Chapter 27: Main Quest

Raven.

For one full second, his brain simply refused to process it. She was thirty feet away not ninety seconds ago, standing at the edge of a group that included the one person on this campus who could turn Cane into a smear with a bad mood. There was no reasonable version of events where she had also somehow ended up directly behind him, close enough to muffle a scream, without so much as a snapped twig announcing the trip.

Unless there had not been a trip at all.

The pieces clicked with the particular, sour satisfaction of solving a puzzle he did not actually want solved. Hereditary magic. He remembered it now, buried somewhere in the original Cane’s secondhand gossip about the Harbringer bloodline — a cloning technique, old and rare enough that most nobles assumed the line had died out generations ago. If that was what this was, the woman with her arms locked around his skull was not the Raven watching the treeline. She was a copy of her, dense enough to have a heartbeat and, apparently, a bra.

Except that did not fully add up either. A construct with this much physical presence, holding together this cleanly under stress, was not the kind of thing a person Raven’s age and rank should be able to produce without help. Cloning techniques that stable usually cost the caster in blood, in mana, in the kind of visible strain that left a person swaying on their feet afterward — and she had shown none of it, not so much as a flicker of exhaustion. An artifact, maybe. Something amplifying whatever her blood could naturally do, quietly, without announcing itself. It was one more thing he did not remember from the novel, which was becoming less of an anomaly and more of a pattern he did not like. He filed the theory away, unfinished, next to a dozen other things about her that did not add up yet.

None of which solved his immediate, extremely pressing problem, which was that his face was still being enthusiastically held against her chest.

He weighed his options for exactly as long as it took to breathe in through his nose — not long, given the circumstances — and decided on the petty one. He bit down harder on the fabric already caught between his teeth and wrenched his head sideways.

The cloth gave with a satisfying tear, and half of what had been covering her chest went with it.

Her bra was plain, dark, entirely unglamorous, and Cane had approximately one full second to appreciate the view of her modest but firm breasts before Raven’s glare turned murderous. She shoved his face straight back into her soft chest with considerably less tenderness than before, muffling whatever comment he had been about to make. Without another word, she hauled him a solid distance through the brush, one hand still fisted in his collar, moving with an eerie, deliberate quiet that made his earlier stumbling look like a marching band. She did not so much walk as pour herself between the obstacles, weight shifting a half-second before each root and low branch, never once glancing down to check her footing. The sway of her hips and ass was tight and controlled, a testament to the powerful thighs moving beneath her skirt. He, by contrast, caught two more branches to the face and bit back every sound he wanted to make about it.

Only once the treeline had swallowed the sound of the group entirely — no voices, no rustle, just the ordinary creak of a forest minding its own business — did she finally let him go, shoving him back a full step as if putting distance between them retroactively fixed anything.

She rounded on him immediately, eyes blazing, one hand instinctively pulling the tattered remains of her blouse together. "What in the actual hell were you doing?"

Cane straightened, brushed a leaf off his shoulder, and told her — face flat, voice level, nothing in it that suggested a joke — that he had wanted her to scream.

"My plan was simple enough. A scream brings the group running. They see the ’Raven’ who ambushed me is a decoy, not their actual ally. The resulting confusion gives me a clean window to disappear before anyone thinks to ask what I was doing lurking in the bushes in the first place."

Raven’s glare did not soften. She was not buying it. "If you knew enough to guess what I am, then you’d know I don’t scream. Not about anything. Ever."

He conceded the point with an easy shrug. "Alright, you got me. The truth is significantly stupider." He met her eyes, his own expression deadpan. "I just wanted to know what colour your bra was."

A low, furious growl tore out of her, more frustration than words. "The universe forces me into an alliance with a pervert," she muttered, half to herself. "I should have just let the real thing handle you and let the chips fall. At least then I wouldn’t have sacrificed a perfectly good uniform top."

Ally.

The word snagged something in the back of his mind half a second before a familiar blue window bloomed into his vision, crisp and formatted, impossible to ignore.

[MAIN QUEST] 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

Help the Goth Baddie

Description: Raven Harbringer has uncovered credible intelligence that her former organization intends to strike during this examination. She requires assistance from someone capable of discretion — a role for which you are, conveniently, the only qualified candidate on campus.

Penalty: Failure may result in the death of one of the primary heroines.

Reward: System Update Pending. Additionally, Raven Harbringer will personally "reward" the Host.

Time Limit: Duration of the current examination.

Cane read it once. Then again, slower.

He had half expected the rush that usually came with a new objective — the greedy little spike of anticipation whenever a quest promised him something worth having. It did not come. What arrived instead was a low, unpleasant hum of wrongness, the kind of feeling that showed up whenever a fact refused to sit flush against everything he already knew.