Chapter 208: Wear It With Honor

The heavy brass gavel struck the wooden bench with a loud, ringing crack. Grand Arbiter Raymond Kincaid looked down from the high platform at the sixty defense marshals and intelligence officers sitting in the tiered rows.

"The inquiry into the District One Sky Rift Incursion is now formally in session," Kincaid announced, his deep voice carrying through the stone room.

Evren sat in the front row in a clean black combat jacket, dark t-shirt, and jeans. Beside him, Amber wore a tailored navy blazer with her gold Vice-Chairman pin, her remaining dragon-bone saber resting at her hip.

An officer in uniform stepped to the center console and pulled up the official report on the screen.

"At eleven o’clock yesterday morning, forty-one hunters entered the breach under joint command," the officer reported. "Total extraction count: forty-one hunters. Fatalities: zero."

He clicked through to the casualty roster on his tablet.

"Eleven personnel suffered moderate concussive trauma or mana fatigue," he added. "All of them are currently resting and stabilized at the Citadel Medical Annex."

The officer tapped the console again, bringing up the collapsed spatial readings.

"The Level One Hundred and Two entity is confirmed dead," the officer said. "The pocket dimension collapsed into a singularity right after extraction, and sensors confirm the rift is completely gone with zero residual mana bleed."

A quiet murmur ran through the rows of marshals. In thirty years of rift warfare in the capital, an extinction-tier boss had never been cleared without double-digit casualties.

Director Calloway of Imperial Intelligence rose from his seat near the front. He was a thin man with short gray hair and a sharp face, wearing a standard dark uniform.

Calloway stepped to the podium and keyed his terminal. The central hologram bypassed the routine battle footage and pulled up a continental strategic projection.

Broad streaks of deep amber and red ran across the empire’s northern and eastern borders.

"Everyone in this room is glad forty-one hunters walked out alive, but the strategic reality is bad news," Calloway said plainly. "Our intelligence divisions finished analyzing the energy surge from the sky rift breach."

He paused, letting the silence settle over the assembly.

"Incursions of this magnitude used to show up once every few decades," Calloway continued, pointing to the red fault lines on the map. "Based on the rate of dimensional decay along the borders, these rifts won’t be rare anomalies anymore."

He looked directly across the room of senior officers. "Our predictive models project that within six to twelve months, extinction-tier breaches will begin emerging monthly."

The entire chamber went dead silent.

Several marshals shifted in their seats, exchanging grim looks. A monthly recurrence of Level 100-plus monsters would drain the empire’s soldiers and stockpiles in half a year. Traditional garrison doctrine and slow mobilization plans were completely obsolete.

Kincaid let the room sit with the numbers before he pushed his chair back and stood up.

"Director Calloway’s findings match what our frontier outposts have reported for months," Kincaid said. "The empire cannot rely on slow committees or red tape anymore. When an extinction-class breach opens, survival comes down to raw combat capability, decisive leadership, and immediate action."

He walked down the stone steps toward the center floor, an aide following closely behind with a polished wooden box lined in black velvet.

Kincaid stopped directly in front of Evren. "Under Imperial Defense Code Section Twelve," Kincaid announced to the room, "the High Defense Board convened this morning and voted unanimously to confer the Imperial Sovereign Defense Marshal’s Seal upon Chairman Evren Crawford."

A low ripple of surprise passed through the spectators.

Kincaid opened the box, lifting out a circular medallion forged from dark obsidian and banded with platinum. In the center was the imperial war crest... a crowned raptor clutching twin lightning bolts.

"The last time this distinction was granted was forty-three years ago, during the Great Northern Wall breach," Kincaid said, looking Evren in the eye. "It grants Apex Sovereign full strategic autonomy, independent frontline deployment without council review, and unrestricted access to Tier-One threat intelligence."

Kincaid pinned the metal badge securely to the left lapel of Evren’s combat jacket.

"You earned this on the field, Crawford," Kincaid said, offering his hand with genuine respect. "Wear it with honor."

Evren took the Kincaid’s hand. "Thank you, Grand Arbiter."

Amber stood next to him with her back straight, and a sense of pride in her dark-brown eyes.

With the medallion pinned to Evren’s chest, an older officer in the second row leaned over his desk. His nametag read Marshal Corvan.

"Chairman Crawford," Corvan said in a gravelly voice. "Sovereign deployment authority gives Apex total independence. But if Director Calloway’s projections hold true, a monthly recurrence becomes a brutal war of supplies."

Corvan looked at the two leaders of Apex. "Can Apex sustain continuous high-tier frontline operations without draining the imperial supply depots?"

Evren looked calmly at the veteran officer. "Apex will not require imperial depot allocations or emergency drafts. We operate on full self-reliance."

He turned his gaze slightly to Amber. "Vice-Chairman Sterling, give the board our supply baseline."

Amber stepped forward half a pace, completely composed.

"Like Evren said, our supply lines are fully vertically integrated," Amber said with calm clarity. "We can extract our own high-grade mana ore from our mines in Veridia, ship it through our armored freight lines, smelt our own alloys, and forge our own armaments."

She paused, meeting the eyes of the senior marshals across the tiered rows.

"Within ten days, Starlight Pharmaceuticals will begin manufacturing high-grade battlefield restoratives in-house," she continued. "The Defense Board does not need to divert critical stockpiles or garrison troops to maintain Apex’s readiness."

She kept her voice steady and professional. "Reallocate your reserves to the frontier garrisons and the legacy guilds that will need them when the breaches cascade. Apex will fund, supply, and hold its own front."

The chamber was completely still.

Nobody spoke. A young intelligence analyst let out a long breath, and two veteran marshals in the third row exchanged slow, approving nods.

What might have sounded like empty bragging from any other guild carried absolute weight coming from Apex. They weren’t asking for handouts, and they weren’t making excuses. They were offering the empire a self-sustaining shield that cost the military treasury nothing.

Grand Arbiter Kincaid allowed himself a thin, satisfied smile.

"Vice-Chairman Sterling’s assessment provides this board with exactly what it needed to hear," Kincaid said. He turned back toward the tribunal bench and brought down the brass gavel with a clean strike. "This extraordinary session is officially adjourned."

The marshals gathered their tablets and filtered out through the double doors. Kincaid motioned for Evren and Amber to accompany him down the private executive corridor toward the secured elevators.

"Walk with me," Kincaid said in a low voice, stepping past two armed sentries who saluted as they passed.

The elevator doors slid shut, sealing the three of them inside the brass-paneled lift. Kincaid let out a tired breath and loosened his high collar.

"Calloway wasn’t exaggerating about the numbers," Kincaid said, looking at Evren. "The thinning is real. The imperial court is still trying to downplay the reports so the public doesn’t panic, but the frontier outposts are reporting structural stress on the barrier every single week."

He shook his head slightly. "What Apex did yesterday gave this city breathing room, but we don’t have the luxury of standing still."

"Apex will be ready," Evren replied calmly.

He waited a second, keeping his expression neutral, before speaking up as if an idle thought had crossed his mind.

"Grand Arbiter, while we’re on the subject of classified records... there’s something I ran across while researching early rift phenomena online."

Kincaid turned his head. "What sort of phenomena?"

"A few historical forums mentioned old terms tied to deep-rift origins," Evren said casually. "Phrases like Archive Seed, Progenitor, and Custodian Protocol."

He watched Kincaid’s reaction closely. "Every time I tried to pull up the source documents or academic papers, the links were scrubbed or redirected to classified dead ends. Do those terms mean anything to Imperial Defense?"

Kincaid’s gray eyebrows drew together. He stared at the brass door of the elevator for a long moment, turning the words over in his mind.

"Archive Seed... Progenitor..." Kincaid murmured, shaking his head slowly.

"In thirty-one years of service, I’ve read thousands of after-action reports and pre-rift theoretical treatises," Kincaid said. "I’ve never seen those designations in modern military files."

He reached into the inner breast pocket of his uniform jacket and pulled out a sleek, matte-black keycard with a silver imperial crest stamped across its magnetic strip.

"Before the modern calendar, during the First Convergence, the empire maintained a dedicated research division focused entirely on ancient relics and spatial anomalies," Kincaid explained. "When the war ended, all of their records were locked away in the sub-vaults beneath the Citadel’s east wing."

He pressed the cool card directly into Evren’s hand.

"This is a Tier-Three clearance pass to the Imperial Pre-War Research Archives," Kincaid said. "It’s outside the standard guild database, and none of it is digitized on the public network."

He looked Evren in the eye. "If those words exist anywhere in this empire, they’ll be down there. Use it whenever you need."