Chapter 516 | Support Flank

Chapter 516: 516 | Support Flank

I ate my lunch. Belle watched me do it like a warden supervising a difficult inmate, which felt about right given how the last two weeks had gone.

Four strips of bacon. Scrambled eggs that had gone slightly rubbery from sitting in the warming tray. Grilled chicken that tasted like the concept of chicken more than actual chicken. A banana that had one brown spot Belle pointed at and told me to eat around because the potassium mattered and she wasn’t wasting good produce on my dramatics.

The C-rank metabolism turned every plate into a suggestion. I’d need a second run through the line before Monterey briefing, and probably a third before Vale murdered me tomorrow morning under the banner of education.

"So." Addison rearranged her lollipop pyramid with the concentration of a surgeon. Purple highlights fell loose from her bun and framed a face that spent most of its energy pretending to be bored. "Kelp forest. Underwater murder biome. Sixty fish monsters that want to digest us. Sounds fun."

"They’re not fish," Javier said without looking up from his notebooks. He had three of them open and a protractor pressed against a hand-drawn map of the Monterey coastline, the pen moving in careful arcs. "The FGRA classification puts them as aquatic-adjacent. Amphibious. They can operate on land and in water but they’re most dangerous in the transition zones where you can’t predict which environment they’ll use."

"That’s worse."

"Considerably worse."

Addison pointed her lollipop at him. "You always know the worst version of things. It’s your whole personality."

"It’s not my whole personality." Javier’s pen stopped. His ears went pink. "I have hobbies."

"Name one that isn’t monster taxonomy."

"I write."

Jordan lifted his face off his arms for the first time since I’d sat down. Sleep creases carved into his cheek. His grey eyes swam for a second before finding focus. "You write what?"

"Nothing." Javier closed one of the notebooks with the speed of a man slamming a door on a fire. "Combat analysis. Formation theory. Nothing interesting."

I knew what Javier wrote. He wrote fan fiction about famous hunters, thousands of words of it, and he’d rather die in a Void Gate than let anyone find out. In the original story he’d been the protagonist, the earnest lottery kid who worked harder than everyone and won hearts and climbed rankings and graduated as somebody important. Now he sat at the edge of a table full of women who orbited me, drawing protractor lines on a map so he could keep us alive in a gate he never asked to enter.

I’d taken his whole future and turned it into a support role. Some days that sat heavier than others.

"Anyway." Belle spun her laptop so the Monterey map faced the group. The projection threw blue light across the tabletop, kelp fronds rendered in careful topographic detail. "Aquatic biome means Blair’s fire loses roughly forty percent efficiency in high humidity. She told me herself, which cost her physical pain to admit, so file that under miracles."

"I didn’t say it cost me pain," Blair said.

She’d returned from the drink station. The empty chair scraped back, and she dropped into it with the posture of a queen forced to slum among peasants, her water bottle set down on the table with a hairline crack running up the side where her grip had won an argument with structural integrity.

Naomi’s knee stayed against mine. Blair sat two seats down, close enough that the temperature in my immediate vicinity climbed a degree, far enough that she could pretend the proximity was accidental.

"You made a face," Belle said. "The face has been documented."

"There is no documentation."

Belle tapped her keyboard. A photo appeared in the corner of the projection. Blair, mid-scowl, arms crossed, the exact expression of someone confessing that water made her weaker.

Blair’s jaw shifted. Steam ghosted off her shoulder. The scorch mark on the conference room door had a sibling now, waiting to happen.

"Delete that."

"It’s evidence."

"Of what?"

"Of the fact that you’re actually useful when you stop being insufferable long enough to give me real intel." Belle didn’t look up from her laptop. "Naomi’s Wave Motion works better underwater. Conductivity boosts range and reduces stamina cost by an estimated fifteen percent. So we build the formation around her instead of Blair for this one, which means Blair takes a support-flank role instead of primary damage."

Blair’s temperature spiked another degree. I felt it against the side of my face like sitting too close to a space heater.

"Support flank," she repeated.

"You have a problem with support flank?"

"I have an S-rank ability. I incinerate things. That is my function."

"Your function underwater is standing around at forty percent while your fire fizzles and Naomi does the actual work." Belle finally looked up, and the amber in her eyes held the kind of light she got when someone tried to argue against math. "You want to lead? Lead the flank. Cover the gaps Jordan’s shadows can’t reach because shadows don’t work great in murky water either. That’s not an insult. That’s the gate biome making the call for us."

Silence sat over the table. Addison’s lollipop stopped moving. Jordan lifted his head another inch, sensing violence the way he always did.

I waited for Blair to burn the tablecloth.

She didn’t.

She uncrossed her arms and pulled the laptop half an inch toward her so she could study the map. Her frost-blue eyes moved across the kelp topography, the transition zones, the depth markers Javier had penciled in along the coastline. The heat radiating off her dropped back to human levels.

"The transition zones are the problem," she said. Her voice shifted into the clipped register she used when she actually cared, the aristocratic edge sanded down into something functional. "If the entities are amphibious and most dangerous where land meets water, we can’t hold a standard formation. The ground won’t stay ground. Half the terrain floods with the tide cycle." She tapped a spot on the map. "Here. This shelf. It’s above the waterline at low tide and submerged at high. If we time the clear wrong we lose our footing halfway through and they drag us under."

Javier’s pen scratched against his notebook. "That matches the FGRA tidal projection. High tide hits at fifteen forty. We deploy at fourteen. We’d have roughly ninety minutes of stable ground before the shelf floods."

"Ninety minutes to clear sixty to seventy-five hostiles in an aquatic biome." Jordan pressed his face back into his arms. "We’re going to die."

"We’re not going to die." Naomi’s voice came out steady, and her hand found my thigh under the table with the casual certainty of someone who’d stopped asking permission somewhere in the last two weeks. "We cleared a swamp. We cleared a Void Gate that killed a dimensional guardian. We can clear a kelp forest."

"The swamp gave us second-degree acid burns and dissolved our suits."

"And we won first place."

"Barely. On credit margin. While bleeding."

Belle pointed at Jordan without looking. "Eat your burger. You get pessimistic when your blood sugar drops."

Jordan reached blindly for the burger balanced on his own spine, found it, and took a bite without lifting his head off the table. Somehow. I’d stopped questioning the physics of Jordan.

Blair leaned back in her chair. The crack in her water bottle caught the light. Her frost-blue eyes drifted to me for exactly as long as she could stand it, then away.

"Monroe hasn’t said anything," she said. "He usually has an opinion. He usually manipulates the entire room into agreeing with the opinion and then pretends it was everyone’s idea." ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

"That’s leadership," I said.

"That’s manipulation with better branding."

"Depends which side of the decision you’re standing on."