Chapter 185: Twenty-Four Hours
They were still standing on the street outside the restaurant.
The blue light had not faded. It sat in the air above the city the way system announcements always sat, visible from every direction, patient, waiting for everyone to finish reading it.
Then a second notification appeared beneath the first.
[Time Until Authority Phase II Begins.]
[23:59:58.]
The timer started moving.
23:59:57.
23:59:56.
Leo stared at it.
"Twenty-four hours?" he said.
23:59:54.
He groaned. Fully. The complete version of a groan from someone who had been waiting for something and had just been told to wait more. "We have to wait an entire day?"
Mina laughed. "I think that’s a good thing."
Leo looked at her. "How."
"It gives everyone time to breathe." She glanced at Kai. "You’ve been fighting every day."
"I’m not complaining," Kai said.
Sera nodded. "Same."
Hana giggled quietly.
Leo crossed his arms. "I am."
Everyone laughed.
The timer continued. The street around them had the quality it always had during system announcements, people pausing what they were doing, looking up, reading, processing. A few of them were already on their phones.
Leo was already on his phone.
He suddenly went still. The kind of still that meant he had found something.
"Oh," he said.
Everyone looked at him.
"The other cities," he said. He was already pulling up tabs. "Their Authority tests. They have to be posting about it."
Kai looked at him.
Leo held the phone up. "They’re already online."
Kai leaned over. "You’re right."
Sera leaned in from the other side.
They all ended up back inside the restaurant. The staff had not yet started cleaning their table and did not object to them sitting back down. Hana squeezed in beside Leo and looked at his phone with the focused attention of someone who had been invited to participate in something.
...
The first city’s footage loaded.
Large city. Wide streets. The system display hanging over a central plaza where several thousand people had gathered.
[Authority Candidate Selection Method: Public Vote.]
Candidates were standing on a raised platform. Not fighting. Speaking. A crowd below them was watching and then voting on handheld devices. Debates had apparently been running for two days. There were interview segments. Background videos on each candidate showing their dungeon records, their statements about what they would do with Authority, responses from other hunters who had worked with them.
Leo watched for about forty seconds.
"That’s boring," he said.
Mina shook her head. "They’re deciding who they trust."
Sera nodded. "It probably works really well in that city."
Kai was looking at the footage. "They’ve probably had fewer disasters in their gate phase. Less urgency to find the strongest person and more room to find the right one."
Hana said, "But how do they know if the person they vote for is actually good at fighting monsters?"
"They probably have records of that," Sera said. "The vote is the final step, not the only step."
Hana thought about this. "Oh." A pause. "Okay."
...
The second city’s footage loaded and Leo’s reaction was immediate.
A large arena. Thirty hunters. All of them active simultaneously.
"THIS ONE," Leo said, sitting up.
The footage was chaos. Alliances forming and dissolving within minutes. Three hunters coordinating to take down one and then immediately turning on each other. The arena itself had started collapsing from the accumulated damage before the fight was halfway through.
Hana’s eyes went wide. "They’re fighting everyone at once."
Kai was watching the footage carefully. "No teamwork."
Sera said, "They only needed one person to survive. Teamwork would just mean more people to compete with at the end."
Kai noticed something. "They’re spending too much energy early. The winner is going to be whoever conserved the most." He watched for a moment. "The strongest person might not win this."
Leo looked at him. "Is that bad?"
"Depends on what the city needs," Kai said.
...
Third city. Split screen. Four candidates clearing the same dungeon simultaneously, each one visible on a quarter of the display.
Fastest clear wins.
Leo said, "Ooooh."
Different approaches visible in real time. One candidate was taking a direct route and fighting everything. Another was finding shortcuts and bypassing encounters entirely. A third was using terrain to funnel monsters and clear in batches. The fourth was moving slowly but with zero wasted actions.
Kai was quiet for a moment. "I like this one."
Sera smiled. "I thought you would."
"It tests problem-solving," Kai said. "Not just combat strength."
"The shortcuts candidate is going to win," Sera said, watching the split screen.
Kai watched. "Probably. Unless the terrain encounters something that can’t be bypassed."
"Exciting," Leo said, with the enthusiasm of someone who was genuinely invested now.
Hana was tracking all four screens simultaneously with the focused attention of someone trying to learn the rules of a new game very quickly.
...
Fourth city. A leaderboard. The candidates had apparently been competing across multiple categories over several weeks. Highest level. Most B-rank clears. Most boss kills. The numbers beside some of the names were difficult to fully process.
Leo whistled. "They’re monsters."
Kai looked at the numbers. "They’ve been preparing for months. Not for the announcement. For the whole gate phase. They already knew this was coming."
Sera said, "That city values results over anything else."
Mina said, "Is that good or bad?"
"Neither," Kai said. "If B-rank threats are their main concern, results are exactly what you’d want to measure."
...
Fifth city. Not individual candidates at all.
Entire guilds.
The system had apparently decided that this city’s selection method would be guild-based. Whichever guild contributed the most across a set of measured categories during a defined period would have their Guild Master become the Authority holder.
The footage showed massive coordinated operations. Dozens of hunters moving together, resource collection, dungeon clears at scale, support infrastructure being built while the combat operations were running.
Kai watched this one for a while without saying anything.
Mina said, "That probably keeps the guilds working together."
Sera said, "Or competing harder than they would otherwise."
"Both," Kai said. "At the same time."
Hana said, "Which guild is winning?"
Leo zoomed in on the leaderboard. "The one in blue."
Hana nodded seriously, as though this answered the question completely.
...
Sixth city. The footage loaded and the system display was visible.
[Selection Method: Unknown.]
Leo frowned. "Unknown?"
The footage continued. The candidates were assembled. Then they were not. No visible transition. No dramatic moment. They simply disappeared from the frame in the same second, every one of them, and the crowd that had been watching them was now watching an empty platform.
The video cut.
The comments below the footage were running fast and none of them agreed on what had happened.
Leo stared at the screen. "Wait. What?"
"Nobody knows," Kai said, looking at the comments.
"Even the people there don’t know," Sera said.
Hana had moved slightly closer to Mina.
"That’s creepy," she said.
Kai looked at the frozen frame of the empty platform. "Yes," he said. "Very."
He filed this away as something worth knowing more about later.
...
Leo put his phone down and looked around the table.
"I still like ours," he said.
Hana raised her hand slightly. "I liked the arena one."
Mina said, "I liked the voting."
Sera looked at the phone. "They all made sense for their cities. The voting city probably has a strong political culture. The arena city probably values individual strength above everything else. The speed clear city values efficient problem-solving."
Kai nodded. "The system isn’t repeating the same method."
Everyone was quiet for a moment.
"It’s choosing methods that fit," Mina said.
"Yes," Kai said.
Sera said it quietly, more to herself than anyone. "If every city has a different Authority holder chosen by a different method, they’re all going to develop differently from here."
Kai remembered what Lily had said in the overlook. First priorities shape later years. The order mattered. And now every city in the region was in the middle of setting its first priorities through completely different processes.
The world was going to diverge. Not slowly. Quickly.
He was looking at the timer on his phone.
23:11:42.
...
Leo yawned.
Not a small yawn. A complete, full-body yawn that communicated total commitment to the experience of being tired.
"I’m staying up," he said immediately afterward.
"No you’re not," Mina said.
"I am."
"Leo."
"I’m going to watch all of them."
Hana nodded beside him. "I’ll watch too."
Mina looked at Hana. Hana looked back with the earnest expression of someone who genuinely meant it.
Kai said, "They’ll still be there tomorrow."
Leo sighed. The dramatic version. The version that communicated the depth of his sacrifice. "Fine."
Hana looked slightly disappointed but accepted this.
Everyone gathered coats and phones and the various small items that had distributed themselves across the table during the evening. Leo held the restaurant door open for Hana with the specific deliberateness of someone who had just remembered this was a thing you did.
Outside the night was cool and the city was still showing the timer on screens and phones.
23:09:17.
Mina and Leo and Hana headed in their direction. Leo said something over his shoulder that Kai did not fully catch but that sounded like a threat to watch the arena city footage from his phone under his blanket.
Kai and Sera stood on the street for a moment.
The blue glow was still faint in the sky above the city.
"One day," Sera said.
Kai looked up at the timer on the nearest screen.
One day until whatever Phase II meant. One day until the system decided what came next for a city that had spent two months doing things nobody had a playbook for and had kept going anyway.
He looked at the night sky past the glow.
"Feels like everything’s changing again," he said.
Sera stood beside him.
"It is," she said.
The timer kept moving.
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