Chapter 945: The Anchor’s Move
The soundless press of Phei’s footsteps carried him across the moonlit garden toward the stage, his presence moving through the chaos of cables, cameras, folding chairs and low production voices with a calm that looked almost insulting beneath the nervous energy churning around him.
From the way heads turned before he had even reached the platform, it became painfully clear that everyone had simply been waiting on him — the small audience already seated under the softened garden lights, his own people occupying the front rows with expressions ranging from open curiosity to quiet, knife-bright suspicion.
The stage ahead had been arranged with expensive care, raised slightly above the manicured grass, framed by elegant side structures and washed in lighting warm enough to make even an interrogation look like lifestyle television — which was, Phei reflected, probably humanity’s most shameless achievement after turning war into economics and calling it policy.
The thing he should have worried about was not the lights, or the cameras, the audience, or even the polished man already seated on stage wearing that professional smile people put on when they had been paid either to charm strangers or to destroy them politely.
What should have worried him was the absence of control.
Interviews usually arrived swaddled in scripts, review sheets, filtered questions, safe topics, neat little boundaries and enough pre-approved nonsense to make truth itself die of boredom in the corner.
This one had none of it.
No question list or briefing on tone.
No one had told him where the conversation was meant to go — which meant whatever escaped that man’s mouth tonight would be roughly as predictable as a drunk politician set loose near a live microphone.
That made Phei want to worry, slightly.
Only slightly because panic was for people without cheekbones, bloodline privilege, or the emotional irresponsibility to smile at traps purely to see whether the trap got nervous first.
He had a great deal of all three.
And besides — he’d walked into far worse situations than this one wearing far less than a tailored shirt and an attitude.
A garden full of cameras held no special terror for a thing that had stared down progenitors over breakfast after enslaving one a night before, nothing compared to making on One Above’s Consort.
If anything, the production values were a step up.
"Mr. Ryujin Tiamat!"
Awoman called suddenly, and before he could finish pouring a reasonable measure of concern into his thoughts, she came rushing toward him — earpiece tucked neatly against one ear, clipboard clutched to her chest, breathless with the specific urgency that came from a salary depending entirely on making rich people appear on time without offending them into becoming legal problems.
She stopped before him with a bright professional smile polished enough to survive three breakdowns and a serious caffeine dependency.
"Thank you so much for coming down. We’re ready for you now. The anchor will introduce you first, then you’ll take the chair opposite him. Just follow my cue when I gesture — and please don’t worry, the lighting’s already adjusted for you."
Phei glanced past her toward the stage, where the cameras had swivelled a few degrees in his direction, mechanical predators doing an unconvincing impression of furniture.
"That sounds comforting."
The woman laughed, nervous and plainly unable to decide whether he was joking. "It is. Very comforting. Extremely controlled and completely standard."
Which was precisely what people said directly before disasters, usually while standing beside the first corpse and insisting it was sleeping.
She gestured toward the stage with both hands as though presenting him to an altar of death, the executioner was ready — an image he chose not to examine too closely — and Phei followed without comment, stepping into the warmer circle of light as the audience stirred.
The instant he came properly into view, applause rose from the seated guests, polite at first, then louder as the cameras swung toward him and the anchor turned to face the crowd, his smile widening like a man unveiling something he already knew would earn him ratings.
"Ladies and gentlemen," the man began, his voice rich, rehearsed, carrying through the garden speakers, plainly in love with itself and long past suffering any consequence for it, "please welcome the young man who took Paradise by storm."
The applause sharpened.
Phei kept walking, unhurried, letting them look.
Being looked at had stopped costing him anything some weeks ago.
"The boy who stepped onto the court and dominated the very Prince of Earth himself," the anchor continued, one hand lifting toward the audience as the cameras flicked briefly to Landon and Brian in the front rows. "Not only did he challenge an entire basketball team with only three players at his side — he and his companions still walked away with the victory."
Landon raised a hand with a faint grin when the camera found him. Brian waved more lazily beside him; his expression caught somewhere between amused and already exhausted by being public property.
A few audience members laughed softly, and for one moment the energy stayed warm, almost celebratory — the carefully arranged public admiration that always looked so harmless under good lighting.
Then the anchor’s smile changed by a fraction.
Small. Barely anything. Most people would never have caught it, because most people walked through life trusting smiles like fools pressing spare keys into the hands of burglars.
Phei caught it.
The man turned slightly back toward him and let his next sentence land more slowly, savoring its own weight.
"And of course — this is also the young man who singlehandedly challenged the uncle who raised him for ten years."
The garden changed.
Not dramatically enough for the cameras to panic, nor loudly enough for the audience to grasp that they had just been led by the throat into a different room — but the air shifted all the same:
The applause thinned strangely, several people pausing mid-clap while others glanced around as if waiting for the sentence to explain itself. Because worded like that — stripped of context, dressed in just enough admiration to disguise the blade tucked beneath it — the statement no longer sounded heroic.
It sounded like a rebellious boy with too much adrenaline, too much power and a family problem large enough to qualify as public entertainment had turned on the man who’d put a roof over his head.
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