Without a word, Leon kept his head bowed as he followed the Qing family through a massive entranceway.
Though he couldn’t see the color or its height, he could see the width that seed to swallow them.
’What place is this?’ he scread in his head.
They moved silently through a series of white corridors.
"Why is his head down?" Kira said in a sharp voice. "Let him raise it and see what he is."
"KIRA!" Zoe silenced her sister’s words mid-air.
After ten minutes, they halted before a set of towering double doors. With his gaze fixed on the floor, Leon felt the change in the atmosphere.
A wave of sound and movent erupted when the door swung inward. The ground vibrated as every person seated in the vast hall slamd their palms on the long table before them and rose to their feet.
"Welco, Pri Minister Lord Hu Qing!"
’Pri Minister? Lord?’ Leon’s eyebrows lifted and landed on Hu Qing. And when Hu Qing’s eyes tilted to Leon, a cold jolt shot through Leon, causing him to wrench his eyes back to the gleaming floor.
’Wait, if Zoe’s father is the Pri Minister... and Zoe is his daughter...’ he tried joining the knots. ’Oh no. Does that an Dad was soone so important that they had to bow to ?!’
He tried to stifle the sudden realization, but his shaking arms betrayed him.
Darian leaned in. "You can raise your head now. But don’t freak out."
’Don’t freak out? That alone makes not want to look at their faces.’
"What is he waiting for again?!" Kira’s voice pierced the formal silence.
Swallowing hard, Leon lifted his head slowly, his muscles protesting as if against a great weight.
The hall was lined on both sides with tiered seating like a grand theater of judgnt, leaving no seat unoccupied.
Leon’s gaze skimd over the sea of faces, then snagged.
’Mr. Lee. Feng. Lieutenant Hayes.’ He forced himself to look further, scanned the other stern n and won in uniforms he didn’t recognize.
Zoe stepped forward and gestured with a flat, authoritative hand. "You may all be seated."
The crowd obeyed with a rustle of fabric and creak of chairs. Zoe turned and walked back to her father, leaned closer to him, then whispered in his ear.
When she pulled her head back, she turned and walked toward Leon. "Co with ," she said in a voice that left no room for hesitation.
Leon followed like a puppet on strings. She led him away from the family group and stopped directly in the center of the open floor before the assembled crowd.
"Stand here," Zoe said, tapping on Leon’s right shoulder. "I’m coming."
Leon stood there, shaking, watching her walk without returning or even giving a backward glance.
’Ooooh, what is this?’ Panic began to coil in his gut. ’Why leave here?’ He felt every individual stare, picking him apart.
Beads of sweat traced down his brow to his cheekbone. Though he swiped it, they continued like ants drawn to sugar.
After two minutes of silence, Leon’s breathing grew shallow. And without warning, the wall directly behind him lit up.
A wash of blue and red light imprinted on his back, casting a long, distorted shadow on the floor before him.
Murmurs stirred through the crowd like wildfire.
Leon turned his head, then his whole body followed. On the wall, his own face stared back at him from a massive screen that occupied the wall.
The first scene hit him like lightning. The hospital room at WinJi Central. The seconds before the blast and the hours after the blast.
Leon’s blood ran cold, his jaw jiggling.
The video stopped, followed by another that made his heart freeze. Now he saw himself on the field where Dies Irae thundered in his ears and served as his own motivator.
His mouth opened wide when the speed at which he himself ran, per the video, sent chills down his spine.
It paused, followed by another that made him feel like he’d wet himself. The treadmill incident. The smoke curled from the treadmill’s undercarriage before it exploded.
A hot wave of sha and violation washed over him. ’Were they watching ? Does that an they have video of bathing?’
Before he could finalize it, another video popped up.
The group trial, the broad-shouldered boy being bisected by the blue-flad sword, and him killing the two red-haired and the white-haired.
The cara angle changed to the golden light that erupted from him and washed out like a nuclear black. He saw Jade’s form dissipating, Vera’s dispersing into several pieces, and Tiger’s own lting.
The video ended, but the smoking wasteland reeled in his mind as if he had been teleported to the land in that instant.
A deafening silence struck the hall.
Hu Qing stepped away from his family, walked, and stood beside trembling Leon. He placed a heavy hand on Leon’s shoulder, at which Leon flinched.
"We have all seen," Hu Qing stated in a voice that resonated through the hall. Then he turned his gaze across the assembled crowd.
In an instant, whispers and taunts shot toward Leon and Hu Qing.
"He should be terminated!" a man in military dress barked, surging from his chair.
"He killed his own colleagues! He must be eliminated!"
"He turned a well-respected nurse to a skeleton! He vaporized fifty arcs of land! Only the Destroyer of Worlds was capable of such things, and he is gone, thanks to the Crash! This boy is an abomination!"
A calr voice that sounded like an older woman countered, "But consider this: he also healed Mike—the boy who all the doctors from all around the world, and even gods, couldn’t heal for the past ten years."
"A creation that levels fields and erases people!" another male voice scread. "He is a walking ti bomb!"
The voices overlapped, building into a chorus of judgnt.
"Ahem."
Hu Qing cleared his throat. Though it wasn’t a word, it sliced through the noise like a blade. The hall fell silent, every eye fixed on him.
He removed his hand from Leon’s shoulder and took two steps forward.
Leon froze, his breathing slow, while he waited for the man’s statent.
"Termination," Hu Qing said, pausing. "Termination is a waste. You saw what he did unconsciously."
He turned slightly and smiled at Leon’s pale face, then turned back to the crowd.
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