Before Ryan could take a definitive step toward the heavy bronze gates to catch his evening connection, the frantic magistrate intercepted him once more. With the frantic energy of a regional director dropping a catastrophic, unbudgeted crisis onto a coordinator's desk five minutes before shutdown, the official shoved an unsealed imperial decree straight into Ryan's chest. The scroll, inked in heavy, sweeping calligraphy and smelling faintly of scorched parchment, demanded an immediate, high-priority courier run across the contentious border of the war-torn province—an assignment that sounded distressingly like an emergency freight forwarding dispatch to an abandoned industrial facility.
Ryan let out a long, exhausted sigh, his fingers instinctively tapping against the strap of his canvas messenger bag as he scanned the frantic official's demands. To the magistrate, this was a matter of life, death, and feudal sovereignty; to a marketing coordinator accustomed to managing impossible event run-sheets and sudden vendor cancellations, it was simply an egregious violation of standard working hours. With the quiet, stoic resignation of a salaryman trapped in an endless administrative loop, Ryan adjusted his pressed white collar, gave the decree a professional, critical once-over, and mentally calculated how many train connections he would miss to fulfill this ridiculous cross-provincial dispatch.