"Because we don’t know what’s inside, we’re building for flexibility, not for a specific counter."

The screen behind him lit with broad roles rather than names. Raid lead. Secondary command. Frontline. Shield line. Ranged pressure. Healing. Scouting. Abnormal-floor reading. Emergency support. Fallback command.

Names slid into the columns as he spoke, and every time a guild lost a slot it had expected to hold, someone’s mouth tightened.

"Marcus Hale leads."

Marcus inclined his head once. His hand stayed flat on the table and he did not look pleased about it, and his eyes went back to that report a beat longer than the moment asked for.

"Maeve Callahan, field-reading and abnormal-floor interpretation. James Ganner, necromantic utility and direct relevance to the named entity. Finn Hale, frontline pressure, working inside Team Zero’s existing structure."

When Finn’s name and role went up on the screen, Marcus glanced at it, then at Finn, then made himself look back at O’Shea.

Finn’s hand went still on the table. He did not look at his father at all.

Declan Roe was the one who said it.

"Reaching Floor 19 nine days ago doesn’t make a team ready for a twenty-person main story raid." He folded his hands. "It makes them fast. That’s not the same thing, and everyone at this table who’s buried people knows it isn’t."

A file opened across the table. Somewhere down the row, a stylus moved over James’s supervised-release line.

"Three seats to one young team," another master said, "when there are Floor 19 veterans sitting outside this building who’d take them. Explain the math to me."

A third didn’t bother with the math. "We’re putting a Challenger on supervised release, after Ashford Grand, into a national raid. If that goes wrong on a live floor, it’s not Emerald Spire’s name on it. It’s the Bureau’s."

A chair shifted when Maeve’s name came up next, but no one pushed on her the way they pushed on the other two.

O’Shea let them finish before he answered, and he answered with the floor, not with feeling.

"The Bureau isn’t fielding popularity. It isn’t fielding seniority, and it isn’t fielding guild pride." He looked down the table. "It’s fielding relevance to this specific floor. Team Zero has cleared abnormal floors that broke the parties who tried them first. James Ganner is the only Challenger in this country who has had direct contact with the Angel of Lust line and walked back out of it. Finn Hale and Maeve Callahan operate at their best inside that team. Split the three of them up, and you lose the exact thing that made them worth a seat."

The room did not warm to it. It went quiet, which was different.

Declan Roe leaned back, not satisfied, but out of argument for the moment.

Saoirse Doyle looked at James properly for the first time, the way a person looks at a tool they hadn’t bothered picking up yet.

Marcus said nothing at all, because anything he said in Finn’s defense would have made the nepotism whisper louder, and he knew it.

It came up anyway.

"And the Hale seat," one of the masters said, not quite looking at Marcus. "We’re all going to pretend that’s about fit and not about whose son he is."

Marcus’s head came up. "He’s a registered independent Challenger who cleared three floors in two weeks. Check the dates before you—"

He stopped himself there, one beat too late, his hand closing on the edge of the file.

Finn’s hand went still again on the table. He did not thank his father. He did not look at him. He kept his eyes on the screen and let the silence say that he hadn’t asked for the defense and didn’t want it.

O’Shea moved the meeting on before the room could turn a father and a son into its second argument.

James spoke once, and only once.

"What’s the plan if the floor splits us?"

The master who had questioned the seats started to wave it off, then didn’t, because the question had teeth.

"If it isolates the raid lead from the rest," James went on, "or turns our own formation into the thing that kills us. Twenty people is a lot of bodies to keep in one shape on a floor nobody’s mapped."

He did not say betrayal. He did not say anything he had no way of knowing. He just laid the gap on the table.

O’Shea looked at Marcus instead of answering straight away.

"Unknown floors punish assumptions before they punish weak Challengers," Maeve said into the pause. "A strong raid that walks in certain of its own shape is exactly the kind that doesn’t walk out. He’s right to ask."

Nobody had a clean answer for it. That was the point of the question.

The screen cleared and filled again, group by group.

Raid lead: Marcus Hale, Emerald Spire.

Then Emerald Spire’s elites, several of them, Floor 19-cleared and named in a block under their guild master.

Then the other major guilds, two seats here, one there, less than any of them had wanted.

Then the independent S-ranks, Saoirse Doyle’s name among them, slotted on fit.

Then, near the bottom: James Ganner. Finn Hale. Maeve Callahan.

James read the list once, then read it again, and found the absence he had already known would be there. No Ronan. No Cillian.

Finn did not move when his own name appeared. His eyes moved when Marcus’s stayed fixed at the top.

Maeve studied the whole arrangement like a wall she was looking for the crack in, twenty names in a shape, and her gaze went back and forth across the seams of it.

Nobody in the room looked fully satisfied. That was probably the closest thing to fair the meeting was going to produce.

Out in the observer corridor, the same list came up on the screen on the wall.

Cillian’s face barely changed. His thumb pressed against the edge of the observer badge on his collar until the metal bent a little under it.

Ronan looked at the three Team Zero names on the roster, then folded his arms and said nothing.

When the meeting let out and James passed them in the hall, there was no long apology and nobody reached for one.

"Official?" Cillian asked.

"Official," James said.

Ronan unfolded his arms. "Then go in, clear it, and come back with the other two on their feet. That’s the whole job."

James held his look for a second, and nodded, and went.

O’Shea closed the room with the window.

"After this meeting, there is no public debate, no guild lobbying, and no roster changes. The only thing that takes a name off this list is a medic saying that person can’t stand." He looked down the table once. "The attempt begins at dawn."

Aides started closing folders. The last whisper in the room stopped. A guild master gathered his files and stood.

Marcus looked at the roster on the screen instead of at Finn.

Finn looked at the door instead of at Marcus.

Maeve looked at the seating order one more time, twenty names holding a shape, and at how little it would take to break it.

James looked at none of that.

He looked at the line still glowing at the top of the screen, the only words in the room that had not changed once in the last hour.

[MAIN STORY QUEST: ANGEL OF LUST — THE FIRST DISCIPLE]

[ENTRY REQUIREMENT: 20 CHALLENGERS]

Twenty seats. Twenty Challengers. Exactly enough, and he could not shake the feeling that the number had not been chosen to honor anyone.

It had been asked for.