Chapter 199: No Need for Lucian Vance

Lucian swung his feet over the edge of the bed and read the report again.

His hair was sticking up. One slipper had disappeared. Neither problem deserved attention while somebody was putting the word resolved on an incident involving a dungeon barrier.

Station Eighty-Eight. Primary overload. Secondary-line failure. Two towns without power. Unstable containment at a Rank D gate.

He scrolled past the response log.

Local isolation. Reserve supply from Tartarus. Replacement crew dispatched. Damaged components removed. Reconnection independently checked.

No deaths. Seven minor injuries. Equipment losses entered against the district maintenance fund. Clinic follow-up assigned. Replacement schedules and shift-handover procedures updated.

At the bottom was a final field.

Central Vance intervention: NOT REQUESTED.

Lucian scrolled back to the top. “No way.”

He opened the attached readings.

The primary regulator had burned out. It wasn’t a mislabeled warning or somebody using incident to describe a broken lamp. The secondary line had genuinely failed. The barrier really had dropped outside its normal operating range.

He compared the barrier’s record with the Tartarus supply log. The reserve feed had arrived before the containment threshold was breached.

He checked the reconnection figures. Somebody had used the wrong resistance factor. Somebody else had caught it. The cor-rection was recorded, countersigned, and reflected in the actual load.

That was annoying. He had briefly thought he’d found some-thing.

Lucian got up, found the missing slipper beneath the bed, and carried the tablet to his desk.

The financial attachment was next.

The damage estimate was real. So was the funding authorization. Replacing the regulator wasn’t being charged to an account that existed only in the optimism of a provincial clerk.

He checked the injuries against the clinic return. Seven treated. None admitted for serious complications. Follow-up responsibil-ity accepted by the local office.

There were still scorched panels at the station. A replacement shipment had to be reordered. Someone would have to explain why the old inductor had remained in service beyond its limit.

All of those tasks had owners.

None of the owners was Lucian Vance. He called the regional office.

An engineer answered with workshop noise behind him. “Western Grid.”

“This is Lucian Vance. Your report says the incident is closed.” “Yes?”

“Are you sure?”

The engineer paused. “Yes.”

Lucian opened the cost attachment again. “Do you need capital?”

“Already approved locally.” “Technical support?”

“Repair team finished. Varik signed the restoration.” “Astra?”

A longer pause.

“Why would we need Lady Astra?” Lucian looked at the wall.

“No reason.”

“Was there something you found in the report?”

There was still time to discover a missing signature. A tax discrepancy. A usefully urgent clerical mistake.

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“No,” Lucian said.

“All right. Have a good afternoon, Mr. Vance.” The connection closed.

Lucian put the tablet down with unnecessary care.

* * *

Eleanor found him at the desk later, looking at nothing. “What’s wrong?”

“They didn’t call me.”

Her hand stopped on the back of the spare chair. She glanced at the incident report, read the status, then looked at him again.

“Oh.”

“Don’t ‘oh’ me.” “You’re offended.”

“I’m auditing.”

“You’re very offended.”

Lucian turned the tablet toward her. “I built half that infrastructure.”

“You built it so they wouldn’t have to call you.” He looked at the report.

“That was theoretical.” Eleanor sat down.

Lucian went through the timestamps once more. The small faults were still there. So were the people who had dealt with them.

“System.”

[Yes.]

“Based on the incident records and the actual readings. Did I need to intervene?”

The attachments opened briefly beside the question. The System compared them, then closed them.

[INTERVENTION REQUIRED: NONE.]

Lucian kept his eyes on the line.

From the garden came the scrape of a rake. Somewhere down-stairs, Boris asked a delivery driver to use the side entrance. A cart rattled past the open window and continued down the road.

Eleanor stayed beside him. She didn’t reach for the tablet or tell him what the answer meant.

His hands had been braced against the edge of the desk. He noticed and let them rest.

After a while, he opened the old combat tab out of habit.

[HOST CURRENT COMBAT POWER]

Relevance to incident resolution: None.

“Rude.”

Eleanor’s mouth moved at one corner.

Lucian closed the tab and opened the archive.

He went back through the last several months. A damaged relay. A boundary dispute. A warehouse fire contained before it reached the reserve crystals. A bad update withdrawn by the engineers who had released it.

There were losses. Complaints. Corrections to procedures that should have been clearer the first time.

He recognized some subjects from the old alerts. Others he had never opened.

The reports used to arrive marked ACTION REQUIRED. Later, they had become INFORMATION ONLY.

Now entire chains reached ARCHIVED with local signatures at every step.

He had been waiting for the world to announce that it was finished needing him.

Apparently, it had been doing paperwork. Lucian set down the tablet.

“I’m going out.” Eleanor stood with him.

* * *

The city was having an ordinary afternoon.

A merchant argued with a carter over a cracked crate. Two workers had lifted the paving stones outside a shop and were disagreeing about whose turn it was to shovel. Children in school

uniforms streamed around them, warned away from the hole by a teacher who sounded tired of giving that warning.

At the station, a delayed train produced an announcement and several eloquent complaints.

Lucian waited at a crossing while a Grid technician replaced a fuse in a street cabinet. The technician shut the panel, tested the lamp above it, and moved his ladder out of the way.

Nobody knelt.

A shopkeeper recognized Lucian, raised a hand, and went back to wrapping a parcel.

Lucian raised his hand too. They kept walking.

At a bakery, the owner offered him a pastry on the house. “No,” Lucian said. “How much?”

“Two silver.”

He inspected the pastry. “It’s from this morning.” “Yes.”

“One.”

The baker considered, then held out a hand.

Lucian paid and broke the pastry in two. Eleanor accepted her half without commenting on the negotiation.

They took the path home and climbed the small hill behind the Vance house. He sat in the grass with the city spread below them. A train moved between the roofs, late but moving.

Eleanor sat beside him.

“I think I’m unemployed,” he said. “You’re obscenely rich.”

“Wealth isn’t employment.”

“You always wanted this.”

He watched the train until it passed out of sight.

There had always been something else to secure first. More money. Better skills. Enough power that nobody could drag him into some stupid danger. Then enough control that he could leave without everything falling down behind him.

Below, the city went on with its afternoon. Lucian brushed a crumb from his knee. “…Yeah.”

They sat until the light softened over the roofs.

At the edge of his vision, he opened one last status page.

[ACTIVE WORLD-LEVEL EMERGENCY DIRECTIVES]

0.

He waited.

The number stayed where it was.

From the house below, Valeria called, “Lucian! Come eat!” He looked down toward the open kitchen window. “Coming.”