Chapter 355: Apathy in High Places
"Whew…"
The hooded man, one of Ealdred Crow’s informants who had become infamous as of late for his known soft spot for Eunice, downed a cup of chilled lemon water, letting the citrus tang bite sharply against the fatigue in his throat. Though his face was hidden, the weariness in his voice was unmistakable.
Behind him, a line of similarly dressed informants waited their turn to order from the same street vendor. The sight of hooded figures queuing for lemon water might have seemed surreal elsewhere, but here in Dungeon City, both locals and the Security Team had grown too accustomed to such oddities to give them a second glance.
As he returned the metal cup to the stall, the informant glanced toward the nearest Monitor and let out another sigh.
[Those idiots in upper management… I never thought they’d waste the main team’s time on something so pointless.]
They’d ordered Stephanie’s team to search for a hypothetical hidden passageway on the ninety-sixth layer, the very existence of which remained unconfirmed, and the operation had been going on for five full days. That time could have been spent bringing in a torrent of profit. After all, anyone could see that Stephanie’s team was Ealdred Crow’s primary breadwinner.
Their performance in the Dungeon directly impacted the Clan’s bottom line, and the stakes were growing. Following Amy’s lead, individual sponsorships were beginning to pop up with increasing frequency. Stephanie herself had received no shortage of offers. For now, they were funneled through the Clan, but it was anyone’s guess when those offers might tempt a member to strike out independently.
So who, in their right mind, thought it wise to assign the Clan’s most valuable team to sift through dust and cobwebs for a hidden passageway no one would ever see on a public broadcast? To make matters worse, the search directive had been categorized as low priority. From the footage of the ninety-sixth layer alone, the informant network had already extracted far more actionable intelligence. But instead of capitalizing on that, management had ignored the data they were provided and pressed ahead with their own misguided plans.
He had raised eyebrows at leadership decisions before, but never had their disregard for the informants’ work been so blatant. He couldn’t overlook this, neither as an informant nor as someone who had bled time and sleep gathering what they needed to win.