Ch 87: Olivia Bright

Olivia Bright had been running for her dear life alongside her twin brother Joseph through the miasma-riddled beast forest.

They had been taken by complete surprise while training near the border of the miasma-filled forest, fighting against beasts to gain real-life experience and to acquaint themselves with the dangers of the real world. It was knowledge they had honestly been ingrained with from a young age, being the prince and princess of the elf kingdom. They had been equipped with enough understanding of their enemies and the world to navigate it with confidence.

And despite all of that fucking knowledge, they had been blindsided by elf traffickers who had launched at them like a horde of tidal beasts. The retainers they had brought with themselves had been completely overwhelmed, and what was even more infuriating was that those bastards had the audacity to dare to kidnap the prince and princess of one of the strongest kingdoms on the continent, the elf kingdom Sorayes. More than anything, the traffickers had not taken her guards and retainers with them. Instead, they had injured and killed some of her guards and had the nerve to drag her and her dear brother away, rendering them both unconscious with sedatives.

The kidnappers had come in fucking groups, and she had only brought a handful of retainers, thinking they would venture no further than the border and that little harm would come of it, since she herself was strong enough to protect them both. She and her brother had no plans to venture inside the forest. They were adults with enough brains to know better, and yet those fucking kidnappers had dared, in broad daylight, to spirit them both away.

While they were held hostage, they had managed to sneak away, but they were soon discovered, and they had been running for their lives for hours since, barely keeping themselves alive. The evidence was plain enough: their clothes were tattered and the two swords they had stolen from the kidnappers were bloodied from the miasma beasts they had stumbled upon along the way, beasts they had been forced to cut down while terrified of the kidnappers catching up to them. Some had caught up, and they had managed to kill those ones only by the slimmest of margins.

And, this wasn’t the end of their suffering. In all her life, she had never thought she would stumble upon a man in a place like this, and what struck her with jaw-dropping shock was that the man was wearing a crisp black shirt with matching black trousers, his dark black hair slicked neatly back. The man had flawless white skin, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, and by all the gods, the man looked devastatingly beautiful. He was entirely her type, and for the sake of everything, when he turned his head toward her, her breath seized in her throat and a primal fear crept through her at the sight of someone who looked no older than herself.

Her breathing grew tighter, sharper, more uneven as she sucked in a breath, and when she took a step forward from behind her brother toward the man, her foot came down upon a wolf's head. She immediately stumbled back, her steps faltering, and only then did she register the carcasses of wolves littering the ground ahead of her. Some had their heads severed clean. Some had their bodies split in two. Some had pissed themselves to death.

Fucking shit. How did I not notice this? Olivia could not believe she had not see the hellish carnage spread before her. All because she had been staring at the man the entire time. The man spun his sword lazily between his fingers and turned his deep, unreadable gaze upon her and then her brother.

She instinctively took a step to the side and placed herself between the man and her brother, glancing back with a cold dread coiling in her gut, afraid the kidnappers had finally caught up. When she turned her head back to the front, her heart lurched violently.

"Hiek." The breath caught in her throat and the sword she had been clutching in her right hand went slack in her grip, clattering to the ground with a dull ring.

The man had appeared directly before her with a speed so swift and so absolute that a shudder rolled down her spine before she could contain it. When his deep silver gaze swept over her from head to toe, she felt her heart slam against her ribs like something caged and desperate.

"Wh... Who are you?" The words left her lips before her mind could form them. She did not know how she had managed to utter those words out. She did not know when the man had moved his hand and reached out to touch her ears, which he seemed to find pleasing, grazing them gently.

She stood utterly still, like a statue, while her brother pressed against her back and cowered, having witnessed with his own eyes the bodies strewn around them. He must have seen it before she had, since he had been the one running ahead while she covered the rear, making sure that if any kidnapper lunged from behind, she would be the first to intercept them. She was not going to allow any of those bastards to lay a hand on her dear brother.

But her fears had been for nothing, because a man far more dangerous than any of those kidnappers had appeared from the front. No, it was they themselves who had stumbled blindly into the dragon's den.

"How beautiful," the man murmured, his voice cold as the night air that touched her lips.

"I am Lucien," he continued, his tone carrying a weight that pressed against the silence. "And why is an elf this deep inside the empire?" The word elf was spoken with deliberate emphasis, and her brother clung to her back even more tightly, his shaking hands grasping hers. "Sis," he rasped, his voice trembling badly. "H-he is... Nor..." He broke off with a sharp intake of breath before crying out in a voice stripped raw with fear: "Northern Blade."

Olivia felt sweat begin to soak through her back despite the biting cold of the air around her, a cold droplet running down her temple. Lucien Duskbane? The Northern Blade?

And as if to confirm it, the man's lips curved in the faintest smirk, so slight that she would never have caught it had he not been standing so unbearably close to her.

Before she could think of how to escape, her lips moved well ahead of her mind. "Help us," she plead, her voice coming out stronger than she expected, and Lucien regarded her with an expression of quiet amusement, his gaze lingering on her ears with more interest than felt comfortable.

"Wh-" Her brother began from behind her, but before he could finish, she cut him off firmly. "We need his help." She was startled by the steadiness of her own voice, by the resolve that underpinned it despite how fear streaked she was. She did not know where her courage was drawing itself from, or why she was extending trust to a complete stranger. She had heard his name, but he was a stranger to her and she to him, and yet, against all reason, something deep in her chest insisted she could rely on him.

Her eyes swept the carnage around her and snagged, for just a moment, on a colossal black wolf lying at the far edge of the clearing, nearly hidden among the dark due to its vicious dark fur. She had entirely missed it until now. Its body had been split clean in half down the center, one half fallen to the left, the other to the right. Even in death, the wolf radiated a regal, oppressive power, as though it refused to fully surrender even now.

She did not know the exact measure of the creature's strength, but she was certain of one thing: had she and her brother encountered it before Lucien, they would have been its meal. He had slaughtered it. Slaughtered the entire pack. Alone. No matter where her eyes moved, she found no other person in this hellish clearing but Lucien, and the rumors she had once dismissed with confidence began to feel embarrassingly naive.

She had thought the rumors were inflated, that there was no reasonable way a boy a year younger than her could have accomplished so much and climbed all the way to Sky rank. It was absurd to her. She was only at Master rank and he was two full ranks above her despite being younger. Fucking rumors, she had told herself. But seeing the carnage filling the ground firsthand, watching the way he had appeared before her like a shadow, she could not find any other explanation. The bodies were his work. She was certain of it.

Lucien did not answer her request for help. His lips did not part. He simply stood there and looked at the two of them, still and patient, as though he were waiting for something more to be offered. "Help us and I will reward you," she pressed, thinking that Lucien simply saw no value in helping them without something in return, and that the reward might be enough to tip the scales.

And as though he had indeed been waiting for precisely those words, Lucien opened his mouth at last. His red lips parted slowly.

The short-lived relief she had felt, that fragile bloom of hope at the thought that he might actually agree, collapsed entirely as his words settled over her like a bucket of ice water poured from a great height.

"I don't need your reward," he replied flatly.

***

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