CHAPTER 104: MARGARET’S CHOICE.

(A/N Big thanks to everyone for the Power stones and Golden tickets, they mean a lot. As usual, please don’t hesitate to comment or drop a review. ENJOY)

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They skittered into his range because they wanted him to see them. The arrogance in their posture was clear. They had expected a confrontation by posture alone. They wanted to test their boldness against a name.

Orion stepped out onto the path they had marked for themselves.

The girl noticed him before the boy did. That was typical. The first glance pinned him in place: short, efficient, a measured face. She pushed her hair behind her ear and smiled like a challenge. The boy mirrored the expression with less skill.

"You’re him," the girl said loud enough for everyone to hear.

"Yes," Orion replied.

They had already prepared their lines. The boy said, "We heard the number one was here. We decided to—"

"—greet him." The girl finished with a laugh.

Orion’s eyes registered the gap in their timing. He let them talk. That bought time for two things: observation and boredom. He could end both quickly, or make the small show last until his patience gave him more useful data.

He detected their intent in the way they shifted weight, in small muscle tics. The girl favored speed and taunt; the boy favored angle and feint. That made a two-on-one plan obvious: use the girl to bait, the boy to flank. An experienced team would hide a third vector. These two did not.

Orion had noticed a pattern in the thinning field: since the compression, people who kept moving tended to avoid the inner zone and seek fights at the edges. Those who waited expected rank to walk to them. The duo had made a choice; he would test their rationality despite how mundane and unappealing the effort sounded.

He raised a hand once, not to signal aggression but to indicate readiness. That was enough. The girl’s eyes narrowed. She took a step forward, voice sliding into a taunt.

"Come on, number one. Show us a trick. Or are you just a name?"

Margaret’s hand tightened at his side. He felt the small, electric spike of her irritation in the model. He did not adjust his own stance. He let it register as data.

The duo had expected a two-versus-two. That was false logic. They had misread his association with Margaret as weakness. They had misread a dozen things by the way they planted their shoes.

’Protocol’s goated’ Orion thought, the information he was receiving was outstanding.

Orion considered the fight economically. If they were clean, he would avoid spending time on them. If they were sloppy and arrogant, he would make them count as uncomfortable examples for anyone who watched later. He preferred the quiet teaching method: a quick, decisive answer that left no doubt.

He watched the girl lean forward and begin her verbal provocation again. She jabbed with words designed to make Margaret respond. The boy flanked lightly, angling to the side. The plan was textbook: bait the female support into reaction, then hit the remaining target with a controlled strike.

Margaret took the bait, which would have been obvious to anyone watching. But she didn’t snap. Instead she shifted back one step, which altered her balance and her exposure. It was not a retreat; it was a reconsideration due to experience.

Orion noticed the shift instantly. He did not comment. He stored the motion as a variable in his short-term memory. The girl saw the movement and misinterpreted it.

"You’re hiding behind him, aren’t you?" the girl spat. "You can’t fight. You just cling to the great ones to survive."

Margaret’s jaw tightened. Her hand hovered a fraction of an inch from her cloak. The girl’s words were cheap, meant to sting. They often worked. Margaret had a short fuse on certain insults. Orion had logged that earlier.

For a heartbeat, nothing else mattered except the way Margaret’s shoulders rose. That was the cue to a likely spike in instability. He felt it like a minor temperature change in the field. If he pushed now, the disruption wave would be likely to trigger, temporarily scrambling his predictive feed.

He thought quickly along two lines: provoke enough to make the disruption helpful as a predictable event; or avoid provoking so that he retained all of his own cognitive tools. The first option was high-risk but high-utility: if he timed it when he had a clean path to the duo, the interference would help by opening a microwindow when their concealment or coordination faltered. The cost: he would also lose some of his own Protocol precision for that window.

Orion’s model ran the scenario and ranked outcomes. The duo were clearly not near the kind that required him to use all his tools. He had time and he could regain control quickly. The benefits of using Margaret’s instability to create a forced moment of unpredictability outweighed the downside of temporarily losing a sliver of his predictive clarity.

He also considered a simpler option: do nothing, let Margaret react, then surgically finish them later if needed. That was the safe, neutral choice. But he was not neutral. A part of him — small, practical pride — favored an active experiment. He wanted to see how marginal chaos affected group coordination in the field. The trial was data. It was also a sport, an entertainment.

He did not decide yet. He held the model and let the duo continue, watching how the girl pressed. Her taunts sharpened. Her voice climbed. The boy positioned his angle for a swift double.

Margaret braced visibly. Her entire stance narrowed subtly. The way her muscles tensed told him there would be a spike measured in milliseconds — long enough to affect closing calculations.

He could have told her to ignore it. He could have stepped forward and ended the performance, which would have provoked fewer variables and less excitement. Instead he watched. He wanted the moment; he wanted to see what Margaret would do. Maybe something had changed in her in the small period they’d been together.

The girl leaned in, grin wide, certain she had provoked something more than a flinch. Margaret’s hand lowered an inch.

Orion’s eyes did not leave the pair. He catalogued microsecond timings, the way the girl’s pulse rose, the boy’s breathing lengthened, the exact angle of their weight shift. Everything slotted into his awareness like numbered chess pieces.

He had made his choice by not making one. He waited for the spark that would let him test the hypothesis. He waited to see whether Margaret would snap or hold.

Even he didn’t know the right decision to take, if he were in her shoes.