This feeling was somewhat unusual. No matter how much she had experienced, Laura Croft still could not get used to it.
Compared with the gentle figure who had appeared last night, the person sitting across the long table now had an overwhelmingly powerful presence. His dizzying charm seemed to fill the entire room, leaving not even oxygen a place to exist. That was what Laura Croft believed; only that could explain the dizziness she was experiencing. The person across from her was not the sort of traditional politician seen on television—the kind who gave speeches surrounded and watched by a pack of agitated animals in the House of Commons, then handed the more specific work to civil servants while personally appearing on TV.
This was a political system entirely beyond her knowledge: a system with only civil servants.
She watched the most controversial man in the world across the long table. Rows of beautiful maids brought stack after stack of documents and plate after plate of food to the table. Thick-cut steaks and gravy-soaked bread vanished at astonishing speed, while he wrote and drew on a data slate between bites. Laura Croft glanced over and saw complex baselines, charts, and documents flashing past on the slate. A vast Solar System model turned slowly, every planet wrapped in countless white numbers and dense points of light. Bayonetta and Jeanne, who were also seated at the table, seemed utterly unfazed, as though this were nothing more than pre-meal exercise. Or perhaps it was because he had satisfied their desires before breakfast—Laura Croft swore that scene had possessed extraordinary beauty—which made them so tolerant of bringing official business to the dining table.
In her impression, a nation's security agencies generally only dealt with people dissatisfied with the country. Yet she had seen him