Renwick had called the meeting.
That alone was strange. Eleven years, he'd called two formal meetings of this body. The first was in his third month as Head of State, before he'd really understood what the body was. The second was in his fifth year, when he'd still believed that understanding it might let him change it.
He understood it now. He understood exactly what it was and what it did. And he'd called this meeting anyway, because saying nothing after what had happened on that street was the kind of failure he wasn't going to add to his account.
Same room as before. Same chandelier. Same table. Same windows looking out on the same city, except the city was different now in that way cities got different after something happened in them that couldn't be undone.
Renwick didn't sit.
He stood at the head of the table and looked at the three men across from him.
"Seven thousand people," he said. "Filing the right papers. Following the law. Doing something the constitution of this republic says they can do."
The Marshal looked at him like someone getting a report they'd already read.
"Public order required—"
"Public order," Renwick said.
The words hit the room the way they'd hit the street: heavy enough to make everything around them feel thin.
"Seven thousand people," he said again. "Not fighters. Not rebels. Workers. The people whose labor built everything in this city that makes the money that pays for the institution that just killed them." He looked straight at the Marshal. "You are a snake. And you are a traitor to the people you were supposed to protect. Those are the right words for what you are, and I'm saying them here because I'm still, technically, the Head of State of this republic, and this is still, technically, a republic, and I'm going to use whatever time is left where both those things are true to say what's true."
The Marshal's face didn't move.
He had that look of someone who'd been called a lot of things by people whose opinion couldn't touch him. He took Renwick's words the way you take weather you've already decided to wait out.
Renwick turned to the Minister.
"And you," he said. "You somehow manage to be the worst of all of them in this. Sitting there. Not picking a side. Watching them kill people in the street like bugs, and arranging your papers, and putting yourself somewhere between concerned and supportive because picking either one might make you less useful to whatever comes out the other end." He let it land. "That's not being neutral. It's a choice. And the choice has a name, and the name isn't neutrality."
The Minister stared at the table. Not ashamed. Like a man who'd already done the math on the accusation and figured waiting was smarter than answering.
The Pontiff had been quiet through all of it.
He sat with that kind of stillness that wasn't holding back but was more like he'd decided this part didn't need him yet. When he finally spoke, it was with the slow patience of someone letting the scene play out before getting to what actually mattered.
"Aldous," he said.
Using the first name was deliberate. Not warm. A signal about what key he planned to speak in.
"The grief is understandable," the Pontiff said. "What happened was regrettable. The Church takes no pleasure in it."
"The Church," Renwick said, "backed the rule that made it possible."
"The Church backs the return of order when things are under serious strain. How that order gets restored is for the civil and military authorities to decide."
"The civil authority," Renwick said, "is standing right here. The civil authority wasn't asked."
"The civil authority," the Pontiff said, same calm tone, "is an office that now functions mostly as a formality inside a structure that's moved past what it was built for." He paused. "I'm not saying this to put you down. I'm saying it because it's accurate, and I think you're someone who values accuracy."
Renwick looked at him.
"Elysion is a republic," he said.
"Yes," the Pontiff said.
A pause.
"Not yet," he said.
Two words, quiet. Not whispered. Quiet the way something sounds at full volume in a room that's suddenly gone completely still.
The Minister's eyes flicked. Not to the Pontiff. To the table. That specific move of someone catching something and already deciding what to do with it.
The Marshal's face stayed exactly as it was.
The Pontiff didn't take the words back. He didn't add to them. He sat with them in the room like someone who'd said something that could be heard several ways and was fine with all of them.
Renwick looked at him for a long moment.
"This meeting," he said, "is over."
He was the only one who walked out.
The street outside the building where Gepetto had finished his last Eldravar task was ordinary. The kind of ordinary that piles up in a city over three hundred years without anyone noticing. Stone fronts. Gas lamps still dark in the afternoon. That particular smell of a place running on coal and trade that had long since stopped smelling itself.
He walked without rush.
Underneath the calm, something stirred. Not worry. A reworking. The feel of a mind running on a model that had just gotten enough new data to know the model was off.
He'd known, the way you knew things from having played the game, that the Church of the Solar God had more than three demigods in active service. The number wasn't small. They were scattered—some in the lands past Elysion's three big cities, some in dioceses in other nations where the Sun God's presence was tolerated but not welcomed, working low-profile out of respect for local faiths but not shut down and not idle.
In the first timeline, the Pontiff had called them in. The push came when the fight with the Children of Medusa climbed past what the regular commissioned force could handle alone.
The push in the first timeline was a specific event at a specific point.
What actually happened wasn't that event. The killing on the avenue wasn't about the Children of Medusa. It came out of the Pontiff's deal with the Marshal—that cold logic of locking down power that was moving faster and louder than the first timeline, spitting out results that were sharper and harder to guess.
The question wasn't whether the Pontiff would summon the rest of the demigods. It was when, and what reason he'd give, and what that summoning would actually look like when it hit.
He thought, for a moment, about what it had been like to be Gepetto in the game.
In the game, Gepetto was a ranked player. You could pause. You could log off. You could come back fresh with new eyes and a plan built outside the heat of the moment. The world didn't keep going while you were gone. The other players didn't move while you thought. Your resources didn't drain while you slept. The clock didn't run while you recalculated.
Here, the clock ran.
Aldric had been below him in power, technically, the way Gepetto read power. Level 95 against 100. The gap was real. The gap still hadn't been enough, in a fight he didn't fully control, to guarantee a clean outcome without help. Without Alaric, the gap would've been swallowed by the edges a demigod with eleven years in the field and three Class 0 relics brought to a situation Gepetto hadn't shaped.
He was playing chess against people with infinitely more pieces, infinitely more room to move, and infinitely fewer chains on what they could do. The Church's institutional muscle, the Marshal's army, the Consortium's money-grip, the Children of Medusa's buried hands in the courts—these weren't pieces sitting still waiting for their turn. They moved on their own, all at once, following rules that weren't his and that his model hadn't fully caught.
The model needed fixing.
He reached the building.
Semper Fidelis had been in Eldravar four days.
The jump had taken under two minutes. Gepetto had run the numbers before leaving Vhal-Dorim: leaving Semper Fidelis in the base under the dead warehouse was a risk the current air didn't allow. Vhal-Dorim and Aurelia were under a kind of watch that had no equal in the six months he'd been here. The Church's boots in Vhal-Dorim alone had tripled since the Emergency Council. Armandel was wounded but still working, running his own hunt through channels that Aldric, as a marionette, could only partly see and partly nudge. The base was safe. Safe wasn't the same as invisible to everything the Church could now throw.
Eldravar was different. The Church had a diocesan house here but no crisis grip. The city's watching was the ordinary watching of a place that saw the academic quarter as managed ground, not a live threat. Moving Semper Fidelis here meant putting him somewhere the noise was lower, where his head could work without the sharp risk of some Church tool pinging an oddity in a city where every oddity got chased right now.
The math took thirty seconds. The jump took two minutes. The result was a body in Eldravar that could chew what needed chewing, in a city that wasn't yet hunting.
Semper Fidelis was already facing the door when Gepetto walked in. That meant the analysis had been running and had guessed the arrival within a fair odds-window.
"The summoning," Gepetto said.
"Likely inside six to twelve weeks," Semper Fidelis said. "It'll be dressed as an answer to ongoing institutional rot. The Children of Medusa give the cover. The politics give the push. They're not the same thing, but from where the Pontiff sits, both work."
"How many."
"Confirmed active service: seven past what was already thrown into Elysion. Three in the outer lands. Four in quiet dioceses in nearby nations."
Gepetto was still a moment. Seven. Each one, by definition, in the range where Aldric had worked. Each one meaning a fight that, under the last fight's conditions, would ask what the last fight asked. He filed the number with the weight it deserved and kept going.
"The outer-land demigods sit lower in reach. The quiet-diocese ones have been working under wraps for a long stretch and will need time to spin up to full teeth."
"Time I don't have."
"No."
Gepetto sat.
He'd been managing how seen he was with the tight care of someone who knew that being seen was the thing that most decided how much room he had to move. Every swing he'd taken had been weighed against how much light it drew. Every tool he'd kept holstered had been kept holstered because pulling it would've left a mark, pulled eyes, made the kind of readable noise that Anonymous Presence was built to swallow.
The room for that balancing was shrinking.
"I need your full head," he said. "Not just spot-checks. War-math. Everything you've got on this: with the clock speeding up and more demigods probably coming, what order of moves gets the needed end before the gap shuts?"
Semper Fidelis was quiet a moment—that kind of quiet that meant the chewing wasn't done yet, not that there was nothing to spit.
"The answer means eating more eyes on you now to buy a spot later that cuts how much you're seen in the last stretch," he said. "The math wants a piece I don't have enough on yet."
"Which piece."
"The Illusionist."
Gepetto looked at him.
"Without the Illusionist," Semper Fidelis went on, "the moves you'd need to make to handle the speed-up throw off more light than Anonymous Presence can swallow on its own. The Church's extra demigods will be hunting exactly the kind of trail the next few months are going to leave." He paused. "The Illusionist doesn't cut the moves. He cuts how they read. He gives the kind of working cover that lets Alaric, and me, and you, move with a lot less chain on the guess that what's seen isn't what's actually going on."
"A curtain," Gepetto said.
"A curtain that shifts," Semper Fidelis said. "One you have to think about—where to hang it, what to let through, what to make sure can't be seen at all. Different problem from just being harder to spot."
Gepetto was quiet.
He hadn't thrown the Illusionist in six months because the Illusionist wanted careful staging. Not battle-staging. The other kind—the kind where you had to sit with what it meant to build a false world for other people that didn't match the one they thought they were in. The Illusionist's tools worked in the key of seeing and made-real, which meant using him asked you to grip not just what you were doing but what it aimed to spin a seeing for thousands of people that wasn't true.
The straight why he'd waited: he'd told himself the right ground hadn't shown up. The straighter why: he'd been using that ask as a wall to not throw the tool into a fight he hadn't fully drawn. The Illusionist cooked the gap between what was seen and what was. That gap, thrown across thousands of people in a city cracking open, wasn't just a fight-tool. It was a deep act with tails that ran past the fight it was meant to serve.
He'd spent six months chewing on whether he was the kind of person who should swing that act. He'd landed somewhere that wasn't a yes or no but was truer than the waiting: he was already swinging picks of near weight. The gap between choking word through house-pressure and cooking a false see-field was real. It wasn't fat enough to stand on while he worked without the tool and five camps stirred around him on ground he no longer set the beat for.
The ask had been a slack thing. The slack was gone.
He stood.
"Call the Illusionist," he said.
Not a thought. Not a landing. An order, handed to himself, in the key of someone who'd moved a piece from waiting to live and was already chewing the next piece.
The box that had been shut six months opened in his head.
He thought about where a curtain needed to sit, and what needed to show through it, and what didn't.