The Transmigrated Author

Chapter 312: A Long Time After (2)

[Pinnacle Academy, Male Dorms: Room 4-A]

[Thursday, 4:02 PM]

The summons came the way it always did.

BZZZT!...BZZZZT!

[You’ve received a message from: [email protected]]

[Subject: Debrief]

[Report to HQ. 6:00 PM. Full gear.]

[Do not be late.]

Short. No pleasantries. That was Yang.

I read it twice anyway, mostly because of the last line. She’d never once needed to tell me not to be late.

Which meant this wasn’t a debrief so much as a conversation she’d already decided how to start.

haah...

I got up and pulled the duffle bag out from under my bed.

Black robe. White mask. Sword on the left hip, pistol on the right. The codes went in last, tucked into the side pocket where the IDS scanners would catch them.

It was strange how routine it had become. There was a time when putting this on made my hands shake. Now I did it while thinking about whether I’d have time to eat afterwards.

I zipped the bag shut and headed for the station.

***

[Eldoria, Mercenaries Headquarters - Floor 12: Squad Briefing Room]

The briefing room on the twelfth floor was the smallest one in the building, and Yang used it specifically because it was the only room with no windows.

She was already there when I walked in, seated at the end of a long steel table with a tablet in front of her and her jacket over the back of the chair. The bandaging on her shoulder was fresh.

The door sealed behind me.

"Mask off."

I pulled it off and set it on the table.

"Sit."

I sat.

For a moment she just looked at me, and I got the distinct impression I was being inspected rather than greeted.

"You look better than you did in that courtyard," she said.

"I slept."

"Fourteen hours. I know. I had the estate report your condition."

She tapped once on the tablet.

"Let’s begin. Everything from the moment the orb activated to the moment you came out. Leave nothing."

So I told her.

Not everything, obviously. There’s a version of the truth that fits in a report and a version that ends with me explaining that I wrote this world, and I’ve gotten very good at knowing where the line between them sits.

I gave her the four regions. The systems the orb assigned each of us. Richard’s demonic form and the serum behind it. The shards, and the platform, and the way five fragments came together into one.

I gave her the Soul Forger.

That part she made me repeat twice.

"A primordial being," she said flatly.

"That’s what he called himself."

"Held prisoner in a pocket world by Philip Han’s organisation, forging on command."

"Yes."

"And you beat him."

"I survived him," I corrected.

"There’s a difference. He wanted to fight Jan. He got me instead, and he was..."

I stopped, because the honest word was *disappointed*, and saying that out loud would raise a question I didn’t want asked.

"He was thorough," I finished.

Yang’s eyes stayed on me a second longer than they needed to.

Then she made a note.

"Continue."

I told her the rest. The Momentous Future. The exit. Coming out into the courtyard with Morwen standing in the wreckage of the Montclair estate.

What I didn’t tell her was what happened in the white space in between. Prime, the three spells, the compass, dying and coming back with four charges left instead of five.

That belonged to me.

"...And that’s all of it," I said.

Yang set the tablet down.

"Now the part you left out."

...!

I kept my face still.

"Which part?"

"I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking." She leaned back in her chair.

"Axel. I’ve been reading your reports for months. You write like someone filling out a form, which is fine, most mercenaries do. But you’ve never once given me a report where the timeline had a hole in it, and this one has a hole roughly the size of the entire teleportation sequence."

Of course she noticed.

Sometimes I forget that the reason Yang Vienna is Vice Commander isn’t her mana rating.

"Something happened," I admitted. "It wasn’t relevant to the mission."

"I’ll be the judge of—"

"It wasn’t relevant to the mission," I repeated.

The room went quiet.

I don’t know what came over me. You don’t say that to a superior officer, and certainly not to this one.

But I was tired of the number of people I was lying to, and this felt like the smallest possible amount of truth I could give her instead.

Yang studied me for a long moment.

Then, unexpectedly, she let it go.

"Fine," she said.

"Then we move on. But understand that I’m noting it as withheld, not absent. If it becomes relevant, you’ll tell me before I have to find out on my own."

"Understood."

"Good."

She swiped the tablet, and the room’s projector flickered to life above the table.

"Now here’s what your report bought us."

***

The first image was a map of the Montclair estate with three separate approach vectors marked in red.

"The Devil’s Cult," Yang said.

"Three cells, moving on the estate simultaneously while you were all inside the orb. We stopped them at the outer grounds. What matters is that the Syndicate and the Cult moved on the same target, on the same night, without coordinating."

"They didn’t know about each other."

"They didn’t know about each other," she confirmed.

"Which is the first useful thing that’s happened in this business in a year. Quadra doesn’t fracture. Ever. But two of the four leaders just reached for the same object without telling the other, and that means whatever that orb is, it’s valuable enough for Morwen Cross and Vladimir Bane to keep secrets from each other."

I said nothing, because I knew exactly what it was worth, and every word I could have offered would have been a confession.

A vessel that can hold a soul. And whatever else is left inside it.

"Second." She swiped. "Richard."

Aubin Henri Richard’s face filled the projection, unconscious, restraints visible at the edges of the frame.

"He woke up nineteen hours ago and hasn’t stopped talking since. Which is itself suspicious." Yang’s mouth thinned.

"He’s given us shipping routes, three safehouses, two names in the Nightshade chain. All of it checks out. All of it is also at least eight months stale."

"He’s buying something."

"He’s buying his life, and he knows the only currency that works is information. So he’s spending the cheap stuff first and holding the rest." She looked up.

"He’s asked for a specific arrangement. Protection, relocation, a new registry identity. In exchange he says he’ll give us the delivery structure of the serum programme. Every lab, every distributor, every buyer."

The DS-235UT chain.

"Are you taking it?"

"That’s above me. But the Commander is considering it, and if it goes through, someone is going to have to sit across a table from that man for a very long time." She held my gaze.

"You’ve met him. In there. You know how he thinks."

Ah.

"You want me in the room."

"I want you available. There’s a difference, and you’ll appreciate it when you’re older."

She swiped again before I could answer, and the projection changed.

And my stomach dropped.

It was a photograph of a tower.

Not a clear one. It had been taken from a great distance and blown up until the grain swallowed the detail, but there was no mistaking the shape of it, that impossible vertical line running up out of the landscape and continuing past the point where the sky should have started.

"Third," Yang said.

"And this is the reason I called you in rather than sending the report through channels."

"...What is that?"

"You tell me. It was taken eleven days ago from the eastern edge of Eldoria." She let the image sit.

"Command has been sitting on it. There are four of them. There have always been four of them, and for as long as anyone has kept records, they have been closed."

The photograph stayed on the wall.

Eleven days.

"Are they opening?" I asked.

"Not this year. Probably not next." She folded her arms.

"But the energy output has climbed four percent in a month, which doesn’t sound like much until you understand that the number has not moved in eighty years. Eldoria runs on that output. This entire country exists because those four things emit something and the land drinks it. So when the number moves, the Corps notices."

Not this year. Probably not next.

Two years, then. Maybe a little more.

The towers were waking up slowly, the way something enormous wakes up.

"Why show me?" I asked, and I was genuinely careful with how I asked it.

Yang was quiet for a second.

"Because you’re seventeen," she said, "and by the time that thing opens its doors you’ll be old enough to be sent through them."

She switched off the projector.

"When it opens, and it will, every organisation on this planet is going to throw bodies at it. The Association. The guilds. Us. The Darkworld And Quadra, who will be there first, because they always are." She stood and pulled her jacket off the chair.

"The mercenaries who survive that will be the ones who spent the next two years getting ready instead of the last two weeks. So start now."

I picked up my mask.

"Yes, ma’am."

"One more thing."

I stopped at the door.

"The orb stayed with the Montclairs," Yang said.

"You were in that courtyard when the Montclair boy made his claim, and you didn’t say a word."

My hand tightened slightly on the mask.

"I didn’t have standing to."

"No, you didn’t." She pulled her jacket on, wincing as it went over the bandaged shoulder.

"But you did have an opinion. I watched you have it."

She walked past me, and paused with her hand on the door release.

"I’ve been doing this a long time, Axel. When a person your age wants something badly, it shows up on them like a fever." The door hissed open.

"You wanted that orb to stay exactly where it ended up."

...

"Get some rest. You’ve got school in the morning."

And then she was gone down the corridor, and I stood alone in a windowless room on the twelfth floor with my mask in my hands, thinking about how many people were now watching me and how few of them had told me they were.

Prime. The Soul Forger. Valencia.

And now her.

haah...

I put the mask back on.

Four towers, waking up eleven days ago.

I really needed to learn how to lie better.