Chapter 85: Felony!

We made our way out of the hall and into the night. The sounds of laughter and drinks quickly resumed after the speech ended.

I didn’t know how much time we had. So, I settled for the safe option, for once.

"Let’s hurry! Uh... Someone could be stealing it!" I told Lily.

"Mhm. Darn thieves... How dare they!?"

[... I almost feel bad for lying to her.] I then pictured the Calamity Queen wrecking the whole world, though. [Almost.]

A few stray guards were walking around from one place to another, looking vaguely like NPCs in a video game. I was still as weak as a toothpick, but this fox body wasn’t the same as my old human body. I was flexible, agile, and I could actually be quiet if I wanted to. Lily, funny enough, was having a bit of trouble.

"Let me know if you need a moment," I told her, giving her a thumbs-up.

She smiled.

"I’m fine. Let’s continue!"

"Yes, ma’am."

The moonlight was out in full force. It was making things easier to see, which was nice. But on the other hand, it was making us easier to see too, which I didn’t care for.

"Say, you saw that one student earlier?" One of the guards said. "The one who left for the mountain."

"The fox?"

Lily and I both stopped.

[... Uh, what?]

"Yes! Good grief, her tits were massive!"

I looked back at Lily like, "are you hearing this?"

Lily, meanwhile, looked like she wanted to go have a word with them. I gently put a hand on her wrist and tugged.

[Let it slide, sweetheart... Besides, I’ll take the compliment.]

We got past them by going low behind a stack of firewood, and then we had to wait, because two more came around the corner of the storehouse with a lantern between them.

"... So then, he says the tree is pink because of the soil."

"What? Is he stupid? That’s not how soil works."

"That’s what I said! I told him, my uncle grows turnips on the same soil, and the turnips are not pink."

[Turnips. We’re risking prison for life over Dawnlight, and these men are out here doing turnip science.]

Lily was crouched next to me with her hands over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking. I had to grab the back of her collar to stop her from tipping over into a bucket.

They went. We moved.

The last pair was posted near the well, and those two weren’t talking about anything at all, which was much worse. I pointed at the gap between the bathhouse wall and the fence. Lily nodded. We went through one at a time, and her sleeve caught on a nail, and she stopped dead and looked at me with her whole life flashing behind her eyes until I unhooked it for her.

"Sorry," she mouthed.

"You’re doing great~"

Then we were around the corner, past the light, and standing in front of the side entrance the warden had used that afternoon. The door was shut. There was nobody on it.

Lily let out a long breath and straightened her skirt like we’d arrived at a tea party.

"Okay," she whispered. "What now?"

I stretched my arms.

"Now, we walk around, see if we can find any places that would logically fit a massive boulder with a sword sticking out, you pull it out, and, uh... We hold onto it for the night." I quickly put my hands up. "ONLY for the night, okay? Just till morning!"

"Hm... Alright. Only for tonight. Got it."

The shrine grounds at night were a maze of low buildings that all looked the same, and none of them were labeled, because why would they be.

We started with the storehouses along the east wall. I checked the doors while Lily checked everything else, and by "everything else" I mean she was crouching behind planters and looking around corners with her hand on her sword like she was expecting an ambush.

"Clear," she whispered at me from behind a barrel.

"Great. Nobody in the barrel."

"A-A thief would absolutely hide in a barrel!"

[Would they? Would a thief fold himself into a barrel and wait, on the off chance that a sword walks past?]

She moved to the next one. At one point a cat came out from under a walkway and Lily froze completely, one hand up to stop me, staring it down for a solid three seconds before deciding it wasn’t a criminal.

"Sorry," she whispered. "It was moving strangely."

[She is so cute. I’m turning the cutest girl in the world into a criminal.]

The truth was I felt bad. She was out here in the cold with her heart pounding, guarding a province from a thief who did not exist, and the only reason any of it was happening was because I’d needed a story that would move her.

Then I thought about the Calamity Queen putting a hole through this whole continent in about eight months, and I felt better.

Anyway, the fourth building had light coming out of it.

It sat at the bottom of a short flight of stone steps, dug halfway into the hill behind the dining hall, with a heavy door and a lantern hung beside it. That was the left passage. Marisol had been right about where it went, which I’d assumed, since Marisol was right about most things.

Two guards were standing in front of the door. Both of them looked awake, which was a problem.

Lily pulled me back behind the corner and put her mouth next to my ear.

"There are two of them. They’re armed, and they’re going to be alert, because they know what’s in there." She was breathing fast. "Kohaku, what do we do? We can’t fight the guards. They’re not the thieves. They’re the good guys, technically, even though we’re also the good guys."

I reached into my collar and took out the weasel.

He was asleep. He came out in a limp little curl with his paws sticking up, and he opened one eye at me, and I gave him a scratch under the chin while I did the math.

TAUNT forces a monster to come after him. That’s how it reads on my Status, in plain letters. A monster. Not a person. So the question was whether the system that runs this world draws that line where a decent person would draw it.

[Teen me wrote this magic system in about four hours. Let’s find out.]

"Okay, buddy. Go be annoying."

I threw him.

He unrolled in the air, landed on the stone six feet from the guards, sat up on his back legs, and screamed at them. It’s not a noise a small animal should be able to make. Both men turned around at once.

Then they went for him.

One of them dropped his spear on the way, both of them made straight for a rodent in a shrine yard at full sprint, and the weasel took off down the path with the two of them behind him, out past the gate, up the slope, in the exact direction of the mountain nobody is allowed to go up.

The night got very quiet.

[... So people count. People count as "monsters." That’s a little bit fucked.]

I stood there with that for a second.

[I’ll think about it later. That’s a later problem.]

"Was that safe?" Lily asked.

"For who?"

"Any of them!"

"He’ll be fine. He’s faster than they are, and he enjoys the attention." I started down the steps. "Come on, before somebody notices two guards are missing."

The door wasn’t even locked. The warden had left a lantern lit, hung on a nail just inside, and the room past it went back further than I expected.

They were all in there. Forty-something blades, most of them still in their stone, laid out on low wooden frames in rows with paper tags tied to them, and the tags had writing I couldn’t read from the door. The air smelled like dust and cut rock. My ears went flat on their own.

And there, at the end of the row, was our boulder. Still on the cart. Still with the sword buried to the crossguard.

[Dawnlight!]

"That’s it," Lily breathed.

"That’s it. Okay, so you’re going to walk up there and put both hands on the-"

I stopped.

Something was wrong with the smell in the room. Under the dust, there was cold air and clean soap. It smelled awfully familiar. I clocked it as something I’d been sleeping next to for six nights, and my brain caught up with my nose about half a second too late.

Someone stepped out from behind the boulder with her hand hovering by the sword’s hilt.

White hair. Red eyes. Gloves on, of all things, like she’d thought about this.

Serena looked at us with wide eyes.

We looked at Serena.

"EH!?" Both parties said at once.