The Bureau took them in through a sealed corridor before dawn, not a waiting room.
The floor was polished to a shine. The doors along it only opened when something upstairs decided they should. Medics, aides, and armed Bureau agents stood behind a long wall of glass, watching the twenty get ready on the other side of it, and nobody out there spoke above a murmur.
James moved down the line with the rest. Guild pins threw small points of light off the glass. The S-ranks near the front carried old scars at their wrists and the backs of their hands, the kind a person earned by walking into places like this and coming back.
This did not feel like Team Zero going up a floor.
It felt like a country handing twenty people to something that had already eaten six.
His hand went to his sword without him telling it to. Then to the slot where the sealed scythe sat cold against his hip. Then to the seal on his wrist. He made it stop after that.
