Not all of the people in the convention hall wore costumes, and Yuriko wasn’t entirely sure that those who wore costumes were capes. She was sure some were Altered Humans, but that was more gut instinct than anything else. The fact that Graham Lowe, an Altered Human healer who’d been missing for weeks now, and had come into dubious contact with other surviving Lunites, also weighed things in that favour. She just wasn’t sure if this was a heavy-handed means of recruitment, or they’d been rolled into a general recruitment drive. Of whom, she wasn’t sure. 

As they entered the convention hall, Yuriko’s perception aura covered about half of the area easily. It was a rectangular hall with stalls and booths right where she could perceive. On the other side, she could see a stage and hundreds of chairs. She scanned for a poster denoting the schedule of events and found one on a pillar. 

“Opening address, one o’clock,” Yuriko muttered. 

“They started late?” Zach wondered. It was close to noon already. 

Yuriko shrugged. They spent too much time on the road already; she’d be happy to find out what in the world this was about, then move on with her life. Her true body had already gone through her training and meditation set and she considered going on an extended delve to help gather funds. She had enough credits to justify going to the second layer. Hmmm, who would she take with her? Well, she’d plan things out with her companions first. After all, fifty days out of contact isn’t a good thing. Hmmm, unless all of them went?

In the convention centre, Yuriko and Zachary bemusedly perused the stalls. A good half of them were snack places, mostly local or close enough to town to qualify. The other half were companies advertising their products or looking to get new hires. 

The companies had funny names, too. Independent Acquisitions, Inc. Minions R Us. Odd Jobs for Anyone, Co. 

Yuriko pursed her lips and shook her head. They were obviously villain groups, considering their receptionists were capes, too. What should she do about that, though?

“Oh! You’re Lilibeth Lawson!” one of the receptionists, a young man with blonde hair and baby blue eyes, squealed. “I’m a big fan! Can I have your autograph?” He glanced at Zachary and his eyes widened while his mouth turned into an even more surprised ‘O’. “Are you two dating?” 

“Not at all,” Yuriko said easily, “we’re just colleagues and, well, friends, I guess.” 

Zach’s face twitched a bit, but he sighed and nodded. “Zachary Rusell.” 

The young man nodded, frowned for another moment, then shrugged, before turning his entire attention to her. He reached underneath his kiosk and came up with a notebook. A well-worn and well-loved book, from the looks of it, and opened it to a page in the middle. The leaves were filled with dedications and autographs, and he grabbed a pen and thrust it at her. “Please make it out to ‘Johnny Cool’!” 

Yuriko raised a brow. “Really?” 

“Heheh, yeah, legal name.” He tapped his name tag, and it did say ‘Johnathan Cool’. 

She shrugged and signed the page with a simple dedication and handed the notebook back. He half reluctantly flipped the page and handed it to Zach, who forced a smile and did the same. 

Once he was happy, Yuriko asked, “So, we were kinda invited here blindly…” 

“Oh, you want to know what’s going on? I get it, I get it! A lot of the participants didn’t know what they walked into, but just as many know.” He gestured towards the sign above his kiosk, Independent Acquisitions, Inc. “To be honest, I’m just a face. I don’t know the company’s real workings, but here,” he offered a pamphlet, “IA, Inc. is simply a job board for, well, acquisitions specialists. There are jobs listed on the site, each with an overview but lacking details to allow poaching, and a referral fee to the lister. On the other side, clients can post their own jobs, but only after a stringent screening for authenticity.” Johnny Cool gave both of them a wide grin. “Though I guess neither of you celebrities needs to be on the worker side, huh? If you want anything, anything that isn’t easily acquired or one of a kind, you’ll find Independent Acquisitions can get it for you.” 

Yuriko accepted the pamphlet and the business card from the young man. A quick glance showed her it had a Network address as well as a phone number. Curiously, it also had a physical address, but she wondered if it was where they actually held office or if it was simply a virtual office. 

She’d been inundated with virtual office services lately, specifically since the announcement of the cape laws a week ago. It was probably no coincidence, but the implications were interesting. Not quite worrying, since she wasn’t that invested in being a glorified law enforcement agent. 

She felt she wouldn’t let innocent people get hurt, but only if she was right there. Her foray as Regalia was borne out of boredom more than anything else. Her goal of amassing enough worship to distil Ambrosia in enough quantities to accelerate her and her companion’s growth felt a bit secondary now that she thought about it. Her Anima reach grew faster when she wasn’t stuck in a rut. It’s been five years since she started after all. 

She was a bit more than halfway to the peak of Transformation with regard to her reach. The unfortunate thing was that she was unsure how much her Will and Intent had to grow to reach the optimum level. It took less Intent to conjure an Invisible Edge every day, but she was unsure if it was because of her increasing reserves or her skill growing. Probably a mixture of both, but the unknown ratio was irritating. She’d have to settle for blindly growing. However, she was unsure if she could even feel if she reached the limit. Troubling. 

She let Johnny Cool’s marketing spiel flow around her. It was an interesting thing, but nothing more than a trifle. After a while, they left the kiosk and looked at the other companies. They offered similar services but for different foci. There was even one called ‘Team Builder’, which was a matching service for capes with complementary powers. She browsed the service’s demo, and the striking thing was that it separated users into a heroic or villainous track. 

Eventually, she and Zach took a break to eat lunch. Sausages on buns with an assortment of toppings and sauces. Yuriko picked one with heavy spices, and while she wasn’t used to burning her palate, it was a nice change. 

While the two of them engaged in small talk and a bit of their celebrity work, Yuriko spread her perception and examined everything around her. She’d positioned herself to be at the centre of the hall, and while she covered most of the open space, she couldn’t see into the backstage and staff areas. There was no sign of Graham anywhere. 

“I think we’ve been scammed,” Yuriko chuckled. 

“No sign of him?” Zach asked. On their long trip, Yuriko revealed a bit more of her capabilities, though none of the specifics. He’d rolled with it and didn’t ask too many questions, something she quite appreciated from the young actor. 

“None. No messages?” 

“Nope.” 

“Did you say I would come with you?”

“No.” He tilted his head. “You think he got scared off?”

“Are we sure he’s hostile?”

“He’s been gone for weeks without a word, then this all of a sudden.” He shook his head, “I’m honestly not sure what to make of it, and I hope he’s fine. But sending us here…and he wouldn’t even take a call.”

“No answer?”

“Wouldn’t even ring.” 

Yuriko frowned. “That only makes it more suspicious. You think it wasn’t Graham at all?”

“Maybe,” Zach grinned. “The only reason I agreed to this was because you wanted to come with.”

“Aww, I’m flattered,” Yuriko said in a monotone, which only prompted a guffaw.

“Yes, I trust you with my life,” Zach said with a bright smile, his sincerity showed through his teasing tone. 

Yuriko simply smiled and nodded. 

By the time they finished eating, someone was at the stage and was calling for people to take their seats for a presentation. The two of them sat at the back, near a corner. Most of the capes sat near the front, or rather, those who were ostentatiously capes. She was sure some of the others in plain clothes were Altered Humans, too. 

The presentation turned out ot be a movie with upbeat music. It was basically a summarisation of the new cape laws, specifically the delineation between masked and civilian lives. It emphasised that capes could not be persecuted through their civilian identities as long as they kept their dual lives as separate as possible. As long as they didn’t voluntarily unmask, in the eyes of the law, they were functionally separate. 

It was as fishy as the depths of the Abyss, Yuriko decided. Why? 

“… as many as one in four people are Altered Humans…”

Oh. So there was probably a grand conspiracy the hidden Altered managed to infiltrate the government. Or perhaps there were now more than enough of them to gain a majority in the halls of the lawmakers. She still wondered why they were doing this, though. They could have just made and enforced anti-discriminatory laws or something like that. Did they think the hatred was too ingrained? 

She looked up a bit of history, and she knew that the first Altered Humans created quite a commotion. Actually, more of a massacre, though an involuntary one when the powers unleashed were uncontrolled. That resulted in a death toll in the hundreds of thousands, spread across a dozen districts and towns. The Altered Human’s identity had not been revealed, nor the minutiae of their power, more as an attempt to further dehumanise them than anything else, Yuriko guessed. 

The presentation ended with a pitch for those hidden Altered to take up a cape identity and explore their true natures. It was only a matter of time before everyone was Altered, after all, and learning their own powers would prove beneficial to the new reality. 

After the presentation, a handsome man appeared on stage and practically repeated the salient points. Yuriko pursed her lips and frowned. The man looked eerily familiar, and it only took a couple of seconds for her to realise why. 

Golden hair in a mullet. Blue eyes nearly the same shade as her own. Broad shoulders and a physique that matched Heron’s, though it was softened by his suit jacket and long sleeves. 

Homelander. The black domino mask the villain wore was a common one, and could probably be found in any two-bit costume parlour, but the man wore it proudly, and somehow made it distinctly his. Well, he also wasn’t in the khaki uniform that he wore yesterday. 

It was the Homelander, of course, and Yuriko realised that Zachary recognised him and was understandably shaken. He kept glancing around, but when he didn’t see the Homelander’s counterpart, he started trembling. He grabbed Yuriko’s hand in a death grip and hissed, “We…we should go. Now.” 

Yuriko hummed, then nodded. “I guess we should.”

They were at the edge of the seating anyway, and it wasn’t all that difficult to slip away. The two of them easily made their way back to the parking lot, and Zach heaved a sigh of relief. 

“Is the Homelander really that scary?” Yuriko asked quietly. 

“Yes,” Zach said curtly, then added, “He’s a terrorist and without his rival, impossible to deny.” His fists clenched, “I don’t know what Lowe’s playing at, but I want no part of it now.” 

“Alright. Then let’s return to Neo Prism City.” Yuriko agreed. Before they exited, Yuriko looked back at the event stage. And met the Homelander’s eyes as his gaze locked into hers.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep