Chapter 515 | My Supply Chain

Chapter 515: 515 | My Supply Chain

The table had picked up two more bodies since dawn, when Mark and Jordan had been the only ones conscious enough to drag themselves out of bed. Two extra chairs now flanked the group, stolen from tables near the window where guild kids usually sat and glared at anyone who dared relocate their seating arrangements.

Hikaru occupied the first stolen chair with the stillness of a blade left unsheathed on a table. Green tea steamed between her palms. Those red eyes tracked me the second I walked through the cafeteria doors, a predator’s focus that never quite reached threat level but always sat one degree away from it. Her Obsidian uniform looked parade-ready, not a wrinkle in sight, the black trim sharp against the grey blazer. The binding sat hidden beneath all that fabric precision, doing its job, keeping her secret sealed behind every button and fold.

The Ice Prince in all his manufactured glory.

I knew better. I’d seen her cry in a bathroom with her forehead pressed against my sternum. I’d watched her sprawl on my bed reading shojo manga through reading glasses she never wore in public, mouth twitching at the corners when the male lead did something particularly stupid.

The ring in my peripheral vision pulsed once. Pale blue. Thin as wire but load-bearing according to Yumi’s structural analysis, the kind of thing that held up architecture from the inside where no one thought to look.

Hikaru’s eyes dropped first. They always did. That was the agreement we’d never discussed.

The second stolen chair sat empty, but someone had claimed it already. Black leather jacket with more zippers than function draped over the backrest. Skull patch on the left shoulder, edges fraying like it had survived a few fights. Blair’s.

I scanned the cafeteria and found her at the drink station, filling a water bottle with the specific posture of someone who believed the water owed her an apology for being room temperature. Her short red hair caught the overhead lights and turned copper at the edges. The burn scar peeked above her collar on the left side, angry pink against pale skin, a permanent reminder of the forest she’d set on fire and the cave where she’d kissed me and the hundred-foot drop into a river that I’d thrown us both into because the alternative was watching her get eaten.

Blair felt me looking. She always did. Her ice-blue eyes snapped to mine across forty feet of cafeteria, and her water bottle cracked under the sudden pressure of her grip, water sloshing over her knuckles. The scorch mark on the conference room doorframe was maybe ninety minutes old.

Thirty-three percent. Three question marks.

The ring at the far edge of the crystal plate in Santa Barbara, the one Yumi said flickered because Blair hadn’t decided what she felt. The one that burned brighter every time Blair let something slip through the cracks she couldn’t quite seal.

Blair looked away. I let her.

"Monroe." Belle’s voice cut across the noise without raising volume, a skill she’d honed from years of making herself heard in rooms that didn’t want to listen. "Sit down and eat some protein."

Addison pulled the cherry lollipop from her mouth and pointed it at Belle like a weapon. "Touch my supply chain and I manifest scythes."

"You can’t manifest scythes in the cafeteria. There’s a sign."

"The sign says no unauthorized ability use. My scythes are always authorized. By me."

"That’s not how authorization works."

"It is how authorization works when you’re an A-rank and the sign was written by a D-rank intern."

I sat down between Naomi and the empty chair with Blair’s jacket draped over the back. Naomi’s knee pressed against mine under the table, warm and solid and real. Addison slid a lollipop across the surface toward me without breaking eye contact with Belle, the wrapper catching the fluorescent light overhead. Cherry-flavored. Offered with the same casual certainty she brought to everything else in her life.

"Thanks," I said.

"That’s one," Addison said, and the tip of her current lollipop disappeared back between her teeth. "You still owe me two more coffee jellies. Interest accrues daily."

I unwrapped the lollipop and put it in my mouth. Cherry burst across my tongue, artificial and sweet and just intense enough to cut through the lingering taste of protein shake. The graft hummed against my sternum, warm and full and resonant. Eight rings burning in the back of my skull. The girl beside me who smelled like my soap from this morning’s shower. The girl across the table building weapons out of spreadsheets and bid numbers. The girl with the scythe fetish guarding her sugar supply like a dragon sitting on a hoard. And somewhere behind me, the girl with fire in her hands and three question marks where a decision should be, staring at the back of my head while her water bottle leaked onto the tablecloth.

Eighteen days on the clock. A weapon being forged in Santa Barbara from folded dimensional alloy and every bond I’d ever made. A gate opening in Monterey with sixty hostiles and kelp forests and a fracture space that didn’t care about my feelings. A squad of eight people who couldn’t agree on lunch but had learned to hold a formation under fire.

Belle’s spreadsheet glowed on the screen. Column D contained the Monterey bid confirmation number, highlighted in green.

"We’re in," Belle said. "Deployment Friday at fourteen hundred. Eight-person clearance authorized. Tier Two aquatic-adjacent biome. Entity projection sixty to seventy-five." She looked up from her laptop, and those amber-brown eyes held the particular light she got when the numbers added up and the risk paid off and the girl from Burns, Oregon who ate chicken salad sandwiches with vending machine chips because she couldn’t afford anything else had just bid her squad into a gate that would pay three thousand credits a head. "So eat your lunch, Monroe. You’re going to need the calories."