Usually my mornings were pretty slow and quiet. I loved to take my time in the shower, grab a bite, and then greet the morning sun as it rose. Since I didn't need to sleep, this routine was what ultimately gave a sense of rhytm to my days, and missing it felt kind of uncanny. Unfortunately, this time I had no choice but to deal with it, along with a noisy living room and a pair of rambunctious girlfriends.

"We should have a full English breakfast! Beans and bacon and eggs and all!"

For further emphasis, Elly put her hands on her hips as she glowered at my dear assistant, yet Judy stood her ground, arms crossed an glaring back in a fashion.

"No. I told you, it's too heavy."

"But that's the point! After last night, we need the proteins! In fact, let's make double portions!"

"I said no," Judy pushed back, not breaking eye contact for a moment. "Not all of us have your draconic constitution, and we can't have the Chief put on weight."

I was pretty sure she was more worried about her own lines than my own, but I wisely refused to enter that conversation, and instead focused on my sister by the front door. After some consideration, I picked a thick scarf off the hanger and carefully wrapped it around her neck before taking a step back to observe my handiwork.

"This should be good enough." Nodding, I gently rubbed Snowy's noggin, careful not to mess up her beanie. "Have fun, and don't forget to be home by dinner."

"I-I won't," she stuttered while holding onto her cap with both hands. After I stopped, she timidly glanced up at me, then behind me, towards the living room. "Shouldn't… you do something about them?"

As if waiting for her to ask that, Elly suddenly exclaimed, "We absolutely cannot put that into a sandwich! What kind of culinary heresy is this?!"

"I was only trying to compromise, but if you refuse to make concessions, neither will I."

Glancing over my shoulder, I shrugged my shoulder and simply uttered, "Eh, it's nothing to get worked up about. They'll figure something out on their own."

"Are you… sure?"

"Yep. Now, go. Don’t make Angie wait, and remember…"

"Have fun, eat as much as I'd like, and make sure Angie pays her share of the bill," she recounted the rules I made her memorize, which earned her another head pat. This time she quickly ducked out of under it and retreated to the door. "I'm going now! Bye!"

Saying so, she dashed through the entrance and once stopped to wave at me once she was well out of arm's reach. I returned the gesture with an amused smirk, and watched her walk off. I offered to call a taxi for her, but she insisted that she wanted to walk because she liked the snowy streets. What was the idiom? Nomen est omen, I believe?

Anyhow, once she was far enough away, I pointedly cleared my throat, and less than a second later, a dark figure landed on the path leading to the sidewalk in front of me and immediately descended into a genuflection.

"Your orders?"

Looking the Kage ninja over, one of Rinne's four direct subordinates, I let out a pleased hum. It took a while, but they finally got winter ready, and the one in front of me in particular ditched the stripperific mini-kimono and fishnets for a decently warm skiing outfit. Of course, she still had the headband and the short swords on her hips, so the ninja branding was still present, but at least she was season-appropriate.

"Follow her at a distance, and scan the area for surveillance or suspicious elements. If you find any, I leave things up to your discretion, otherwise make sure you don't get noticed."

"As you command!"

She gave me a Faun-style salute, which was rapidly becoming the general way to do it in our happy little secret organization, and she jumped off the ground and landed on my rooftop without a sound. I asked Mountain Girl about this, but apparently being able to jump eight-to-ten meters high from a standstill was a basic prerequisite for being a Kage ninja. She also kept blabbering about how it was a frog-ninja technique or whatnot, but by that point, I kind of tuned out of the conversation.

In any case, I closed the door behind me and returned to the living room, where my girlfriends were still locked in an intense argument about whether or not cutting the baked beans from a traditional English breakfast platter would make it healthier. I had no horse in that race, so I sneakily headed upstairs and managed to return to my room without getting involved. I figured they'd sort it out on their own sooner or later. I mean, they were flexible enough to make this whole polyfidelity thing we were doing work out great so far, so I sincerely doubted an argument over the breakfast menu was going to tear our peaceful lives asunder.

First things first, I poked my PC to get it to boot up, and while it did that, I fixed the bedsheets. I'd already put the evidence of last night's surprise lewding into the washing machine, so it didn't take too long to tidy things up, and by the time I returned to the desk, I was welcomed by the login screen. Once the desktop loaded in, I checked my mail, then loaded up the secure browser and checked the Celestial Hub.

There wasn't much movement on the site last evening, though I figured it was mainly due to Mike's report not reaching the higher-ups yet. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't expecting there to be a huge hubbub, but I still had to do a double-take when the page loaded in.

"What the heck happened here…?"

While I intended that as a rhetorical question, things took a turn to the unexpected (or rather, even more unexpected) when I noticed that my inbox had a message in it. Not the PM box (though that one also had an exclamation mark), but the internal mail address that came with the account. The one that didn't receive a single message since the first time I logged into the Hub.

I didn't hesitate long before clicking on the prompt, and it opened an extremely barebones user interface right out of the nineties. Or rather, an even more barebones one than the basic Hub interface, but let's not split hairs over something like this. Once it loaded in, the first thing that caught my eye was the sender.

"Celestial Intelligence Network – Chief Operations Officer?"

That already sent all kinds of alarm bells ringing in my head, but when I read the actual message, it was soon replaced by a sense of deep and profound confusion.

The main body of the text, when stripped of all the nondisclosure clauses and double-speak, could be summarized as such: after reviewing my recent activity, I was getting promoted from 'Deputy Director of Intelligence Community Coordination' to 'Deputy Director of Clandestine Service', due to a newfound vacancy in the position. It apparently came with a new set of authorizations and duties I didn't care much about at the moment, as the second half of the text was much more important.

Apparently, all currently ongoing intelligence activities were to be immediately and indefinitely suspended due to a series of internal investigations. The cause of this was vague at best, but considering the message listed nearly a dozen director-of-somesuch and chief-of-something-or-other positions getting mysteriously vacated overnight, I had a feeling there was a sudden and violent restructuring going on within the Celestial Intelligence Network.

Furthermore, I was told to temporarily suspend the creation of any new accounts and to perform a full security check on all existing accouns, prune any sock puppets, and generally tighten things up a notch.

Getting a promotion was a tad unexpected, but I never knew Admin had a proper office in the Celestial hierarchy to begin with, let alone a fancy one like that, so I figured it didn't really matter that much. If they didn't call me out for not performing whatever directorial duties I had before, I had a feeling they won't call me out for continuing to neglect them either.

More importantly, after re-reading the message, just to be sure I understood it right, I moved on to check the PMs, and there were about a hundred of them. Scrolling up, I found that most of them were users complaining about losing access to the report repository, asking if I knew anything about the sudden icing of operations, and only when I reached the top did I find a message from MoroseMoose, telling me that he also received a message from the higher-ups, and that he pinned a forum thread about what's going on and blocked access to the repository for everyone without moderator rights. He apparently did all that because I was offline at the time, but his messages sounded a tad uncertain, so I made sure to give him my thanks and tell him he did well.

It was a good thing I made him a moderator way back when; the guy was much more on top of things when it came to the site than I ever was, and it was nice to see him pick up my slack on his own. Was this the kind of delegation Elly kept pestering me about, I wondered?

In any case, after the PMs were resolved (read: answer Moose, ignore the rest), I opened the forums and the repository in two different windows and began my deep-dive into figuring out what the actual hell was going down at the CIN headquarters.

My initial guess was that the formation of the Draconic Federation under their nose caused a couple of heads to roll, but a quick skimming of the database told me Mike's report didn't make it to the repository, and when sorted from newest to oldest, none of the top entries had anything to do with intelligence related to the Draconians. I did the same with the forums as well, and aside from a single thread about the duel between Naoren and me, and even that was more of a light-hearted discussion with bets and predictions. Combined with the timestamp on MoroseMoose's message, I concluded that the lockdown on the Hub went into full effect before the Draconian tournament even began.

That meant that, whatever caused this internal mayhem in the Celestial Intelligence Network, it probably had nothing to do with the first public appearance of Bel, the alliance between the Knights and the Draconians, or the newly formed Draconic Federation. Whatever the reasons were, I couldn't help but feel apprehensive about this development. While my cover was still safe, this abrupt promotion could potentially mean Admin would have to personally report to the higher-ups to be sworn into office, which was obviously impossible for me. Furthermore, due to the newly imposed restrictions on the Hub, its usefulness as a source of inter-supernatural intelligence took a major hit.

And last, but certainly not least, the fact I didn't know the exact nature of what was going on inside the CIN was troubling. Did they get wind of the Draconic Federation through more analog means, which led to a string of demotions? Was it an internal cleansing operation? If so, who was doing it to whom, and why? Or was it a power grab? If so, did it already succeed, or did it fail and they are now getting rid of the upstarts? How many sides were there? I would've loved to know any of these things, but at the moment, the only two Celestials I had marked were Mike and Angie, and neither of them were exactly famous for being on top of Celestial politics.

…

No, wait. I also had a mark on Jaakobah, didn't I? I wasn't paying much attention to the guy lately, but now that he came up, I Far Glanced his way at once, and found him in a very stereotypically shadowy meeting room with a bunch of stereotypically shadowy people sitting around a round table, their faces hidden by the way the place was lit. I had no idea why this was necessary: they were all in the same room, so I figured once the meeting was over, someone had to flip a light switch so that they could find their way out, and at that point, they would see each other's faces anyway.

But putting my gripes about impractical shadiness aside, the Celestial agent's dot felt very distant and fuzzy, kind of like how Crowey's felt when I was spying on him. That got me a little excited, as this could've been the first time I could get a direct glimpse at the Celestials' little hidey-hole, but I quickly tempered it, as I had more important things to focus on at the moment.

"— the reincarnation candidates. Are you sure he's the one?" one of the shadowy men hidden in the shadowy shadows asked in a deep, resonating voice, and Jaakobah, whose face was also barely visible, firmly nodded.

"The one from the prophecy?" another man inquired from the other side of the table, and the gaunt celestial agent nodded again.

"Yes, director, sir."

Oh? Okay, putting my irritation about the absolutely schlocky execution of this whole 'clandestine meeting between powerful people in the shadows' trope, I belatedly realized that I might've stumbled onto something actually important this time around, so I put my prejudices aside and focused my full attention on the scene unfolding in front of me.

"Why didn't you report this until now?" a woman's voice called out next, sounding audibly irritated.

"As I already testified, I believed it was important to ensure the integrity of the Celestial Intelligence Network first. Bel of the Abyss is operating on Critias, but he doesn't seem to be aware of the target's identity yet. I was afraid that if the agency remained compromised and his identity was revealed, it would expose him to danger, so I temporarily withheld the information."

"You should've reported it to me anyway," the first man spoke up again.

"My apologies, director, but I wasn't sure whom I could trust at the time, and I deemed this course of action the most prudent."

"What's done is done, and there'll be plenty of time to discuss it later," a new voice interjected, sounding both younger and more eager than any of the ones before him. "Tell me, agent: Are you one hundred percent sure it's him?"

"Yes. I was trained to recognize him," Jaakobah responded bluntly, and even in the purposefully poor lighting conditions, I could see the younger man's eyes light up.

"We have waited for so long… to think that it would be in my generation…" he muttered, but the rest seemingly ignored him.

"This information cannot leave these four walls," the first voice, apparently the leader of the group, stated solemnly, and the others agreed in unison. "If agent Jaakobah's assessment is accurate, the second coming of Deus is upon us. We cannot afford any mistakes."

"Certainly, but we still have to decide on a course of action all the same," the only woman in the group interjected, and her words also drew a couple of nods from the participants.

"We should make contact right away! No, wait! We should send in a strike group instead and retrieve him at once!" the younger man proposed, but was shot down at once by a new voice, an old man talking in a droning, almost mechanical tone.

"Negative. The target is in direct contact with the Alteration School of Timaeus, and the local Magi are on high alert due to the many dragonblooded on the island. With the purge of compromised personnel still underway, we cannot afford to mobilize for an exfiltration operation, and with our case officers and assets being cut off from the network, we don't have up-to-date intelligence on the target's situation and environment either. Under these circumstances, I advise against any black operations on the island for the time being."

"But… we have waited for this day… for so long…" the younger man whimpered, but it was cut short by the leader with the unnecessarily deep voice.

"And we can wait a while longer, until we can ensure the success off—"

And then, just as he was about to finish his line, he was cut off by a guitar solo.

"Oh, for fuck's sake…" I grumbled as I exited from Far Sight and reached over to pick up my ringing phone. I checked the caller ID, then a groan later I forcefully swiped the green phone symbol and said, "Morning, Mike. Your timing really, really sucks."

"Oh, hello. Sorry about that," the hapless Celestial apologized at once, then remained silent.

"So? Why are you calling?"

"Ah, right…" He paused for a beat, during which I could hear him take several breaths, then he began with, "So, I've read the report you sent in, and… well… I just wanted to make sure I understood it right. Are you saying that you are the leader of the oath—I-I mean, the Knights?"

"We are called the Ordo Draconis now, but yeah, that's the short of it."

"And this Draconic Federation thing means… like, all of the dragonbloods and the Knights working together?"

"Yes."

"Oh geez… That's… um… H-How much can I actually report of this?"

"Why are you asking me?" I blurted out in surprise.

"I mean, wouldn't you be troubled if the CIN learned all about this right now? I'm just trying to be considerate…"

Sighing, I shook my head and told him, "You know, Mike, you're really not cut out for this spy job." He remained silent no matter how long I waited, so I added, "Last I've heard, there's something big going down in the CIN right now, so I doubt you can even send your report even if you wanted to."

"Wait, how do you know that?"

"… Mike. I'm an information broker. It's my job to know these things."

"Isn't being the leader of the Knights your job?"

"Don't nitpick my words and listen up: I sent you that report because I knew that your higher-ups would find it out anyway. At least this way, they would be hearing it from the source."

"Ah, speaking of sources," Mike cut in as if worried that if he didn't grab the opportunity, he would be left behind. "You wrote something about requesting official statements in the future, so… does that mean our deal is off?"

"In a way." I could hear an odd and distinctly worried noise from the other side, so I hastily added, "That said, we had a pretty decent cooperative relationship so far, so once things normalize on your end, make sure to tell your higher-ups that I'd like to keep you as my official liaison."

"Really? Thank you!"

He sounded way too excited by the prospect, but I didn't question him, and instead said, "Is there anything else you want to know about, or can we end this call?"

"Oh, right, sorry. No, I have nothing else." I grunted in acknowledgement and was just about to cut the line when he exclaimed, "Ah! Wait, there's one thing I completely forgot about!"

"Yes?"

"Happy holidays!"

I was honestly taken aback by that, and took me a good five seconds to utter a pleasantly surprised, "Right, we haven't talked since the banquet, have we? Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you as well."

"Thanks!"

I could totally imagine the ear-to-eat grin on the guy's face, and now that we were done with that, I could finally end the call and threw the phone back onto the desk before closing my eyes and returning to the meeting.

"— for the glory of the Second True Archon, and the glory of Deus," the head of the group declared, and the rest of the participants echoed the same line more or less in unison, including Jaakobah. Then, after a long beat of silence, everyone left the room one by one, meaning…

"Damn. I guess that was the end of the meeting," I griped, followed by a string of silent curses under my breath.

Still, I stayed around for a little longer, just in case something interesting would happen, but the only thing worth mentioning was my first glance at Elysium through the windows of the room where Jaakobah retired. Though again, that might not have been the right word, as based on the number of guards around his small, austere room, it almost looked like he was under house arrest.

But back to Elysium: Just like the Abyss, it was a parallel space overlapping the island of Critias. As for why that was the case, according to Judy's research into the topic, it involved some kind of ley-line configuration and one being patterned after the other and emergency measures and whatnot, but at the end of the day, I wrote it all up to it being just another trope. Just like how in Japanese or Korean fiction, everything in the world revolved around their small island/peninsula, I figured the reason why everything was so bloody focused on Critias was simply because Josh lived here.

Putting my tropey gripes aside, while the Abyss was remarkably similar to our island, not only in topography but also in terms of architecture, a couple of big, gloomy gothic castles notwithstanding, my brief glimpse outside the window made me instinctively take a second and even a third look, just to be sure I was seeing things right. On one hand, unlike in the real world, it was a pleasant summer morning, with sunlight glinting on several tall, white spires dotting the landscape. They had an almost organic appearance, as if made of countless layers of spider silk, but with countless windows and balconies dotting their surfaces. Considering the viewing angle, I had a sneaking suspicion Jaakobah was also inside one such spire, though I couldn't get a full picture of the place even when I moved my point of view outside the window.

On the other hand, when I did that, I noticed something weird: even though these towers looked like they would belong to some kind of technocratic utopian setting, when looking down, I saw they were surrounded by hundreds of thatched roofed hovels, and the dirt roads leading out of these settlements were occupied by people wearing simple togas and riding on horse-drawn carts towards large, hand-plowed fields covering the landscape.

Conclusion: Either Celestials were really, really into the whole 'agrarian idyll' aesthetic, or something was seriously wrong with this picture.

However, before I could get any more engrossed in the scenery, I was once again jolted out of my Far Sight, this time by the door of my room getting violently thrown open.

"Leo!"

After the obligatory surprised blinks, I lazily turned my chair around to face the princess in the doorway.

"Yes? Did you decide on breakfast?"

"That's not important right now!" she exclaimed while waving her phone my way. "Dad just called me! The tournament isn't canceled after all!"

"… Oh, you've gotta be…!"