Before sealing the gate and returning to the primordial side, he made a stop.
The team's channel systems had been doing significant work across the week — the core absorptions, the calibration engagements, the extended atmospheric exposure all demanding from both the mana architecture and the physical frame in ways that required proper nutritional support rather than simply rest. The primordial game meat was excellent for environmental adaptation but high in volatile compounds that the body's energy was better spent on absorption rather than processing.
What he wanted was quality protein from familiar sources, properly prepared.
Campeón was on the way.
The restaurant recognized him before the host had completed the standard greeting. The establishment had, at some point in the past three years, developed a specific operational protocol for his appearances, which involved bypassing the reservation architecture entirely and going directly to the kitchen consultation window.
"Grand Champion's Feast," he said. "Triple protein portions, packaged for field conditions."
The head chef did not argue about the reservation system. He had the specific professional manner of someone who had developed a relationship with a regular customer and understood what the regular customer's needs looked like.
Twenty minutes: two racks of the slow-roasted honey-glazed boar, a full bird in the salt-crust preparation, thick prime loin in the herb-reduction that the restaurant had been developing since the previous year's menu revision, three varieties of the wood-fired preparation that he had first ordered here the night after the quarter-finals.
He packed it correctly — the dimensional inventory's stasis configuration preserving the thermal state at the moment of loading rather than allowing decay during transit. The food would arrive in the primordial suite at the same temperature it had left the kitchen.
He left a tip that reflected the twenty minutes of priority service and the bypassed reservation queue.
The suite was empty when he arrived.
The note was gone from the table. The essence shard that had weighted it was on the windowsill. The beds were made.
He read the four mana signatures through the spatial sense — the specific quality of each one that he had been tracking since the academy, as readable to him as familiar voices — and located them in the settlement's lower district.
Moving together, which was correct. Moving with intent rather than wandering, which was also correct.
He placed the food on the table under the inn's own preservation ward — not as good as the stasis configuration, but adequate for the hour or two before they'd return — and went to find them.
The Whispering Slag Tavern occupied the lower commercial district's most traffic-dense intersection, which was also the most information-dense intersection. The team had chosen it well.
He found them at a table along the eastern wall, each of them doing the specific thing their particular kind of intelligence gathering looked like: Donna with her atmospheric mana-sense tracking the movement patterns of the local practitioners through the building, Mika with one of the local carved-stone menus that appeared to contain more than food listings, Jessica watching the equipment configurations of the practitioners at the bar, Rosanne in active conversation with a merchant at the adjacent table in the local dialect she had apparently been working on since the first day.
He pulled the fifth chair from the nearest empty table and sat down.
"How long," Rosanne said, which was her way of asking how long he had been there rather than how long she had been here.
"A minute," he said.
She had the look of someone who had found interesting things and was deciding the order in which to present them. "The tribute enforcement cycle," she said. "It runs every four weeks. The next one is in six days. Two weeks after that is the week following — the enforcement team comes back through for the secondary assessment of any settlements that paid short."
"That's a pattern we can work around," he said.
"There's a faction here that's been paying short deliberately," Rosanne said. "Not randomly — the same amount short, each cycle. Small enough that the enforcement team considers it within variance. Large enough that over multiple cycles it adds up."
"Sven's network equivalent," he said. "Someone here is doing what Sven was doing in the Iron Citadel."
"That's my read," Rosanne said.
He looked at the merchant at the adjacent table, who had excused himself when Markus sat down with the instinct of someone who had been having a private conversation and had encountered a reason to continue it later.
"Good work," he said.
"The food," she said. "Did you actually bring food or is that a metaphor."
"Campeón," he said. "It's on the table at the inn."
Her expression was the one she used when something had gone exactly the way she would have wanted and she was deciding how to receive it. She chose not to say anything, which was its own version of the expression.
"We finish the round here," he said. "Another hour. Then we eat and I'll tell you about the Platinum contracts."
"What Platinum contracts," Jessica said, turning from the bar.
"The ones I just filed," he said.
A silence.
"We're upgrading to Platinum," Mika said.
"Yes," he said.
"How many contracts."
"Three."
"Simultaneously."
"The registrar had opinions about this," he said.
"The registrar was probably correct," Rosanne said.
"Possibly," he said. "We'll find out tomorrow."
He settled into the chair with the specific quality of someone who had done the logistical work and was now simply present in the room where his team was doing the intelligence work, and watched them work, and thought about the contract geography and what the Platinum tier's threat profiles looked like against the calibration progress they had made this week, and concluded that the assessment was defensible if not entirely comfortable.
The hour ran its course.
They went back to the inn and ate the Campeón food, which was still at the temperature it had left the kitchen, and planned the next day around the three contracts, and the specifics of that planning kept Rosanne engaged past the point where she would ordinarily have said they should sleep.
Eventually he said they should sleep.
She said fine.
The three suns had set. The settlement's nighttime ambient mana was different from the daytime — quieter, the temperature drop producing a change in the atmospheric density distribution that the Ghost Sense was reading as a different information texture from the daytime's.
He noted this.
In the morning: three Tier 5 anomalies, the survey contract, and the faction that was paying short.
The work continued.