Chapter 209: A proposal

The General entered his office and sat down in his chair with a sigh of relief. Speaking at the assembly for so long hadn’t been easy. He removed his glasses and placed them carefully on the table.

The room was quiet. The kind of quiet that only came after noise—after a hundred students standing at attention, after his own voice filling a hall that wasn’t built for comfort. He exhaled slowly and leaned back, letting the chair take his weight. The leather was warm from the afternoon light cutting through the window. Outside, the grounds were already returning to their usual rhythm. Students drifting toward the training blocks. Masters calling out drills. The tournament announcement had stirred something in the air—he could feel it even now, sealed behind glass.

He reached for his phone.

Just as he was about to switch on his phone, there was a knock.

He didn’t move immediately. One breath. Then he set the phone back down and looked at the door.

“Come in.”

“Olmo stepped in.”

“Sorry to bother you, sir… but I have something to tell you.”

The General glanced at him, then let his phone drop back onto the desk.

The man looked composed enough. But there was something in the way he held himself—weight slightly forward, hands loose at his sides—that said he’d been rehearsing this. Olmo wasn’t someone who knocked on doors without a reason. And he wasn’t someone who led with apologies unless he knew what he was walking into.

“What is it?” he asked.

Olmo hesitated slightly. “Mira… she asked if there isn’t something worse than this.”

The General said nothing for a moment. He studied Olmo’s face. There was no deflection there—no attempt to soften it into something easier. Just the words, plain and direct, carrying whatever weight Mira had put into them.

He filed it. Not away—just aside. For now.

“Take your seat,” the General said.

Olmo pulled the chair forward and sat across from him.

The General folded his hands on the desk. The afternoon light had shifted slightly, falling at an angle across the surface between them. He waited. If Olmo had more to say, he’d say it. If he didn’t, the silence would shake it loose.

“Well, how may I help you?” the General asked.

Olmo took a breath. “It’s about the way you decided we should select the representative for the upcoming tournament.”

The General raised an eyebrow. What could Olmo possibly want now? He had just finished making corrections regarding the tournament. What else was there to change?

The announcement had taken two weeks to finalize. Two weeks of back-and-forth with the other academies, with the committee, with the administrative board who always found something to query. He had settled the structure. He had confirmed the timeline. He had stood in front of every student this morning and delivered it cleanly. And now Olmo was sitting across from him with that look.

Olmo continued, “I believe each master knows the strongest among their students. So, what I’m proposing is this: each master should choose their best student, and those selected will fight to determine the final representative.”

He paused, then added, “It would be tougher—and far more stressful—for me to personally decide the strongest students in my class and have them fight for the position.”

The General looked at him and forced a smile, veins bulging on his forehead.

It wasn’t the proposal itself. The proposal was reasonable enough—he could admit that, privately. What knotted in his chest was the timing. The precise, inconvenient timing. The assembly was barely an hour behind them. The students were still buzzing with it. And Olmo had let all of that happen, let him stand at that podium and announce the structure, and only now decided to walk through his door with a better idea.

He was about to speak, but Olmo continued.

“There are a lot of students in my class,” Olmo said. “Of course, I’ve trained them and seen them fight, but that doesn’t compare to the training they’ve had with their individual masters. Each master only handles three students, so it’s easier for them to track their growth and strength.”

He stepped forward slightly.

“But for me, it’s different. There are too many students. It would be a much harder decision to make. Honestly, I can’t determine who the strongest is without holding a small tournament myself.”

The General let that sit.

He turned it over slowly. The logic wasn’t wrong. A master with three students had three data points—three patterns to read, three sets of tendencies to track over weeks of close observation. Tongen knew his students in the way a craftsman knew his tools. Sherlock was the same. That kind of knowledge was granular. Specific. The sort of thing that didn’t come from watching a student perform well in a group drill.

But Olmo’s class was different. Larger by design—a broad intake, meant to give the academy range before the sorting process narrowed the field. The General had built that structure himself. He understood what Olmo was saying. He understood it clearly.

That didn’t make it easier to hear.

The General stared at him for a moment.

The silence stretched. Olmo didn’t fill it. Didn’t shift in his seat or look away. He just waited, which was either patience or confidence—the General hadn’t decided which.

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” he asked.

The question came out quieter than he intended. Not soft—just stripped of the edge he’d been holding since Olmo walked in. It was a genuine question. That was the part that irritated him most. Not the proposal. Not even the timing. Just the fact that he didn’t know the answer.

Olmo shrugged lightly. “I had no idea you were going to approach it this way. I just thought I should let you know there might be a better method than the one you proposed.”

The General looked at him for a long moment.

Then he reached for his glasses. Picked them up from the desk and turned them slowly in his hand—not putting them on, just holding them. A habit. Something to do with his hands while his mind worked through what came next.

Olmo’s suggestion meant adjustments. It meant contacting the committee again, or at least flagging the internal change before it became a visible inconsistency. It meant the structure he’d announced this morning would shift—quietly, before it calcified into expectation.

He set the glasses down.

“Leave it with me,” the General said.

It wasn’t agreement. It wasn’t dismissal. Olmo seemed to understand that, because he nodded once and rose from the chair without pushing further.

The General watched him go. The door closed with the same soft knock it had arrived with.

He sat alone again. The quiet returned—different now, heavier in the specific way of a room where a decision was being delayed rather than made. Outside, the training grounds were still moving. Students still calling out to each other in the late afternoon.

He picked up his phone.

He set it back down.

Looked at the window for a long, quiet moment.

Then he reached for the phone again and began to dial.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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