My Class is Null, But I Always Get the Best Outcome

Chapter 110: Collapse

Victor was not arrested.

That was the first thing everyone noticed. The second thing was that he had still walked into the Hunter Division building flanked by three investigators and two Hunter Police officers, and the image of that walk had been captured by enough phones from enough angles that by the time it reached every screen in the city, it was simply a fact rather than a rumor.

Victor sat across from Mayor Ko in a plain room with a table, chairs, a recorder, and two investigators occupying the seats beside the mayor.

Mayor Ko folded her hands. "Thank you for coming."

"I wasn’t aware I had a choice," Victor said.

"You did," she said.

Neither of them believed that. The silence that followed acknowledged it.

Then the questions started.

Business relationships. Financial records. Partnership agreements. Known associates. Victor answered each one directly. He had been in difficult conversations before, and he understood the structure of this one.

Victor recognized the structure immediately. They weren’t trying to catch him in a dramatic mistake. They were creating a record. He gave answers that were accurate in the ways that could be verified and careful in the ways that required care, and he did not give anything that was not asked for.

One of the investigators pushed a folder across the table.

Victor looked at it. Then at the investigator. "Is this a question?"

The investigator started to respond. Mayor Ko put her hand briefly on the table between them, and the investigator stopped.

"People are concerned," Mayor Ko said.

Victor leaned back slightly. "People are always concerned about something."

"Not usually this many at once."

That almost made him say something. He kept it back. Instead, he folded his hands the same way the Mayor had folded hers. "Concern isn’t evidence."

"No," she said. Her eyes had not moved from his face since the questioning started. "But evidence tends to create concern."

Victor said nothing.

He knew exactly what would happen if he said Kai’s name.

Nobody would believe him.

He was not going to do that.

The questioning continued for two hours. By the end of it, nothing had been proven, and nothing had been dismissed, and Victor walked out of the building into the city’s full attention, having confirmed nothing that could be used against him while demonstrating publicly that he had been questioned.

Both were true.

Victor didn’t know which would matter more.

...

The city did not reach a verdict. It reached an argument.

Tae and Nari had been running dungeons together for a month. They ate at the same restaurant before every shift because the coffee was strong and the owner let them sit as long as they needed.

Today, they had been sitting for forty minutes, and neither of them was in a hurry to leave.

"I worked a Victor Hale operation," Tae said. He was looking at his coffee. "Two months ago. Storm Castle logistics. He organized the entire support structure. Fourteen hunters coordinated perfectly. Nobody died."

"I know," Nari said.

"That was real. That happened."

"I’m not arguing with you about that."

"You’re arguing with me about him."

"I’m saying the investigation is there for a reason." Nari wrapped both hands around her cup. "Documents don’t appear out of nowhere."

"Documents can be framed."

"These ones have investigators who say the context is fine."

"Investigators can be wrong."

"Tae." She looked at him. "I’m not saying he’s guilty. I’m saying I don’t know. And not knowing is different from being innocent."

Tae watched people pass Hale Headquarters. A few were slowing down to look at the building. Not stopping. Just slowing.

"He gave resources to the gate response," Tae said. "While everyone was terrified. He put people in the field."

"Yeah," Nari said. "And?"

"And that matters."

"It does," she said. "It also doesn’t cancel other things if those other things are true." She put her cup down. "That’s what I’m sitting with. That both things can be real at the same time."

Tae was quiet.

"The part that bothers me," Nari said, "is that I can’t tell which version of him was real and which was strategy. That’s the thing I can’t figure out."

Tae thought about the Storm Castle operation. About the logistics that had worked too well to have been improvised. About what it took to build something that functional in two months from nothing.

"What if both were real?" he said.

Nari looked at him.

"What if he actually wanted to help and also did the other thing?" Tae said. "What if those aren’t two different people?"

Nari was quiet for a moment. She looked at her coffee. At the window. At Tae. "That’s the version that scares me most," she said.

Neither of them had an answer for that. They finished breakfast. Paid their bill. Went to work. The conversation kept going in the back of both their heads all morning.

They finished breakfast and went back to work, and continued the conversation in their heads, the way the city was continuing it in every channel simultaneously. Forums, group chats, the quiet conversations between hunters who had been in Hale operations and hunters who had not, and hunters who had been affiliated with guilds that had recently departed and were still processing what that meant.

Some defended Victor. Some did not. Most occupied the space between those positions, which was uncertainty, and uncertainty was its own kind of movement in the city’s thinking about what Hale Guild actually was.

...

The common room had been quiet all morning.

That was the tell. Normally, it was the loudest room in Hale Headquarters. People eating breakfast. Comparing run numbers. Arguing about gate rotations. The specific noise of a team that worked well together and knew it.

Today, everyone was eating quietly and watching the television, and not talking about what was on it.

Elden let it go for an hour.

Then he reached over and turned the television off.

Everyone looked at him.

"Okay," he said. "Say it."

The teammate across from him, Hana, put down her fork. "Say what?"

"Whatever you’ve not been saying since yesterday."

Hana looked at the others. She was the youngest on the team. Twenty-two. Had joined Hale six months ago because the training structure was the best available. She had never once questioned the organization in six months.

"I called my brother last night," she said. "He’s in a different guild. He asked me when we were leaving."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him we hadn’t decided yet." She looked at her hands. "He said the decision was already made. That we just hadn’t accepted it."

The room was quiet.

Ryu, the team’s heaviest fighter, leaned back in his chair. He was thirty-one. Had been with Hale since the second month. He had been in more Victor Hale operations than anyone at the table.

"I defended him," Ryu said with a sigh. "Last week. When the first evidence was released, two people from other guilds were talking in the break room of the gate staging area. And I told them the framing was wrong. That I knew what kind of operation Hale ran, and this wasn’t consistent with it."

"You believed that," Elden said.

"I did." Ryu was quiet. "I still think I wasn’t entirely wrong. The operational side of this guild is exactly what it looked like. The work was real." He looked at the turned-off television. "But that’s not all that was happening."

The table sat with that.

Min, who hadn’t spoken since Elden turned off the television, said, "What happens to the people we recruited?"

Everyone looked at her.

"The hunters we brought in," she said. "The ones we personally vouched for. If we leave, what happens to them?"

"They make their own choices," Elden said.

"We told them Hale was trustworthy," Min said. "We told them it was stable. We used our credibility to bring them here."

"I know," Elden said.

"So if we just walk out—"

"Min." He met her eyes. "We can’t stay in a building we don’t trust because we feel responsible for the people we brought into it. That’s not how this works."

"How does it work then?"

"We leave," Elden said. "We tell the people we recruited exactly what we know and exactly why we’re leaving. We give them the same information we have and let them decide for themselves." He paused. "That’s what respecting them looks like. Not staying somewhere wrong to protect them from a decision they’re capable of making."

Min looked at the table. Then she nodded.

Hana said, quietly, "Where do we go?"

The room looked at Elden. He had known they would.

He thought about the message he had been composing in his head since yesterday. Three sentences. He had written and deleted it twice. The third version was still on his phone, unsent. frёewebηovel.cѳm

"I have somewhere in mind," he said.

"Where?" Ryu asked.

"I will tell you all later. For now, let’s get ready."

One by one, they nodded.

...

The running path along the eastern district was quieter in the morning than at any other time of day, which was why Sera had chosen it.

She had been out of the hospital for two days, and her body had already communicated its position on extended rest. She matched Kai’s pace without difficulty, which she could see from his expression was mildly aggravating.

"Most people ease back into exercise," he said.

"I am easing back."

"That concerns me."

"It should."

Ahead of them, Kei had slowed to a deliberate near-stop and was pointing dramatically at a bench beside the path. "I’ve made a decision," he announced.

Rin’s response arrived before he finished the sentence. "No."

"I have."

"No."

"I’m retiring from running."

"You’ve been running for six minutes."

"Exactly." Kei looked at the bench with the expression of someone who had found a kindred spirit. "That bench understands me."

"It doesn’t," Rin said.

"You don’t know that."

"It’s a bench."

"An understanding bench."

Lina pulled level with Kei and looked at the bench and then at Kei with the patience of someone who had been doing this for a long time. "Keep moving," she said.

Dorn had said nothing during any of this, which was Dorn’s default contribution to Kei’s conversations. But there was something in his expression that communicated he found it funny and was not planning to admit this.

Sera laughed and Kai shook his head.

After Kei’s bench declaration and the team settling back into their run, Lina pulled level with Kai on his left side.

"She’s back," Lina said, quietly enough that it was just for him.

Kai knew she meant Sera. "Yeah."

"The last week and a half was rough," Lina said. "Watching you in that gate. And not being able to do anything about it."

Kai looked at her.

"I know that’s not about me," Lina said. "You were the one who went in. But watching it was its own thing."

"I know," Kai said. "Sorry for worrying you guys."

Lina shook her head. "Kei organized it. The whole team is watching together. He found the biggest screen in the hospital break room, and we stayed there until you came out."

"All of you?"

"All of us. Even Dorn." She smiled slightly. "He stood the whole time. Wouldn’t sit down. I think standing felt more ready to do something."

Kai looked at Dorn, running steadily in his usual position. Giving nothing away.

"Yeah," Kai said. "That sounds like him."

They ran in silence for a moment.

"You didn’t have to do that alone," Lina said.

"Everyone else was in the hospital."

"I know. I’m not saying you should have done it differently. I’m saying it was hard to watch. And I wanted you to know that."

Kai nodded.

"Just because we couldn’t help," she said, "doesn’t mean we weren’t with you."

She pulled back to her usual position.

Kai didn’t answer but he remembered it.

Ahead, Kei was explaining to Rin why the bench had better energy than the path. Rin was not engaging but was listening. Dorn was running with the focused expression of a man who had decided running was a job, and he was going to do it correctly.

Sera was keeping his pace on his right side.

The conversation moved through other things.

Nothing about the investigation.

Nothing about Victor.

Nothing about the search warrants, the questioning, or the footage on every screen in the city. Just people running together on a quiet path in a city that was still, despite everything, a city. For the first time in weeks, he wasn’t chasing evidence or interrogating someone.

He was just running with his friends.

Eventually, the dungeon district came into view, one of the new D-rank gates visible in the distance, its blue light consistent and steady in a way the Mythical gates had never been.

Sera stretched her arms without breaking stride. "Ready?"

Kai looked at the gate. "Yeah," he said.

His phone vibrated. He glanced at it and saw it was from Elden. He read the message before chuckling and putting the phone away.

And headed inside.