Chapter 797: Who Did I Offend? [Bonus - ]

Chapter 797: Who Did I Offend? [Bonus Chapter]

Solenne had squeaked and clutched her file to her chest while her ears went flat.

"T-Thora, please! He’s our Lord! It isn’t proper to—"

"Proper my hairy left foot!" Thora had snorted, spitting a fleck of tobacco onto the floor. "That lad’s got a whole flock of pretty girls circling his Keep like hungry hawks! Saintesses! Pirates! Elves with legs up to their necks! If you want a piece of him, you’ve got to be bold! You’ve got to tease him, sass him a little, and above all else..."

The stout dwarf had jabbed a thick finger straight at the shimmering pile of silver fur curled around Solenne’s stool.

"...wave those ridiculous tails right in his face!" Thora had bellowed. "No man with a pulse can resist nine fluffy tails swishing around his belt! Put some wiggle in your hips, lean over the workbench to grab a wrench you don’t need, and let the lad get a good look at what’s under all that fluff! And when he grabs the fur, you let him keep going! Maybe guide his hand a little lower, eh? Hah!"

Then the dwarf had leaned in close and dropped her voice to a loud conspiratorial whisper that the entire forge could hear anyway.

"And if that doesn’t work, you sit on his lap and say your tails are cold. Works every time... Trust me."

Solenne had turned so red that she’d nearly dropped the gear.

"T-T-THORA?!"

"What?!" Thora had cackled, slapping her own thigh so hard her pipe nearly fell out. "Trust me, lass! You show a little spine, flick those tails, and maybe bend over the anvil once or twice by accident, and he’ll be eating out of your hand by the end of the week! Or eating something else! HAH..."

Back in the present, Solenne wanted the stone under her skirts to open up and swallow her whole.

’Curse that loud-mouthed dwarf...’ Solenne groaned miserably in her head, digging her fingernails into the silk over her thighs. ’What was I thinking, taking romance advice from a woman who smells like slag and uses forge grease as perfume?!’

She looked down at her hands, her heart tangled up in a flustered knot of frustration and none of it had changed anything.

All that clumsy forced teasing and all that awkward posing, and what had it actually done? Nothing...

He was treating her exactly the same as always. He looked at her, he smiled, and then he went straight for her tails like she was a plush cushion.

’It hasn’t changed anything at all...’ she thought with a silent miserable pout. ’He’s still just grabbing my tails like always...’

Right as the gloomy thought settled into her chest, a broad warm calloused hand reached out from the side.

Silas, still casually pinning the thrashing Ther’Abella against his ribs with his left arm, stretched his right hand across the gap between them.

His long fingers sank smoothly into the thick velvet fur of one of her tails.

FLUFF!

His palm pressed deep into the dense undercoat, and his fingers curled in a slow gentle kneading motion that traveled from the middle of the tail all the way down to the sensitive spot near the root.

"Aaahn..."

A tiny breathless whimper slipped out past Solenne’s lips before she could clamp her teeth shut.

It was so soft and so helplessly needy that her whole body went rigid.

A jolt of sweet electricity shot from the base of her spine straight up to her ears and burst into a dizzy warmth behind her eyes, leaving her toes curling inside her slippers.

Her breath caught. Her golden eyes went hazy and fluttered half shut as a delicious paralyzing shiver ran through her whole body.

She liked it, Solenne couldn’t lie to herself about that... She liked it way too much.

The heat of his fingers sinking into her fur melted away every bit of tension she had but at the same time... a strange hungry ache tugged at her chest.

’I don’t want my tails to be the only thing he touches...’ she thought, her fingers trembling against her knees as her breath came short and shallow. ’Is that what I want...? His hands on my shoulders? On my waist? O-or do I really just want him to keep holding my tails forever...?’

She didn’t know.

Thinking about it made her head spin... Her body got really strange whenever he touched her tails.

Her skin got hot under her robes, her thighs pressed tight together, and behind her back, her other eight tails betrayed her completely.

Without a single conscious thought from her, they started swaying back and forth in big lazy arcs, leaning toward his hip all on their own like flowers turning toward the sun.

S-swish...

’No...’ Solenne decided with a silent desperate whimper, squeezing her eyes shut. ’This is crazy. Teasing someone into grabbing my tails isn’t for me at all. It doesn’t make me look bold or mysterious... it just makes me hopelessly embarrassed...’

Sitting on the other side of the boulder, Kaelia was quietly burning with jealousy.

The petite black-haired chef was sitting with her small hands clutching her knees and her apron a little rumpled, and her eyes were glued to Silas’s big hand buried in Solenne’s silver fur.

She watched the slow affectionate way his fingers kneaded it, and she listened to the sweet breathless little sounds spilling out of the fox.

Kaelia’s cheeks puffed out into a round childish pout, and her lower lip trembled.

’Why does Solenne get nine whole tails...?’ Kaelia thought, squeezing the fabric of her skirt until her knuckles went pale. ’Why don’t I have a tail too?! If I had one, it’d be soft and shiny and black as midnight, and I’d brush it three times every morning just so Lord Silas would want to touch it! I want him to touch me like that too... I cook all his favorite meals, I knead dough until my arms ache, I made a whole batch of honey buns just for him... and the fox gets all the petting while I sit here holding a spoon?!’

Her eyes flashed with a tiny spark of determination.

...Maybe when they got back to the Keep tonight, she’d ask Rowenna if there was some kind of rune that could make a fluffy tail grow.

Surely magic could manage something that simple.

Before Kaelia could start planning, Silas shifted his weight on the rock.

Still keeping his fingers buried in Solenne’s tail, he slid his palm along the fur and used it to gently coax her an inch closer to him across the stone.

At the same time, his left hand left Ther’Abella’s thighs to reach across the boulder, while his forearm stayed clamped over the furious elf.

His fingers settled on the small of Kaelia’s back and nudged the chef over until she bumped right up against his shoulder.

"Eep!" Kaelia squeaked with her hands flying up to her chest.

"You too," Silas said with a lazy grin, looking down at her flushed face. "Don’t think I didn’t see you staring at Solenne’s tails like they were a fresh loaf out of the oven... You looked ready to take a bite."

"I-I wasn’t!" Kaelia protested, her face going crimson all the way up to her cap. "I was just... looking at how soft they are! As a chef! For... for texture!"

"For texture," Silas repeated, completely deadpan.

"Y-yes!"

"Uh-huh. And here I was, thinking you were jealous." He leaned his head a little closer to hers. "Don’t worry. You don’t need a tail for me to pet you, Kaelia... You just have to ask."

Kaelia let out a sound like a squeaking kettle and buried her burning face against his shoulder but she didn’t move away.

Her smaller hands curled into the fur of his mantle and held on while her ears turned so red they practically glowed.

Silas chuckled, keeping her tucked against his side, and turned back to the fox.

He leaned down a little, his dark blue eyes sparkling with warm knowing amusement as he looked right into Solenne’s burning face.

"You’ve gone awfully quiet over here, Solenne," Silas murmured. "I saw that look on your face just now... What’s going on behind those cute fox ears? Were you cooking up another bold move to try on me?"

Solenne’s eyes snapped wide open.

Her face went so brilliantly scarlet that it put the crimson ferns down in the hollow to shame.

"I-I w-wasn’t...!" Solenne stammered, her words tumbling over each other in a flustered heap while her hands flapped uselessly in the air. "My Lord, I promise... there wasn’t any scheming! I was just... the air coming up from the hollow is really warm today, and my ears are sensitive t-to the wind! P-please don’t look at me like that, Lord Silas!"

Her ears flattened completely against her hair and tried to hide under her bangs, like if she squeezed them down hard enough she might disappear off the face of the earth.

Silas chuckled warmly, thoroughly charmed.

Unfortunately for his grip, that brief lapse in attention was the exact opening a certain squirming elf had been waiting for.

Ther’Abella’s cold blue eyes flashed.

The moment Silas leaned toward Kaelia, the arm clamped over her thighs loosened by a fraction of an inch.

Ther’Abella moved instantly.

She twisted her hips with the explosive desperate agility of a centuries-old warrior and slid her slender body right out from under his forearm.

Her hands hit the stone, and she pushed off in an acrobatic spring that flipped her upright in midair.

FWIP!

She landed five paces away at the edge of the ridge with her boots skidding across the moss.

"Hah! Free at last, you arrogant barbarian!" Ther’Abella spat, her chest heaving as she smoothed down the ruined mud-caked front of her tunic with furious trembling hands.

She looked back over her shoulder and shot Silas a glare sharp enough to split firewood.

’Laugh all you want, you insufferable thieving usurper...’ she cursed in her head, grinding her teeth until her jaw ached. ’You think you can carry a warrior of the Viridian Guard around like a prize pig at the market? I’ll get you for this! I’ll put rot-spiders in your boots! I’ll salt your tea! I’ll—’

Satisfied with her list, Ther’Abella spun on her heel with perfect military posture, pulled a fresh starlight dagger out of the air and leaped heroically back toward the fight.

The instant she turned her face forward...

WHAM!

A four-foot club of petrified wood swung through the air like a runaway log.

An old bramble brute had climbed the eastern side of the ridge completely unnoticed during the chaos, and it had picked that exact moment to take one big blind swing.

The club hit Ther’Abella dead center across her face.

SMAAACK!

The sound was dull, dense and horribly loud as Ther’Abella didn’t even have the breath left to scream.

Her head snapped back, her boots left the ledge entirely, and she launched into the air in a perfect uncontrolled backflip.

FWUMP-FWUMP!

Then she did a second one.

She sailed fifteen yards through the misty air with her arms and legs flailing in big chaotic circles, and then she crashed straight into a jagged pile of moss-covered boulders at the edge of the hollow.

KRASSSH!

She hit the stones with a heavy clattering thud and tumbled into a limp disheveled heap between two rocks.

A little shower of pebbles rained down onto her silver hair a second later.

TIK! TIK! TIK!

A beat of total dead silence fell over the ridge then, from every corner of the battlefield, a wave of uncontrollable laughter burst up into the trees.

"BWAHAHA!" Lupina howled from down in the muck, slapping her thigh with a clawed hand as she doubled over. "Did you see that?! She did two whole flips before she hit the rocks! Two! That’s a ten out of ten!"

Even the five new Shieldmaidens, holding their formation behind their shields, had their shoulders shaking with muffled helpless snickers.

Up on the boulder, Silas threw his head back and laughed out loud with the deep sound rolling across the whole clearing.

Beside him, Kaelia was squealing into her apron, and Solenne’s embarrassment was instantly forgotten as she clutched her stomach and wheezed.

The bramble brute that had hit her stood there on the ridge for a second, looking at its own club like it wasn’t sure what had just happened then Silas flicked his longsword without even looking at it, and the brute fell apart into neat chunks of firewood.

SHHHK!

Ten paces below the boulder pile, Aki whipped her armored leg through the body of a lunging crawler and split the wooden monster in half with a crisp spinning kick.

KRAAACK!

She spun on her heel, her azure eyes wide with real frantic concern as she looked toward the pile of rocks where her Hero had vanished.

"Ther’Abella!" Aki called, cupping her armored hands around her mouth as she stepped over a smoking root. "Ther’Abella, are you okay?! Can you hear me?!"

From the deep crack between the two boulders, a single trembling mud-splattered hand rose slowly into the air.

The fingers curled in, and the thumb stuck straight up in a stiff shaky completely unconvincing thumbs-up.

...It wobbled.

Down under the pile of rocks, buried in gravel and crushed ferns, Ther’Abella stared up at the canopy with glassy unblinking eyes while her ears rang like a thousand angry cicadas.

’Who...’ she wondered in a faint dazed stupor as a drop of green sap dripped onto her cheek from a broken root above her. ’Whose shrine did I knock over in my past life...? Who in the heavens did I offend to deserve this day...?’

Down in the hollow, the fight was building toward its finish.

Aki’s girls were holding the outer edge with steady stubborn discipline.

The Shieldmaidens stabbed out from behind their shields in tight quick jabs, cutting down anything that tried to break through the line, while Elowynn’s rapid-fire sparks kept the eastern side locked down behind a curtain of crackling orange explosions.

The Blessed Land girls, meanwhile, were turning what was left into a slaughter.

Near the middle of the hollow, Aurelia had completely abandoned her gentle healer’s poise.

The Saintess had borrowed a spare sword from one of the Shieldmaidens, and she was carving through the brush like a holy storm.

’Argent Edge!’