Chapter 110: Delegation is Just Pointing At People

Three days of classes.

That was all it had taken for Sanctuary to develop problems.

The leadership booklet had been sitting on my desk since the evening the residences were named. I had read eleven pages of it. Penelope had read all of it, twice, which she mentioned at intervals she clearly believed were subtle.

"Page nineteen."

"I’m aware there’s a page nineteen."

"You haven’t read page nineteen."

"I’m aware of that too."

She sat down across from me in the Sanctuary common room, which was, at that hour, in a state I would generously describe as evolving.

Someone had moved three chairs to the window and not returned them. The supply cabinet by the stairs was open and mostly empty. There was a stack of borrowed textbooks on the floor that had been growing since the second day, owned by nobody, claimed by nobody, migrating slowly toward the fireplace like something that intended to nest.

"Page nineteen," Penelope said again, "is residence duties."

"I know what page nineteen is."

"You said you hadn’t read it."

"I read the first line of page nineteen and made an informed decision."

She looked around the common room. Slowly. Letting me follow her gaze to each individual piece of evidence.

"The cabinet’s empty."

"I noticed."

"Nobody’s restocked it because nobody’s been asked to."

"Also noticed."

"So?"

"So I’m considering my options."

"Your options are a committee or a schedule."

"Those are terrible options."

"Those are the only options."

They were not the only options.

But explaining why required admitting I had been paying attention, which would establish a precedent I had spent considerable effort avoiding.

Here is the thing about thirty-six people living in one building.

They organize themselves.

Not well. Not deliberately. But within four days, patterns appear whether anyone plans them or not. Certain people end up in certain chairs. Certain people end up handling certain problems. The building develops habits before anyone thinks to write any down.

A committee would sit on top of those habits and argue with them.

I had spent four days doing very little in a very visible location, which people mistook for laziness, and which was mostly laziness, but which had also produced a considerable amount of information.

So instead of writing a schedule, I stood up.

Penelope’s eyes narrowed immediately.

"What are you doing?"

"Delegating."

"You don’t know anyone’s names."

"I know eleven names."

"There are thirty-six people."

"Which is why I only need eleven."

"Roland."

He looked up from an argument he was winning.

"Leader."

"Don’t."

"Sorry, Leader."

"Who’s been taking the extra blankets."

Roland answered without pausing.

"Third floor. Two of them. Marren and the tall one who won’t tell anyone his first name. They’re not hoarding, the north corridor runs cold and nobody’s told maintenance because nobody knows how."

I looked at him.

"How do you know that."

"People talk."

"Not that much."

"They do around me." He shrugged. "My family are cloth merchants. You grow up in a shop, you learn people tell you things while they’re deciding whether to buy something. It’s just a habit now. I don’t do anything with it."

"You just did something with it."

Roland paused.

"...Yes. Fine. Occasionally."

"Congratulations. You handle disputes."

"What?"

"Anyone in this residence with a complaint goes to you first. You already know what the complaint is before they finish saying it. That saves everyone considerable time, most of it mine."

"That’s a real position?"

"It is now."

Roland considered this with the expression of a man discovering that a thing he did for free had value.

Which, given his family profession, was probably a familiar sensation.

"Do I get a title?"

"No."

"Do I get a better room?"

"No."

"Do I get anything?"

"You get to keep knowing everything, except now it’s official and nobody can complain about it."

Roland thought about that for slightly too long.

"...That’s actually good."

"One more thing."

"There’s more?"

"I have a new skill. Healing type. It speeds up your body’s natural recovery for an hour. Doesn’t fix anything, doesn’t close wounds. I need to use it on people and I would like to use it on you."

Roland’s expression changed instantly into something I recognized from every market stall I had ever been dragged past.

"What’s it worth?"

"It’s free."

"Nothing’s free. What do you get?"

"Practice."

"That’s not an answer, that’s the shape of one."

He was, irritatingly, correct.

"It’s a new skill," I said. "New skills need use before they improve. That’s how attributes work."

Roland looked at me for a moment longer than was comfortable, the way his family presumably looked at cloth that was being described too enthusiastically.

Then he held out his hand.

"Fine. But I’m remembering this one."

"Remembering it as what."

"As a favour. I don’t know what kind yet." He grinned. "I’ll think of something."

I took his hand.

’Activate.’

Green mana gathered, thin and quiet, and moved from my fingers into his and stopped being visible.

Roland blinked.

"Huh."

"Well?"

"It’s warm." He flexed his hand. "And my shoulder’s stopped aching, which it’s been doing since the exam, which I hadn’t actually mentioned to anyone."

"You should have mentioned that to Lena."

"I was going to. Eventually. When it got worse."

『 Sub Quest 1 : Healing Bond Path 1

➤ Objective: Successfully bond with 7 individuals through Healing Bond (3 / 7) 』

***

Lena was in the corner she had claimed on the first evening, which had somehow acquired a table, a shelf, and an increasingly organized collection of small jars.

"You already run the medical corner," I said.

"I’m aware."

"Now you officially run the medical corner."

"Does that come with a supply budget?"

"Page nineteen says residence funds require leader approval."

"So yes."

"So ask me when I’m too tired to argue."

Lena wrote something in her notebook.

"Noted."

Cedric found me before I found him, which was how most interactions with Cedric began.

"I heard you’re assigning jobs."

"Duties."

"Same thing."

"Duties sound worse. That’s the point."

"Can I have one?"

"Which one?"

"Any of them."

"That’s not how choosing works."

"I’m very good at things," Cedric said, with the total confidence of a fifteen-year-old with S potential who had never been meaningfully stopped by anything. "Fire. Force. Carrying stuff. Waking people up."

"That last one is a threat."

"It’s a service."

"It’s a threat with a schedule."

He grinned.

I looked at him for a moment.

Cedric was, on paper, the strongest person in Class Five who wasn’t me. S potential. Two main offensive attributes. In Class One or Class Two he would have been a name people said carefully.

He was in Class Five, which had received zero SS students, and he had responded to that by becoming loud.

I did not think those two facts were unrelated.

"Training coordination," I said.

"What’s that?"

"Nobody in this residence has organized practice time. Everyone’s going to the training halls alone at random hours and discovering they’re full. You fix that."

Cedric stared.

"That’s a lot of talking to people."

"Yes."

"I’m good at that."

"I’m aware. That’s the entire reason."

He left at speed, presumably to talk at somebody.

Mira was the last one.

She was also the next day, because Healing Bond did not care about my scheduling preferences and had informed me, via a small unhelpful notice, that it required another nineteen hours.

So on the fifth evening, then.

Mira was not in the common room.

I found her on the back stairwell, which was cold, unlit, and the only place in Sanctuary where thirty-six people were not currently generating noise.

She had her eyes closed.

I stopped three steps up.

"I can go."

"You’re already here."

"That’s not the same as staying."

Mira opened one eye.

"Sit or leave, Leader. The deciding is louder than either."

I sat.

For a while neither of us said anything, which I appreciated more than I expected to.

"How far?" I asked eventually.

"What?"

"Your hearing. How far."

Mira was quiet long enough that I assumed she wasn’t going to answer.

"Kitchen," she said. "Two floors down. Someone’s washing dishes badly. Third floor, two people arguing about blankets. Roland is talking to somebody about me right now, probably about this, because he saw you come this way."

"That’s..."

"Constant. Yes."

"Can you stop it?"

"No."

"Ever?"

"I sleep about four hours. Then the building starts again."

She said it the way people say things they have explained many times and stopped expecting anyone to do anything about.

Four hours.

I had opinions about sleep that were, by any reasonable standard, extreme, and I recognized immediately that mine were a preference and hers was not.

"Nobody assigned you a duty," she said.

"I’m getting to it."

"I don’t want one."

"I know."

"Then why are you here?"

I considered several answers and discarded all of them, because Mira would hear whichever ones were false in the space between words.

"I have a new skill," I said. "Healing type. It speeds up your body’s natural recovery for an hour. It doesn’t fix anything. It just makes rest work better than it normally would."

Mira opened both eyes.

"Say that again."

"It makes rest work better."

"For an hour."

"For an hour. Once a day, and not the same person twice in a row, because it needs a day to recharge."

She was very still.

"Why me."

"Because you sleep four hours."

"That’s not an emergency."

"No. It’s just a thing that’s been true every day for five years and nobody’s ever offered to make it better for one of them."

Mira looked at the wall for a long moment.

"It won’t fix it."

"No."

"Tomorrow I’ll still hear everything."

"Yes."

"Then what’s the point."

"The point is that tonight you won’t be tired on top of it."

She held out her hand without saying anything else.

I took it.

’Activate.’

Green mana gathered, quiet and thin, and moved from my hand into hers and stopped being visible.

Mira’s shoulders dropped about an inch.

She did not say anything.

She did not need to. I had seen that exact movement several hundred times at the border, on people who had been holding something up for so long they had forgotten it was heavy.

"Okay," she said finally.

"Okay?"

"It’s quieter." A pause. "Not the sound. The sound’s the same. Just... I’m not fighting it as hard."

『 Sub Quest 1 : Healing Bond Path 1

➤ Objective: Successfully bond with 7 individuals through Healing Bond (4 / 7) 』

Four.

I stood up.

"Leader."

"Yes."

"You’re collecting people."

I stopped.

"That’s a strange phrase."

"It’s the accurate one." Mira’s eyes were closed again. "Lena. Sophie Trohan, on the practical field, which half the school is still talking about. Roland last night, right after you gave him a job he already had."

"You heard all of that."

"I hear everything. I just don’t usually say it."

"Why say it now?"

Mira shrugged, which from Mira was a full paragraph.

"Because you asked me a question nobody’s asked me in five years, and I’ve decided that buys you one warning."

"About what?"

"Roland’s already noticed. He hasn’t worked out why yet."

She settled back against the wall.

"He will."

***

’That was not part of the plan.’

[You had no plan.]

’I had a sequence.’

[A sequence is not a plan. It is a list you are attached to.]

I climbed the stairwell back toward the noise of thirty-six people who had, in the space of one evening, acquired a dispute handler, a medical officer, a training coordinator, and one person who had refused a duty and been given something else instead.

Four of seven.

Three remaining, and every one of them lived in a different building.

’The next one is James.’

[Yes.]

’He doesn’t stand still.’

[No.]

’He doesn’t stand still, he doesn’t like me, and the only class we share is combat fundamentals.’

[Correct on all three.]

’You could be encouraging.’

[I could.]

There was a pause.

[Bring the pillow. He hates it. It will keep him near you.]

Which was, unfortunately, excellent advice.