He kept his face exactly where it was. Unhurried. Unreadable. The same expression he had worn walking into the colosseum every day for nine days, the one that apparently read as interesting enough to land him in this room.
"No," he said.
The smaller man's eyebrows moved slightly. "You haven't heard the full terms."
"I don't need to." Lucien looked at Judge. "If the offer is what I think it is, you've got the wrong person. I'd rather take my chances with death than spend years as someone's experiment in a kingdom I can't leave."
He said it the way he said most things. Flat. Without performance. Which made it considerably more convincing than if he had said it any other way.
The room was quiet for a moment.
The smaller scientist looked at Judge.
Judge had not moved. He was looking at Lucien with the same measuring expression he had worn since Lucien sat down, the one that suggested the answer he had just given was being filed somewhere rather than responded to.
"You're not afraid," Judge said. It wasn't admiration. It was observation, the same way everything in this facility was observation.
"I'm aware of what afraid is useful for," Lucien said. "This isn't one of those situations."
"Explain that."
Lucien looked at him. "Being afraid of you doesn't change what I just said. It only makes me easier to manage. So there's no point in it."
Judge was quiet for a moment. Then he leaned back slightly in his chair, the first movement he had made since Lucien sat down that wasn't entirely controlled.
"You came to Germa for technology," Judge said. It wasn't a question. "You've spent a week mapping infrastructure that most visitors never look at twice."
Lucien said nothing.
"I can give you access to things in this facility that don't exist anywhere else in the four seas," Judge continued. "Knowledge. Methodology. Things you would take a decade to accumulate anywhere else."
"What do you need in return?"
He asked it the way Cael had taught him to ask it, early, before the offer had time to settle into something that felt reasonable. One of the first things Cael had told him was that there was no such thing as a free lunch. If something sounded like exactly what you needed, that was usually because someone had designed it to sound that way.
Judge looked at him with something that might have been the closest he came to approval.
"Cooperation," he said. "Your time. Your participation in a controlled series of tests. Nothing permanent. Nothing that leaves this facility."
"How long?"
"A week if you're lucky," Judge said. "Up to a year if you're not. But when we have what we need, you leave. With everything I've offered."
The smaller scientist was writing steadily. Lucien had stopped trying to read the notation from across the table. Whatever was going into that notepad, it had been going in since before he sat down.
"You already have nine days of data on me," Lucien said. "The colosseum. The warehouse before that. Whatever your cleaner reported after." He watched Judge's expression for any reaction and got none. "What is it you think you still need that you couldn't get from watching?"
"Watching tells us what you do," the smaller man said, without looking up. "It doesn't tell us what you are."
Lucien looked at him.
"Biologically," the smaller man added, pen still moving. "Structurally. The Haki you're using is present in perhaps one in several thousand people at your age and development level. The baseline that produces it is what interests us. Not the fighting."
Lucien sat with that for a moment.
Not his fighting they wanted. Not his sword or his Haki or the particular way he had learned to read a room before committing to it. The body underneath all of that. The baseline that had produced it.
He thought about what it meant to be useful to Vinsmoke Judge.
"And if I say no again," he said. "What happens then."
The room was quiet.
Judge looked at him across the table and said nothing for a long moment.
"That," he said finally, "would be a waste."
It wasn't a threat. It was something that sat just beside a threat, in the particular space that men like Judge reserved for things they considered genuinely unfortunate rather than merely inconvenient.
Lucien held his gaze and said nothing.
"A week," he said. "I'll give you a week. After that we renegotiate or I leave."
The smaller scientist looked up for the first time. "You're not in a position to set terms."
"I know that," Lucien said. "I'm doing it anyway."
Judge looked at him across the table for a long moment.
The smaller scientist's pen had stopped. The room was quiet in the way rooms were quiet when something was being decided.
Judge reached forward and turned the document back to face himself.
"One week," he said.
Lucien nodded once.
"You'll be shown to your quarters. You don't leave the facility without an escort. You don't access any area you haven't been cleared for." Judge looked at him with the flat certainty of someone stating facts rather than issuing warnings. "And you don't touch anything that isn't yours."
"Understood," Lucien said.
He stood. The soldier who had brought him in appeared at the door without being called, which meant he had been listening the entire time, which meant the corridor had ears the same way the warehouse had eyes.
Lucien filed that away and followed the soldier out.
Behind him, the smaller scientist turned to a fresh page and began writing before the door had fully closed.
Judge sat alone at the table for a moment, looking at the document in front of him.
Then he picked up his pen for the first time since Lucien had walked in, made a single notation at the bottom of the page, and closed the file.
************************************
Remember 1 Chapter For Every 50 Power Stones.