Twenty-five guards was a conservative count.

Roman had tried to count them properly as they walked him through the streets of Strength City and kept losing track because more kept appearing from side streets and falling into the formation around him, and at some point he stopped counting and just accepted that the number was large enough to make the point clearly.

The residents of the surrounding streets had stopped what they were doing to watch, which was understandable. Twenty-five guards escorting one person who appeared to be a teenager was not a common sight in any city, and the people watching had the particular expression of people who were genuinely curious what this kid had done.

Roman walked with his head up and said nothing.

When they reached the Mayor’s residence, the courtyard was noticeably different from the previous night. The caravan was gone. No sign of it anywhere, no tyre marks even, like it had been cleared away cleanly and quickly by people who knew what they were doing.

Roman filed that away, as that wasn’t a big case.

They brought him through the outer courtyard and toward the main entrance of the building, and just before they reached the doors, a man stepped forward from the group. He was broader than the others and carried himself with the easy authority of someone several ranks above the people around him, and when he raised a hand the entire escort stopped.

"I will take it from here," he said. "You are all dismissed."

There was a brief moment where nobody moved, and then they moved, peeling away from the formation and dispersing back toward the courtyard and the street beyond it until it was just the man and Roman standing at the entrance.

The man looked at Roman for a moment without saying anything. Then he reached out, not roughly, and took Roman by the arm and walked him through the doors.

The inside of the building was quiet. The kind of quiet that a large, well-built space gets when most of the people have been cleared out of it. Their footsteps carried down the main corridor and the man took him left, then right, then through a set of doors that opened into a chamber that was different from everything else Roman had seen of the building.

It was modern, cleaner, with large windows along one wall letting in the afternoon light, and the furniture was the kind that had been chosen to be comfortable rather than impressive.

Roman stepped through the doors.

The man let go of his arm, turned, and left without a word, pulling the doors shut behind him.

Roman stood in the room and looked at the only other person in it.

North...

North Rockbridge was sitting in a chair near the window with a glass of wine held loosely in one hand, her legs crossed, looking at him with the calm, direct expression of someone who had been waiting for a while and was not particularly stressed about any of it.

She was not what Roman had built up in his head from the group chat messages, which was to say she was more. Tall even sitting down, with the kind of presence that filled a room without trying to. Her silver hair was pulled back in a way that looked deliberate without looking like it had taken long, and the clothes she was wearing were fitted and dark, simple in the way that expensive things often managed to look simple.

Roman stood near the doors and did not say anything.

North looked at him.

"You have been a genuine pain in the ass," she said. "I want you to know that."

"I have been told," Roman said with a slight, unnoticeable smile.

"But," she continued, "that is what you get when someone is desperate enough about their freedom that they will run through half a city rather than sit still." She tilted her head slightly. "I cannot be too upset about that kind of thing."

Roman looked around the room briefly, then back at her.

"I am innocent," he said. "I should not have been held captive in the first place."

North raised an eyebrow and moved her lips a bit.

"You stepped in front of three A rankers from the Steel Empire to help someone escape from them," she said. "That is not exactly minding your business."

"She did not want to go," Roman said.

"She is the Emperor’s daughter."

"She is still a person," Roman said. "She said no. That should mean something."

North looked at him for a moment with an expression he could not fully read.

"You might have just made yourself the Steel Emperor’s next significant enemy," she said. "I hope you understand that."

Roman shrugged like he didn’t see it as a big deal.

"I will deal with it."

North almost smiled. She looked down at her wine briefly, then back up at him.

"The whole Reach is talking about you," she said. "Roman Rings. The brave stubborn rat."

Roman frowned immediately she said that, and she completely understood why.

"I did not call you that," North said immediately. "That is what the people on the BSP net are calling you. It is trending, if that makes you feel any better."

"It does not," Roman said with a glare before looking away.

She set her wine glass down on the small table beside her and leaned back in the chair.

"The Cross Operation is in three days," she said.

Roman went still, and well, he hadn’t fail to enrich his listening.

"I have been planning how to bring you in for it since you missed Privilege Day," she continued. "When I heard the messengers were passing through my city, I had a feeling you were probably somewhere in that caravan." She paused.

"I was right."

Roman looked at her carefully.

"The dinner," he said slowly. "The hospitality. All of it."

North said nothing, which was its own kind of answer. But they both already knew that was was revealing itself.

"You were buying time," Roman said. "Giving me a window to get out."

"I trusted that you would be able to handle ten C rank guards if you had the right moment," North said. "Based on everything I had seen from your BSP ranking, that seemed like a reasonable assumption."

"And the messengers?" Roman asked. "Where are they now?"

"That is not important right now," North said simply.

"It kind of is..."

"Roman." She said his name in a way that was not unkind but was very clear. "It is not important right now. What is important is that you are free, you are here, and the Cross Operation needs you in three days."

He looked at her for a moment.

Then he exhaled and let it go.

"Tonight," North said, and there was something slightly different in her voice now, lighter, "you are hunting with me in Terror Lake. And while we are out there, I am going to tell you everything you need to know about the operation, the group, and why you are the only F ranker in a Platinum group full of S rankers."

Roman looked at her and there was a kind of amazing smile that appeared on his face.

Terror Lake.

The same place she had mentioned on the very first night in the group chat, the place he had been thinking about since he first saw her post about it. He had been wanting to get there for weeks, had been holding it in the back of his mind as the next thing, and now it was tonight.

He had not even tried to hide the fact that the mention had gotten to him, because North was already reading his expression with a look of quiet amusement.

"You already wanted to go there," she said.

"I have been thinking about it since the first night in the group chat," Roman said honestly.

North picked her wine back up.

"Good," she said. "Then tonight should be interesting for both of us."

Roman stood in the clean afternoon light of the chamber and thought about Terror Lake and the Cross Operation and the particular way North Rockbridge had just said the word interesting, and decided that Strength City had turned out to be a far more eventful stop than he had planned for.

Not that he had planned for any of it.

But still...