Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 1008

Chapter 1008: Bowing Nation

The night’s footage had run on every network in the country until dawn, the crawl on Kaiden’s forearms toward the boss room, the spur punching through his hip, the pincer closing on a foreign family holding a Japanese town’s door.

Somewhere before sunrise, the nation’s gratitude had turned around and gone looking for its own government.

The Circle’s public phone lines went down twice before six. A petition demanding accountability for the gate’s poor scouting gathered four hundred thousand signatures overnight, every line of it in immaculate formal Japanese.

Outside the Circle’s Tokyo headquarters, a crowd assembled at first light and simply bowed at the building, in silence, in rows, which unnerved the security detail far more than shouting would have.

The morning shows asked the same four questions on a loop. Who thought it was a good idea to assign the honored guests of Japan to such a badly scouted gate. What if Kaiden Grey took it personally? Why did honored guests bleed for a Japanese town with one squad in support. Who answers for this.

At the Moon-Thread estate, breakfast was held until noon, and the family ate it in the long room off the veranda with the pond throwing light on the ceiling.

Alice and Alexandra arrived last, hand in hand, scrubbed and rested, looking nothing like the two casualties who had been carried up a corridor the night before. They found Kaiden at the same moment, and two bright smiles aimed themselves at him from the doorway.

Rin Sonoda arrived as the teapots emptied, folder in hand, and her bow to Kaiden held its regulation depth on visibly no sleep at all.

"My lord. Ladies." She straightened to parade rest. "My section monitors foreign broadcasts. Since midnight, every screen on my wall has been domestic. I have been asked to brief you before the afternoon council."

She opened the folder and read the numbers flat, keeping her voice level by procedure.

The jammed phone lines.

The petition count.

The silent bowing crowd, which her office had classified, for lack of an existing category, as an incident.

"And at six this morning," she said, "the Gates seat submitted a letter of resignation to the council. The Kawanami rating came from that office."

The room went still around the rice bowls.

"That’s the wrong man to lose," Kaiden said. "Has the council accepted it?"

"It convenes at two." Sonoda’s eyes came up from the folder. "Lady Yunohana is already on her way here, my lord. She wished to speak with you before it sits."

...

Yunohana took tea with him on the veranda an hour later, and poured it herself before the staff could reach the pot.

"Lord Grey. The council sits at two. Before it does, I came to say again that the fault-"

Kaiden lifted his cup toward her, easy. "You said it yesterday. And I answered it from the bottom of a dogpile. I say there’s no need for a round two."

"Japanese apologies come in courses, my lord." The ghost of a smile crossed her and was gone. "This is merely the third. I have about nine in me."

He set the cup down. "Then let me ask for something. The Gates seat sent your council a letter this morning. When it reaches the table, I’d like the council to refuse it. That is, unless he’s had multiple infractions before."

Yunohana watched him over her tea and said nothing, so he laid the reasoning out plainly.

"The file rated Kawanami exactly what ten years of gates taught it to rate. The dungeons broke recently, bringing with them a new norm of weird monsters and situations that we’re still adjusting ourselves around."

"And your squad was never too little. Captain Asakura’s people knew that valley house by house, and their knowledge saved the operation twice before their spears did."

For a while, the only sound was the pond.

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