Chapter 60: Arrogant nobles
"We are off boarding from the front. Please, everyone maintain an orderly line."
The conductor’s voice carried through the length of the battleship from his position at the front, his gaze moving steadily across the passenger space as he spoke.
In his years operating transit like this he had seen every category of person that existed. Merchants carrying more gold than sense. Nobles who treated any enclosed space as an extension of their estate. High level summoners who had stopped acknowledging the existence of people below a certain tier somewhere along the way. All of it had passed through his lines at one point or another, and all of it had eventually bent to the same requirement.
Order was the only thing that mattered in his professional estimation. Not rank. Not name. Not the weight of what someone’s family had accomplished two generations back.
Most people who boarded his vessels understood this on some level and adjusted accordingly. The ones who didn’t usually read the room quickly enough once they registered that his expression didn’t change regardless of who they were.
One person in the current passenger list did not appear to have received that understanding.
From somewhere near the back of the cabin, a figure stood without waiting for the process to reach him, and the cluster of people surrounding him stood at the same moment, the group orienting toward the front and beginning to move through the still-seated passengers as though the boarding announcement had been directed at them specifically and everyone else was simply an obstacle between them and the exit.
He reached the conductor on his way through.
He tapped him on the shoulder.
A brief acknowledgment, not quite a greeting, not quite a dismissal. The kind of gesture that assumed the recipient would understand it as sufficient.
It happened fast enough that the conductor’s professional instinct to respond hadn’t fully assembled itself before the group was already stepping off the vessel and onto the ground below.
He stood there for a moment.
Then the remaining passengers began filing out in the established sequence, and order reasserted itself without his having to redirect anything.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
"Those people are from your family?"
Ethan came down the boarding steps with Ella beside him, his gaze following the departing group as they moved across the open ground ahead, the entourage reforming around the central figure with the practiced ease of people who had spent a significant portion of their lives doing exactly that.
He kept his voice conversational, a coy quality sitting at the edge of it.
The young man’s posture as he walked. The way his hands rested at his sides. The angle of his head relative to the people surrounding him. All of it communicated something that didn’t require the Dracontis name to identify. Ethan had encountered enough variations of this particular type across two lives to recognize the markers immediately.
Entitlement wore a consistent shape regardless of the world it was operating in.
"I’m afraid so."
Ella smiled and lifted her shoulders in a small shrug, the gesture carrying neither apology nor embarrassment, simply the mild acknowledgment of a fact she had long since made her peace with.
They moved toward a secondary White Tower carriage waiting near the edge of the boarding area.
Arian’s connection to the Dracontis family was not something she had severed when she joined White Tower. The blood was the blood, and the family remained the family, regardless of the professional path she had chosen or the level she had reached within it. She was still family. High ranking family, at that.
What that meant in practical terms was that when Dracontis relatives arrived in Windgrave and presented themselves at the second headquarters, the interaction carried a particular weight that couldn’t simply be processed through standard visitor protocols and moved along.
The carriage reached White Tower’s gates.
"You fucktards!!"
The voice hit them before the scene did, carrying clearly across the open ground between the gate and the inner courtyard beyond it.
"You think you can just barge into White Tower and act a fool?! I’ll show you how to act right!!"
Arian stood in the courtyard with a fire whip moving through the air in wide controlled arcs, her body positioned between a cluster of retreating nobles and whatever direction they were hoping to reach before the whip found them again. The figures were moving fast, their earlier confidence entirely absent from their posture, the composed entitlement that had preceded them through every corridor apparently having made contact with something it hadn’t been built to handle.
Arian was known for many things within White Tower.
A permissive attitude toward pampered behavior was not among them.
Her own daughters had not been raised with the ease that their mother’s rank could have provided. They had been given standards instead, and the gap between what those standards required and what the Dracontis relatives arriving from the capital had apparently assumed was acceptable had produced the scene currently unfolding in the courtyard.
The reports had been too much.
"Mother. Good morning."
Ella’s voice came out warm and slightly amused as she and Ethan stepped down from the carriage and took in the view. The smile that crossed her face carried genuine affection for the spectacle, the particular happiness of someone who had grown up watching this woman handle situations and still found it entertaining.
Arian glanced down at them.
A brief nod.
Then her attention returned to the retreating group without breaking.
"When I see you next, that attitude of yours should be seriously adjusted!!"
The final declaration landed across the courtyard with enough force that the figures who had been slowing near the far end found a new reason to keep moving. The fire whip pulled back and coiled with a practiced motion, the display concluding without ceremony.
She was done.
"Let’s go inside."
She turned from the courtyard with the clipped efficiency of someone setting a finished thing aside and moving to the next, gesturing for the two of them to follow as she walked through the gates.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
"Haha, those kids really don’t know what’s good for them."
Inside a conference room deeper in the building, several White Tower members were already well into a conversation that had clearly been running for some time.
"They think because they share a surname with the High Regent they can throw their weight around. Now they’re the ones being thrown."
"Good thing our princesses didn’t turn out like those spoilt brats."
The Dracontis relatives had apparently made productive use of the time between their arrival and Arian’s intervention, moving through White Tower’s offices with the confidence of people who believed that a shared family name transferred organizational authority. Requests for internal reports. Demands for resources. The suggestion, delivered with the particular tone of someone who assumed it wouldn’t need to be a request twice, that certain staff members might find their positions reviewed if cooperation wasn’t immediately forthcoming.
It had been genuinely annoying.
The only thing preventing a more structured response was the complication of Arian’s actual connection to them. Throwing relatives of the High Regent into a holding cell required a set of justifications that none of them were prepared to assemble on short notice, regardless of how satisfying the outcome would have been.
—click
The conference room door opened.
Arian walked in, Ethan and Ella filing in behind her. She crossed to an empty seat and took it, her gaze moving across the assembled faces with the practical efficiency of someone accounting for who was present and moving directly past the social portion of the entry.
"Sorry about that."
She waved a hand toward the group, the apology brief and without elaboration.
"We can continue the discussion about the magic dungeon from where we left off."
Comments