Misadventures Incorporated

Chapter 381 - Pledge IV

Her mask crumbled as she descended the steps. Her lips shook, her eyes lost focus, and their lids began to droop. Looking around the house did nothing to help. She could see her wherever she looked. Lounging on the couch. Lazily wandering down the hall with her eyes half-closed. Standing in the kitchen and constructing a terrible meal.

She could practically hear her voice as the memories came flooding back.

She had tried so hard to suppress them.

She had fought them off for months on end.

And for a while, it looked like she was able to put them behind her. But seeing the look on her mother’s face, seeing the familiar way her teacher grasped his blade, and speaking with her father in person. All of it had broken the dam wide open.

She wanted to rip open a hole in the void and scream.

Her senses were muted. Everything was blurry. She barely felt the wood beneath her feet as she wandered through the house. Her already dysfunctional nose returned not a single result. And even her prided ears saw the world drowned out by a persistent ringing.

It wasn’t until she felt a set of arms around her shoulders that she finally bit her lips, clenched her fists, and returned to reality. Her breathing was still rough, but she leaned into the embrace. The one thing that was always there as she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The familiar scent tickled her tongue as the familiar warmth lifted her spirits. Eventually, she spun around and returned the hug, burying her face in the fox girl’s chest. A moment that lasted until her ears were filled with footsteps.

She lightly pushed Sylvia away and directed her eyes up the staircase. It took another few moments, but she soon found a pair of boots descending the familiar path. They came alongside the one human in the space. He toyed with his new sword as he walked, even as its ice ate away at his uncovered hand.

Belyaev smiled when he noticed their gazes. It was about as forced as expected. The old man was trying his best, but the impression he gave remained that of a weary old soul. It seemed like he may well collapse if prodded a little too hard.

“Want to head out back?” The emotion leaked into his voice. It shook when he tried to speak, but he firmed up by the end of his question. 

Claire didn’t respond immediately, but she took a breath after Sylvia squeezed her hand and slowly opened her mouth.

“Might as well.”

She magically opened the sliding door that led out to the patio, floated over the railing, and landed in the backyard. It wasn’t the biggest space, just a little over thirty meters in either direction to accommodate the full size of her old true form. Said form had left large depressions where her body once slithered. But while they were certainly more eye-catching, Claire’s gaze sat on the regular old footprints instead.

Not all of them were hers. Some were left by shoes a little too large—shoes that belonged to someone even taller than the squid.

All of a sudden, she lost the urge to make use of the backyard. There were still traces of her presence, and anything that they did was sure to wipe it away. Still, she pressed forward. It was time to move forward. She couldn’t just cope. Of course, she could have simply bottled up her emotions and squeezed their voices away. But she knew that one day, everything would fall apart. Just as it had on Borrok Peak.

“To be honest, there wasn’t much left for me to teach her by the time she left,” said Belyaev. At some point, he had donned an oven mitt. It was the type of glove that would clearly hurt his dexterity, but at the very least, it was better than getting frostbite. “I showed her most of my tricks and had her memorize most of the runes. The only thing she had left to do was to master them.” He poked the tip of his weapon with his free hand. “Do you have anything else? Unfortunately, there isn’t all that much I can do with a blade that doesn’t bend.”

“I can fix that,” said Sylvia. “It just needs to be like Lia’s, right?”

“Yes, if you could.”

“Mmk.”

The bard pressed a hand to her chest and sang a small set of jovial notes. It was maybe a third of a song, with the main stanza only repeating twice. It didn’t look like anything had changed, but when the berserker tried the tip, following its conclusion, he found that it was as rigid as a willow.

“That’s perfect, thank you,” he said.

“I wanted to make it last forever, but true ice is kinda hard to enchant,” she said. “It’ll probably be back to normal in a few days.”

“A few days is more than long enough.” He turned to face Claire and held the rapier in front of his chest. “I would tutor you the way I taught the sisters, but I doubt it’d be all that effective. It would be better if we sparred.”

“That’s fine,” said Claire.

A Boris appeared in her hand. He changed shape three times, becoming a spear and a shieldlance before winding up as a frozen axe with a handle made of bone. The process was half to renew her state of mind, and half to demonstrate his capabilities. There was no reason to hide them. She wasn’t looking to catch the old human off guard.

“Ready?”

“Yes,” he said.

His blade was already dancing through the air by the time the words reached her. It wasn’t an attack; he hadn’t closed the distance. He was simply drawing the runes that he needed to enrage. She could have sprouted her wings and closed the distance in a heartbeat, but Claire refrained. There was no point in interrupting him when she had explicitly asked for a demonstration.

He bolted across the yard as soon as the inscriptions were written. As was the case with his disciple, Belyaev’s muscles never grew and his veins never bulged. The enhancement was strictly magical in nature. And perhaps because of his mastery, or perhaps because he didn’t have any claws to flex, his body was not clearly affected. His eyes had only flashed red for the briefest of moments. Claire could tell at a glance that he was still mostly there. He was perhaps just a little more susceptible to trickery, but that was about the extent of his loss of function. Everything else that had come with the spell was a strict enhancement.

With his fighting style no different, he was still subject to all the same limitations that the catgirl had struggled with. His sword did not immediately strike his target. The overly flexible tip was knocked back as the body swivelled through the air. It seemed like an opening. But the master was not as flawed as his apprentice.

He suddenly twisted the angle of his blade when the lyrkress moved to block it. The tip flickered, moving up and down, forward and back. Its final destination was far from clear, or at least it would have been, had Claire not determined it from the movement of his eyes.

She almost wanted to laugh. Though certainly far more skilled, he was just as honest as her former companion. Perhaps that too was something he had taught her.

It almost felt like she was fighting her again.

Boris flashed through the air. Like a candle in the dark, he pulled everyone’s eyes with his glimmer as he drew a perfect arc. The human parried him, catching his edge with the bottom of the icy blade’s guard while its tip arced down towards his mistress’ wrist. In terms of sheer force, he was by far the winner. The false axe was readily knocked out of the way, but his weapon was still repelled. A fresh blade grew from the back of the lizard’s body and caught his icy edge, right as it sprang forward.

His slash was certainly stopped, but that was only half the attack. The other half of his body whipped around, his arm moving in the same disjointed way as his rapier as he drove his fist forward. If it was Lia, she would have used a claw, but that was more so an adaptation than part of the formula.

In either case, it should have been impossible to tell exactly where it would land, but again, his honesty proved itself a fault. Claire twisted away from the attack and took a few steps back. When he charged to close the distance again, she tugged on his leg. And surely enough, just like his apprentice, the master lost his balance.

The only difference was that he failed to fly face-first into the dirt. He drove his hand into the ground and transformed the attack into a frontal flip. Belyaev spun like a dancer, almost failing to telegraph the attacks aimed right at her ankles, her waist, and her chest in sequence.

Claire leapt over all three with a single motion, only for him to vanish and appear right where she planned to land. He was already in the midst of a punch. It was a shame then that she had opted out of gravity. It wasn’t like she flapped her wings. She simply released herself from the planet’s grasp and stopped falling altogether, just a few centimetres in front of where his fist wound up.

The human looked between his hand and the girl before returning it to his side and lightly muttering a command under his breath. His enraged state was released in a heartbeat, a much calmer look replacing it outright.

“Why don’t we call it here for now?” he said. “I don’t know how much further we can push it without either of us getting injured.”

“We have a healer.” Claire pointed her tail at the half-elf. “We’ll be fine.”

“You might be.” He lightly hammered his waist with his free hand. “But these old bones are already starting to creak.”

Claire paused. “Alright.”

It was a bit of a shame. The way he fought, the way he moved, the way he reacted. All of it was so familiar that she felt like she had taken a trip right down memory lane. Even though Lia would have never been able to keep up with the speed of their previous exchange.

“Thanks,” he said, as he continued to massage his spine. “You must have sparred often.”

“Yeah.” Claire smiled, softly. “We did.”

“Guess that means I’d better follow up on my promise.” With a stretch of the back, he put some distance between them and slowly raised his weapon. “I said it earlier, but she knew all my tricks. The only ones she couldn’t pull off were the ones that needed more classes.”

“She was bright.”

“Yeah, she was.” He took a breath. “Both sisters were prodigies.”

Claire nodded. She had never met Alina, but Lia’s diary had painted a picture of only the most competent twin.

“They were supposed to surpass me. They were supposed to outlive me and pass down my techniques.”

Again, the lyrkress nodded. There was nothing she could say to the old man lost in his memories.

“Anyway, here’s the gist of it.” Beylaev raised his sword to his face, took another breath, and carved a series of runes into the air. They were much smaller than the ones that he and his disciples had demonstrated on every other occasion, requiring far more precision to shape. By the time he was done, there were over fifty of them in all. “These are a fair bit weaker since I don’t want to break anything, but each basically has got its own effect.”

He prodded the first rune, the lines in which stretched with his blade before rebounding like an elastic. The second disintegrated when he touched it, and the third ignored any attempts he made to move it. So on and so forth, he demonstrated a wide range of different properties ranging from offensive spells to remote slashes.

“You’re supposed to draw these with the motion of your blade while you fight,” he said. “You can hide them all over the battlefield and pop them when the time’s right. Oh, and they’re meant to be invisible.” The runes faded in time with his words. “But that requires a runecraft class over a thousand. Lina had one, but Lia was never quite motivated enough to match her.”

“Can you combine them?”

“O’course,” said the human, “but that’s the part that requires another class. Synergist is the name. I told them to make it their fourth or fifth.”

The lyrkress nodded. “They look useful. But I doubt I’d remember the runes.”

“Yeah, probably not. Honestly, I barely remember them,” he said, with a chuckle. “Half the time, I have to get the blood flowing first.”

There was a brief moment of silence. Neither said anything as the summer breeze blew by, rustling the grass and ruffling their clothes.

“Would I have made a difference? If I was there,” asked the old master.

“Yes.” Another moment of silence. She wasn’t sure if she was meant to lie or tell the truth. But eventually, she settled on the latter. “No.”

“Yeah, I figured,” he muttered. “Your countrymen are tough. And the one that we saw in that song seemed even tougher than the others.”

“They aren’t my countrymen.”

“Maybe not in your books, but they still know you as one of their royals.”

“I don’t care.” Claire squeezed her lizard’s tail. “It was never something I wanted.”

Belyaev frowned. “Yeah, I know it sucks, but that’s just how life is. Sometimes, you roll the die and get shit. It’s just how it goes.”

“I wish it wasn’t.”

“Yeah, you and me both.” Stretching his back again, the bald human walked back over to the kitchen door. “Now come on, let’s get going. Everyone else is sitting around, waiting for us to wrap up.” He pointed at the observers standing behind the glass. At some point, Arciel had accompanied Lia’s parents back down to the first floor. Sylvia was there too, bored with her face in her hands as her tail flicked to and fro.

“You’re very strong,” said Liliya. “Belyaev rarely backs down so readily.”

“He only does it when he knows he’s outmatched,” said Lavrentiy.

“Oh, lay off,” muttered the old human. “You weren’t supposed to tell her that.”

Claire briefly closed her eyes. “Lia’s half the reason.” She toyed with a set of vectors. They swirled around the tips of her fingers, but she stopped short of opening a portal. “Do you want to stay the night?” she asked. “We have plenty of guest rooms and the maids keep them clean.”

The Paunseans took a moment to exchange looks.

“We’d love to,” said her father.

“Shall I call for the maids?” asked Ciel. “To draw a bath, among a few other things.”

“Yes.” Claire ripped open a much smaller hole and magically floated the dinner table’s contents back through it. “We’ll need a moment to reheat dinner in either case.”

“If it’s just drawing a bath, we can have Belyaev handle it,” said Liliya. “It’d be a good chance of pace for him to do something around the house for once.”

“You make it sound like I’m not a solid ninety percent of our income,” he muttered. “Where’s the well?”

“Fret not. I shall have the maids attend to this duty,” said Arciel, with a laugh. “It is not with well water that we bathe in Vel’khan.” She started off towards the door. “I shall return before long.”

“I’ll come with you,” said Sylvia. “It’ll probably be a whole bunch faster if I warp us around, and there’s something I want to take care of in town.” She stretched her back, followed the witch into the foyer, and crafted half a portal before spinning around. “Oh and uhm, Claire?”

“What?”

“Don’t get any funny ideas about helping with dinner please.”

Laughter rang throughout the room as the lyrkress twisted her lips into a frown, grabbed the fox girl’s cheeks, and gave them a seemingly violent tug.

The rest of the evening went rather swimmingly. They enjoyed a traditional, Paunsean dinner, took turns soaking in the bath, and chatted around the fireplace. Most of the discussion revolved around the Vernelle family and its past. And that was precisely why Claire found herself staring at the diary when the day came to its end.

It floated in the air above her as she lay still—not that she had much of a choice. Sylvia, who was still in her elven form, had fallen asleep with her body half wrapped around the lyrkress’. She couldn’t really budge without waking the half-drunk fox.

After another brief moment of hesitation, another deep breath, and another squeeze of her best friend’s hand, she slowly opened it and started flipping through.

One by one, she danced her eyes across the pages. She read about the adventures Lia had growing up. She read about the tough training that her master put her through. She read about the time she spent as a part of the military’s force.

And then, she read about the time they met.

The time they spent together.

She read through it all.

The sun goddess had started poking her way back over the horizon by the time she was finally done. But feeling more content, more relieved, more free than she had in months, Claire had no trouble drifting off to the land of dreams.