Chapter 30 – An Answer That Came Too Quickly

Lyon didn't say anything.

He couldn't.

Lyon remained sitting on the couch, the remote still in his hand, the TV screen frozen on the menu of a movie no one was going to watch anymore, with a single sentence repeating inside his head at a completely unmanageable speed.

'I'm interested in you.'

'Romantically.'

Lyon's heart started beating faster.

'...Did I hear that right? Did I actually hear that right? Her? A girl? A real, actual girl with a physical body, sitting fifteen feet away from me, just said she's interested in me?'

And she wasn't just any girl.

The owner of one of the most powerful guilds in the country had just confessed to him!

Lyon tightened his grip on the remote slightly.

'There's a catch here... There's definitely a catch here!'

"Oh, Lyon..." the voice said in a tired tone.

Lyon froze.

"Don't you think it's a little late to start worrying about that?"

Lyon felt an absurd, almost physical sense of relief that lasted exactly as long as it took him to register the tone she had used.

'...You're back.'

"I never left."

'You haven't said anything in forever.'

"I was thinking."

'About what?'

"About how stupid you are. Besides, I talked to you a few minutes ago, and you ignored me."

'Ah.'

"But back to the point," the voice continued with poisonous calm. "You're sitting there breaking out in a cold sweat, wondering whether that girl is plotting something against you. And I'm asking you: don't you think it's a little late for that realization? Considering you fucked her more than ten times in the back seat of her own car thirty minutes ago."

'Don't say it like that!'

"How do you want me to say it?"

'Any other way!'

"Fine. Considering that thirty minutes ago, the two of you engaged in a consensual exchange of bodily fluids in front of an employee..."

'THAT'S WORSE!'

"It's the same thing."

'IT IS NOT THE SAME THING!'

The voice laughed inside his head, then lowered her tone again.

"She's probably going to try to tie you down now."

'Tie me down?'

"Tie you down. Bind you. Put a leash on you." The voice paused. "That's how human women work, Lyon. First they feed you. Then they buy you things. Then they bring you home. And once you can't live without any of it, they hit you with the 'I'm interested in you' line, and by then you're already cooked. You belong to her. You're not a person anymore. You're her property with limited rights to express an opinion."

Lyon considered that for a second.

One whole second.

Then he responded with an honesty the voice absolutely hadn't expected.

'Well... honestly, being tied down by a rich, hot girl like her might not be that bad.'

Silence.

A different kind of silence from the others.

"...What?"

'I said it might not be that bad.'

"..."

'Think about it. She thinks I'm a normal student. Just some ordinary college guy with nothing weird going on. She doesn't know anything about the other stuff.'

"She is extremely suspicious about the other stuff."

'Okay, she's suspicious, but she doesn't know.'

"She showed you fan art of yourself in your own living room three hours ago."

'That was a coincidence!'

"It was not a coincidence."

'It was a coincidence!'

The voice made a low sound somewhere between a sigh and a growl.

"Lyon, listen to me carefully. Have you lost your mind? Did all your common sense suddenly disappear?"

'No.'

"Yes. It did. And I'm going to tell you this one more time, slowly, because apparently it didn't get through your skull the first time: stop thinking with your dick."

'I'm not thinking with my dick!'

"You're thinking exclusively with your dick."

'I'm thinking with both heads! And one of them is doing math!'

"Math?"

'Math.'

And there, still sitting on the couch, his face still apparently calm, Lyon began laying out what he'd spent the last thirty seconds putting together in his head.

'Okay. Let's go one step at a time. She offered me a job, right?'

"Yes."

'If I accept that job, what happens?'

"You become her employee and her toy at the same time, and—"

'I wouldn't have to worry about money anymore.'

The voice went silent.

'Not even once,' Lyon continued, the idea inside his head beginning to accelerate at a dangerous speed. 'Never again. No more calculating whether I have enough money to make it through the month. No more eating rice four days in a row. No more checking my balance before buying anything. And that means...'

Lyon's eyes widened slightly.

'I could buy the console!'

"Oh no."

'THE CONSOLE! And the game! The game that came out yesterday! The one I've been waiting three years for and couldn't buy because a giant worm destroyed the entire store and wrecked my phone!'

"Lyon."

'And if we take this even further, I could buy a new computer! A real one! One that doesn't sound like a plane taking off every time I open two tabs!'

"Lyon."

'I could move! I could live somewhere my neighbor can't hear me opening the fridge!'

"Lyon."

'What?'

"If you accept that," the voice said very slowly, "you won't be able to turn into a girl and run around pretending to be some fake hero anymore."

Lyon stopped.

For one second.

Then he answered:

'I don't give a shit about that.'

"..."

'What?'

"Nothing."

'No, tell me. What?'

The voice let out a long sigh inside his head.

"You say that, but it isn't true."

'Yes, it is.'

"No, it isn't. You transformed yesterday. And the day before that. And last week. And—"

'Yeah, and every single time, I transformed for the same reason.'

"What reason?"

'Because I wasn't going to stand there and watch people die right in front of me.'

The voice didn't answer.

'It's not like I want to be a hero,' Lyon continued, staring blankly at the dark TV screen. 'I don't care about that. I don't want fame, I don't want people thanking me, I don't want to be on TV—which, by the way, already happened, and it was awful. It's just that if I let someone die when I could've stopped it, I won't be able to sleep afterward. And I already sleep badly enough. I don't need nightmares on top of that.'

Silence.

"...Uh-huh."

'What?'

"Nothing. It's just that all of that sounds very noble, but let me remind you that your instincts—"

'That's exactly why.'

"Excuse me?"

'That's exactly why,' Lyon repeated. 'I've already thought about it. Starting today, I'm going to eat a lot of meat.'

"..."

'A lot. Every day. Red meat, raw meat if I have to, whatever. If I keep that under control, those stupid vampire instincts won't bother me anymore, and what happened at the portal won't happen again.'

Lyon clenched his teeth at the memory.

'What happened at the portal is never happening again.'

And the voice went silent.

Actually silent.

Lyon waited for a joke. He waited for a sharp comment, a correction, an "that's not how it works, idiot."

He waited for any one of the twenty responses the voice normally would've had ready for a plan like that.

None came.

'...Hello?'

Nothing.

'Hey.'

Then the voice spoke again.

But in a different tone.

Low. Short. With something underneath it that Lyon couldn't quite identify, though it sounded a lot like resentment.

"Do whatever you want."

'Huh?'

"I said do whatever you want. Eat meat. Buy your console. Move into your luxury tower. Date that human. Do whatever the hell you feel like."

'Hey, wait—'

"But there's one thing I won't allow."

'What?'

"You finishing inside that human."

Lyon blinked.

'This again?'

"This again."

'Why?'

"..."

'Seriously, why? What's the problem? Explain it to me. Because you've been going on about this all day—'

"Lyon."

Lyon stopped.

But it wasn't the voice that had interrupted him.

It was Cya.

Cya was looking at him from the dining area.

By her own calculation, she'd been watching him for thirty-four seconds.

Thirty-four seconds since she'd said the most difficult sentence of her life, and thirty-four seconds during which Lyon had said absolutely nothing, hadn't moved, and had kept his eyes fixed on a dark television while his expression changed every two seconds for no apparent reason.

Inside her head, Cya had already constructed seven different hypotheses.

All of them bad.

"Did I say something unpleasant?" she asked.

Lyon snapped back to the present.

"Huh? No."

"You're quiet."

"Yeah."

"You've been quiet for quite a while."

"Yeah." Lyon cleared his throat, set the remote down on the couch, and rubbed the back of his neck. "It's just... you left me speechless."

Cya tilted her head slightly.

"Why?"

And then Lyon looked at her.

Really looked at her for the first time since she'd said it.

Cya was still sitting in that chair in the dining area, about eighteen feet away, her back straight, her hands resting on the table, her expression perfectly blank—an expression Lyon was, by now, starting to understand a little better.

Because her ears were red.

Very red.

And she wasn't moving a single millimeter, in the particular way people froze when they were desperately trying not to let anything show.

Lyon smiled slightly.

"Well... I wouldn't mind seeing if we're compatible."

Cya blinked.

"Compatible?"

"Yeah."

"What do you mean?"

"That," Lyon said, shrugging with as much casualness as he could possibly manufacture at that moment. "I'll go out with you."

Clack.

Cya's phone fell onto the table again.

Inside Cya Hogwarts's head, the world stopped for the second time that night.

'...What?'

'What did he just say?'

'"I'll go out with you"?'

'Go out?'

'GO OUT WITH ME?'

Cya kept her face completely blank while internally falling apart at record speed.

Because there was a problem.

A very big problem.

'I didn't ask him out.'

'I DIDN'T ASK HIM ANYTHING.'

'I only clarified that I was interested in him so he wouldn't think I was offering him a job as some kind of financial-control strategy. It was a clarification. Contextual information. Technically speaking, it was the correction of a misunderstanding.'

'And he took it as a confession.'

'He took it as a CONFESSION.'

Cya felt heat rising up her neck again.

'And he accepted.'

'He accepted immediately.'

'He didn't think about it. He didn't ask anyone. He didn't ask for time. He accepted in thirty-four seconds.'

'Is that normal? Do people accept that fast? Does that mean he was already interested in me too? Or does it mean he accepts anything people offer him? Or does it mean he feels obligated because of what happened in the car?'

'Does he feel obligated?'

'DOES HE FEEL OBLIGATED?'

Cya grabbed her phone off the table so quickly she nearly dropped it again.

And she started searching.

She searched as if her life depended on it.

She searched with her thumbs moving at a speed that would've impressed any of her subordinates.

She searched entire sentences, full questions, things she never would've imagined typing into a search bar in her life.

[What to do when a guy agrees to date you?]

[Is accepting too quickly a bad thing?]

[How to respond when someone reciprocates your confession?]

And she found exactly the same thing she'd found half an hour earlier.

Everything.

She found everything.

One entire forum said that in this situation, the best thing to do was play hard to get. That responding immediately killed the mystery. That a little distance created more interest, more desire, more motivation to chase. That whoever showed less emotion always held the power.

Another forum said that was stupid.

Another forum said, word for word, that playing hard to get was something insecure people did, that those kinds of games only wasted time that could've been spent enjoying yourself, and that leaving someone waiting after a mutual confession was practically ghosting them, which according to that forum was very badly viewed.

Cya read both positions.

She read them twice.

And she still couldn't determine which one was correct.

'There's no consensus.'

'Why is there never any consensus?'

'How does this species function? How do they reproduce when there isn't a single standardized protocol for any of this?'

And then, in the middle of all that, something happened to Cya that hadn't happened in years.

Her hand trembled.

Not much.

Barely.

But the phone moved enough for the screen to shake slightly in front of her eyes, and when Cya noticed it, she stared at her own hand in a kind of disbelief.

'...My hand is shaking.'

'Mine.'

And at that exact moment, Lyon stood up from the couch.

Cya backed away.

It was instinctive.

Immediate.

A movement her body made without going through any conscious decision-making process: Cya stood up, took two steps backward, and ended up partially barricaded behind one of the tall kitchen tables, clutching her phone against her chest.

Lyon stopped dead halfway toward her.

"...Cya?"

"Give me a few minutes."

"Huh?"

"A few minutes," Cya repeated, her voice still flat but slightly faster than normal. "I need to organize my thoughts."

Lyon looked at her.

He looked at the table.

He looked at the defensive posture of one of the strongest hunters in the country hiding behind a piece of kitchen furniture.

And decided not to ask.

"...Okay," he said, carefully raising both hands before sitting back down on the couch. "Take your time."

"Thank you."

"Take as much time as you need."

"Thank you."

And Cya lowered her eyes back to her phone.

The next four minutes were, for Cya Hogwarts, some of the longest she'd experienced in a very long time.

She kept reading.

She kept comparing.

She kept trying to build a strategy using the same methodology she used to plan containment operations, and at some point during those four minutes, she realized the methodology wasn't working.

Because every time she evaluated the option of playing hard to get, Cya tried to imagine the entire scenario, just like she always did.

She imagined responding coldly.

She imagined telling him, "I'll think about it."

She imagined his face when he heard that.

She imagined Lyon lowering his eyes a little, wearing that tired smile of his, saying, "Oh, sure, no problem," in that light tone he used whenever something actually mattered to him but he didn't want anyone to notice.

And every single time, without exception, Cya's chest hurt.

Not metaphorically.

It hurt.

A real, tight pressure right in the center of her chest that appeared every time her mind constructed an image of Lyon being rejected by her, then vanished the instant she discarded the idea.

Cya tested it four times to make sure it wasn't a coincidence.

It hurt all four times.

'That option is ruled out.'

Cya lowered her phone.

She placed it facedown on the kitchen table and stepped out from behind the furniture.

Lyon looked up from the couch.

Cya walked until she stood in front of him, a couple of steps away, her hands clenched at her sides and her back straight as always.

Except this time, she was trembling.

Her hands were trembling.

Her knees were trembling slightly.

And when she opened her mouth to speak, the voice that came out wasn't the flat voice of the Hogwarts Guild Leader.

It was something else.

"I-I..."

Cya stopped.

Closed her eyes for a second.

Breathed.

Then tried again.

"I hope I can be... a good girlfriend to you."

Small Schedule Update

Hi, everyone! (´｡• ᵕ •｡`) ♡

Since practically all of the support in the polls ended up going toward VQ, this novel will continue getting 1 chapter per day for the rest of this week.

After that, the schedule will drop to around 2–3 chapters per week, while I focus a little more of my time on VQ.

This novel will continue updating and will not be abandoned! I'm simply adjusting the schedule based on the support and the number of active readers following each story. (ง •̀_•́)ง

Thank you so much to everyone who keeps reading!