Chapter 28: Help

[MAIN QUEST]

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.

An attack during this exam specifically did not track. He could not have said exactly why yet, only that some instinct built from two full readthroughs of the novel was quietly screaming that this was not supposed to happen here, was not supposed to happen now. As far as he could recall, this particular examination barely rated a paragraph in the source material — a minor beat between bigger set pieces, the kind of Chapter readers skimmed to get to the next heroine encounter. A terrorist strike large enough to kill nobles and make kingdom-wide headlines was not the sort of thing the book would have skipped past in a single throwaway line. Which meant either his memory of the novel had a gap exactly where he needed it not to, or something about this timeline had already drifted further off the rails than one rock thrown at a duskfang could explain. Neither option sat well, and that discrepancy mattered more right now than the reward line currently promising him a "personal reward" from a woman who’d just torn her own shirt fighting him off. Her tits looked great, but not ’get killed by terrorists’ great.

His expression settled into something serious enough that Raven visibly noticed the shift.

"Walk me through it," he said, his voice stripped of the earlier bullshit. "Exactly what you know. Start to finish."

She blinked at the change in him, clearly thrown. She made no move to fix the torn front of her uniform. Whatever modesty she might have clung to under normal circumstances had apparently been spent already; a woman with her particular history, he supposed, had bigger things to worry about than an exposed bra. The dark fabric did little to hide the bounce of her breasts with each breath she took. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

"A source I still maintain outside the academy, one nobody here knows exists, confirmed it. My old organization plans to strike during the exam. Not a skirmish, not a message. They’re here to kill as many noble students as they can and broadcast the results across the kingdom. The point isn’t the body count for its own sake. It’s the aftermath. Unrest, fear, and a wave of public distrust aimed squarely at the academy that failed to protect them."

Cane nodded slowly, then rattled off a handful of names — leadership figures buried in the original Cane’s memory of court gossip, names that carried weight in exactly the circles that mattered, Raven’s ex included.

"Of these, who’s on the ground for this?"

The question visibly staggered her. Her mouth opened and closed once. "Those names... they aren’t public knowledge. They aren’t even organization-wide knowledge. Only someone near the very top of the hierarchy should have access to a list like that." Her eyes narrowed, all business again. "Were you one of us?"

He narrowed his own eyes right back at her. "This isn’t the moment for that interrogation."

She pushed anyway, just once, her voice tight. "How am I supposed to trust a man who keeps producing information no outsider should have, without a single explanation attached to any of it?"

He did not answer, only held her gaze until she was the one who looked away first, a flicker of frustration in her dark eyes.

She nodded, still visibly rattled, and let it go — for now, he suspected, rather than for good. "Of everyone you named, only my ex, Alexander, is leading this specific operation."

Cane nodded again, unsurprised. That tracked with everything he knew about the man: reckless, righteous, the kind of leader who would walk his own people into a slaughter and call it a victory as long as the message landed. He worked the logic out loud, more for himself than for her.

"If this were simply a doomed, disposable strike, you wouldn’t need outside help. You’d let it burn itself out and mourn the casualties from a safe distance. The fact that you’re here, asking, means you understand something uglier." He met her eyes. "The organization doesn’t need this to succeed. Every operative involved can die, the strike can fail outright, and the Talons still walk away with exactly what they want. The goal isn’t victory. It’s the spectacle. The fear, the headlines, the erosion of trust. That kind of success doesn’t require anyone on their side to survive it."

Raven’s jaw was tight. "Which brings me to my actual target for this operation. Zero casualties. Not minimized. Not ’acceptable losses.’ Zero. On every side of the fight that matters to me."

Her expression as she said it braced for mockery, like she expected him to laugh in her face and call the number naive — the kind of target idealists set for themselves right before reality corrected them. The set of her shoulders was rigid, and the way her blouse was torn revealed the taut muscle of her stomach clenching.

He did not laugh. "Zero deaths," he agreed, his voice flat, without a trace of the performance he usually wrapped around anything sincere. "That’s the number we have to hit."

It was not about being generous or heroic. A quest that dangled a heroine’s death as its penalty was not threatening him with failure in the abstract — it was telling him, in the system’s own crude shorthand, exactly what outcome it considered acceptable and exactly what it did not. He had a growing, uncomfortable suspicion that "zero" was not just Raven’s number. It was the system’s too, whether either of them liked how that particular alliance had formed or not.