Chapter 337 --337
"I’ll give you the full list. For now — what’s the current capacity for integrating people who have physical capability but no administrative experience?"
He considered this genuinely, which was one of the reasons she had kept him. "We can absorb perhaps twenty without disruption to current operations, if we structure it correctly. More than that and we’d need to expand the supervisory layer first."
"Expand the supervisory layer," she said. "Give me a proposal by tomorrow morning."
He bowed and left.
She picked up her pen.
The beast knights who had been under Mahir and Ken’s direct influence numbered, by her count, thirty-one. Of those, perhaps six had achieved something close to full independent control — she had observed them over the past days, watched the quality of their decision-making, noted the ones whose actions seemed to originate from themselves versus the ones who were still operating with the particular quality of people whose choices are being shaped by something outside themselves. It was not a clean line. It was never a clean line with the collar situation.
But Mahir and Ken themselves had full control. That much was clear. That was, in some ways, the more complicated problem — because full control meant full accountability, which meant full consequence, which meant she needed to be precise about what she did with them and when and in what order.
She was not a forgiving person by nature. She was also not a wasteful one. Mahir and Ken in a dungeon were a resource sitting unused. Mahir and Ken in logistics were a message, a management solution, and a resource in active use simultaneously.
The ones who had partial control were a different category. They were not fully responsible for themselves yet, which meant treating them as fully responsible was both unjust and strategically imprecise. You did not punish a tool for how it had been used. You secured it, redirected it, and monitored it until you understood it clearly enough to make a better decision.
She drafted the orders.