Chapter 547 | The Third Principal

Chapter 547: 547 | The Third Principal

Arthur Vance sat in a folding chair that had not been designed for a man of his frame and listened to the Task Force liaison read threat classifications off a tablet screen in a voice so flat it could have been generated by the building’s intercom system. The chair’s metal legs bowed outward under him. The fluorescent lighting in the IHC Verano Field Office turned everything the color of a headache. Someone had placed a bottle of water in front of him at some point during the first hour, and it remained untouched, sweating a ring of condensation onto the laminate table.

He was not in his hero form.

Arthur Vance at rest weighed one hundred and thirty-one pounds. His tracksuit hung from shoulders that had carried the number one ranking for twelve consecutive years and currently carried approximately nothing. The hollows beneath his cheekbones caught shadow in a way that made his face look like something left out in weather too long. His hair, when it was not swept back in the iconic horn-shaped bangs that sold action figures and cereal boxes, lay thin and dull against a skull that ached from the inside.

He had not transformed since the dome. The three hours and forty-three minutes he had burned through downtown that morning, pulling families from sedans and walking through chemical fires and punching through fourth-floor windows to reach a girl who smelled like smoke and looked like every nightmare he’d carried for nine years, had cost him something he could not afford. The cough had started before he reached campus. The blood had started before he reached Ashby’s office. The number had not stopped declining since.

Two hours and fifty-one minutes. That was the current ceiling. Down from three hours and forty-three. Down from four hours and twelve the day before that.

"Detained combatants number thirty-one across the four sectors of the facility," the liaison said. Her name was Director Yun-Seo Park, and she ran the IHC’s West Coast Coordination desk with the energy of someone who considered enthusiasm a misallocation of resources. Korean descent, mid-forties, a jawline that could open letters. Her suit cost more than Arthur’s entire civilian wardrobe. "Of those thirty-one, twenty-nine have been positively identified through federal and state databases. All twenty-nine possess criminal histories predating the incident. Assault, unlicensed Aspect use, aggravated battery, weapons trafficking. The standard catalogue for hired muscle."

Arthur stared at the water bottle and said nothing.

Director Park continued without requiring his participation. "None of the twenty-nine detained individuals possess Aspect classifications above Rare. The median classification is Common. Three test as Unmarked entirely. Several carry documented substance dependency histories that predate their criminal records. Two were on active parole at the time of the breach."

"Expendable," said the man to Arthur’s left.

Garrison Mack leaned back in his own folding chair with the ease of someone whose two hundred and sixty pounds of muscle rarely encountered furniture that argued. Garrison’s arms were crossed over a chest that strained the fabric of his dress shirt, and his expression carried the particular brand of disgust that came from having spent a career sorting genuine threats from the human wreckage that genuine threats left in their wake.

"Cannon fodder," Garrison said. "Every last one. You don’t send guys with Common-tier abilities and parole violations to assault the most prestigious Hero Academy on the planet unless you’ve already decided those guys aren’t coming home."

Director Park’s mouth compressed into something thinner than a line. "The assessment is consistent with our preliminary findings."

"It’s not an assessment." Garrison’s voice dropped low enough that the recording equipment on the table might struggle with the register. "It’s a confession. Whoever sent those people into that dome knew exactly what would happen to them. They were noise. Background. Something for Steele and Dravid to wade through while the real operation happened in the center of the plaza."

Arthur kept his eyes on the water bottle. A bead of condensation reached the base and spread into the existing ring.

The Task Force had assembled in the fourteen hours following the breach. Director Park had flown from Geneva to Los Angeles in nine of those hours, which told Arthur everything he needed to know about how seriously the IHC was treating the incident. The rest of the room held faces Arthur knew at various depths. Garrison from Halloran’s faculty. A Network analyst named Chen who specialized in post-incident reconstruction and spoke in data sets the way other people spoke in sentences. Two regional IHC investigators whose names Arthur had been told and immediately failed to retain because his brain kept circling back to a number.

Two hours and fifty-one minutes.

"The three principals," Director Park said, and the room tightened. "The individual identified by faculty witness testimony as the primary hostile combatant has been designated Thatch. Male, early twenties, possessing what field reports describe as a black-fire projection Aspect of considerable output. He was observed engaging both Instructor Steele and Instructor Dravid simultaneously, producing burns on Steele’s dominant forearm that required specialized treatment and delivering kinetic force through the secondary entity sufficient to incapacitate Dravid."

Chen pulled up footage on the wall display. Arthur did not look at it. He had already watched it eleven times in Ashby’s office while drinking tea that tasted like stone fruit and trying to convince himself the tremor in his hands was caffeine-related.

"The second principal has been designated Gerard," Park continued. "Male, middle-aged, wearing a butler’s uniform and a smooth featureless mask. No documented Aspect discharge during the incident. No physical engagement with faculty or students. He entered via the same grey-static portals used for troop deployment, addressed the student body directly, and provided operational coordination to the primary combatant through an earpiece embedded in the combatant’s collar. He exited through a vertical portal approximately seven seconds before Thatch and the entity departed. No forensic trace. No DNA. No residual Aspect signature. The mask material has been flagged for materials analysis but the fragments recovered are ordinary polycarbonate."

"A handler," Garrison said.

"That is the working classification."

"And the portals?"

Director Park’s jaw worked once before she answered. "Unknown mechanism. The static portals do not correspond to any documented spatial manipulation Aspect in the IHL registry. Chen’s reconstruction indicates simultaneous deployment across a minimum of fourteen distinct aperture points within the dome, which exceeds any documented single-user spatial displacement capability by a factor of approximately nine. The portals produce no residual signature, no thermal bloom, no electromagnetic distortion. They simply appear and close."

"Third principal," Garrison said.

Park set her tablet face-down on the table with a gentleness that communicated how much she hated what she was about to say. "The third principal has been designated Nexo."