The tent flap opened, and a woman in Association grey stepped through.
She was young, professional, and visibly uncomfortable about interrupting five won who were still riding the high of watching their enemies’ rankings collapse in real ti.
Her eyes swept the tent, took in the overturned chair, the still-flickering hologram above Kaiden’s wrist, and the general state of a group that looked like they’d won a war.
She cleared her throat. "The investigation team has requested individual interviews with each mber of the Runewoven team currently present. Standard procedure for an incident of this scale."
Luna’s grin died.
"Now?"
"I’m afraid so."
"We just got him back."
"Are you refusing to aid the investigation?"
Luna looked at the woman flatly. This association rep couldn’t read the room, or just didn’t care enough to do so... Or maybe her role simply didn’t allow her to.
’Yeah, I shouldn’t be complaining right now... We could be questioned in chains right now.’
"Go," Kaiden said. "Cooperate. Be polite. Answer what they ask."
He grinned as he added, "After all, that’s what innocent people are supposed to do."
The girls each grinned back at him, gave him a long hug each, and soon, the tent beca empty.
Kaiden stood in the silence for a mont. Then he exhaled and pushed himself to his feet. His body ached in the dull, specific way that ca from channeling too much mana in a short span of ti, and sitting alone in an Association tent felt like the exact opposite of what he wanted to do right now.
He needed air.
...
The camp sprawled across the land in organized clusters of canvas and portable infrastructure, Association tents arranged in neat rows that felt absurdly civilized given what had happened in the basin a few hours ago. Officers moved between stations with clipboards and recording artifacts, dics rushed from one grave injury to the next, and a small logistics team was still cataloging monster corpses.
Kaiden walked through it with his hands in his pockets and his head down, the posture of a man who didn’t want to be stopped. Nobody stopped him. A few officers glanced his way with expressions that ranged from professional neutrality to barely concealed curiosity, but none of them approached.
Whether that was because Eleanora had cleared him, because they’d seen the stream, or because none of them wanted to be the person who engaged with the Paragon of Sin on a day like today, he couldn’t tell.
He didn’t particularly care.
His feet carried him past the last row of tents and up the gradual incline to the ridge.
The sa ridge.
The stone was still scorched in places where his girls’ mana had carved through it during the bombardnt. Faint burn marks traced the trajectory paths of Luna’s lightning, and a long shallow groove ran along the eastern edge where Calypso’s axe strike had bitten into the rock. The air slled like ozone and sothing fleshy underneath, the lingering trace of monster blood baking dry in the late afternoon sun.
Kaiden walked to the edge and sat down.
His legs hung over the drop, boots swaying above the basin floor where, not long ago, he’d orchestrated sothing the Association was calling a rescue operation and Magnus Ashborn was calling murder.
The view was wide and quiet. The basin stretched below, still littered with the remains of the engagent, and beyond it the mountain range faded into blue haze under a sky that was starting to turn gold at the edges.
He pulled out his phone.
The notification count had given up on specificity and settled for a symbol that ant ’more than the screen can display.’ He ignored the direct ssages, ignored the team channels, ignored the sixteen missed calls from numbers he didn’t recognize, and opened the news feed.
The confrontation with Magnus was everywhere.
Every major outlet had the clip. Every minor outlet had the clip. Several outlets that Kaiden was fairly sure hadn’t existed before today had been created specifically to host the clip. The headlines competed for dramatic real estate like rival auctioneers who’d all spotted the sa painting:
ASHBORN VS. THE ANOMALY: A CONFRONTATION ON THE RIDGE
KAIDEN GREY TELLS THE MOST POWERFUL GUILD LEADER IN ARICA TO MIND HIS BUSINESS
’I DON’T ANSWER TO ANYONE’: THE ROOKIE WHO WON’T KNEEL
He scrolled.
The serious analysis pieces had already started piling up. Op-eds from awakened-affairs comntators, retired guild strategists, and at least two political columnists who normally covered congressional hearings but apparently found the awakened world more interesting this week.
The most shared analysis ca from a forr New Dawn consultant whose na Kaiden didn’t recognize. The piece was asured, professional, and asked the one question that Kaiden had wanted a million people to ask.
The argunt was simple.
Magnus Ashborn wasn’t supposed to do this.
Guild leaders didn’t personally confront rookies. Guild leaders sent subordinates. Guild leaders issued formal complaints through Association channels. Guild leaders didn’t land on ridges in front of live caras to scream at twenty-sothing-year-old competitors who posed zero strategic threat to their organization.
New Dawn had twenty registered fighters in the field, most of whom ca away alive. Any one of them could have filed a formal objection. Instead, the guild master himself appeared on the ridge within minutes, confronted Kaiden directly, and made personal threats in front of an audience of over one million concurrent viewers.
The obvious question, the article concluded, was the one Kaiden Grey himself had asked on cara: why does the guild master of New Dawn care this much about a rookie?
Kaiden scrolled past it. He already knew the answer.
The comnt sections were doing the rest.
The top-voted response had fifty thousand upvotes from user GoblinModeActivated and counting: "Because it’s personal. Full stop. That wasn’t a guild leader making a jurisdictional complaint. That was a man who HATES Kaiden Grey for reasons he can’t say out loud. Watch the clip again and look at his eyes."
ManaSensitiveNipples: "so what are we thinking, an ex-girlfriend situation? Kai stole one of his won? lmao"
3KidsNoMana: "Bro Kaiden has five won already and Magnus has Vespera. Who would dare cheat on THE Vespera Ashborn?"
VesperaMyEvilQueen: "bold of you to assu Vespera’s off the table. have you SEEN the way that woman looked at Kai during the ChronosX coverage? she was interested."
ShadowMommyIssues: "Vespera Ashborn leaves Magnus for a 22 year old rookie and hands him New Dawn’s guild charter as a breakup gift. I’d watch that movie."
TinfoilDungeon: "the tiline works too. she stops appearing next to Magnus in public right around when Kai starts rising. just saying."
The thread devolved from there into increasingly elaborate theories about Kaiden seducing Vespera Ashborn away from her husband and inheriting the most powerful guild in North Arica through sheer romantic conquest, and Kaiden stared at his phone screen with an expression that couldn’t decide whether to laugh or be horrified.
He landed on both.
’That’s my mother,’ he thought, scrolling past a surprisingly well-edited fan composite of himself and Vespera standing side by side with a heart emoji between them. ’The internet wants to steal my own mother’s heart.’
Kaiden chuckled and shook his head. He didn’t understand the wife-stealing obsession to begin with. The forums treated it like the pinnacle of masculine achievent, the ultimate power move, as if there was nothing more impressive than taking another man’s woman.
To him, if a woman was ready to cheat on her husband, that woman was not worth his ti at all.
The fact that the woman in question had changed his diapers made the whole thing significantly less appealing.
He closed the thread before it got worse. It was getting way worse.
The s had evolved faster than the analysis.
Soone had edited the confrontation footage so that Magnus’s dramatic landing was set to circus music, and it already had more views than the original clip. Another creator had taken the mont where Magnus stood mute after Kaiden’s question and looped it for thirty seconds with the caption: "Loading... Loading... Loading..."
A split-screen compilation showed Kaiden’s one-word "Noted" response to Magnus’s threats next to clips of various world leaders receiving devastating criticism and responding with identical blankness, titled "N WHO CHOSE PEACE (compilation #4)."
Soone had screenshotted Kaiden standing on the ridge looking down at his dying enemies and turned it into a motivational poster: "I DON’T ANSWER TO ANYONE, BE THEY S-TIER COMBATANTS, MASTERS OF THE MOST POWERFUL GUILDS, OR THE PRESIDENT HIMSELF. - Kaiden Grey."
That last one had been reposted enough tis that Kaiden suspected it was going to be printed on actual rchandise.
He scrolled deeper, past the surface-level reactions and into the forums where the analytical crowd lived. The places where people built tilines and cross-referenced footage and treated awakened politics like a spectator sport with conspiracy-theory brackets.
Most of them were asking the sa question the mainstream analysts were, just with less polish and more speculation. So went the rivalry route. So went the business angle.
But one thread had a different title, posted by user ’MyExLeftNowITrackGuilds’
It was buried three pages deep on a mid-sized awakened speculation forum, posted forty minutes ago, sitting at six hundred and thirteen upvotes. Low enough to be ignorable. High enough to an people were reading it.
"Kaiden Grey is an Ashborn."
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