Chapter 116: I Love You… Wait, We Can Create Skills?!

Freya stayed silent a while longer, as a knot of anxiety slowly formed in the pit of her chest.

She stayed like that, her back to Aria, her hands resting on her silk tunic, and let everything she had built up so far pass through her. The doubts, the questions she had pushed aside, and the silences she had pretended not to notice went by one after another, until at last they stopped tightening around her throat.

All the while, Aria didn’t say a word. She simply stood behind her, motionless, waiting for Freya to be ready.

Freya finally turned around, but without raising her eyes to her. She knew that if she met her gaze now, she would break down.

So instead, she did what Aria had just done for her.

She reached for the straps of Aria’s pauldrons and undid them one by one, slowly, then lifted the plates away and set them down beside them on the rug. Next she unfastened the breastplate, whose buckles resisted a little under her fingers, slid the vambraces down Aria’s arms, and pulled off her gloves one after the other, finger by finger.

Aria let her, without moving, her arms held slightly away from her body, never taking her eyes off her.

When the last piece of armor joined the others, Aria too was left in nothing but a simple silk tunic.

Freya then took both of her bare hands in her own and held them against her chest, her eyes still lowered.

"I have an idea of what’s going on," she said quietly. "Of what you’ve deliberately been hiding from me since the beginning, and of why you recited that Oath to me."

Aria didn’t answer. She only tightened her fingers slightly around Freya’s and gave her the time to open up.

"I’m not stupid, you know." Freya let out a small, shy laugh. "Well... not completely."

After all, thanks to a memory that had become a true database, Freya could perfectly recall everything she had seen, everything she had heard, and everything that had happened since she arrived in this world, and all of it led her to a single conclusion.

A conclusion too perfect not to be the true one.

"Don’t say that, Freya..."

Aria gently freed her hands, and before Freya had time to react, she drew her in and wrapped her arms around her shoulders. She rested her cheek against her hair and held her close like that, one hand on her back, the other cradling the back of her head.

Freya stayed frozen against her for a moment, then her hands slowly came up and clutched the fabric of Aria’s tunic.

At last, she raised her eyes to her.

"But I’m scared..." Her voice trembled. "I’m scared of what it means. I’m scared that you’ll confirm all of it, and that everything I thought I’d built on solid ground, whether it’s the two of us or myself... that it’ll all come crashing down."

Aria loosened her embrace a little so she could look at her. She raised her hand and ran her thumb beneath the damp eyes of the woman she loved so much, first under one, then the other, with infinite tenderness.

Her heart clenched to a degree no being in this world could have imagined, a pain so terrible that anyone else would have gone mad from it.

But her hand did not tremble.

Freya took a long breath.

"Then instead of a confirmation, or anything like that... just answer these two questions, Aria. Please."

"Anything you wish, Freya."

Freya gripped the fabric between her fingers a little tighter.

"Is what you’re hiding from me, and what you’re doing, for my own good?"

"Yes."

Freya didn’t wait a second longer before asking the next one.

"Do you love me? Me, Freya?!"

"Yes, Freya."

There wasn’t the slightest hesitation in her voice, not the slightest doubt, neither about the answer nor about the name she had just spoken.

Freya looked at her for a long time without saying anything. Her lips trembled, and the tears she had been holding back since the start of the conversation finally began to fall, but this time, it wasn’t fear that brought them.

"I love you, Aria," she breathed. "I love you so much..."

Aria laid her hand against her cheek, and Freya leaned into her palm, closing her eyes for a moment.

Then she rose onto her toes, and Aria bent down toward her.

Their lips met softly, almost shyly at first, in a light kiss that asked for nothing more than to be there. Then Freya slipped her arms around Aria’s neck, Aria held her close with a hand pressed to the small of her back, and the kiss grew deeper, longer, filled with everything neither of them had managed to say until now.

They stayed like that for a long while, without pulling apart, while outside, beyond the sound barrier, the camp went on living without hearing a thing.

When their lips finally parted, they still didn’t draw away. Freya kept her forehead pressed against Aria’s, her eyes still closed, and Aria went on holding her close, without a word.

A few minutes later, once the two women had calmed down and Freya’s doubts had been at least partly eased, they had settled together on the rug in the middle of the tent.

Freya had ended up lying on her stomach, her chin resting on her folded arms, with Aria sitting right beside her, legs tucked to one side, one hand idly playing with her beloved’s hair.

The tension that had weighed between them for days had vanished all at once, and they only realized it when they heard themselves laughing.

They talked about everything and nothing. Freya talked, Aria listened with a small smile and occasionally added a remark in a perfectly serious tone that made Freya burst out laughing, and the conversation drifted from one subject to the next without ever stopping, as easily as if they had never grown apart at all.

At one point, Freya propped herself up on her elbows to glare at her, pouting, and demanded to know why she had kept complimenting her in the carriage in front of everyone. Aria simply admitted, without the slightest trace of remorse, that she had done it on purpose, just to see her squirm, and that the kick to her ankle had been well worth it.

It was in the middle of one of those fits of laughter that Freya noticed the quantimana path running through the tent, just above them.

Her eyes lit up at once.

"Want to train a little tonight too?" she asked, kicking her legs in the air behind her, all excited.

"Of course. Why don’t we do something different tonight?"

"Ooooh~" Freya immediately turned away from the path to look at Aria. "Something new?"

They had started this training recently, and it consisted mainly of two exercises.

The first was to gently draw a quantimana out of the flow and guide it to a given point, whether that was Freya herself or another person. This temporarily expanded the "reserve" of whoever received it.

The second was the reverse: pulling a quantimana out of a person and returning it to the flow, which just as temporarily shrank their "reserve."

Both had proven extremely grueling for Freya.

The first difficulty was controlling one specific quantimana among the multitude that made up the flow. Aria had been very clear on that point: "To sharpen your control as much as possible, my lady, you will need to handle them one at a time at first." And since she was the one saying so, no one in this world could have contradicted her.

The second difficulty came from the very nature of quantimana. It was a variable that followed an anchor point, and it had to be guided to the desired point along the most accurate, most optimized path possible.

If it strayed from that path, it began to grow agitated and became absurdly hard to control. At that point, it was better to release it immediately, for fear it would explode, although, fortunately, the explosion remained minimal, since it was only a single quantimana.

Having to guide a quantimana that was already absurdly hard to control from point A to point B, all while following a line her eyes couldn’t even see, had therefore turned out to be nothing short of hellish.

Oh well, the harder the challenge, the sweeter the reward at the end~

Aria watched in amusement as Freya drifted off into her thoughts, a smile on her lips, humming to herself and swinging her feet.

She didn’t wait any longer before dealing her lover the finishing blow.

"What if we created a skill tonight?"

There was a silence.

Freya stopped humming. Her feet dropped back onto the rug.

Then she spun around all at once, scrambled over to Aria on her elbows and knees at full speed, and grabbed her by the shoulders, eyes wide, shining with excitement and greed.

"Create a skill?!! Are you kidding me?!!"