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The clinic reception had been built for patients.
It held a war council anyway.
Ren sat behind the reception desk with his fingers drumming a slow rhythm on the surface. In front of him stood the Abominations: Needle, Bone Saw, Retractor, Suture, Forceps. No chairs had been set out. None were needed.
Viktor was absent. Viktor was usually absent.
Ren stopped drumming his fingers.
"It's time," he said. "Victoria just lost most of its Mythical-rank combat capacity in the Overlord engagement. The Blinding Light is at its lowest operational ceiling in years. If we move now we have a window that will not stay open."
Nobody spoke. Needle's third eye was reading the room. Bone Saw's eye sockets held their steady red glow. Retractor adjusted his instruments without looking at them. Suture stood with her hands folded and her eyes forward.
"I will take Gregory Hood's head personally," Ren said. "That's the objective. Everything else is logistics."
Needle cleared his throat. It was a precise, deliberate sound.
"Father," he said. "The plan has been ready for some time. The dormant assets I positioned inside the guild will activate on signal. By my current assessment, if we move at optimal timing, the probability of successfully reaching Hood is approximately seventy percent."
"Seventy," Ren said.
"Seventy. The remaining thirty accounts for variables I cannot fully model: Hood's personal causality readings, any external reinforcement he has called since the engagement, and the possibility that he is already anticipating retaliation." Needle paused. "It is a manageable margin."
"Seventy percent chance of taking a Legendary-rank Divine Hierophant's head," Bone Saw said. "That is extremely good odds."
"You would think that," Needle said.
"I do think that." Bone Saw's eye sockets brightened slightly. "I am enthusiastic about this plan."
"I know you are. That is part of what I am accounting for in the remaining thirty percent."
Bone Saw's eye sockets dimmed back to their normal level. He appeared to be thinking about this.
"This time," Ren said, "Needle, Bone Saw, Retractor, Suture, and Forceps will go in. I'll be with them." He looked at the row. "Priority is surgical. We minimize civilian casualties."
Forceps raised one hand. He was compact, older, his skull sealed but the brand still visible at the temple, the faint gold tinge of his skin catching the clinic light at an angle that did not look entirely biological.
"How about this, Father," he said. "This old man can concoct a gas. Colorless, nearly odorless, disperses within eighteen minutes. Renders targets unconscious for six hours. Nobody has to die who isn't supposed to die."
Ren considered this.
Needle and Suture's mouths twitched in the same direction at the same time.
"That," Needle said, "is what minimize civilian casualties means. Preserve their lives. Render them unable to interfere. Not kill them efficiently."
"This old man said not too painfully," Forceps said.
"The goal is not to kill them at all," Needle said. "You old fool."
"Ah." Forceps looked at his instruments. "Ah, I see. This old man had a slightly different interpretation of minimize." He adjusted something on his belt. "The gas still works. Works better in this context, actually."
"Yes," Needle said. "It does. Use the gas."
"This old man thought you liked his ideas."
"I like your other ideas."
Forceps seemed to accept this without particular distress.
"Father," Suture said.
Every head in the room turned toward her.
"I have a suggestion regarding Hood himself," she said. "If it would help."
"Go ahead," Ren said.
"I know his patterns. His routines, his blind spots, his method for reading an engagement and the specific interval between when he identifies a threat and when he acts on it." She paused. "He taught me these things, indirectly, over a period of months. He is brilliant. He is also consistent, and consistency in a brilliant person is a vulnerability." She looked at Ren. "If you want, I can walk you through the sequence. There is a specific window in any engagement where his causality analysis requires him to commit to a reading before he has full information. That window is approximately four seconds. If we can force that commitment at the right moment, the reading will be incomplete."
The clinic was quiet.
"Four seconds," Ren said.
"Four seconds," Suture confirmed. "I can engineer that moment if I know when you want it."
Bone Saw's eye sockets had gone bright again.
"HAHAHA," he said, and then apparently remembered this was a strategy session and reduced it to a low resonant sound somewhere between a laugh and a hum.
"If we do it like this," Suture said, and began to explain.
. . .
Jake Mercer had joined the Blinding Light Guild at twenty-two with the intention of becoming the strongest hunter in Victoria.
He was twenty-nine now and S-rank and had recently been assigned to door duty.
This was not what he had pictured.
The guild had been in a state of sustained catastrophe for the past year. The mantra incident. The Overlord engagement. One hundred and forty-one people who had not come back from the engagement, including ten at S-rank, which had moved Jake from a comfortable middle position in the S-rank roster to something considerably more exposed. The Blinding Light's operational capacity had been reduced to a subject people discussed in careful language. Nobody in the guild was saying it plainly. Everyone in the guild was aware of it.
And today he had been assigned to receive a guest.
His communication device buzzed. Prepare. They arrive in three minutes.
Jake straightened his uniform and stood in front of the east entrance. He had once imagined himself at the front of battles. He was at the front of a driveway.
I am S-rank, he thought. I have survived three S-class gate breaks. I defeated three Mythical-rank opponents in the guild ranking tournament. I am standing outside a building holding a clipboard.
The limousine came up the drive.
It was a good limousine. It said nothing about its occupant because saying nothing was the point.
Jake moved to the door. He reached for the handle. He prepared a greeting.
He opened it.
"Greetings, Ms."
He did not finish.
The woman who stepped out of the limousine was dressed in a white priestess suit: high-collared, immaculate, silver embroidery at the cuffs and hem that caught the light and held it a beat too long. Her black hair was pulled back with one loose strand at the temple. Her eyes were blue, the particular blue that exists at altitude, clear and deep and entirely calm. She moved with a posture that came from years of training, nothing performed about it.
Jake's lungs forgot what they were doing for approximately two seconds.
She looked at him.
She smiled.
It was a specific smile: warm, direct, the kind that found you rather than aimed at you. It landed somewhere in the center of his chest and stayed there.
He recognized her face half a second later. That face had been on every internal Blinding Light dispatch for three years: guild charity events, diplomatic visits, her father's public appearances. Gregory Hood's daughter. The Saintess of the Blinding Light. Sienna Hood, standing in front of him at the east entrance of the guild her father ran.
Unannounced.
"Greetings, Mr. Jake," she said. "I apologize for arriving without prior notice. I was hoping to speak with Vice-Master Harland about a private matter."
Jake opened his mouth.
He closed it.
He became aware that he was an S-rank hunter and was currently failing to produce a single coherent word in front of a woman who was smiling at him in a white suit.
"The Vice-Master," he said.
"Yes." Her expression shifted, the smile settling into something quieter. "I heard he had been called to the Victoria engagement. I came as soon as I could. Is he available?"
Jake looked at her.
He had been present for the debrief. He knew the full casualty list. Vice-Master Harland had been in the secondary collapse at the guild's auxiliary structure on the third day of the engagement.
"Ms. Hood," he said. "I'm afraid the Vice-Master is not available."
A pause crossed her face. Brief. Controlled.
"I see," she said.
She said nothing else, but her hand closed slightly at her side. She already knew. The question had been a courtesy.
"Please," he said. "Come inside."
"Thank you," she said.
He began walking. She fell in beside him, hands clasped, entirely at ease.
That, Jake thought, is not a condolence visit.
He was right.
She walked through the entrance of the Blinding Light Guild with a small silver embroidered cross at her collar and her hands folded and her eyes forward, and the asset went active.