The carriage's senses settled around Team Laps.

Not completely, though.

The link had edges, places where Naf's reach thinned out, and the Chief's experience became more impression than clarity.

Naf was not controlling a consciousness. He was sitting in one and passing the view back through the connection, which meant what arrived on their end was not just the Chief's thoughts but his current experience, the texture of his perception rather than the true content of his mind.

What the Chief saw, they saw.

What the Chief heard, they heard.

And underneath both of those, running like a baseline current, what the Chief felt at any given moment carried through the link as a kind of ambient weather, the emotional temperature of a man who had been managing high-stakes situations for decades and had developed watchful stillness that filled the carriage.

The intrusive irritation when a cart blocked the intersection for thirty seconds longer than necessary.

The brief and genuine appreciation for a merchant's well-maintained shop front.

While inside Kisho Hikaru's guest lounge, nobody spoke.

The carriage was rolling through New Shinkotsu several kilometers away, and through the link everyone present was riding inside it.

Naf sat with both hands folded in his lap, his helmeted head angled slightly forward.

"Big bro Luke... What do I do now?"

Luke had not moved from his position on the sofa. One ankle crossed over his knee, both arms resting, looking at nothing in particular while he thought.

"What is he thinking?"

Naf fell quiet.

The helmet dipped slightly.

Several seconds passed in a silence as Naf slowly touched the Chief's thoughts.

"He feels disappointed…"

Luke's eyebrow went up a fraction.

"About?"

"He expected the target to join in their fight against Entropy. But the target has firmly rejected them."

And the grin that came to Luke's face was slow.

"Interesting…" he said.

Irhaal, without looking up from the reports she had reopened, rubbed her chin with two fingers. "If he feels that strongly about the target declining, he must really want Entropy gone… could be a useful lever. If we can work with him."

"Indeed," Gorran nodded as he picked the bowl back up.

"Why didn't the target join them?" Luke asked.

Naf went silent again, longer this time, the helmet angling further down.

"He feels the target was justified…" Naf said eventually. "He told them he was too weak to battle Entropy despite the talent he clearly has."

A pause then followed as Naf tilted his head slightly. "I don't understand. Then why does he feel disappointed?"

Naya set down her teacup, drawing a brief look from everyone in the room.

"Because of the Hollow Cinder Mine," she said, looking at Naf.

Giving everyone in the room a glance over, she continued, "The target fought through the Outsider horde all night while simultaneously defeating a Tier 5 Entropy cultist. Alone."

She then looked at the table rather than at anyone specifically. "And then lost his arm, his leg, and his eye doing it... Someone who does that doesn't stop doing it because they've been frightened. The Chief knows that too. Which is why the refusal reads as something other than fear."

She picked the teacup back up. "And that gap between what he knows the target is capable of and what the target is choosing to do is where the disappointment lives."

"That's it," Luke looked at her.

Around the room, the assessment settled and held.

"Naf." Luke drummed two fingers once on the armrest, "Is the Chief curious? Does he want to ask Nico the actual reason? Is he even just sitting with the general feeling of it?"

The boy's helmet tilted slightly.

"Yeah, it's at the back of his mind," Naf said. "Would you like me to amplify it?"

"Yes."

Naf nodded and went still.

Nothing in the room changed. No mana presence, or visible strain, nothing that would have read as anything other than a twelve-year-old sitting quietly in a chair with a helmet on.

But several kilometers away, the Chief shifted his weight in the carriage seat.

His attention moved to Nico beside him.

Then away to the street outside.

Then back.

The curiosity had always been present in the link's ambient weather.

Naf had simply increased the pressure behind it, and now the urge to ask the question was more and more overwhelming by the second.

Nico, through the link, was visible leaning against the carriage window with his chin resting on his one hand, watching the city pass.

Another minute passed, and the Chief finally spoke.

"So," he asked, voice uncomfortable. "Why won't you join us against Entropy? What's the real reason."

Nico turned from the window, one eyebrow up.

"Didn't take you for the pushy type."

"I-"

"Look," Nico said, cutting him off, "… don't mean to burst whatever bubble you've got going on. But I'm too weak to fight them. Nom-Nom isn't. But I'm her greatest weakness. All you have to do is kill me, and you kill her too. Familiar Bond, remember? And Peko, my sister, she's strong, but only strong enough to defend herself against them. Taking them on is a different beast entirely."

In the guest lounge, Luke's eyes moved to the middle distance.

He said nothing about the Peko claim.

He had fought X-97 before reaching the containment island where Nico and B-42were.

He knew exactly what X-97 was capable of, and he knew that piece of the answer was deliberate misdirection. And he filed it without comment.

"I am not pushing you…" the Chief said. "I am just disappointed."

And the Chief sounded just as disappointed as himself for even probing Nico.

"Why?" Nico chuckled. "Just because I stayed during the mine incident, you thought I'd jump at the first call against the bad guys?"

The Chief's silence, coming through the link, answered the question.

While the grin that spread across Nico's face was wide enough to qualify as its own form of communication.

He lifted the stump of his left arm and held it where the Chief could see it clearly.

"Look at what it did to me, big guy."

The Chief looked at it. Then immediately looked away toward the window instead, and through the link everyone in the lounge received that same impulse, an instinctive aversion as though he could not bear to look at it.

And the laugh Nico let out had no bitterness in it, no performance either. It was just tired.

"What you're asking is the privilege of the strong… I thought I was strong back at the mine. We both know how that turned out. I barely won, and half of that was luck."

With that, Nico turned back to the window. "Besides. My plate is already overflowing."

The Chief studied the side of his face for several seconds.

"If you are in trouble, perhaps I can help."

That got a short genuine laugh out of Nico.

"I wish," he said, and meant it, and turned back to watching the city while silence settled back into the carriage.

In the guest lounge, Luke sat motionless for long enough that Gorran set his bowl down again.

"What?" Gorran said. "Did I miss something in what he said?"

Luke did not answer immediately.

Then: "He's biding time."

The room waited.

"And by that overflowing plate…" Luke continued, "He meant us."

He let that sit for one beat. "And he is lying about X-97 only being strong enough to defend itself. If I hadn't had the Boomstick on the containment island, we would not have walked away alive from that fight. He knows exactly what X-97 can do."

Irhaal set down the report she had opened.

"So the answer…" she said.

"The answer about X-97 was a pretty clever misdirection regarding its capabilities," Luke said. "… The answer about himself and the Familiar Bond was real. He knows he's the weak point in the formation. He's not wrong about that."

He tapped one finger against the armrest and continued. "But here's what the whole thing is actually saying. He has a System. What he needs more than anything else right now is time, undivided time in dungeons, killing things, getting stronger, and the freedom to do that without his rate of improvement becoming visible to people who would then have questions about it…. The Chief's a perceptive chap. Our target knows that. Explosive growth is not subtle, and joining the fight against Entropy means being watched by exactly the people he cannot afford to be watched by."

Luke then turned his attention back toward the link. "So neutrality is not cowardice or apathy… or anything along those lines. It's strategy. It will be interesting to see how he plants ot handle the Entropy problem when it comes knocking."

Gorran absorbed this and nodded once.

Naya refilled her cup without speaking.

Kisho, who had been listening from his seat across the table, kept his expression composed and said nothing, which required more effort than it should have.

Luke looked at Naf.

"Is the Chief curious about what target's actual end goal is? Not Entropy, not politics. What he wants for himself and his group. Could be the key to extracting all three of them without the sedatives."

Naf's head dipped into the posture before-

"Yes…" he said after a moment. "The thought is there. Small… At the back. Like something he knows he can't ask."

"Amplify it."

Naf went quiet again, and this time the stillness in the room felt strangely strained.

The first amplification had been straightforward, the Chief pushing against a question he was already pushing back.

This one was different.

This was more personal, a question he had briefly considered and then set aside as presumptuous.

Pushing something like that toward the surface and making it overwhelming required more delicacy than the first, because if Naf moved too quickly the thought would feel foreign and the Chief, with his experience, would recognize it as intrusion.

And so minutes passed.

Inside the carriage, the Chief shifted once. Then again.

His eyes went to Nico, then to the window, then back to Nico.

While across the table from Luke, Kisho slowly set down his cup and breathed out a shaky breath.

He had understood, intellectually, that Pantheon's capabilities were significant.

Every man who owed Pantheon for his position understood this in the abstract.

But abstract understanding and watching a twelve-year-old child in an unmarked helmet steer the internal landscape of the strongest adventurer in Fugen toward a question he would never ask were different experiences. So much so that the word significant could not fully express it.

This was not mind reading.

It was considerably worse.

The Chief finally exhaled.

"So…" he started, unable to force the words back. "What's your endgame? What do you want to do?"

Nico shifted his gaze from the window, and the grin that came to his face was the teasing kind.

"Oh?" He turned fully toward the Chief. "Turns out Chief's a gossip gal~"

In the lounge, Naya covered her mouth. Irhaal looked at the wall. Gorran's shoulders started shaking.

But the Chief continued looking at Nico, waiting.

The grin held for another moment before Nico let it go.

"Look, I get where you're coming from," he said, the teasing gone from his voice. "You're the Chief. The Union Head… Big bro and whatnot. But I'm not obligated to-"

"Yes, I know," the Chief said, cutting across him as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I'm sorry I asked. It's just been bugging me."

"What exactly has been bugging you?"

The Chief was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at Nico directly.

"Have you seen your little group?"

Nico's expression shifted.

[Right… of course]

The Chief continued without acknowledgment.

"A young man with six circuits, two very rare affinities in Metal and Nature, impeccable control over both, Ice on top of that. And if I am correct, your mana recovery is also unnaturally fast."

In the lounge, Luke's expression shifted involuntarily.

"Impeccable control? We did not have that data…interesting…," Luke said.

"That's one word for it," Irhaal replied.

But the Chief had not finished.

"And if that wasn't enough, you have a goddamn Greater Dragon as your Familiar. And if that wasn't enough either, you have a Tier 6 sister with six circuits and four classical affinities."

By the time the list ended, Nico looked like he was assessing whether the carriage window opened wide enough for him to jump through.

"Your point?" he said.

"Your dragon will ensure you remain among the strongest for as long as she lives," the Chief said. "… Your own abilities will guarantee a life no lesser than any noble in this nation. And based on your sister's beauty and talent, the house she eventually marries into will be one of the most powerful in Fugen. She may even become an Imperial Concubine…"

[Over my dead body…] Nico internally scoffed.

"And that will extend your influence further regardless of whether you seek it." The Chief folded his arms and leaned back as he spoke the last of his piece-

"Which is why I asked what you want. Because what you do going forward will produce ripples throughout this nation whether you intend them to or not. This is not about you. It is about everyone else."

In the lounge, nobody spoke.

Even Luke had stopped moving.

Because the Chief was not wrong. The observation was accurate, so was the conclusion.

Nico sat with it for several seconds before bursting into a giggle.

"One hell of a passion fruit you're turning out to be, you know that?"

But the Chief's steady gaze never left his face.

"So what do you want, Nico?"

"You wanna know that bad?"

The Chief nodded once.

Nico sighed and looked out the window, at the city moving past, the merchants, the families, the adventurers, and the children, all the ongoing life of people that did not have two international organizations hunting them.

"I just want peace, man," he said before immediately shaking his head slightly. "Nay... We want peace… just wanna be left alone."

The words arrived in the carriage and stayed there. The most straightforward answer he could have given, and the one that carried the most weight for exactly that reason.

The Chief looked at him for several seconds before turning to the window himself.

And so the carriage rolled through New Shinkotsu.

"Having said what I said," the Chief said, his voice quieter than it had been, "I will say one more thing."

Nico raised an eyebrow.

The Chief watched the city outside, the lives moving through it in every direction.

"Seeing all the treasures you possess… that is one hell of an ambition."

Meanwhile, back in Kisho Hikaru's guest lounge, nobody said anything for a long moment.

Naya was looking at her folded hands.

Irhaal had set the reports aside and was not looking at anything in particular.

Gorran's arms were folded across his chest, and he was leaning back with his eyes on the ceiling.

While Kisho exhaled slowly through his nose.

"This makes it almost easy," Kisho said, "If that is truly all he wants."

Luke looked at the window on the far wall, toward the direction of the city he could feel through a borrowed pair of senses granted by a twelve-year-old's impossible reach and muttered, almost to himself-

"Provided he's the Destined Hero."