The hallways of the 7th Division HQ exuded a worn solemnity.
The lamps hung at regular intervals crackled with an orange glow, casting dancing shadows across the tiles.
In the center of the hall, the main staircase spiraled upward to the upper floors.
Elias's fingers trailed nonchalantly along the polished oak banister.
Ahead of him, Mara climbed the steps two at a time. Elias clung to the banister, each step feeling as laborious as a condemned man's march to the scaffold.
"Just reminding you that elevators exist," he called out, already breathless on the third floor, his voice echoing in the stairwell.
Mara didn't slow down one bit. "We don't have the luxury of waiting for one. No need to remind you why, right?"
The file she'd shoved into his arms on the ground floor started slipping, pulled by gravity and Elias's feigned clumsiness. Pages escaped, fluttering in the air currents like birds with broken wings. Elias watched them fall with almost tender melancholy, a faint smile on his lips.
"Accident," he murmured to a passing employee in the stairs, whose suspicious gaze was already fixed on the scattered sheets across the granite steps.
The tactical council meeting room awaited them on the fifth floor. A massive oak door. A brass plaque, polished to blinding shine, read "Alpha Strategy Room."
Mara stopped at the entrance. With a quick gesture, she tucked a rebellious strand into her strict bun.
She grasped the bronze handle without hesitation.
The door opened onto a silence as thick and reverent as in a cathedral.
A dark wood conference table.
A dozen captains, representatives from other Division companies, sat around it. At the back of the room, a giant map was pinned to the wall, studded with colored pins.
The door's creak drew every eye. The weight of those converging gazes crashed down on Elias and Mara.
He shuffled forward. Mara froze to his right, in the regulation subordinate standby position.
"Captain Mercer. Late, as always," sneered an acidic voice from his left.
Elias turned his head with calculated slowness.
"Captain Goran. The mustache is still so... topographic." He collapsed into the only empty chair, stretching his legs under the massive table with exaggerated relief.
Mara, standing behind him, breathed so heavily that Elias felt the air stir his messy hair.
A sharp, authoritative fist struck the table. Everyone jumped, except Elias, who merely blinked.
"Let's begin," Hargrave growled.
The meeting unfolded with the joy of a first-class funeral. Numbers, incident reports, threats of civil unrest in border zones, rumors of Nemesis mutations in the southern swamps... Elias propped his elbow, chin in palm, and stared at a hairline crack in the white ceiling. With a bit of imagination, it formed a vaguely duck-like shape.
At regular intervals, Mara gave him discreet but firm elbow nudges in the back. He responded with a muffled grunt, grabbing a pencil to doodle concentric circles and hypnotic spirals on the blank cover of his file.
"—Captain Mercer."
His name, thundering in the room's hushed silence, hit like a detonation. He raised his eyes slowly, meeting a mosaic of gazes: some sparkling with malicious amusement, most loaded with deep exasperation.
The Commander pointed a gnarled finger at the map.
"Your sector. Report."
Elias blinked. "Everything's fine."
"That's it?" Hargrave's voice had become dangerously calm.
Elias nodded, chin still nestled in his palm. "No one's dead. Well, not on our side."
Mara leaned in, lips barely parted: "The appearance of five Class B rifts last week..."
"Ah yes. The Class B rifts." He made a vague gesture with the pencil-holding hand. "Handled."
Elias let the pencil roll across the table.
"How? With the usual methods. We went on site, located the bosses, eliminated them, the rifts closed."
He shrugged.
On the left, Captain Goran let out a dry little laugh. "Five Class B rifts, spread over a twenty-kilometer radius, neutralized in... what was the exact duration, Captain Mercer? Sixteen hours, according to the summary report your vice-captain miraculously managed to submit?"
"About that, yeah."
"No losses?" insisted another captain, a woman with flaming red hair and a piercing gaze.
"My guys know how to behave. And Mara's a very good hunter." Elias flashed a crooked smile at his vice-captain, who kept a marble face, though a slight twitch at the corner of her mouth betrayed her annoyance.
Commander Hargrave hadn't detached his gnarled gaze from Elias. "Sensor reports mention an abnormal energy concentration during the closure of the last rift. A signature close to Class A threshold. Explain."
Elias felt Mara's gaze grow heavier on his back. He stretched nonchalantly, cracking his vertebrae, earning several disapproving looks.
"The boss of the last rift was a bit... excitable. Some kind of giant crab with too many legs and a bad temper. He threw a fit when he saw we'd dealt with his buddies." He spoke in a drawling voice, as if recounting a boring anecdote. "He started sucking in ambient ether to overload himself. Rapid power surge, containment breach threat, the whole shebang. Procedures recommended retreat and calling in a heavy team."
"And you didn't follow procedures." Hargrave's voice was flat.
"Procedures took too much time. The overload risked blowing up an entire neighborhood." Elias leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers interlaced. "So we sped up the process. Pushed him to overload faster than planned, and at the peak of instability, I... gave a little nudge to the Boss's matrix. His attempt collapsed in on itself. Neighborhood intact, no one hurt. Who can beat that?"
"You... gave a nudge." Hargrave repeated. "Can you explain?"
Elias raised an eyebrow. "I don't really remember. O'Connell?"
Behind him, Mara took a deep breath.
"Captain Mercer used a skill that inverted the polarity of the ether flow at the overload epicenter. The effect converted the imminent explosion into an implosion."
She spoke with manual-like precision, but her gaze fixed on a point on the wall behind Hargrave, carefully avoiding the other captains' eyes.
"A containment skill... used in destructive mode," murmured the red-haired captain. "That's... insanely risky. A miscalculation by an iota and you'd have created a much larger cataclysm."
"Yes," Elias admitted with a slight nod. "But the calculation wasn't wrong."
The implication hung in the air, heavier than any boast: Because I was the one who did it.
Hargrave stared at the map again, then Elias. Finally, he slammed his hand on the table.
"Very well. Your sector remains your responsibility. But if a single one of these... methods causes an incident—"
"It'll obviously be my fault," Elias finished cheerfully. "As usual."
Mara, behind him, let out a silent sigh.