Chapter 233: Those Who Remain

"Does that hunter know the weight of the name 'Heracles'?"

"He knows better than either of us." Hecate smiled.

"He came to my door begging for it. This anchor is exactly what he sought.

"The Hunter path dreams of grasping a top-tier name that resonates with them.

"For something like this, you could place a thousand gold pieces before him and he might not even blink.

"But promise him the mask of Heracles, and he would wager half his life."

Demeter fell silent.

She suddenly felt that Hecate's operations at this table ran far deeper than she had initially realized.

"Heracles... is a good name," she finally repeated. "Let us hope that Hunter can bear the weight of it."

"If he cannot, I have other candidates," Hecate said, collecting the puddle of black water.

"There are only so many top-tier names, and the people willing to fight for them are lining up."

"You are in such a rush," Demeter said, puzzled. "What for?"

"Did you think I was the only one conducting this kind of ritual?"

Demeter said nothing.

"You have seen the chessboard of the Old Continent."

Hecate's voice shifted back to that of an old woman.

"The wells are emptying out one after another, and the high-ranking figures are playing their pieces with increasing urgency.

"Those of us at the bottom have each set up our own tables, managing our own affairs. None of us can hide anything from the others."

"Are you saying..."

"There are other salons that have already entered the third stage."

Demeter's heart skipped a beat.

"They did more than just enter it," Hecate continued, revealing the information she had gathered.

"One table used the third-stage ritual to take the very first step toward becoming a Virtuoso."

Silence lingered in the temple for a long while.

Demeter had guarded her "field" for so many years, lingering beneath the threshold of Major Adept for longer than she could remember.

To her, a Virtuoso was something beyond the ceiling—an existence that barely belonged to the mortal world.

Yet Hecate was claiming that someone had already extended a foot across that line using this very ritual.

"So this ritual..." Demeter felt a stir of temptation.

"You pulled the six of us together to form a table, forge the masks, and advance the stages... all to reach that step."

"Yes." Hecate didn't hide a thing.

"Seven people at a table, seven masks, seven names.

"Once all the Minor Adepts enter the third stage, that ritual can finally begin to turn.

"And once it does, everyone sitting at the table will get a piece of it.

"Their path toward becoming Major Adepts will be vastly shorter than if they fought alone, and I, too, can take another step forward."

"But if we are even one step too slow, we will have nothing."

Her maiden voice rang clear and cold.

"Other tables are already sprinting ahead. If my table is dragged down by someone falling behind, by the time we sluggishly gather seven Minor Adepts...

"The others will have already completed that step and devoured all the benefits.

"By then, despite my years of painstaking effort, I wouldn't even get a sip of the broth."

Demeter finally understood why Hecate had gone to such great lengths, scattering dozens of tokens, sifting and testing candidates one by one.

She was gathering seven pillars that could be driven into that ritual together.

Every single pillar had to be straight enough, solid enough, and able to bear the weight.

Ares's pillar was already bent and rotting.

"I will be honest with you."

Hecate's voice softened again, carrying the casual ease only old acquaintances shared.

"Of the ones at the table, I originally wanted to replace Nemesis, too."

Demeter looked up.

"She has absolutely no backing. Her father is dead, her connections are severed, and her inventory shrinks every time she digs into it. In terms of weight, she was actually quite precarious."

Hecate continued.

"But I've observed her twice now. That girl is ruthless, and she isn't stupid.

"Tonight, Hermes stole all the spotlight, yet she sat there without overthinking it, knowing exactly when to hold back.

"With that kind of temperament tied into the ritual, she can bear the weight."

"So you kept her."

"I kept her. Swap out the weak, keep the ruthless. My table cannot afford to feed idle mouths."

"It is getting late." Hecate waved a hand, dismissing her guest. "You should head back as well."

"Alright." Demeter stood up.

Just before leaving, she couldn't help but speak one last word on Ares's behalf.

"If that child is to be replaced... can it be done with a bit of dignity?"

Hecate fell silent for a moment.

"It will be."

"Enough money for him to get a prosthetic limb, and a 'we'll meet again.'

"I won't short him on the dignity he deserves."

Demeter closed her eyes, counted to seven, and vanished from the temple.

On the main seat, Hecate sat alone for a long time, lost in her own thoughts.

...

Richard opened his eyes.

The notebook on the desk was flipped to a blank page. His fountain pen rested horizontally, the ink on its nib already dry.

He raised a hand and touched his chest.

The Silver Ring and the Eagle Hook hanging from the cowhide cord were both cold.

Richard turned the notebook to the section labeled Theogony Salon.

Dipping his pen in ink, he first recorded the night's earnings.

"Second official gathering, acquired: sixty pounds in cash."

Sixty pounds.

The liquid cash he had on hand, even after accounting for the expenses of ordering equipment earlier, had surpassed thirty pounds.

Adding this sixty pounds brought it to ninety pounds.

What kind of sum was ninety pounds?

His father, Rogers, an engineer, couldn't save that much in several years.

Richard suppressed that little surge of pride and continued writing.

"Intelligence acquired..."

He organized the things he had heard tonight that were fit to be put on paper, item by item.

Hecate's addendum: the winner was the one weaving the ropes; he was sealing the wellheads, and it wasn't going smoothly.

Another colony in the inland New Continent had been emptied out.

Evil creatures in the northern Highlands were migrating south.

The Imperial Capital's alert level was raised another half-tier, and the seal maintenance cycle was shortened to six months.

Demeter's crop analogy: the grain in the fields was growing faster and faster, yet becoming increasingly hollow.

Richard's pen paused beneath this final point.

Growing fast, growing hollow.

He used [Speculation] to mull over this phrase.

Grain, fields, the one who guards the fields... the sheaf of wheat hanging over Demeter's head, the sickle resting horizontally beneath it.

A Minor Adept who was close to touching the threshold of Major Adept, claiming to be "guarding matters in the fields."

The "fields" she guarded were absolutely no ordinary fields.

After logging the intelligence, he leaned back in his chair, organizing the most crucial matter of the night.

The second stage, the Divine Persona Mask.

The mask was a conduit, channeling a sliver of the cognition that the name had accumulated over a millennium into the wearer.

Borrowing power to aid in ascension.

The vigilance in Richard's heart vastly outweighed his greed.

There was no such thing as free power in this world.

A conduit—you borrow its water, and it recognizes you in return.

Hecate herself had said that more than half her power came from her mask.

In other words, more than half her power was also gripped by that mask, bound by the rules that forged it.

Wearing the mask she crafted meant attaching a stretch of track laid down by someone else onto his own upward path.

The track might be easy to walk, but where it led was up to someone else.

Not to mention the name "Hermes."

Messenger, patron of commerce, orators, and scholars, ferryman of souls—and also the god of eloquence and trickery.

Names had always been double-sided.

If he borrowed that sliver of eloquence and Learning, would it also drag in the slivers of trickery and ferrying souls along with it?

Richard flipped the notebook to the three columns marked Shareable / Intermediate / Top Secret.

Under the Top Secret column, he added a line.

"Acceptance of the Divine Persona Mask: TBD.

"Before accepting, must investigate: what kind of traces does the mask leave on the other side of the veil."

After writing that, he set the pen down.

There was one more thing.

The look in Hecate's eyes tonight had been quite different from before.

Previously, he had just been a newcomer at the table with some skill and perhaps a bit of backing.

After stealing the spotlight tonight, his weight in Hecate's eyes had clearly increased.

Being weighty was a good thing, but also a source of trouble.

Richard recalled Mr. Hutton's warning.

Those who leaned against towering trees first learned to look up; when the tree fell, they fell with it.

But Hecate was no tree.

She was a gardener, and she had gathered this table to cultivate seedlings.

Whichever seedling grew straight and strong, she would nurture; whichever wilted and rotted...

He thought of the look in Hecate's eyes earlier at the table when she glanced at Ares's severed shoulder.

Ares was likely in grave peril.

...

On the first day after the Easter holidays, Richard arrived at school right as the final notes of the morning bell faded, just as usual.

As morning prayers dispersed, he followed the flow of the crowd and turned into the familiar corridor.

Spring came late to Greenwood. The row of old elms outside the window had only just sprouted their new buds, their green looking incredibly tender.

Weighed down by the lingering moisture of last night's rain, their color was a shade deeper.

Pushing open the classroom door, Richard was somewhat surprised.

At the start of the term, the classroom for their year had been packed full.

Some forty-odd heads had been crammed together, and temporary stools even had to be added to the back row.

Now, sweeping a glance from the doorway, he counted fewer than twenty.

The vacated desks remained uncleaned, sitting exactly where they always had.

The chairs were all flipped upside down onto the tabletops, placed there uniformly by the janitors before the holidays.

There were more flipped chairs than occupied ones.

Richard walked to his window seat.

To his left was Hugh's desk.

The desk cubby was empty. Hugh hadn't left his sketchbook behind, and he had even taken the stub of the charcoal pencil he'd chewed down to the nub.

Only a shallow carving remained in the bottom right corner of the desk.

It was a chicken Hugh had carved with a pocket knife last year out of sheer boredom—its comb was crooked, and it was missing a claw.

The desk one row back and to his right had originally belonged to Warren.

As soon as Easter passed, he had followed the path his family laid out for him, joining a merchant guild to learn double-entry bookkeeping and coal market trends.

Mason had gone to apprentice at a machinery factory in the south of the city; his father was a foreman there and had secured a decent position for him.

As for Grey, she would be departing for a girls' school in the Imperial Capital in May. She was probably already packing her bags at home.

Their whole cluster of desks had scattered clean away.

Only Richard remained, still sitting in his original spot.

"Williams."

Someone called out diagonally across from him.

Richard turned his head.

The one who called him was a tall, skinny boy named Percy, someone who barely counted as a nodding acquaintance.

The kid usually dozed off in the back row, his homework notebooks holding more ink blots than actual words.

Now, three Latin grammar books were spread open in front of him. He had dark circles under his eyes and a few patches of unshaven stubble sprouting on his chin.

"How much did you... review over the break?" Percy's fountain pen rested on his exercise book.

Richard glanced at the open page.

The noun endings for the third declension filled two entire pages of Percy's copying.

Halfway through, he had skipped lines, jumbling the genitive cases of corpus and tempus together, making three or four mistakes.

"I reviewed some," Richard answered vaguely.

"Does this look right to you?" Percy turned his notebook around.

Richard gave it a quick scan.

"The genitive of corpus is corporis, but you just wrote it like corpus without adding the r."

Percy stared at his own handwriting for a long time before crossing out the error, his hand trembling.

"...Thanks," he muttered, burying his head back in his work. "Two months left. My family said if I don't pass the prep school exams, they're sending me to copy documents at my uncle's firm."

Richard didn't reply.

The dozen or so people who remained were all trying to pass the prep school exams.

These final two months were the last sprint.

The classroom was incredibly quiet. You could hear the rustle of pen nibs dragging across paper, and the crisp tear of a page corner when someone flipped a book too frantically.

Richard sat down in his seat and rested his schoolbag on his lap.

He rummaged through it and pulled out a copy of Tacitus's Annals.

As soon as he opened the book, Percy lifted his head again from diagonally across.

He glanced at the cover of the book, swallowed hard, and dropped his head even lower.

Richard shifted the book a little closer to himself, moving it to the right half of his desk.

He turned the pages.

Tacitus wrote of Rome, of how once-illustrious families took the stage and how they made their final bows.

He wrote of Tiberius's reign, of the Senators falling one after another to informants and withering away.

Richard turned the page, not allowing himself to linger on that section for too long.

The bell rang again. The first class of the morning was History.

Mr. Hutton walked into the classroom carrying his dog-eared lecture notes. He swept a glance over the sea of flipped chairs but said nothing.

"Today, we will be discussing 'population mobility' in the early Empire."

"You might feel this topic is far removed from you."

"But in reality, it isn't."

His gaze swept from the front row of the classroom to the back, passing over row after row of empty desks.

"The people in a city are always moving, every single year.

"Some leave, some remain. Some climb upward, and some plummet downward."

"What the history books record are always those who remain—the names of those who climb upward."

"Those who leave, those who fall, never warrant so much as a single line."

Mr. Hutton turned a page of his notes.

"But those omitted by the history books outnumber those recorded by far."