My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 168: Lior Came Back Wearing His Father’s Name and Left Without It

The hearing wing had never held this many jackets.

Delegation gray in the front rows.

Council pins behind them.

Faculty, press credentials, and a feed camera on a stand that nobody had bothered to hide, because hiding it would have insulted the point of the whole room.

Soren sat with the pack along the respondent bench, Celia’s procedural map memorized, Voss’s handheld in Dani’s bag, and watched the machine assemble itself stage by stage, exactly the shape the margins said it would be.

Vasquez Senior took a seat in the second row, not the first.

A man who sat second row at his own reckoning was a man leaving himself a lane to the exit.

Then the doors opened again, and Lior walked in.

◆◆◆◆

He’d dressed for it.

Pressed jacket, the clean line of blond, the face the illustrators loved, and he crossed the floor to the speaking position with the walk of a man whose floors had always agreed to hold him.

Months out of the academy hadn’t marked him anywhere visible.

The credential badge on his chest was his father’s office.

"Members of the inquiry."

His voice carried without pushing, the trained register.

"I’ve submitted a full analysis of the incident. I’ll summarize it in one sentence. The entity beneath the east yard slept undisturbed for longer than this academy has records, until one class’s anomalous bonded aggregate began resonating directly above it."

He turned, unhurried, and looked at the respondent bench.

"Class Z didn’t respond to a disaster. Class Z is the disaster. The provocation signature is in every reading this institution logged all year, and the institution logged plenty, because some of us made sure it was watched."

A murmur went through the pins.

Soren watched Lior work the murmur, feed it a pause, let it grow, and he had to give the man his due, it was a good theory for a room.

"Questions for the respondent class," the inquiry chair said.

Soren stood.

"No questions. One correction."

He nodded to Dani, and she keyed the handheld, and the room’s shared screen came up with a document on it, itemized, timestamped, notarized by its own filing system.

"Mr. Vasquez cites a year of surveillance readings," Soren said. "He’s right. My class was watched all year. I’d like to enter the procurement record of that watching."

The list scrolled.

Every credential the shell had purchased.

The buyers.

The bought press.

The delegate’s crossing.

The festival access seats.

And the monitor’s reporting keys, itemized, line-priced, with the nightly routing destination printed beside them in the archive’s own plain type.

One office.

The room read the office designation at the same speed, and the murmur this time had a different pitch to it, and Soren let it run a moment before he finished.

"Every reading Mr. Vasquez just cited was commissioned, purchased, and routed to the credential he’s wearing right now,"

"He didn’t analyze a year of surveillance. He ordered it. Through a shell, off the books, using bought access to a public festival, which is the incident this inquiry was actually convened to examine."

He sat down.

"That’s the correction."

The chair asked Lior if he wished to respond.

Lior was still looking at the screen.

Soren watched him read his own routing designation in front of three continents, and watched him understand, in real time, the shape of the trap, which was that there was no trap.

Nobody had forged anything.

The record was simply true, and he had stood up in front of the truth’s own filing system and cited its product as his evidence.

"The office conducts oversight," Lior said. "Oversight of an anomalous class is not..."

"The office," said Vasquez Senior, from the second row, "conducts nothing."

The room turned.

The father hadn’t stood. He sat with his hands folded and delivered it seated, quiet, which made every jacket lean in to hear it, which was the point.

"The credential my son is wearing was suspended this morning, pending internal review of unauthorized procurement conducted under its authority."

The words came out signed and stamped.

"The Vasquez name is cooperating fully with this inquiry. The individual is not, as of this morning, speaking for it."

The individual.

Soren watched the word land on Lior.

A man reduced to a unit of liability in one clause, by the voice that had paved every floor he’d ever walked on.

Lior looked at his father.

His father looked at the inquiry chair, finished, a man who had cut the rot and kept the tree.

◆◆◆◆

There was no scene.

That was the thing Soren would keep from the afternoon.

Lior Vasquez stood at the speaking position for three more seconds with a dead credential on his chest, and the room had already moved past him, the chair calling the next stage, the clerks re-ordering documents, the machine grinding on to the parts that still had power in them.

He’d been deducted.

Lior unclipped the badge, set it on the speaker’s rail with a small exact click, and walked the length of the hall to the doors while three continents watched a man stop existing institutionally in real time, and he did it with his spine straight, which was the only asset he had left and he spent it well.

At the doors he stopped.

He looked back once, past the pins, past his father, at the respondent bench, at Soren, and there was nothing to read in it.

The last time he’d left this academy he’d said that to a hall monitor, flat, and it had been the most dangerous thing about him.

This time he said nothing.

A man with a next move makes threats.

The doors closed on Lior Vasquez, and the gate log Dani pulled that evening showed his credential wiped, his housing released, and his name transferred out of the continental registry entirely, and none of them ever saw him again.

◆◆◆◆

The inquiry ran two more hours and hung its verdict where everyone had known it would hang.

Unauthorized procurement.

Institutional failure of oversight.

The Vasquez office dissolved, the shell’s accounts frozen, the academy’s festival charter suspended pending reform, and Class Z, in the finding’s own careful language, commended for incident response exceeding institutional readiness.

Commended.

Maren read that word off the posted finding four times and made Dani print it.

Walking out through the emptying hall, Joan fell in beside Soren, quiet, and nodded back at the room.

"Frozen accounts," she said. "The shell’s dead."

"The shell’s dead."

"You don’t look like a man whose enemy just got dissolved."

"Because they dissolved the office," Soren said. "The office was new money on an old account. Voss pulled the founding. The account predates the office, predates the son, predates everything that room just buried."

He pushed the doors open onto the evening.

"They hung the right man for the wrong machine, Joan. Somebody built that shell years before there was a Vasquez to run it. The room got its villain."

The campus lights were coming on across the yard, ordinary, unbought, and he watched them a moment.

"Mine’s still out there holding an oil can."