Chapter 102: The New Canon

I lay on my back in the storeroom and stared at the ceiling.

I had been doing that for about two hours. Fenna had left for the tavern after dinner, and I hadn’t moved since.

"I like you."

The words kept playing in my head on repeat. Lily had said them with her hands still bunched up in my blouse, close enough that I could count her eyelashes. Lily Everdawn, who turned red when somebody complimented her handwriting, had looked me right in the eye and said it without stuttering once.

Lily Everdawn liked me.

I made that girl. When I was fifteen, I sat at my desk with a notebook and a pink gel pen and wrote down everything I thought the perfect woman should be. She was kind, brave, beautiful, and a little bit clueless, the type to give her last coin to a stranger and then apologize for not having more. I wrote her so princes, knights, and archmages could fall in love with her.

Out of all of them, she’d picked... me.

The corners of my mouth started to curl up.

[WIPE THAT SMIRK OFF YOUR FACE, THIS IS BAD!]

I slapped both of my cheeks and sat up.

It WAS bad! Lily was the girl who needed a harem to survive the end of the world. She was supposed to fall for Aldric, Cassian, and every other idiot I’d written for her, and their combined power of love was supposed to carry her through the final battle against the Calamity Queen. If she liked me instead, the whole ending fell apart! Last night alone, I’d stolen Cassian’s entire rescue scene right out from under him.

[Oh, god. The rescue.]

I hadn’t even checked what the system did about that. Between the drowning, the crying, and the fainting, I’d forgotten it existed.

"Status."

The screen opened in front of me. At the very top, a notification was blinking.

New Canon Established: The Fox, The Peasant, and the Villainess

The canonical thread "Rescue at Sea" has been overwritten. The heroine’s first bond has formed outside the original text. The system has accepted the replacement.

Reward: +40 MP

Current MP: 100

I read it three times, moving my lips along with the words.

Then, I looked at the title again.

The fox was me. The peasant was Lily, the commoner scholarship girl.

The villainess was Serena.

The last time I saw this message, Dawnlight had bonded to Serena, and the whole story rearranged itself around her. This time, the system had taken the heroine’s harem and written three names on it, and one of them was mine.

[I’M IN HER HAREM NOW???]

The room tilted sideways. My vision went fuzzy at the edges, my ears went flat, and I started to tip over backward for the second time that day.

I grabbed the edge of the cot with both hands and held on.

---

I spent the entire next day avoiding Lily.

It started at breakfast, when I was halfway to my usual table with a tray of eggs and saw her come in through the dining hall doors. My legs turned me around on their own. I set the tray down in front of Odette and kept walking, straight through the kitchen and out the back door.

"Are you going to eat this?" Odette called after me.

"It’s yours!"

At the spirit handling assessment, Lily was standing in line three spots ahead of me. I offered the Knight Course boy behind me my lunch in exchange for his spot in the other line. He took it without asking any questions.

Around noon, I was crossing the beach when she came out of the infirmary tent with a basket of clean towels. I dove behind the fishing nets drying on their racks, and I got so tangled up in them that it took me ten minutes to get out. By then, she was long gone.

In the afternoon, I was lying on my cot in the storeroom, finally relaxing, when I heard her voice in the hallway.

"Fenna, have you seen Kohaku?"

"Uh... She’s around."

I climbed out the window.

[This is fine. This is a perfectly healthy way to handle things.]

---

By evening, I had run out of places to hide. So, when I spotted a blonde head coming down the dock toward the boathouse, I did the only thing left available to me. I pulled the lid off the nearest barrel, climbed inside, and pulled the lid back on over my head.

It was full of fish.

They were cold, and slimy, and they were all looking at me. Judging me.

I held my breath and listened. Footsteps came down the dock, walked past the barrel, and kept going. I let the breath out, very slowly.

Then, somebody knocked on the lid.

"Kohaku."

I didn’t move.

"Kohaku, I can see your tail sticking out."

I lifted the lid an inch. Sabine was standing over the barrel with her hands clasped behind her back, looking down at me with a very patient expression.

"... Good evening, Professor."

"Good evening." She tilted her head. "I’m obligated to ask whether you’re conducting an unsanctioned inventory of the academy’s fish stores."

"I’m hiding."

"I gathered that. From whom?"

"Lily."

Sabine held the lid up for me and waited while I climbed out. I landed on the dock with a wet slap, and a small fish slid out of my collar and flopped back into the barrel.

"Sit," she said.

We sat on the edge of the dock. Sabine didn’t say anything else, so I ended up talking just to fill the silence.

"She told me she likes me."

"I see."

"Like, LIKE likes me. And she’s... She’s got a lot going for her, you know? She’s going to do big things. There are people out there who are supposed to be with her, important people, princes and knights and all that, and I’m..." I gestured down at myself. "I’m a fox who just climbed out of a fish barrel. I don’t know what to say to her. So, I’ve just been running away every time I see her."

Sabine was quiet for a moment. Then, she sighed, and she smiled.

"Kohaku. Aren’t you two already married?"

"We’re WHAT?"

"You share a room. You eat every meal together. You walk to class together, you hunt together, and I have personally watched you fix her collar in the hallway on at least four separate occasions." She counted on her fingers. "Two nights ago, you fought a sea monster with an oar for her. Half the faculty assumed it was already settled. What exactly is the problem?"

I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

What the fuck was I supposed to say??? The problems were all tangled up in information that would break this lady’s head. It would be, to her, what some dude back on earth hearing "you’re living in a simulation" would be.

"You should go and work this out with your wife," Sabine said, and patted my knee. "Preferably after you bathe."

"She’s not my wife."

"Of course she isn’t."

She stood up and brushed off her skirt. Then, she paused, and the smile went away.

"One more thing. Whatever it is that’s happening between you and Miss Frostfall, I’d advise you to stop it."

My whole body went stiff.

"What?"

"That girl is going to be engaged to the crown prince by the end of the year," Sabine went on. "Royalty attracts trouble, and anything that orbits it for too long gets pulled in. If something goes wrong, nobody is going to blame the future princess. They’ll blame the fox." She tapped the scarf around my neck. "Be careful, Kohaku."

Then, she walked back up the dock, and left me sitting there with fish in my hair.

I took the long way back to the facility, along the path behind the storehouses where nobody ever went. I needed time to think.

Sabine was right. The Serena thing had been a one-time accident, fueled by cider and bad decisions, and it was over now. Serena had kissed me in the woods two days ago, sure, but she had been half-asleep. She probably didn’t even remember doing it. It was done. All I had to do now was figure out Lily.

[Okay. Step one. Take a bath. Step two, figure out what a normal person says to a girl who...]

I turned the corner and walked right into Serena.

She took a step back and looked me up and down. Her nose wrinkled.

"You smell like the harbor."

"I... was in a barrel."

"I won’t ask." She glanced over her left shoulder, then her right, and then up at the facility windows over the storehouse roof.

"Serena? What are you..."

She grabbed the front of my blouse, pulled me into the gap between the two storehouses, and kissed me.

It was a short kiss. She tilted my head exactly where she wanted it, kissed me slowly and thoroughly, and bit my bottom lip once before she let go. Then, she stepped back, straightened her collar, and looked at me like nothing unusual had happened.

"Everdawn was looking for you, by the way," she said. "Take a bath before you find her."

She walked off toward the facility without looking back.

I stood there between the storehouses, still smelling like fish, with my lip throbbing.

[Oh. I’m already in trouble, huh?]