A small story about a pub and a hundred barrels of wine. In any other context, in any other hands, it would have been filed and forgotten — a curiosity piece for the regional edition, read by twelve people and remembered by none.
Morgans was not any other hands.
The woman on the other side of the wall had shown him a Byakugan. Whatever else remained uncertain about her and her business, the eye in that box was real, and its value was not something that could be fabricated. She had leverage on him through the prospect of that compensation, and she had his attention through what she'd offered, and his attention was not a thing most people managed to obtain for free.
"For the Byakugan's sake," he said, "I'll move the information along. I won't guarantee the outcome — the Marine doesn't mobilise on suggestion, and the other parties make their own decisions. But I can reach them." He paused. "If this turns out to be a trap aimed at one of the forces I contact — I will know who set it up, and I will find a way to make that a front-page story in every edition I print."
The woman did not answer this directly, which he took as acknowledgment.
He held out his hand to the secretary waiting beside him. She placed the encrypted Den Den Mushi in his palm — a device maintained ally for communications that were not supposed to be traceable to the news organisation's standard lines. He dialled the first number in front of his guest, so she could hear exactly what was being said and to whom.
The Den Den Mushi's face contorted, slowly, into the expression of the person answering: eyes half-closed, posture implying a deep investment in the current horizontal position, the whole expression radiating the particular quality of someone who found the universe mildly beneath them.
"Morgans." The voice was Admiral Borsalino's — unhurried, the cadence of a man who was comfortable performing slowness because the alternative required effort. "I've had a good run lately. Don't have much to sell you."
"I'm not buying. I'm giving you something." Morgans ran through the situation — the pub, the date, the calls that had continued for over a year, the city that no wholesaler had been able to enter since October of last year. He kept his language clean and factual, which required discipline, because clean and factual was not his natural register. "Pass it up the chain. Whether Fleet Admiral Pendragon wants to investigate is her decision, not mine."
There was a silence at the other end that had a different quality than the earlier laziness. Something in the details had engaged a different function.
"I'll mention it," Borsalino said.
The line closed.
In the new Marine structure, Admiral-level initiative had been deliberately constrained. Artoria Pendragon had spent years building an organisation where officers of the highest combat capacity did not act on personal inclination without authorisation. It reduced the kind of incidents that had defined the previous regime and made foreign powers nervous about the Marines' unpredictability. The tradeoff was the response time — an Admiral who needed clearance was an Admiral who waited, and waiting had its own costs.
Whether the Fleet Admiral would find the ghost city compelling enough to deploy was a question Morgans did not need to answer. His obligation was transmission.
The second number connected after three rings.
The name Morgans used for this contact — Alucard — was one he did not announce to the room in the same tone he would have used for a Marine Admiral. The Black Church operated in spaces that the world's official organisations preferred to pretend did not exist, and their exorcist worked in the gap between what could be publicly acknowledged and what nonetheless needed to be addressed. Morgans had cultivated the connection carefully and did not overuse it.
He gave the same summary. The same dates. The same repeating calls from a pub in a city no one could enter.
There was a brief silence, then a laugh. Not warm and not hostile — the laugh of someone who had recognised something in the description that the description itself had not intended to name. Whether Alucard had personal knowledge of what was happening in that city, or whether something in the pattern matched a category he already understood, Morgans could not determine from the sound alone.
The call ended with neither confirmation nor refusal.
Third number. The third party was nominally affiliated with an organisation rather than operating independently, but Morgans had long since stopped thinking of the Revolutionary Army's current leadership as an organisation in the institutional sense. Sabo answered.
Morgans told the story again. The wine. The pub. October twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth, repeating, for over a year, while the city itself remained inaccessible to anyone who tried to enter.
He hung up.
"First call: Marine Admiral, who will report up the chain," he said to the wall separating him from the woman. "Second: the Black Church's exorcist. Third: the Revolutionary Army's leader. The information has been passed to all three. The rest is their decision." He folded his wings. "Don't leave before we've settled the Byakugan arrangement."
The space on the other side of the wall had changed while he was talking.
The woman's silhouette — visible only as a suggestion of shape through the wooden slats — had been present throughout the calls. Now, as he finished speaking, it was not present. The shape had dissolved, or rather folded, the air around where she had been standing compressing and then releasing back to its original distribution. No footsteps. No door. No gap in the room through which she might have passed.
She was simply gone.
Morgans sat with the empty room for a moment.
Space transfer. The capacity to relocate without passing through the intervening distance — not a common ability, and not one that suggested a small or easily-understood actor. She had known which branch he was visiting before his own staff had confirmed the schedule. She had arrived before him, waited for hours without being detected, and left without using any of the building's exits.
He did not know who she was. He did not know what she had in motion. He knew she was sick, she had a Byakugan, she wanted people she could not contact directly to go to a city that had been sealed off for over a year, and she had spatial transfer capability.
He told his secretary to begin relocation preparations. This branch was no longer secure, which meant it was no longer useful, which meant it was time to move. He had operated this way for years — staying in one location long enough to conduct business and not long enough for the location to become a liability.
He was already thinking about where to go next when the Sky Screen moved.
—Broadcast—
The city on the screen was not one that had been introduced to peace recently.
Artillery fire moved through the streets in competing directions. Buildings that had been standing when the engagement started were in various stages of no longer standing. The smoke columns rose from multiple addresses simultaneously, and the civilians who were still visible had adopted the body language of people who have been calculating the relationship between available cover and incoming fire for long enough that the calculation is now involuntary.
On an elevated position above the fight, a man watched.
He was not in the combat. He was watching it in the way that someone watches a river — not detached, not uninvested, but operating from the position of someone who has placed pieces on the board and is monitoring how they move.
Wavy blond hair. A scar crossing the left eye, lighter than it would have been when it was new but permanent. The confident set of his expression had the quality of ease rather than performance — he was not reassuring anyone by looking calm. He was calm.
Sky Screen Character Note: Second-Generation Revolutionary Army Leader — Sabo. Epithet: "Red Son."
"Get Gajeel," he said. To no one ally. To whoever was close enough to hear and act on it.
Gajeel was removed from the forward position by loudhailer and arrived at Sabo's location wearing the expression of a man whose morning had been going well until it had been interrupted. His iron fists had been making contact with the opponent's defensive line at a rate he found satisfying, and the interruption had not been welcome.
The expression shifted when he heard what the task was.
He had been with the Second Generation Revolutionary Army long enough to know Sabo's approach to information — the man did not use that private line for general business. If Morgans had called on it, the information had cleared whatever internal filter Morgans applied before deciding something was worth the effort of the secure channel.
A city that no one could enter. An anomaly running for over a year. Send someone who could go in, look around, and come back.
Gajeel was not an investigator by inclination. He was a fighter by inclination, and investigation was the work you did when you needed to understand what you were about to fight. He could do both.
"All right," he said.
Sabo knew when he had made the right choice. He did not say so out loud.
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