Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 983

Chapter 983: Confused Circle

Back when Kaiden Grey’s plane was still crawling across the Pacific at hospitality speed, the lights on the top floor of the Shogunate Circle’s Tokyo headquarters had been burning since the previous morning.

The Circle had been running Japan’s dungeon lines for the better part of a decade.

In the first chaos years of the mana apocalypse, when the private guilds broke against the overflow one after another, the government gathered the survivors and fused most of them into a single body under a single charter.

Six seats ruled the result and gave the guild its name: Blades, Gates, Treasury, Ministry, Media, and the Shrine. Between them they commanded more awakened than most armies, and they answered to the Diet, mostly, when it asked nicely.

Courting letters went out to every promising foreign guild, as they always had. It was tradition, it was polite, and nearly every recipient in the Circle’s history had declined with matching politeness.

The Sinners wrote back asking for dates.

The reply landed on a quiet morning, Tokyo time. The High Shrine Maiden answered it herself. Her answer took eleven minutes, and it promised a great deal more than the letter had offered.

Then she informed the council.

The Shrine seat commanded more than the charter ever wrote down. Faith, to begin with: the shrines had held the country’s spirit together through those years, and millions still prayed where the High Shrine Maiden bowed.

Nobody argued with a colleague like that, so the council had spent the hours since making her promise come true.

By two in the morning, the emergency session had given up on looking dignified. Aides moved at a jog, ties hung loose, and the long table grew a skyline of binders, cold teacups, and one seating chart for a welcome banquet that kept changing size.

"Every broadcaster in the country has requested the landing feed," the Media seat said, scrolling with both thumbs. "Also forty international networks. Also the palace asked, unofficially, whether the family watches sumo."

"I have forty-one gates past their clearance window," the Gates seat said, to nobody who was listening. "Forty-one. And seemingly the only guild on the planet with capacity to spare is about to land on our soil to train."

The United States had put its share of the global outbreak down fast. Most countries were still fighting for their continued existence or had come out of it limping, and Japan was one of them.

The crisis in Japan had passed. The awakened who ended it were still paying the bill, half of them holding the backlog and the rest recovering from wounds taken during the outbreak.

"Which is why nothing about this visit can look like poaching," the Ministry seat said, pressing two fingers to the bridge of his nose. "The Americans are already asking questions through back channels."

"It is poaching," the Media seat said.

"Of course. But it must not look like it."

The Blades seat had contributed one sentence all session, and it had been ’Wake me when we reach the training.’

The problem, the Ministry seat finally admitted, was not the schedule.

"We know how to host summits. We know how to host disasters." He pushed his cold tea away. "I have no idea what we do with someone who said yes."

Proposals followed. The Media seat wanted the family on a prime-time variety special within the week, and the Gates seat wanted them inside a gate by their second morning, paperwork already in hand.

"We could gift him a castle," the Treasury seat offered.

"A castle," the Ministry seat repeated.

"He lives in a fancy palace, I heard. Why not?"

This grave matter cost the room a quarter hour of debate.

The seating chart, on its ninth revision, quietly grew a wing.

Yunohana Tsukikage had arrived from Kyoto after midnight, folded her hands, and listened.

Then the agenda arrived at hospitality, and the Treasury elder, undiscouraged, cleared his throat again.

He had served the Circle since the charter was signed, and he took his time, entirely certain he was about to be helpful.

"There is a custom, old and reliable. When a great lord honored a house with a visit, the house sent the finest women under its roof to see to his comfort."

He settled back in his seat.

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