Back when Kaiden Grey's plane was still crawling across the Pacific at hospitality speed, the lights on the top floor of the Shogunate Circle's Tokyo headquarters had been burning since the previous morning.
The Circle had been running Japan's dungeon lines for the better part of a decade.
In the first chaos years of the mana apocalypse, when the private guilds broke against the overflow one after another, the government gathered the survivors and fused most of them into a single body under a single charter.
Six seats ruled the result and gave the guild its name: Blades, Gates, Treasury, Ministry, Media, and the Shrine. Between them they commanded more awakened than most armies, and they answered to the Diet, mostly, when it asked nicely.
Courting letters went out to every promising foreign guild, as they always had. It was tradition, it was polite, and nearly every recipient in the Circle's history had declined with matching politeness.
The Sinners wrote back asking for dates.
