Chapter 59: Terms and Conditions
"I refuse."
For the first time since Hide had entered the office, Maddox went completely still.
The easy smile remained on his face, but only just. It looked thinner now. He leaned back into his chair, fingers loosely interlocked over his stomach, and regarded Hide with an expression that was almost curious.
"You know," Maddox murmured after a moment, "You should at least let me finish before rejecting one of the best offers most people ever receive in their lives."
Hide did not return the faint humor in his tone. "Then they probably need it more than I do."
Maddox’s gaze sharpened by a hair.
"I’m not interested in becoming a government lap dog." Hide added.
For a second, the room seemed quieter than before.
Then Maddox chuckled, as if Hide had unexpectedly confirmed something. "That," he muttered, "sounds very much like her."
Hide’s eyes narrowed instantly. "What did you say?"
Maddox did not answer directly. He reached for the glass of water on his desk, took a slow sip, and set it back down with deliberate care. "I said," he replied lightly, "you have a very inconvenient personality."
Hide stared at him for two beats, then asked the question he had come here to ask from the very beginning.
"Do you know Erin Volter?"
That did it.
This time the change on Maddox’s face was impossible to miss.
It was small, absurdly small, but Hide saw it anyway. The vanishing of that lazy amusement that had floated around him from the moment Hide stepped through the door.
For the first time, the man behind the desk stopped looking like a playful commander and started looking like what he actually was.
An old monster in a young man’s skin.
When Maddox finally spoke, his voice had lost some of its warmth. "Who told you that name mattered?"
Hide’s jaw hardened. "So you do know."
Maddox held his gaze in silence. Then he exhaled slowly through his nose and looked toward the glass wall behind Hide.
"Yes," he said at last. "I know who Erin Volter was."
Something hot and vicious moved under Hide’s ribs.
He had expected denial or maybe a half-answer wrapped in bureaucratic nonsense. But not this.
Hide’s knuckles turned white where he gripped the armrests. He fought to keep his breathing steady. "Then tell me."
"I can’t."
Hide’s eyes narrowed into dangerous slits.
"That intelligence," Maddox explained, his tone returning to a smooth, unbreakable calm, "is highly classified. It requires an internal clearance level that you do not possess. You are an unregistered Exterminator... I can’t tell you."
"You’re telling me that you can’t tell me information about my mother because its classified?"
He chuckled. "Are you fucking serious? How does that even work, huh?"
Maddox did not flinch. "My answer is that you’re asking the wrong question in the wrong chair."
Hide was already on his feet.
The chair scraped harshly against the polished floor. Years of festering grief, of living in squalor while the world moved on, the agonizing memory of that day never leaving his mind.
"Don’t play with me," Hide snarled, his voice trembling with a rage that threatened to tear him apart from the inside.
Maddox looked up at him and then suddenly, the world dropped.
It didn’t come as a shockwave or a gust of wind. It was an existential weight. The ambient mana in the office solidified into lead, pressing down on Hide from every conceivable angle. His bones groaned in instant protest. His lungs flatly refused to expand.
It felt as though the sky had collapsed into the room, centering its unfathomable gravity entirely upon his shoulders. Hide choked, his knees buckling under the sheer, terrifying suppression of an S-Rank Exterminator’s aura.
Maddox hadn’t moved a muscle. He was still seated comfortably. But his eyes were terrifying—the eyes of a sovereign who had long ago transcended the boundaries of mortality.
"Sit down," Maddox told him.
The words were not loud.
They did not need to be.
Hide’s legs folded under him before pride could stop them, and he dropped back into the chair hard enough to rattle it.
The pressure vanished immediately.
He realized that his hands were already covered in dark scales, slowly moving upwards, but he calmed himself down and let them retreat.
But there was another thing Hide had not speculated and it was much more terrifying that anything else.
The Universal Adaptation system did not react to whatever little trick Maddox had just used.
Across from him, Maddox spoke in the same even tone a man might use while correcting table manners.
"You are free to hate this building, the Agency, and everything attached to it. You are not free to shout at me in my office." He let that settle. "Have I made myself clear?"
Hide lifted his head slowly.
Every sensible part of him knew the answer was yes. Every other part wanted to lunge across the desk anyway.
He stared at the desk, his vision swimming, but amidst the panic, a cold, crystalline clarity pierced through his mind. ’Force won’t work,’ he realized. ’He is a leviathan. I am a fish. I can’t break his jaw, so I have to swallow his hook and drag him with me.
’ "...Yes."
"Good."
The easy smile returned, but only partially. It no longer looked harmless. Hide doubted it ever had been.
A long silence followed.
Then Maddox steepled his fingers and regarded him anew. "Now that we have removed the emotional theatrics from the table, let’s proceed like two intelligent people."
He leaned back. "Since you clearly have no intention of becoming a standard recruit, what exactly do you want?"
Hide almost laughed again.
The bastard had just crushed him into a chair with a thought and now wanted to call it theatrics.
But the outburst had cost him enough already. Rage wasn’t going to drag answers out of this man. It would only give Maddox more room to stand above him.
So Hide did what he had always done when backed into a corner.
He adapted.
He leaned back slowly, unclenched his fists beneath the desk, and forced his breathing into an even rhythm. By the time he spoke again, his voice had gone flat and cold.
"I want Individual Operator status," Hide demanded. "I need the permissions to enter dungeons, in exchange you can have 80% of the rewards and I will not even take a team with me. Also I want access to the Trade market and with those I will work under your banner for the outside world to see."
"And what makes you think I’d give a barely awakened boy that kind of freedom?"
Hide’s expression did not change. "Because the alternative is me walking out of here unaffiliated, and you don’t want that."
Maddox smiled and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. The dynamic in the room had shifted. The boy wasn’t just begging for scraps anymore; he was actively carving out his own territory.
But he was not someone who would let himself be fooled this easily.
"I’ll grant it," Maddox finally agreed. "On one condition."
Hide braced himself. "Name it."
"The World Exterminator Ranking Tournament," Maddox declared. "It takes place in exactly two months. It is an open category this year. You will enter with the NEA’s official team."
Hide’s brow twitched faintly.
Maddox continued, "Place in the Top 10, and I will tell you what I know about Erin Volter."
Hide’s eyes sharpened.
Top 10 in the world.
For a normal person, it would have sounded ridiculous. For an F-Rank eighteen-year-old who had awakened weeks ago, it should have sounded insulting.
Instead, what he felt was something else entirely.
A ladder.
A world stage. An official record strong enough that even if the NEA wanted to play games later, he would no longer be a nameless boy from Area 17. He would be a name people knew.
And Maddox had just handed him the route.
Still, Hide kept his face unreadable. "And if I don’t?"
"Then you continue as an Individual Operator under provisional review, and I continue not telling you classified things."
Hide clicked his tongue softly. "Isn’t that a bit hard?"
"Very."
He should have hated how pleased Maddox looked. Instead, Hide found himself thinking around the edges of the offer.
Top 10 would get him more than answers. It would get him legitimacy, capital and attention. The sort of reputation from which bigger things could be built later.
And the reason why he didn’t join the NEA, was so that he could make his own Exterminator Agency in future.
Maddox was trying to place him on a leash.
The irony was that the old man had just offered him a staircase.
Hide considered it, then gave a single nod. "Done."
"Good."
Maddox opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a sleek black folder stamped with the NEA crest. He slid it across the polished wood.
Hide opened it immediately and read every page and then edited the terms he wanted to before signing it.
When it was done, Maddox closed the folder and tapped it once against the desk as though sealing something invisible inside.
"Congratulations," he drawled. "You have just become one of the youngest Individual Operators the NEA has ever provisionally recognized."
Hide stood.
Maddox reached into the same drawer again and this time withdrew two things: a dark metallic badge no larger than a thumb joint, and a black access card trimmed in gold. He set both on the desk.
"The badge identifies you to internal staff. The card opens the right doors and charges the right accounts. Don’t lose either."
Hide picked them up.
The badge was heavier than it looked and his fingers tightened around it, not because he felt proud.
But, because it was useful.
Maddox watched him pocket both items, then spoke one last time before Hide reached the door.
"One small piece of advice, boy."
Hide paused without turning.
"Whoever sent you to Grid 8—" Maddox’s voice was lighter now. "Be careful. People who build stages usually expect blood before the curtain falls."
For the first time since the aura had forced him back into the chair, Hide’s mouth curved faintly.
"Good thing," he muttered, hand closing around the door handle, "I’m not the one who likes performing."
Then he opened the door and walked out... but not exiting the building.
He made his way to 15th floor and from there he walked into a bridge like construct between two buildings. The other building being the NEA’s official trade center.
’Time to earn some money.’