Leon walked to the operators' room to take over his shift.
He sighed as he reached the room.
'Man, why is this work mandatory for all Marked?! There's a lot of less boring work I could do to earn contribution points too...'
Leon knew that after the swarm a week ago, the city had a lot of repairs that were still going right now, repairs that could use the help of the Ether-enhanced body of a Marked like him.
However, he also knew the importance of waiting room operator work, especially when more than twenty new attuned appeared due to the swarm.
While that number is lower than what one would expect from such a huge amount of spirits, it was still enough to almost fill up the available waiting rooms, and keep at least thirty Class 2 strikers busy at all times.
Even after finishing their 12-hour shifts the Marked had to sleep and rest for at least 6 hours, so they were basically unavailable for the rest of the day.
So in total, the strikers had to keep at least 60 Marked of their forces on operator duty everyday.
One had to know that the strikers only had a little less than a hundred Class 2s in the city, so losing more than half of their forces was slowing their operations down quite a bit.
Leon sighed once again, and entered the room. What met him was a medium-sized room with a row of desks facing each wall, organized like so to make exiting easier.
On each desk there was a monitor, a microphone and a control panel with a few buttons on it.
Leon clocked in and greeted a few colleagues then switched places with the Marked on the night shift of his assigned room.
"Lucky you." The tired night operator said as he left his seat.
'Lucky huh...'
He thought as he sat down.
It was true, Leon knew that he was luckier than other Class 2s simply for the fact that he was on day duty, and also...
The guy he was monitoring was pretty amusing to watch sometimes. Sure, he had times where he was moping around in silence, or just quietly meditating, but overall, he was quite fun to monitor at times.
Just remembering the first day had Leon chuckling a bit.
In any case, Leon was now stuck here watching him for the next twelve hours.
'Come on, Ren. Do something funny.'
This train of thought didn't quite fit the task he was doing, especially considering the five rooms that failed in the past week, causing the Class 2s assigned to them to call their superiors and rush to the waiting room to prevent breakouts.
Still, Leon had nothing else to do, so he just watched as Ren got up from his bed and meditated a bit.
A few minutes later, he heard Ren's voice from the speaker.
"Can I have the breakfast tray please?"
Leon clicked an orange button on his left, and spoke into the microphone.
"Breakfast to room 23 please."
He then clicked a red button and spoke into the microphone once more.
"It's on the way."
He watched as Ren nodded and went back into meditation.
A few moments later, the tray came and Leon watched as Ren ate and returned the tray to the door.
Then, he saw Ren standing still in the middle of his room. His eyes closed, and seemingly focused.
'Oh? This is different, he usually either exercises or sits down in meditation.'
Leon watched as Ren kept standing there. A few minutes passed by before he finally moved his arm slowly.
He watched as Ren slowly did his usual training, stopping and standing still again periodically.
'I-is he trying to move around with Ether spread out in his body already?!'
Controlling your Ether to spread out in your whole body usually took at least two weeks of training. Needless to say, Ren's speed in achieving that is astonishing.
As Leon stared at the screen in shock, he remembered being proud when he achieved the same feat in ten days, now he's watching Ren go a step further and move, albeit slowly, with Ether spread out in his body.
'This guy is insane.'
He knew how hard Ren was working, he watched him basically train all day for most of the week after all.
Leon smiled.
"I guess this job is not so boring after all."