Chapter 158: A City Holds Its Breath
The system screens disappeared.
The city exploded with noise.
Conversations started everywhere at once. Questions. Arguments. Phones ringing. Nobody knew what to think, but everyone had something to say. People started talking before the blue screens even disappeared.
Everyone had questions.
Nobody had answers.
He started walking.
The city felt different.
Tonight, everyone was talking about the same thing. And nobody sounded certain.
Two women were standing outside a convenience store. One of them had the system portrait list pulled up on her phone. She pointed at it and said to the other, "If the wrong person gets this, what do we do?"
The other woman said, "What do you mean? What do we do?"
"I mean, what do we actually do? Do we appeal? Do we protest? Is there a process?"
The first woman looked at the system text again. "I don’t see one." Neither of them said anything for a moment. "So we just have to pick right," the second woman said.
The first one put her phone away. "Yeah," she said. "We just have to pick right."
Kai kept walking.
An old man sitting outside a pharmacy was looking at the sky with his hands on his knees. His wife came out with two cups and sat beside him. "Did you read it?" she said.
"Yes," he said.
"All of it?"
"Yes." She put one of the cups in his hands. He held it.
"Are you worried?" she said.
He sighed. "I’m old enough to have seen what happens when the wrong people make big decisions," he said. "And old enough to know that sometimes the right people do." He looked at his cup. "So I’m both."
She didn’t answer and just sat with him.
Kai passed them and did not look back. But he carried the image of them sitting there for the rest of the walk.
A restaurant he passed had its window facing the street. Through the glass, a man was sitting across from a woman with a child between them. The man was looking at the saved system text on his phone. The man had a grimace with his arms trembling.
Kai easily knew what he was worried about.
The ability to lower the age.
The man’s wife looked at their young daughter. The little girl kept eating, completely unaware of why her parents had suddenly gone quiet.
Neither of them said anything after that.
Two teenagers were on the corner comparing their phones. One of them said, "Authority sounds incredible." The other one looked at the candidate list. "Until someone gets it who shouldn’t."
Neither of them had an answer to that.
An older hunter near the training facility entrance was standing with another hunter of similar age. "I thought mayors ran cities," the first one said.
The second one. "Apparently, that’s only part of it."
Kai kept walking.
The city really was about to change.
...
The training facility near the central district was still open. Through the windows, the junior hunters inside had stopped their practice. The wall screens still showed the announcement.
The junior hunters had stopped training.
They were all staring at it.
One of them said, "If someone can bring F-rank gates back."
The group went quiet.
Another one, younger, said, "I would have started sooner if those gates still existed." He was looking at the gate frequency example. "The first gate I entered was D-rank because that’s what was available when I awakened."
Nobody around him argued with this.
A third one, quieter than the rest, said, "Maybe I wouldn’t have almost died in my first month."
The room stayed quiet.
The guild district was having a different version of the same conversation. The guild leaders were not panicking but planning after going through many dangers. But the assessment was producing a constant concern.
One guild master said to the group he was meeting with, "Authority changes city policy. Not just today. Ongoing."
Another said, "Whoever wins changes how we operate. Gate assignments. Infrastructure. The criteria for how resources from the dungeon clears get distributed."
A third. "Everything changes."
Nobody argued.
They all understood what it meant.
The guild district had built its operational structures around a city that ran a certain way. Whoever won would decide how the city moved forward.
...
Outside a noodle shop, two men were having a disagreement that had clearly started somewhere else and had arrived here.
"Kai’s NULL class," the first one said. "He might have an idea of how weaker hunters feel and those in difficult positions. But managing an entire city? He has none of that."
"He cleared the Mythical Phase gates," the second one said. "All five. The city survived because of those clears."
"Surviving a gate isn’t the same as knowing how to run a city."
"Lily can run a city, sure." The second one said. "Kai runs toward the thing that’s going to kill everyone else. Those are different jobs, and right now we need both."
"Authority isn’t a hunting contract."
"No," the second one said. "It’s bigger. Which means you want someone who handles things when they get bigger than expected." He looked at his phone. On the candidate list. "Name one situation where Kai didn’t handle it when it got bigger than expected."
The first one opened his mouth.
"Name one," the second one said.
The first one closed his mouth.
"That’s what I thought," the second one said. They both went back to their noodles.
Kai, who had been walking past and had heard the entire thing, kept walking without changing his pace.
He was not sure whether that had been complimentary or not.
He decided to accept it as both.
...
Mayor Ko was in the coordination building with Lily and several department heads within twenty minutes of the announcement fading. He had the saved system text in front of him. He had read through it twice. He was on the third read.
Someone in the room said, "What do we do?"
Mayor Ko finished the paragraph he was on. Then he said, "Prepare reports."
"On what specifically?"
Mayor Ko looked up. "Everything," he said. He looked around the room. "If the Authority changes the city’s future, we need to understand what future each candidate is working toward." A pause. "That’s more important than anything else in this building tonight."
...
Sora’s stream had been running when the announcement came through, and the chat had gone from several hundred viewers to several thousand in under three minutes. She had been mid-sentence about something else and had simply stopped and looked at the system displays visible through her window, and had taken one breath and said, "Well. I guess today’s stream isn’t going the way I planned."
The chat was moving too fast to read individual messages.
She did what she always did.
She separated facts from rumors.
What the system had said. What the examples had demonstrated. What was confirmed and what was not confirmed. The distinction between what Authority appeared to be capable of and what any individual candidate would actually do with it.
She displayed the six candidate portraits.
The chat exploded.
Every candidate’s name filled the screen.
Someone asked who she was supporting. She paused. Longer than her usual processing pause. "I’m supporting Mythal," she said.
The chat responded to this for a moment, and then someone asked who she thought would win.
She looked at each portrait in sequence: Kai. Sera. Lily. Raze. Mira. Elden.
"I honestly," she said with a small laugh. "Have no idea."
And she meant it.
The city had already picked favorites.
A restaurant owner outside his establishment said to the person beside him, "Raze. Clearly."
"Why Raze?"
"Because if a B-rank gate appears while someone indecisive is holding Authority, we all die."
A student sitting outside a café said, "Kai," to the friend beside her.
"Why."
"Because he’s Rank One and he cleared the Divine Maze solo."
A researcher at a public table said, "Lily," without being asked. The people near him did not know who he was, but nodded because the reasoning was legible. "She’s the only one who’ll actually calculate the correct answer instead of going with instinct."
A veteran hunter outside a guild hall said, "Elden." The person beside him said, "Why not Kai?" The veteran said, "Because Elden spent years inside a guild that turned out to be corrupt and still walked away. That kind of judgment matters."
A young woman near a training facility said, "Mira." The person next to her said, "Why?" She said, "Because she actually asked what we needed during the Mythical phase. She showed up and asked."
An academy student said, "Sera," and then looked slightly embarrassed but held the position when the person next to him looked skeptical. "She hasn’t made a wrong call yet," the student said. "Not one."
No one candidate stood above the others.
Every name had supporters.
The city couldn’t agree on who deserved Authority.
That was its own kind of tension.
Night came.
Nobody stopped talking. The conversations were still running in every venue. Streams were still going. The news broadcasts had been on the topic since the announcement and showed no signs of finding a different topic.
Guild chats were still flooded with messages.
Hunters were still arguing.
Sora was finishing her stream. She looked at the candidate list one more time before she ended it. All six portraits. The crossed-out seventh.
"Whatever happens next," she said, but she wasn’t sure if she was speaking to her viewers or to herself. "I just hope the city survives it."
She ended the stream.
Before anyone could leave...
Every screen in the city turned blue again.
[Authority Selection has begun.]
[Candidates are free to pursue victory.]
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