Chương 21: The Shape of Things

The private dining room had officially become the war room. The long table was now completely covered by Matteo's maps: Turin with its neighborhoods marked in color-coded zones, a large-scale map of Piedmont with regional points of interest circled, and a satellite diagram of the Quadrilatero with the locations of all known Leonelli properties marked with pin flags. Coffee cups, pens, and half-empty water glasses were scattered at regular intervals, the detritus of a long planning session.

Bianca had taken over one entire corner for intelligence, where notebooks, printed pages, and pinned notes created a nest of organized data. Cecilia came in and took a chair at the back of the room. It wasn't her usual chair. Her usual chair was at the head of the table, where the light came in best and the sightlines covered both doors. She'd taken the back deliberately, and the others had read it the same way she meant it: this wasn't her meeting. She was here to see how Luca ran one.

He sat at the far end with his laptop, a notebook, and an electric kettle he'd somehow acquired since yesterday. Every time Cecilia noticed it, she thought about asking where it had come from, then decided she didn't want to know the answer. Ruggiero was already seated near the entrance. He'd told her about Boris on the stairs, on her way down: three words, delivered without preamble.

"He kept them." Cecilia had nodded once, and that was the whole conversation. Ruggiero's assessments ran short because they didn't need to be long. He'd been evaluating people for twenty-odd years, and the ones he'd misjudged he could count on one hand without unfolding his fingers all the way. A few more minutes passed. Then the door opened. The Ferrero couple entered together and sat in the same places they'd chosen the first day they came into the room.

It was a small choice, but one that meant they'd accepted the space as theirs to use. Ermilio opened his laptop. Iris took a notebook and a pencil from her bag and arranged them neatly in front of her. The other recruit arrived alone. Giulia Conti seemed uncertain about the room and the people in it. Her hair had been tied back and her clothes had changed into the jeans and turtleneck that were becoming the uniform for people who didn't want to stand out. She paused near the door, looking from Cecilia to Luca.

"Here's fine," Luca said, gesturing to a chair near the map of the Quadrilatero.

"We're still informal. Close that door if you could." Giulia closed it and sat. She put her hands on the table, then in her lap, then clasped them together, as if they were disobedient things she was trying to organize. Luca looked at them, then turned the laptop to face him and clasped his hands on the table.

"Alright," he said, "let's go through what we know about the System scenarios." The first thing was the creatures. He'd pulled data from six separate accounts of Night of First Measure encounters in the streets around the Quadrilatero, plus what Cecilia had sent back from the military position on Corso Francia. What came out of them wasn't something she'd expected to see laid out as a formal finding, but seeing it laid out made it sharper. The creatures engaged in coordinated approaches.

They withdrew when an engagement stopped being favorable. They didn't scavenge the positions they cleared. And in three of the six accounts, they'd retreated on a signal rather than on individual assessment, which meant they were either communicating or responding to some shared trigger none of them had language for yet.

"So they're intelligent," Ruggiero said. He'd let it run a few minutes before cutting in.

"We knew that."

"We suspected it," Luca said.

"This is the confirmation."

"What does it change?"

"How we prepare for the next Scenario. If they have tactics, they have tendencies. Tendencies can be modeled." He paused.

"If we treat them like animals with enhanced physical capability, we'll keep getting surprised by what they do. If we treat them like combatants with a limited but coherent doctrine, we can start predicting it." Ruggiero was quiet for a moment.

"Fine." He meant it. He'd just needed to know it wasn't academic. Giulia raised one hand, still tentative.

"If they follow signals, do they have commanders?"

"Good question," Luca said.

"We don't have data to answer it yet. They could be driven by pheromonal cues, or a shared sensory system the System gave them. Or they could have units that generate instructions. I'd say forty percent chance of commanders, ten percent for pheromonal, fifty percent for something else we can't guess until we see more of them." Cecilia raised her hand to signal a different thread.

"Their interaction with civilians. What do we know?"

"Based on the night's reports," Luca said, "they target movement first. Loud sounds, large groups, people who run. In isolated cases, they'll engage if someone gets close enough, but they don't appear to break into buildings just to clear them. Also, there's evidence that they don't prioritize NPCs." Ermilio looked up from his screen.

"How so?"

"Three of the reports were from people who described themselves as having ignored the Class Selection. None of them were engaged directly unless they ran. The incidents with fatalities all involved registered classes. It's a small sample, but..." Luca spread his hands. Iris spoke for the first time, her voice calm but with the precision of a point she'd thought through.

"It might mean the System considers the classless entities neutral or secondary, so the creatures ignore them unless they become active threats."

"Possibly," Luca agreed.

"Or it could mean the creatures are calibrated to the level of resistance offered by players. Killing registered individuals provides more challenge. They might be structured to seek that." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. Cecilia made a note. If that turns out to be true, it'd be a silver lining to the NPC problem. Non-registered population could still try to live ordinary lives, while the players took on the System's threats.

Not that civilians could live ordinary lives when the scenario system was sending creatures through the streets. But a city where most of the population could fade into background noise would be easier to manage than one where everyone was a potential target. The second thing was the reward data. Luca had been working through the Scenario output since the morning after the Night of First Measure, cross-referencing the known positions of Leonelli personnel with the rewards they'd logged.

The distribution wasn't uniform. Certain positions within the Quadrilatero Romano had generated returns that the primary objective alone didn't account for.

"Secondary objectives?" Matteo said.

"That's my hypothesis. Hidden ones. The Scenario had objectives it didn't announce. People in specific locations benefited from them without knowing they'd met the conditions."

"What locations?" Luca pointed to a rough area on the map he'd spread across the table. It was centered somewhere in the old Romano. He hadn't narrowed it down further yet.

"So we were being rewarded for being in the right place," Ruggiero said.

"and we didn't even know it."

"Yes."

"How much did we miss?"

"I don't know yet. Enough to matter." Luca's eyes flicked down to his screen for a moment.

"There's a pattern in the class diversity of the people who got rewards." Giulia looked intrigued.

"What pattern?"

"When a group of players with complementary classes occupy a location during the Scenario, the rewards for all of them increase. In some cases, significantly. The secondary bonus seems to be scaling with the presumed effectiveness of the group." Ermilio frowned.

"Presumed effectiveness?"

"There's no metric that tells us how good a group was at working together. So I'm approximating it with class combinations. Auditor plus Architect for information and structure. Something like that." Luca looked at Cecilia.

"This is a guess, though. We'll need more data to refine it."

"That's fine," Cecilia said.

"Give me the version you have now." He nodded once and turned back to the table.

"The immediate conclusion is that the System wants us to work together. It wants synergistic groups in strategic locations." Ruggiero let out a soft breath, almost a laugh.

"The System is a communist." This time, Luca smiled, brief and dry.

"Functionally. It's incentivizing collective action." That got everyone to sit up a little straighter, including Bianca, who had been listening quietly from her corner. Organized crime wasn't anti-capitalist; it was a distortion of it, a shadow-market version where prices were set by violence instead of supply. It worked best when loyalty and territory were the assets you could measure and hold. The idea that the System was a command economy in digital form wasn't reassuring.

"How do we use it?" Cecilia asked. Her business was taking information and turning it into leverage.

"We don't know where the next Scenario will happen, or when," Luca said.

"But we can guess that it'll provide similar secondary objectives. So we can prepare teams with specific class combinations and deploy them to high-value locations before the Scenario triggers." Cecilia nodded once. The Quadrilatero Romano was their home territory, but they'd never held an entire area block to the exclusion of all others, because that sort of obvious control drew attention and enforcement. Now the attention was elsewhere, and enforcement was weaker every day.

They could use that to build a base that the System would reward simply for existing in it.

"The property markets are closed," she said.

"It'll be difficult to acquire more buildings outright."

"We don't need them," Matteo said from the doorway. He'd been listening longer than Cecilia had noticed, which was usually the case.

"We just need to control them." Ruggiero was already nodding before Matteo finished. It wasn't a new idea for them. Plenty of businesses had operated in Leonelli buildings under the right kind of management without technically paying the Leonellis to be there. It was just a question of making the arrangement public enough for the System to see. They worked through the logistics for a while, with Cecilia asking for the concrete and Ruggiero pulling apart the feasibility. Luca stayed quiet and let them talk.

The Ferreros added useful details here and there. Ermilio noted that many of the new arrivals were willing to provide labor in exchange for security. Iris pointed out the empty ground-floor shop units on the south side that could be barricaded and set up as supply dumps. The only person who didn't contribute was Giulia. Cecilia watched her while Ruggiero was mid-sentence, then shifted her attention as the girl tried to make herself smaller in the chair, like she hoped no one would remember she was there.

Cecilia decided to wait until the meeting ended. That came just before 1700. Ruggiero excused himself to oversee the next shift change at the gates. The Ferreros packed their things and went upstairs. Matteo made a brief detour to check on the integration of the Boris contingent, who had been gathered and processed over the course of the afternoon. Giulia lingered, hesitant, until it was just her and Cecilia and the kettle.

"Come here," Cecilia said. Giulia came over and stood in front of the table like someone waiting to be told to stay or leave. Her fingers moved constantly, twisting a rubber band around her wrist, then around her thumb, then back.

"Tell me your class again." Giulia blinked.

"Artificer."

"And what it means."

"It can modify equipment. I can make objects function differently from their original design. In the games, that meant enchanting weapons, adding sockets, changing damage types. Here, it should... I think it should apply to physical systems. Tools. Machines."

"What have you made so far?"

"Nothing. I don't have the materials. I can see how the System would let me reforge things if I had a workbench and components, but... I haven't had time."

"Time is what I'll give you," Cecilia said.

"The resources are something you need to define. Be specific. What do you need?" Giulia's eyes darted to the kettle, to the window, to the maps on the table, then back to Cecilia.

"A workshop. Electronics. Raw materials like circuits, wiring, conductive metals. Tools. Power sources."

"Make a list. Give it to Matteo. He'll get you what you need." Giulia nodded once, quickly, as if she expected the promise to be retracted. Cecilia leaned back slightly in the chair.

"I'm going to use you, Giulia. I'm not going to be delicate about it. You're valuable because you can make the tools of war better. I don't care if you have a college degree or a shop class certificate or if you've never held a job longer than a week. I care that you understand the System well enough to build for us. The things you make will be the reason we keep the people in this building alive. If that's a problem, say so now." Giulia looked down at the table. For a moment, Cecilia thought she was going to cry.

Then she looked up, her eyes wet but not leaking.

"I want to help," she said.

"I can help." Cecilia heard the words that came behind it. The student who'd spent her life watching others get credit for the work she did. The daughter of academics who had assumed she would follow their path. The kind of person who spent her twenties proving how useful she could be because no one else had noticed. Cecilia nodded.

"Get started. Talk to Dario if you need to find any supplies yourself. He's handling the urban salvage runs."

"Yes," Giulia said. Her voice was steadier.

"Yes, alright."

"That's all," Cecilia said. Giulia packed up her notes and left. Cecilia stayed at the table and poured herself more coffee, thinking through the day, the recruits, and the shape of the week ahead. There were a lot of moving parts now. She needed to decide how to move the next ones.