Chapter 58: Truce

"N-Now... Hold on... A... Second..."

I tried to get the words out, but it was hard given that Serena’s SSS-rank hands were wrapped around my C-rank neck and were currently squeezing the life out of me.

"Hold on, I’m almost done killing you," she said, wide-eyed. "Should only take a few more seconds."

This was quite the situation.

I mean, on one hand, getting choked by the hottest woman alive? A few of my dreams are playing out in real life. But, on the other, I’m dying.

[Okay. Think. Think! What can you say that’s gonna get her to not kill you right now... Or at least hold off on it for a few seconds.]

I thought of something.

[Oh, I can use TAUNT!]

With that thought, the weasel popped out of my chest, ready to protect me.

It looked at Serena, and Serena looked back at it with murder in her eyes.

Then, the weasel put one little paw to its forehead, saluted me, and vanished.

[TRAITOR!]

"Right. Where were we? Ah, yes." Serena started squeezing again.

[This is bad... What can I...?] My eyes bulged out of their sockets. [WAIT!!!]

"It’s about Lily!" I choked out.

The hands around my throat suddenly loosened up.

Obviously, Serena had no reason to care about my roommate. But, I was banking on the idea that her curiosity would be enough for me to construct a better reason to change plans in a moment.

"..." Serena’s red eyes narrowed. "Out with it. What about her?"

"The Champion’s Benediction!" I wheezed. "I only wanted to hand it to Lily! That’s all I wanted from the start!"

I could have said some supportive shit like "I don’t mind your dick" and "I have one of those too!" but I felt that getting the topic away from her genitalia was a better move.

And, almost as if losing interest, Serena’s dick began softening. Progress!

"Why would you," Serena started, then caught herself. I could breathe again. "Why does Lily need it?"

[Fuck.]

I blinked.

[I can’t just tell her "because Lily’s gonna fight her mom, the Calamity Queen, in a few years and she needs divine power to survive." That’s way too much. What do I say?]

My mouth moved before my brain caught up.

"I can see the future."

The silence that followed was so complete I could hear the water dripping from the tap behind Serena’s head.

Serena’s expression didn’t move at all. She just looked at me, like I’d grown a second head.

"You can see the future?" She repeated.

"Yes."

"... The future?" She squinted, as if to say "really?"

"Yes."

"And you saw that Lily needs the Benediction or she dies."

"Exactly!"

She looked more bored than murderous all of a sudden, which was a point in my favor.

I decided to press the attack!

"I-I mean, think about it! You know as well as I do, I have no business getting as far in the Duel Festival as I have! I’m weak! Extremely, pathetically weak! How else could I have beaten Perrin, or Aldric, even with your advice!?"

She paused.

That argument made her actually consider my words. Which was a hard thing to accomplish when you were telling someone you were a literal seer of some sort.

"..." Serena tilted her head. "So, theoretically, if you can see the future, you could also see everything that happened until now. The future becomes the past, after all."

"That’s very philosophical, but-"

"Tell me something only I would know," she said. "Something from my past. If you can see the future, at one point, you could see that. Prove it." She leaned in close. "Or I kill you."

I swallowed.

I actually could. That was the insane part. I literally wrote her backstory. And, she was my favorite character in the entirety of the Heroine’s Heart. I knew everything about her.

So, all I had to do was pick a moment and run with it.

"When you were nine, you threw up in the bushes behind the training grounds. Back when you were going to have your very first fight. And, you were so nervous, you lost."

Serena’s hands fell from my throat. Her eyes widened.

She stared at me, and I stared back for a very long few seconds.

Then her hands came back up and wrapped around my neck again, tighter than before.

"How," she hissed, "do you know that!?"

"I told you! I can see the-"

"No one knows that. No one. I was alone, I lied about it before I even got back to the yard, and I have never said one word about it since, so you can’t have-"

She was shaking. The SSS-rank prodigy of the Frostfall house was shaking because I’d recited a bad afternoon from her childhood at her like I was reading off a page.

Which of course, to me, that’s what it was.

"I can see the future!" I repeated, weaker this time. "I’m not lying to you, Serena!"

"Don’t say my name like you know me."

"I do know you! That’s the whole point! And I know what happens if Lily doesn’t get the Benediction, and it’s bad. She dies, Serena. She actually dies. I can’t let that happen, I can’t just sit and watch her-"

She was still choking me, but her grip had shifted from active murder to holding onto my neck because she didn’t know what her hands would do instead.

And then something touched my chin.

I looked down.

The tip of Serena’s dick, was pressed against the underside of my chin. It had softened earlier, but in all the excitement and choking, apparently it had gotten hard again.

We both looked at it, and then we both looked at each other.

"... Okay, now you really must die!" Serena lunged.

[Are you KIDDING me-]

She tackled me. My head crashed against the tile floor and my vision went white at the edges. Her hands were back on my throat, her thighs were clamped around my waist, and her cock was pressed hard against my sternum.

"Wait, wait, wait! LILY DIES! In the future! If she doesn’t get the Benediction, Lily actually DIES!"

Serena’s hands stopped.

She was breathing hard. Her face was flushed and her shirt was still open, her chest bare.

"You’re serious," she said.

"I’m dead serious! Literally! I just told you a thing that happened when you were nine years old, word for word, and you know I couldn’t have known that any other way! I can see the future, and in the future, Lily needs the Champion’s Benediction or she will die! That’s why I entered the tournament! That’s why I’ve been fighting this whole time! I just want to put it in her hands! And, look, I know you don’t care about my roommate, but you don’t want her to die, do you? Besides, you’re the strongest person in the academy! In existence! You don’t need it at all!"

Serena stared at me. Her grip on my throat had loosened to almost nothing. I could see her thinking, the gears turning behind those cold, vaguely-horny red eyes.

"... Fine," she said finally.

I exhaled so hard I nearly passed out.

"But I don’t trust you," she continued, and her voice went cold again. "I’ll hand it to her myself."

[Wait.]

"Yourself?"

"If Everdawn needs the Benediction to survive, and now I know about it, I’d be killing her myself by not giving it to her. Besides, like you said, I didn’t even care for the damn thing. I just wanted to crush you. So, sure, she gets the Benediction. But I’m the one who gives it to her. Not you. I’m not handing divine power to a C-rank fox because she told me a sad story about the future."

She let go of my throat entirely and stood up, and then she straightened her skirt, buttoned her jacket, and fixed her hair, all while still visibly hard.

[She’s just... going to tuck that back in and walk out? Like I didn’t just see everything? Like we didn’t just have this entire conversation while she was sitting on top of me with her-]

"Get out of my sight," Serena said.

"Y-Yes ma’am!"

I sprinted out of the scene as quickly as I could.

---

{Serena}

The walk back to my quarters felt so much longer than usual.

[That memory. The bushes behind the training grounds. I was nine.]

I remembered it now, clear as day. I’d been sick from nerves before my first real match. And then I’d lost that fight. Badly.

To Lily.

She’d found me afterward, sitting in the dirt with vomit on my shoes, and she’d handed me her handkerchief and said something like "you’ll get me next time" with that stupid, warm smile of hers.

Nobody else had been there. Nobody else knew.

[So either Lily told her roommate a story from when we were children, or...]

I stopped in the hallway.

[... She actually sees the future.]

I reached my door. I went inside. I sat on my bed.

I tried to sleep.

I could not.

I looked down and promptly groaned.

[... You have got to be kidding me.]

I was still hard. Still completely, infuriatingly hard. The whole walk back, the whole crisis of faith, the entire existential crisis about seers and prophecies and my dead childhood friendship, and my body had been stuck on one thing this entire time.

The feeling of that fox’s throat under my hands. The way she’d squirmed.

The wolf side of my biology had enjoyed that.

I reached down and wrapped my hand around my cock, knowing I wouldn’t see any rest until I got this out of my system.

[I am going to kill that mutt.]