Chapter 29: Plan [1]

Raven found him at the edge of his team’s designated patch of dirt and misery, right where the sad little field met the imposing dark of the forest.

The morning mist hadn’t burned off yet, clinging to the ground in damp, grey sheets.

She materialized out of it the way a bad thought does, silent and unwelcome.

One moment, there was only the mist and the trees; the next, she was standing ten feet away.

She didn’t lean against a trunk.

She didn’t sit. She stood with her arms crossed, a posture that pushed her modest breasts up against the fabric of her torn blouse, creating a surprisingly compelling landscape of its own. The regulation skirt, still crooked, pulled tight over an ass that looked like it was carved from stone, not flesh. Her gaze was fixed on something past his shoulder, as if he were just an inconvenient piece of furniture in her line of sight.

Her voice, when it came, was flat. All the dry, low amusement from the storage room had been scrubbed clean away.

"My contact confirmed the numbers. Three, maybe four operatives on the ground. They’re coming in through the eastern treeline." She nodded slightly in that direction. "Where the duskfangs were. It’s not a coincidence. Monster activity gives them cover. Anyone sees a shape moving between the trees, they assume it’s a proctor thinning the pack."

She laid out the rest in clipped, declarative sentences. Rough timeline. No new names. When Cane opened his mouth to slide a comment in, a perfectly good line about how her version of a morning report was significantly less fun than her version of an interrogation, she just talked right over him.

"—and they’ll be moving independently until they regroup at a pre-designated rally point somewhere inside the exam grounds."

It wasn’t that she was ignoring him. It felt more like she had failed to register his attempt to speak at all. He felt a flicker of annoyance, but he bit it back. Something told him this particular mood wasn’t one she wanted him knocking on. This was the part of her that hadn’t changed, the part that still lived and breathed in a world of threats and countermeasures.

When she finally fell silent, he offered his own read.

"Hunting them down one by one is a bad play. It’s messy. A single body turns up in the wrong ditch with the wrong kind of wound, and some proctor with half a brain starts asking questions we don’t want answered. This whole exam is chaos, but it’s sanctioned chaos. An unsanctioned corpse messes with the paperwork."

He kept his tone as level as hers.

"The move is procedural. We find a proctor, someone with a bit of authority, and frame a request. Quietly reposition a few patrols near the eastern treeline. Call it a routine precaution, lingering duskfang activity. Your name, your history, your old pals—they stay nowhere near the official report."

Raven’s head moved in a slow, negative shake. "No. We hunt them. Quietly. One at a time. A proctor is an unknown variable. I don’t trust some overpaid babysitter’s untrained guess to be faster or more certain than a blade I already know how to use. Trust is a resource, and I’m not spending it on a stranger."

Cane’s face remained deadpan. "There is something genuinely, almost inconveniently attractive about how casually you suggest murdering people before breakfast." He said it with the exact same tone he’d use to comment on the number of clouds in the sky.

She didn’t glare. She didn’t even twitch. Her gaze stayed fixed on the middle distance, and she moved directly into her next point as if the words had just evaporated the moment they left his mouth. That lack of reaction, the sheer, empty space where a retort should have been, was a thousand times more unsettling than if she’d pulled another knife on him. He hated that it unsettled him. At least a knife told him where he stood. This just told him he didn’t even register.

Neither of them pushed their plan too hard. They settled on a compromise born of necessity. The long, sharp ridge that marked the outer boundary of the exam’s territory became their dividing line, a landmark visible from almost anywhere.

"I’ll take the northern half," Raven said, her voice already distant. "The treeline. It’s ground I already have a feel for."

"Fine." Cane nodded. "I’ll take the southern half, the approach to the teleportation rings. Fits my plan anyway."

They were about to split, to turn and walk their separate ways, when she stopped him with one last line. It was delivered without drama, a statement of fact meant to be witnessed, not argued with.

"If either of us reads the ground wrong, the other one won’t find out until it’s too late to matter."

He didn’t try to crack a joke. He didn’t try to soften it. He just nodded, a small, sharp motion of acknowledgement. In that moment, watching her state the stakes so plainly, he found himself respecting her a little more. She turned and was gone, melting back into the misty woods with the same unnerving silence she’d arrived with. Cane watched the spot where she’d been for a second before turning south, toward his own arena.

---

Several quadrants over, where the grass was greener and the fortifications weren’t just packed dirt, Cassius Augustus leaned against a real stone parapet, bored out of his skull. Their team’s flag fluttered from a proper iron pole behind him, the entire position a testament to the academy’s unspoken rule: the strong get the good shit. Kai stood nearby, his posture relaxed, watching the distant shimmer of the other teams’ arenas. The uniform did unforgivable things to his figure, the trousers hugging an ass that was frankly a crime on a boy, his hips flaring out from a waist that looked impossibly slender.

"Kaia," Cassius said, the name slipping out on pure, lazy reflex. He caught himself a half-second too late, a flush crawling up his ears. He tried to cover it with a laugh that was too forced to fool anyone. "I mean—Kai. Sorry. Habit."