Inside the ship's cabin, the conference room.
This was the most heavily guarded place on the entire ship. Even Frost, as acting head of the family, could only enter after being summoned.
The door was made of steel, half a foot thick, and locked from within. Four Gattuso Family guards stood outside. They carried no guns, only swords—the Sages considered firearms too noisy, too crude, and insufficiently dignified.
Swords were enough. The guards were all powerful Hybrids, at least A-Class if assessed elsewhere, and their Spirit Words were all suited for combat.
There was only a plain oak table inside the conference room, surrounded by equally unadorned chairs. There was no electronic equipment. No screens, no communicators, not even a single electric lamp. The Sages did not put much faith in such things.
Even though the Gattuso Family possessed the finest hackers in the world, the Sages were instinctively suspicious of anything they could not fully control.
Centuries had taught them one truth—the traps you could not see were often the deadliest.
The conference hall was lit by oil lamps. The lamps were made of silver, ancient in design, as though they had been unearthed from the ruins of Ancient Rome.
No one knew what oil they burned. The flames were bright and steady, producing no smoke at all. Instead, they gave off a faint fragrance, like sandalwood. Breathing it for long calmed the mind, as though one stood deep within a thousand-year-old church.
The chairs were full.
These old men were the Sages of the Gattuso Family. They had once possessed names of their own—some had even left their marks on European history—but after moving into the Sages' Shrine, they abandoned their original names and went only by codenames. The leader among them was codenamed Alpha Group.
They wore