Chapter 52: Drawn To Him

Nora didn’t stand up to leave like the rest of the students did...

Around her the lecture hall emptied slowly in noisy currents — students pushing through clusters, and voices climbing back into the disbelief Crane had only temporarily pushed aside.

Marcus’ group left in an angry wave. Aria left without without looking back and eyes kept drifting towards the row where the group in first place still sat, as if the scores might rewrite itself if they stared long enough.

Nora remained in her seat with her hands folded loosely on the desk and let the noise move past her.

She didn’t leave because she was waiting for Ethan to stand. There was another reason as to why she remained glued to her seat...

Ethan sat to her right, face still half buried in his hands with the look of someone who had survived something he couldn’t quite speak about. Lila Kane was beside him, close enough that their bodies nearly touched, her golden eyes moving between the staring students as if daring them to say something.

Nora glanced at Lila, then at Ethan, before her eyes settled back down on the desk. She replayed everything that had happened in the third chamber...

The corpse field, the wall coming apart. The Wolf Alpha’s presence looming over them so thick that it was almost a tangible feeling. Rank B pressure sitting on the lungs like wet stone.

She remembered Ethan on his knees with blood leaking from his mouth when he had depleted his Death Energy. She remembered how close they were to actually losing their lives. A B rank monster was no joke. The fact that it was at the lowest Devil rank wasn’t even helping at all. If they struggled that much against a weaker Devil, the what would become of them if they encountered a Monarch?

The thought flashed once in her head, then she remembered the last command.

One order into a ruined undead. One forced collision strong enough to place cut on a forearm that should not have opened so easily but still somehow did.

Living blood in the air.... An opening for her ability to finally do what it had been built to do.

She had delivered the finishing blow. That was a fact. The academy’s own summary had attached her name to the kill.

But they didn’t know that it was only possible because of Ethan...

Without Ethan, there was have been no wound, no chance, no way of killing the monster...

Without the wound, her ability would have remained a set of broken threads against a hide too dense to penetrate.

If they had decided to try to leave, they would have joined the corpses they saw in the third chamber...

He was the only reason she was sitting in a lecture hall listening to first year gossip instead of going to train or doing any other thing...

She had told herself from the beginning that the arrangement was just a formal one. Nothing more nothing less. Restricted class users staying close enough to exchange information when they could. A living Necromancy reference because her brother’s absence still occupied a space nothing else had filled.

All of that remained true. At this point, she didn’t need too much of an explanation if she was caught staring too long.

But that had stopped being the case before long. She noticed when he was tired before he admitted it.

She noticed the the subtle lag in his commands when Death Link strain climbed.

She had also noticed Lila’s hand finding his in the helicopter when they were coming back...

When she saw it, she felt something in her chest tightening...

It wasn’t jealousy as far as she could tell... Nora was never the type to compete for attention...

She couldn’t deny that whenever she looked at him, she felt a pull she didn’t want to feelm.

She usually looked at him whenever she was assessing something. But that assessment had become a habit that had long since stopped being assessment.

She was drawn to him.

Drawn... that word fit too well, and she didn’t like it one bit...

A student two rows ahead was still whispering about Brimstone. Another was arguing, perhaps wrongly that Devil class monsters could not appear inside a regulated dungeon.

Nora let the noise blur past her as she focused.

She was so focused that she could feel the unsteady bearing of her heartbeat...

She looked at Ethan again.

He had lowered his hands, and raised his head.

From her angle, she could still see how slightly pale he looked as he still recovered from the backlash of pushing himself too hard. The customized uniform made him look better than most of the boys in their class, she couldn’t deny.

When Lila said something to him, his mouth moved as he gave a brief answer, and just looking at made her chest tighten in a way she didn’t like.

She had watched him almost empty himself for a score line and a set of corpses.

She had listened him apologize for his greed even though he had no reason to...

She had watched him refuse to perform harmlessness for a room that wanted to seal him.

Her brother had been brilliant and careful and still had not come back from the kind of attention the MCA reserved for inconvenient growth.

Ethan was growing in public now. First place had turned the growth into a headline. The sensible response — the Nora response was to maintain useful proximity as much as she could...

Instead she found herself doing dumb things like cataloguing the exact shade of green that his eyes glowed in when Death Link was active, and the way his voice flattened when he was cornered and refused to show it.

And the simple truth: *he kept us alive*.

Lila laughed, at something Ethan said. To her, the sound was possessive even if she knew it wasn’t trying to be.

Nora did not get jealous of it. As far as she knew, Lila had earned the right to stand close. She knew that well enoug.

She had held the Alpha’s focus with her body on the line while her own blood reserves was almost empty. If anything, Lila was the MVP of that fight.

Lila had probably come to accept that she had grown a kind of attraction towards him while she sat here pretending that her attraction was a practical kind even though it stopped being true...

She flexed her fingers under the desk and felt the ache of fatigue still clawing at her.

She sighed. Blood Craft always collected its debts. No surprise there.

Students were still watching their row. The combination of their achievementa would follow them through corridors and around the school for a long, long time...

Ethan glanced sideways, not quite at her, scanning the exits with the same flat look in his eyes. For a brief moment his eyes passed over Nora’s and held.

She did not look away, and when their eyes met, her chest did something stupid.

Something in her expression must have been off, because his brow furrowed slightly as if he was asking a silent question he knew she had no intention of answering.

She quickly averted her gaze to avoid anything awkward from happening, gathered her stuff and stood.

Lila rose with Ethan, already angling her body towards him and said something that made him roll his eyes.

When she she saw this, the realization hit her like a truck:

He was the reason they survived,

and she was no longer only interested in him for reasons she could properly defend....