The silence in the chamber lasted four seconds.

Four seconds was the length of time it took for the older civilians in the front row to remember that they were not, in fact, in a temple, and that the small girl standing on the platform with eight wings open behind her was a registered Crusader of the human race, a granddaughter of a sitting Diamond rank General, and a sixteen-year-old citizen of Old York with a registration number filed at dawn.

The silence broke unevenly.

A voice from the third tier was the first to find itself.

"What house did they say she is from?"

The voice belonged to a merchant lord who was pot-bellied. The voice was followed by another, from the second tier.

"Hayashi."

"That cannot be right."

"It is on the registry."

"Hayashi is a mortal house. Hayashi does not produce Celestials."

"The registry says Hayashi."

"Fuck man! I am saying, for a human to form the Vessel of a Celestial, she has to be of Celestial bloodline. How is that possible?"

"Well, I am also saying she is a Hayashi. Rest, no matter."

"You—"

The murmur thickened. The chamber, which had stopped breathing for the length of the implantation and the vessel formation, began to breathe again, and the breath came back as sound.

Names were exchanged across the tiers. Old grievances surfaced.

By the fifth minute, the railings had begun to fill.

Witnesses moved down from the upper tiers toward the lower observation level. The descent was not coordinated.

It was the slow, hungry creep of people who had been told they could not approach the platform until the breakthrough was complete and had decided, with the breakthrough now complete, that the rule no longer applied to them.

The first hand reached the lower railing.

The hand belonged to a young woman in the deep blue of a southern house. Her eyes were on Ayla.

"Lady Hayashi."

The address arrived strange in the chamber. No one had called Ayla Lady before.

The title was the title used for women of the higher civilian ranks, and Ayla had not yet, by any registry, qualified for it.

"Lady Hayashi. My grandmother sends her regards. She was a child in the Northern House when the shrines were still kept. She would consider it a small kindness if you would allow her to send a token to the family residence."

A second voice arrived at the railing.

"Lady Hayashi. The Western House extends an invitation to a private gathering. The date may be set at your convenience."

A third.

"Lady Hayashi. My son is a Silver of clean reputation. Should the General permit, an introduction could be arranged."

A fourth.

A fifth.

The voices began to overlap.

Ayla stood on the platform with the wings still open behind her. The shape of the vessel had not yet receded, because Ayla had not yet asked it to.

She did not entirely know how to ask it to. Her eyes had opened during the silence, and the spectators in the lower observation level had, on the whole, stopped looking directly at her face.

The voices, however, had not stopped.

She looked at them.

She listened to them.

She heard, behind every voice at the railing, a second voice. The Twin Lens carried each one to her without her having reached for them.

She had not had to reach for anything in a week. The lens picked up the thoughts of every witness at the lower level the way a small bowl picked up rain, and the rain had become, in the last minute, a downpour.

’A Celestial. A Celestial in my lifetime. My grandchildren will inherit her bloodline if I move now.’

’Hayashi will not hold her. The house is too small. She will be passed to a larger one within the year.’

’Marry her to a Northern son. Marry her to a Western son. Marry her to any son who can produce a child before another house produces theirs.’

’Eat her core. If she dies before the year is out, the core is harvestable. The harvest would seat any Bronze for life.’

The last thought arrived without warning. Ayla turned her head toward the speaker before she had decided to.

The speaker was a man in the second row. Older. Civilian colors. He had not approached the railing. He had not raised his voice.

He had simply stood at the back of the observation level with his hands clasped at his back, and his thoughts had been the loudest in the chamber because the man had not bothered to muffle them.

Because he never thought anyone could hear his voice.

Ayla’s gold pupils settled on his face.

The man did not realize he had been seen.

He continued thinking.

’A Bronze with a harvested Celestial core would last three centuries. The harvest is messy but the procedure is documented in the older texts. Two practitioners and a sealed room would manage it.’

Ayla blinked once.

It was new news for her that cores could be harvested. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Her hand, still at her side, twitched at the wrist. A thin red filament gathered between her fingers and disappeared again before any witness in the chamber had time to register it.

Bloodnet rose to her hand. Pyromancy warmed the air at her shoulder. Shadow Stride placed itself at her feet, waiting for the instruction.

Acid Synthesis pooled in her right palm. Eight Wing Transformation, which was now redundant with the vessel form she still wore, folded itself politely into the background and waited.

She wanted to kill all these noisy human beings around her, and swallow the brain of that guy to learn more about core harvesting.

Currently, there were many Bronze, few Silver and two Diamond Crusaders. She just had to die one time after killing that man.

The thought arrived clean and quiet. The chamber’s safety glass would not hold against the Pyromancy at her current core level.

The runes on the walls were designed to absorb breakthrough overflow, not directed attack.

The witnesses in the lower observation level were the closest.

Her wrist twitched a second time.

That is when a hand closed over her shoulder.

The hand was rough. The hand was familiar.

The hand was the hand that had passed twice over the back of hers in the corridor of the testing wing, and the hand had moved faster than Ayla had felt anything move since the morning she had registered.

"Baby."

Roric’s voice, very low, was at her ear.

"Eyes on me."

She turned her head. The witnesses at the railing receded from her vision. Her grandfather’s face filled it.

His expression had not changed since the chamber, but something behind the expression had gone hard.

He had sensed what she had heard, in his own way.

’There is a spy from the Ghoul race,’ he thought in his mind, ’but I cannot sense him.’

’Ghoul race.. Ayla wondered.

It surprised her how her grandpa sensed that person at all. Even she, without the Twin Lens, could not have sensed him.

She did not know how. He could not have heard the merchant’s thought from the safety zone.

But the soldier in him had been fighting against Ghouls for years. Their body signals were easily recognizable to him.

’This one is strong. I am afraid it is Platinum at least,’ Roric continued thinking.

His hand tightened on her shoulder.

"Let us go."

Ayla was unwilling to let go of this chance. But she understood she could not beat a Platinum ranked Crusader.

"Mm.." she murmured.