell the difference between somebody enjoying the praise afterwards and somebody who was actually thinking about the problem before it happened.
He did not let it go there.
"Then explain the second half. You were worried enough to hold up a Bureau operation and make them run the instruments again. The instruments came back Green."
"They did."
"So why did you get into the vehicle? If you thought something was wrong in that mine, you had a room full of PSB officers standing right there. You raise it. You refuse. You make them cancel."
"With what?"
He did not answer, so I did.
"I had no reading, no incident report, and nothing to point at. I spent everything I had when I asked them to scan it twice, and it came back Green twice."
"There is no third thing you can say after that which makes a field officer shut down a registered operation."
"They would have let you withdraw."
"They offered. That is not the same as cancelling it."
I looked at him properly then.
"If I had walked away, the entry still happens. The other four go in at two o’clock without me, and the only difference is that I am standing in the sunshine outside the barrier when the wall opens."
Something moved across my father’s face and was put away before it finished arriving.
"When can they leave?" he asked the officer.
"Medical clearances and preliminary statements are complete. The Bureau may recall them once the Gate and the materials have been analysed."
My father glanced at the other four.
"Arrange transport for them if they need it," he told his security. "Wherever they are going."
He did not offer them anything else. No clan positions, no contracts, no speeches. Just cars for four exhausted teenagers who had been inside a mine all afternoon.
Before we left, the field officer signed my gauntlets back to me, since evidence had finished with them.
The left one came back as a gauntlet. The right one came back in a clear bag, in the eleven separate pieces the healer had taken it off my hand in, because there had been no other way to get it off.
I turned the bag over under the corridor light.
The knuckle plate was warped out of true, the finger sections had buckled outward along their seams where my hand had swollen inside them, and the conductive channels were burned dark down their whole length.
That was standard registration equipment doing exactly what it was designed to do, right up until the moment it was asked to do this.
Numbers alone were not going to fix that. I needed equipment built around Aten, and I needed somebody who could teach me how to stop my own Ability from taking me apart from the inside.
The corridor outside the treatment section was quieter, and my father walked beside me without saying anything for a while.
The guards stayed far enough back to be out of earshot.
He glanced at the splinted hand.
"You have had your Ability for three days."
"I know."
"You entered your first Gate, reached Level Five, and came close to crippling your hand killing something twenty-one levels above you."
He did not say it proudly. He said it like a man reading a report he had checked twice and still did not fully accept.
"You still haven’t told me what you want for your awakening present."
I did not need to think about it this time.
"Train me."
He stopped walking.
"You have access to every instructor the clan employs, all the training grounds, and better equipment than anything the Bureau handed you this morning. You have had all of it since you were eight."
"Not the heir’s programme." I lifted the bound hand slightly. "Put me with the active Players. Teach me how to fight with Aten before it tears my body apart."
"You understand what you are asking for."
"I’m asking not to be given exercises designed to make an SSS heir look impressive in front of the council. I want combat control, close range technique, conditioning, mana reinforcement, and people across from me who will punish it when I get something wrong."
He studied me for long enough that I started to think the Gate had cost me this.
"I will assess you myself," he said at last. "Before I put you with anybody."
Then he stopped beside the exit and turned so he was looking straight at me.
"Be in the combat hall at six tomorrow. If you ask me to train you, don’t expect me to treat you like my son."