Chương 37: Who's that kid?

Why have you never heard of the Council, you ask? Well, that is by design. No one outside of the Council members themselves knows of the existence of the Council. What do we do? That's something you're not prepared to hear yet. Also, where do you think the Councils on each planet derived their name from? - Rosalind Highflower, Secretary of The Overseers, in conversation with Droban The preparations had begun weeks ago and had not, at any point, felt like they were going well enough.

This was the nature of the festival, Moghli had told him early on, with the patience of someone delivering information they knew would not fully land until the recipient experienced it firsthand. The festival preparations always felt like it was not going well enough. That was how you knew it was going to be fine. Kara had filed this under things that were probably true and not particularly comforting. The SDC's role was substantial.

Contacting reputed individuals, scheduling, managing the inevitable reshuffling when someone more prominent became available at the last minute and a previous confirmation had to be quietly walked back - this last part being the kind of task that required a specific combination of diplomacy and shamelessness that Kara was developing faster than he would have chosen to. Arranging accommodation and transport. Coordinating with the rest of the campus on shared resources.

It was a different order of complexity from anything the committee had asked of him before. He had not managed it alone. Glasses had been recruited with approximately the level of enthusiasm you would expect from someone being recruited against their will, which was none, but he had shown up and done the work, which was what mattered.

A handful of other batchmates had come on board as well - the contact details of truly prominent individuals being, as Kara had correctly calculated, an incentive most people found difficult to decline. Vixen had been offered the same opportunity and had instead been entrusted with Waggy for the duration, a responsibility she had accepted with considerably more enthusiasm than Glasses had accepted his. Today, the day of the festival itself, the support network had been reduced to the three SDC members.

And today was when the miscommunication announced itself. The transportation agency had been given instructions to collect the honoured guests and deliver them to the venue by ten in the morning, one hour before the event. What the agency had apparently understood was that ten in the morning was the time to begin collecting the guests. The distinction between arrival time and departure time being, apparently, the kind of nuance that required more explicit communication than had been provided.

The first indication that something had gone wrong was a call from one of the guests, noting with restrained displeasure that he had been waiting for some time and no transport had arrived. Phinx had handled the agency. Kara had not been in the room for this and considered himself fortunate. He had been tasked instead with managing the agency's point of contact - keeping the relationship functional, which required a degree of patience he was drawing on from reserves he had not known he would need today.

Moghli was fielding calls from the guests themselves, absorbing the displeasure personally, and reassuring each of them that the revised timeline was still workable. The agency's updated estimate put all guests arriving with a quarter to half an hour to spare before the event. Workable. Just. The guests arrived in sequence, the order of them carrying its own quiet diplomacy. First was Mr.

Stonebottom, Area Head of the First Brain's faction - a broad man in his late fifties who carried his authority as something structural rather than performed, worn in over long years of holding significant positions. He was met by Ms. Leera of the Area 11 Council and the full SDC, and escorted to the waiting room without incident. The stadium grounds had been reconfigured for the occasion.

A stage occupied one end, and in front of it sat a pool - functional rather than decorative, Kara knew, connected to the ocean outside through a channel that had taken considerable engineering to arrange. Whatever was planned for the main event, the setup for it had been running quietly in the background of the preparations for weeks, and Kara was looking forward to seeing it resolved into something real. Ms.

Lineheart arrived next, Area Principal of the Progenitors, and the temperature in the waiting room adjusted accordingly. She was roughly the same age as Stonebottom and had, from everything Kara had gathered, spent approximately as long being on the opposite side of every significant question he had taken a position on. The transport delay gave her something concrete to direct her opening displeasure at, and Moghli absorbed it with practiced composure, a passive skill running quietly in the background.

They were saved from further escalation by the arrival that silenced everything else. Mr. Kazushi, Planetary Chief of the Task Force, came through the entrance with half the Council members arranged to receive him and Mink visibly gratified to be leading the procession. Of the SDC, only Moghli was permitted to serve as escort alongside the Council contingent. Kara and Phinx held their positions and watched. Kazushi looked to be in his early forties.

Clean-shaved, precise in bearing, the yukata placing his origins in Area 10 without ambiguity. Kara had been prepared, in some abstract way, for the feeling that arrived when he saw him - the Task Force had done what it had done to his family, and he had known this moment was coming and had thought he was ready for it. What he had not been prepared for was the respect. It arrived without permission and sat alongside the other feeling without resolving it. There was something in the way Kazushi held himself.

Kara filed the contradiction and let it be. Phinx's hand found his arm from behind before he could think further.

"The travel agency just messaged." Her voice was low and quick.

"Mr. Shanks has arrived but got off at the gate. He's walking in on his own. Can you find him and escort him to the waiting room." A brief pause, before adding, "Be careful with him." Kara looked at her. She had already turned back to the room. The campus was crowded in the way it only got on festival days - the usual quiet replaced by movement and sound from every direction, the corridors and walkways carrying more people than they were designed to feel comfortable with.

He crossed the bridge from the residential block to the academic section and scanned the grounds. The lake caught the ambient light the way it always did at this hour, the bioluminescent corals along its edges running through their slow colour cycle. Most of the area around it was dense with students and visitors. Most. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. One stretch was not. A clear space had formed close to the lake.

At the centre of the cleared space, walking along the lakeside path with the certainty of someone who had been here before and did not need to consult anything to know where he was going, was a figure that resolved itself, as Kara closed the distance, into the tallest person he had seen since Mink. Unlike Mink, there was no bulk to him. He was lean, but clearly athletic despite his age. White hair, cut neatly but with a definite style to it.

A salt and pepper beard, trimmed to the same standard as everything else about him. A suit that had been made for him rather than purchased, and boots that threw back the ambient light, polished to the point where more polishing could add nothing. Kara's Sixth Sense registered him before he was within what should have been range. Something like the awareness of a very large and potentially dangerous presence in the water before you could see it, the pressure differential arriving ahead of the source.

He noticed it, filed it, and kept walking. They made eye contact when he was close enough. Kara stopped mid-stride. Something in his forward momentum stalled - his body did not cease moving entirely, but the drive of it faltered, stalling for the half-second a quick recalculation took. There was something in Mr. Shanks' gaze that bypassed the usual layers of assessment and landed directly on whatever part of the mind handled fundamental evaluations.

Simply the gaze of something that had been at the top of its food chain for a long, long time. His skill moved. The steadiness it produced was a floor under it rather than the absence of sensation, something to stand on while the rest of him caught up.

"I presume you are here to escort me," Mr. Shanks said. The voice was deep enough that Kara felt it in his chest marginally before he processed it as sound.

"Yes, of course."

"I didn't really need an escort," he stated matter-of-factly. Kara wasn't quite sure how to respond to that. Mr. Shanks resumed walking. Kara fell into step beside him, adjusting his pace to match strides that were longer than his own by a margin that required the adjustment to be continuous.

"I've been here before," Mr. Shanks added. That explained the navigation. It did not explain why nobody had told Kara, but that was a question for later.

"Rather than giving me an escort here, you should have ensured that the transportation reached on time. Miscommunications shouldn't happen at this level."

"Sorry about that. We'll make sure nothing like this happens again."

"Good." The silence that followed was not comfortable but it was not hostile either. It was simply the silence of someone who had said what they had to say and saw no reason to fill the remaining space. Kara walked beside him and did not try to fill it. He was aware, in a peripheral way, that the cleared path was reforming ahead of them as they moved - people stepping aside without looking up, the way you stepped aside for something whose presence you registered before you consciously identified it.

He focused on keeping his breathing even and his pace steady, which was doing more work than it usually needed to. The stadium entrance arrived with the plain relief of a destination reached. Standing just inside it, timed as though he had been watching them approach, was Narak. Kara had not seen him positioned there for any of the other arrivals.

"Mr. Shanks. It's been a while. Thank you for accepting the invitation, and apologies for the mix-up with the transportation. I know you dislike nothing more than being kept waiting." The formality of it landed differently from how Narak usually spoke - calibrated - the register of a man addressing someone he knew well and still handled with care. He offered his hand. Mr. Shanks took it. Something in him shifted, a reduction in whatever had been running at full output since the gate.

"Narak. Good to see you too. No need to apologise. This will serve as a valuable lesson for the youngsters, I'm sure." First name. Kara noted it. He had never heard anyone address Narak by first name in a professional context without Narak's explicit approval.

"Thanks for escorting Mr. Shanks all the way here, Kara - even though I know he doesn't need it. Good courtesy from our end regardless. Go and join the rest of your committee. I'll accompany him from here." Kara smiled, nodded, and walked away. He made it around the first corner before he let out a long breath. It came out less controlled than he intended.

He stood there for a moment, doing a quiet inventory of the last ten minutes, and arrived at the conclusion that the only reason he had maintained any semblance of composure on that walk was because his skill had been working continuously the entire time. He was not sure what would have happened without it. He was not particularly interested in finding out. He straightened his mask, filed his questions about Shanks for later, and went to find Phinx and Moghli.

"Who's that kid, Narak?" The waiting room was audible from the corridor - the faction heads had found their rhythm, which meant a continuous low-level friction that the Task Force Chief and the Council members were apparently content to let run. As they approached the entrance, Shanks' voice dropped to the register he used when he did not particularly want to be overheard, which on him was still carrying enough to rattle windows. Narak considered the question for a moment.

There was no point in anything except the direct answer.

"He's Ghilim's brother." The stern expression did not break. It did something more interesting than break - it paused, briefly, the pause of a man meeting information that needed real thought rather than routine filing. Narak catalogued this as a win.

"Hmm. Interesting." A beat.

"So he's an Arafel. Very intriguing indeed." The last part was quieter - the register Shanks used when he was thinking aloud rather than talking to anyone, the low rumble of it sitting at a frequency most people would have taken for ambient sound and moved past. Narak had spent enough time around him to have developed an ear for it. He could not help himself.

"So what made you notice him? And what about the Arafels?" Shanks glanced at him, caught out, weighing how to respond.

"Sometimes I forget you're no longer the kid you were back then, and I'm no longer as sharp as I was." A pause.

"I noticed him because he recognised my aura before he was even within range. And no matter how it looked, he wasn't affected by it. If anything, he was more affected by my words. It's usually the other way around." He paused again, and something in his face settled into the flatness of a door closing.

"As for the Arafels - forget I mentioned them. Nothing significant, never have been. Just the mumblings of an old man who should know better." The tone carried a finality that Narak understood better than to push against. He filed it alongside the other things about Shanks that he had collected over the years and never fully resolved. They reached the entrance. Phinx stepped forward to greet Shanks, composed and professional in the way she had been all day.

As they crossed the threshold into the waiting room, the noise from within dropped away. All at once. The faction heads stopped mid-exchange. The Task Force Chief, who had been offering measured responses to both of them with the level diplomacy of a man managing a long-running situation, looked up. The Council members shifted. Narak watched the room recalibrate without anyone in it making a conscious decision to recalibrate.

Shanks' aura was not the aura of someone above D-grade - not the shimmer at the edges or the visible field that higher grades produced. It was something older and less classifiable than that. The feeling of being in the presence of something that had been at the absolute apex of its domain for long enough that the domain had simply organised itself around it. A predator so established in its position that nothing in the room retained its previous sense of its own standing.

Narak watched the faction heads, who had been bickering with the comfortable energy of people who knew exactly where they ranked relative to each other, go still all at once, the way people do when the rankings suddenly felt irrelevant. Even the Planetary Task Force Chief, one of the most powerful people on the planet, had gone still, measuring his every movement. Narak couldn't blame them.