Chapter 36: Scumbag’s Guide to Diplomacy [1]

Yelena won the election.

If you could call it an election. Four minutes of Marcus’s faction quietly deciding they would rather not fight anymore did not count as democracy in any serious sense, but she had won it, technically. She ran on the twin promises of comfort and the long game, and now she led. That suited Cane just fine since leading, as far as he could tell, mostly meant other people did things while she stood around looking regal about it. Marcus and what remained of his little bloc had not been exiled, exactly.

Nobody had drawn a line in the dirt and told them to stand on the wrong side of it, but the mood radiating off them was unmistakable—the specific, simmering resentment of men who lost an argument and now lived inside the consequences, shoulders stiff, voices clipped whenever Yelena gave out assignments.

They moved like conscripts rather than volunteers.

Cane, for his part, was having the time of his life.

He lay flat on his back in a patch of sun that did more for his mood than any quest reward had managed so far. Shirtless. One arm folded behind his head for a pillow. The other held what was technically not a coconut—some local fruit with a name three syllables long that he heard once and immediately discarded.

It looked like a coconut, split like a coconut, and tasted like a coconut with slightly more attitude, so as far as Cane was concerned, it was a coconut.

He tipped it back, drained a mouthful, and let himself have the specific, smug satisfaction of a man who gamed a system correctly on the first attempt. Helping Yelena win her little election had cost him almost nothing.

A handful of quiet, deniable whispers dropped into the right ears on Marcus’s side, each one carefully engineered to sound like the listener’s own idea rather than Cane’s.

People did things when you made it seem like they thought of it.

The oldest trick in the book.

And now here he was, reaping every last drop of the dividend while people who actually fought for their position sweated through resource-gathering in the tree line.

His mind wandered, sun-warm and pleasantly empty for once. He started building a small, indulgent mental case for why exactly he deserved this. He needed this. Some kind of banked reserve of relaxation.

Between Raven dragging him into blackmail-adjacent terrorist negotiations at knifepoint and the system’s relentless insistence on quests with body counts attached to the failure state, the man had not had five consecutive minutes of peace since arriving at this academy.

Every other protagonist in every other story got a training montage, a beach episode, some gentle downtime where nothing tried to kill them or recruit them into international terrorism. Cane had gotten a torn shirt, a bra reveal he still had not fully processed, and a main quest with the word penalty attached to it in bold.

He was owed this. He was owed several of these, back to back, possibly for the rest of the semester.

He took another slow pull from the coconut and started, unprompted, drafting the actual terms of his imaginary vacation policy. Mandatory sun exposure. At least one attractive woman within eyeshot at all times, purely for morale.

No mandatory violence unless it was the theatrical kind that ended in applause rather than a body count. And absolutely, under any circumstance, no further contact with Raven Harbringer’s family of professional terrorists for a minimum of forty-eight hours. He considered, briefly, whether he should put it in writing somewhere, hand a copy to the system like a man filing a grievance with an uncooperative employer, and decided that would probably just get him mocked in a font only he could see.

He settled instead for drafting it mentally, clause by clause, the way he imagined a lawyer might, if lawyers ever negotiated with divine bureaucracies on behalf of exhausted reincarnated degenerates. The system, predictably, had not weighed in on any of this, which he chose to interpret as tacit agreement rather than the more likely explanation, which was that it simply was not listening.

Which was, of course, exactly the moment a stream of ice-cold water hit him directly in the face.

It arrived with zero warning, a hard, deliberate jet of it splashing across his forehead and down into his open mouth mid-sip. The coconut flew from his hand and tumbled down his bare, sun-warmed chest, dumping the last of its contents in a cold, sticky trail over his abs on the way to the grass.

Cane made a noise he would deny making for the rest of his natural life—high, undignified, unmistakably a shriek—and scrambled upright fast enough to nearly tip himself over. Water dripped from his jaw, coconut juice slicking down toward the waistband of his trousers. He glared up at whoever was responsible with the wounded fury of a man who was doing absolutely nothing wrong.

Yelena stood over him, one hand still extended from whatever spell she had just used to end his peace.

She was not alone.

Flanking her on either side were three girls Cane recognised vaguely from the earlier scuffle, all of them having appointed themselves her personal retinue somewhere in the last hour. Cane, still blinking water from his eyes, could not stop himself from looking.

To Yelena’s left stood a tall girl with dark auburn hair pulled back into a severe, practical braid.

She wore a fitted crop top that stopped well short of her navel and a pair of tight athletic shorts that rode high on her hips.

Modesty and that outfit were mutually exclusive concepts.

Cane caught that her name was Selene, and that Selene had the kind of toned, sun-browned thighs that suggested she had spent more of her life running than sitting.

On Yelena’s right, a shorter, curvier girl named Priya stood with her arms crossed under a chest that the crossing did absolutely nothing to minimise her tits, quite the opposite actually.

A swimsuit top, clearly packed for a very different kind of exam, was paired with a miniskirt short enough that the breeze kept threatening to make an honest man out of it and reveal her tight ass.