Chapter 96: Process

I stood there, silent.

Up ahead, Fenna Greywild’s hips slammed into Sakana’s relentlessly. The pounding she was taking looked like it could split trees, but she seemed to enjoy it. Then, the filth started.

"Come on, harder. Fuck me harder!"

The moment she said that, my own thing hardened. As if it was a personal instruction it had heard.

And yet, I didn’t move. Instead, I watched the whole way through. From Sakana making that instruction, to when Greywild picked her up, wrapped her arms around her legs, and fucked her as she held Sakana in the air.

The part that stunned me was when Greywild came. A flood of white fell on the dirt beneath Sakana. It overflowed, and it soon became clear Sakana had been filled to capacity when the flood intensified.

The whole time, I was standing there with my own thing tenting in my pants.

Finally, Greywild let Sakana’s feet touch the floor again.

"Holy fuck," Sakana said.

I blinked, turned, and walked away, like I hadn’t seen anything.

I looked down.

[... I can’t just come back to Everdawn like this.]

---

{Kohaku}

"Are you... Okay?" Odette asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You’re... Different."

"In what way?"

She scratched her head.

"Uh... You’re very relaxed."

It was hard not to be.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been carrying a lot.

The world ends in a few years unless a blonde girl builds a harem she is not building, I have a schedule with like eleven events left on it and four of them are tournaments, and I have spent two months waking up at five in the morning to do sword forms with a body that has the upper-body strength of a wet napkin.

And Fenna Greywild fucked all of that directly out of me.

Gone. All of it. Some of my internal organs may also have been rearranged during the process, but honestly? Worth it. I’d fill out a customer satisfaction survey if they had them here. I would leave a review.

"You’re smiling at nothing," Odette said.

"I’m appreciating the weather."

"It’s not even good. It’s overcast."

"I’m an optimist."

I stretched my arms over my head and something in my lower back popped in a way that felt religious, and across the yard, Fenna was hauling a crate off a cart with one arm.

She looked over. Our eyes met.

I gave her a little wave. Just the fingers, one after the other, slow.

Fenna dropped the crate on her own foot, said nothing at all about it, and turned around so fast her braid hit her in the face. The back of her neck had gone completely red.

[Heh. I own her.]

"Fascinating," Odette said.

"Don’t you have a book?"

"I have four."

"Read one."

That was when Lily and Serena came up the path from the treeline, both of them carrying gear, Lily talking with her hands about something and Serena listening with that flat look she does when she’s actually paying attention.

"Lily! Serena!" I waved with my whole arm. "How was the hunting?"

"Six! We got six, and two of them were the big ones, and Serena let me take the second one on my own!" Lily was glowing. "How was yours?"

"Productive. Very productive. I’d call it a personal best."

"That’s wonderful!"

And then I looked at Serena.

She was already looking at me.

Not glaring, which is her default, and not doing the thing where she pretends I’m furniture. This was something else. Her eyes went down to about my waist, then came back up to my face, and she held it there for a second longer than any of this required, and her jaw was tight.

Then she looked away and told Lily they were behind on the equipment return.

[... Okay. What was THAT?]

---

Here’s something every teacher in every world should know. You can put a hundred and five teenagers on a beach for six days, and you can give them curfews, and marker flags, and be very stern about not going onto the water at night. But eventually one of them is going to find out there’s a tavern in the village.

It was called the Gull and Kettle. It had one room, one fire, and a barkeep who was being paid far too little to care about anything that went down there, and by the third night half the first year had worked out where it was.

By the time I got there, it was packed.

The Knight Course had taken the long table and turned it into an arm-wrestling bracket. Two Mage Course boys had set a napkin on fire on purpose. Reindl was laughing, which was how you knew she was drunk. And in the middle of the room, Prince Aldric Stellaris-Vane stood holding one cup of cider with both hands, surrounded on all sides by five drunk noble girls who were taking turns touching his arm.

"Is it true you can lift a horse, Your Highness?"

"I, well. I’ve never tried."

"You should try~"

He looked across the room at me with the eyes of a man in a hostage situation. I raised my cup at him and kept walking.

[Not my problem, buddy. You’re the male lead. This is your life now.]

My table was near the back, and it was mostly wolves.

This is a consequence I’m still getting used to. Ever since the thing with Fenna at the Duel Festival, about half the Wildfolk delegation treats me like I’m somebody important, and the other half treats me like I’m available, and on this particular evening those two halves were sitting on either side of me and competing.

"Your tail’s really soft," said the one on my left, who had a scar through one eyebrow and was on her fourth drink.

"It is, isn’t it? I brush it every morning."

"I could brush it for you."

"She doesn’t need you brushing anything," said the one on my right, who was taller and had put her arm along the back of my chair the second I sat down. "I already offered."

"You offered to carry her luggage. That’s not the same thing."

"It’s a higher stage than brushing."

"It is NOT."

I sipped my cider. I don’t know what they were arguing about, exactly. I don’t know what stage anything was. But I leaned back and let them go at it, and I made sure to laugh at both their jokes equally, and at one point I put my hand on the left one’s knee and my other hand on the right one’s shoulder, which in retrospect may have been the problem.

The tall one stood up.

The scarred one stood up.

Somebody’s chair went over, and then the tall one said something in a Wildfolk dialect I didn’t know, and the scarred one grabbed her by the collar, and a whole section of the tavern turned around at once to watch.

I finished my cider, set the cup down on the table, and walked out the door while they were still circling each other.

[Nice girls. Very nice girls. Hope they work it out.]

The walk back up to the facility was dark and quiet. You could hear the sea off to the left, going in and out, and the lamps along the path were far enough apart that you had to walk through a stretch of black between each one.

I was humming. I was pleasantly drunk. And, then...

"Sakana."

I stopped.

Serena was leaning against the fence post under the last lamp before the facility gate, arms folded, in her uniform with the top two buttons open. She’d been at the tavern. I’d seen her at the far end of the bar with a glass of something clear, not talking to anybody, and I’d assumed she’d left early.

"Frostfall~" I spread my arms. "What a surprise. Were you waiting for me?"

"I was walking back."

"No, you were standing still."

"I stopped." Her voice was flat. Her face was a little red, and I couldn’t tell if that was the drink or the lamp. "I saw you in there." ℴ

"Like everyone else did. I’m very visible."

"You had your hands on two women at once. Do you ever think? At all? About anything?"

I rolled my eyes, which, drunk, took a lot longer than usual and almost tipped me over.

"Okay, you know what, Serena? You have got a stick so far up your ass it’s holding your hair up. Somebody should get in there and pull it out for you, honestly, it’s a public service at this point."

I could immediately tell that the alcohol in the cider had started talking for me.

She moved.

I’d known she would, so it wasn’t a surprise. One step and she was on me, and her hand came up and closed around my throat and pushed me back against the fence post, the same as always.

"You know I could squeeze the life out of you, right? It would be easy. Remarkably so."

Yep, the usual. Except this time I was drunk.

And so, instead of choking and flailing like a reasonable person, I looked her in the eye and put my hand over hers, on my own throat, and pressed it a little tighter.

"Mm~ You’re gonna have to choke me harder than that, babe."

Serena went very still.

I licked my lips.

"Actually, you could choke me in a lot of ways."

Her eyes dropped to my mouth.

"S-Shut up," she said.

"Make me."

Her hands trembled. I could feel it.

And then, she kissed me.