Chapter 23: Advanced Convalescence*

"Sit on the desk," Sabine said, pulling her coat off. "Skirt up. I need a baseline."

"That’s not a real medical term."

"It’s on my clipboard, so it’s real."

I was being slow about it, so she pulled my skirt up herself.

Then she stood there for a second, looking at my cock lying against my thigh. She wrapped her hand around it and stroked once, slowly, from base to tip, and my tail involuntarily slapped the desk hard enough to knock the lamp over.

"The subject responds well to stimulus," she said.

"Are you actually going to write that down?"

"It’s useful information."

Then she bent down and took my dick into her mouth, and I stopped caring about the paperwork. She went all the way down until her nose touched my stomach, held herself there, and looked up at me with my cock buried in her throat.

[God, teenage me was an idiot not to give Sabine more screentime.]

Sabine pulled off, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and climbed onto the desk with me. She didn’t bother taking her shirt off. She just unbuttoned it enough to get her tits out, pushed me flat on my back, and sank down onto my cock in one motion.

"Fuck."

She rode me with her hands planted on my chest, slow, her pussy sliding all the way down my cock and lifting nearly all the way off before she dropped again. I grabbed her hips and started meeting her halfway. That got a reaction. Her rhythm broke, she leaned forward, and after that it was a proper fuck. Her hips slammed down, my cock bottomed out in her every time, and the desk creaked under both of us.

[... Is this thing gonna survive?]

Papers slid off the edge. I got a mouthful of her tit and she let me have it, one hand on the back of my head, holding me there while she worked herself on me.

"Advanced convalescence," she said, breathing hard, "requires a full range of motion. Turn over."

So I ended up bent over her desk with my skirt shoved up around my waist. She kicked my feet apart with her boot, reached under me to wrap a hand around my cock, and worked two fingers into my pussy with the other, and my claws left marks in the wood that some poor groundskeeper was going to have to sand out.

I came all over her hand and her desk. She stroked me through it, squeezed out everything I had left, and then held her wet fingers up in front of my face like evidence.

"Adequate."

We went again on the floor about twenty minutes later.

---

Somewhere past two in the morning, I was lying on her office rug with her coat thrown over me, and Sabine had actually picked up the clipboard.

"Sakana, Kohaku," she read. "Beastkin, fox. Enrolled five weeks ago on a commoner scholarship. Initial appraisal, Rank F."

"Are you mocking me?" I asked. She kept going.

"Assigned dormitory partner, Everdawn, Lily. Combat practical: assessed as a non-participant." She turned a page. "Attended the Vantecca tea party without an invitation." She turned another page. "Spirit Forest Exam. Paired with Frostfall. Ignored a mandatory recall order, entered a restricted sector, and took a Warden’s strike at close range, which the field healers described as survivable only in the technical sense. Formed a contract with a lamplight weasel during the incident. Re-appraised eight days later at Rank E."

"That’s the whole file?"

"That’s the whole file." She set the clipboard down on her stomach. "Do you know what I find interesting about it, Miss Sakana? Every anomaly in my first-year cohort this term has your name written next to it somewhere."

"Pure coincidence," I said. "I’m a very ordinary student."

"Mm." She reached over and scratched behind my ear, and my traitor of a leg started kicking. "Clearly. Anyway, roll over. We’re not finished verifying."

---

I got back to the dorm sometime in the morning, walked past Lily without making eye contact, and slept until noon.

Then the crystal board in the common room lit up, and the whole first-year floor screamed at once.

DUEL FESTIVAL

Open Bracket. All Courses. All Years.

Entries close in eight days.

Note: Must have valid sponsorship.

[Right on schedule.]

So that night, I sat on my bed, closed my eyes, and told the Manuscript to give me the whole arc.

[MANUSCRIPT — Lv.1]

[Requested scope: "Duel Festival arc, full"]

[COST: 40 MP]

[REMAINING: 25]

The reading took about two hours.

The Duel Festival, as written by a fifteen-year-old with unlimited confidence, opened with the Entrance Ceremony of Champions, where every entrant walked down the arena ramp and struck a pose. There was a scored category for it. I’d written a judging panel that awarded up to ten points for Presentation, and I’d written Lily’s pose in loving detail: sword raised, wind coming from nowhere, three whole paragraphs of it.

Then there was the commentator, a bard named Ollivant Prue, who I’d given exactly one personality trait: he screamed "NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL A DUEL!" after every single match. He screamed it after forfeits. He screamed it after a boy fainted from heatstroke before the opening bell.

And then came the bracket draw.

I smiled.

[Oh... The doves.]

Yes, I’d written fourteen doves, released from a gilded cage, each one carrying a name ribbon and landing on a slot of the bracket board while a choir sang. Teenage me thought this was elegant. Teenage me never once considered what fourteen birds do above a seated crowd for eleven minutes.

[I am so sorry, everyone who read this.]

I pushed through the cringe and got to Chapter fourteen, which was the one I actually needed. Chapter fourteen is where Serena tries to kill Lily.

In the original, the two of them meet in the quarterfinal. Three exchanges in, Serena drives an ice spike up through the ring floor at an angle that would’ve gone through Lily’s ribs, and she calls it a slip, in typical needlessly cruel villainess fashion.

Cassian vaults the rail, takes the spike through his shoulder, and bleeds all over the sand while Lily holds him. Serena gets disqualified and dragged out by two proctors. It’s the biggest beat in the whole volume.

I read it twice, and then I sat there with my weasel perched up on my left shoulder.

[Hm... This probably isn’t happening, huh?]

That spike was the payoff of two arcs of buildup.

The original Serena hated Lily because Lily had humiliated her at the entrance ceremony, outshone her at the appraisal, embarrassed her at the tea party, and shown her up in the forest. Four humiliations stacked up until the girl finally cracked and attempted murder.

In this timeline, Serena has spoken to Lily... maybe once? Unless she did some bullying I wasn’t privy to.

Every single one of those humiliations went to me instead.

[So the spike never comes. There’s no motive for it. The whole assassination is a beat with nothing under it, which means Cassian’s big rescue is unemployed too.]

[MANUSCRIPT — Lv.1]

[Requested scope: "Duel Festival, prize"]

[COST: 10 MP]

[REMAINING: 15]

The champion of the Duel Festival gets blessed at the closing ceremony by an archbishop of Lux and receives the Champion’s Benediction.

The Champion’s Benediction is a Divine Gift. It’s the one Lily uses in volume five to survive the Calamity Queen’s opening attack. Without it, volume five is nine pages long and ends with a funeral.

So Lily has to win a tournament that Serena Frostfall is going to enter. Serena, who is SSS-rank, who is currently about four grades of monster above where Lily is sitting, and who has no reason on earth to get herself thrown out this time.

[Great. Wonderful.]

And there was anothe rproblem.

Lily is a commoner scholarship student. She has no house, no rank, and no sponsor.

In the original, Sabine signed for her, because in the original, Sabine took Lily on as an apprentice at that tea party.

This time, she took me (and she’s been taking me in lots of ways ever since, hehe).

So, there was a problem. Who was going to sponsor Lily?

---

I got up, walked to the common room, and found Lily in her nightgown, reading the crystal board with a mug in both hands and the most peaceful expression I’d ever seen on a human being.

"Isn’t it exciting?" she said. "The whole academy comes to watch. So many strong people, fighting." She thought about it. "Well, I can’t enter, obviously. You need a sponsor. But I hope everyone has fun!"

I blinked.

[... She doesn’t even care. That’s the worst part.]

I went back to my room and sat down.

[Okay. So we do it the hard way. We get Lily a sponsor, we get her into the bracket, and then I figure out how she’s gonna beat Serena in a fair fight... No pressure.]