Chapter 200: Morning After

Arthur woke slowly.

For a few seconds, he wasn’t sure what had pulled him out of sleep. Then Emily shifted beside him, her knee grinding harder into his shins, and the rest of the situation came back immediately.

Chloe’s bed had absolutely not been built for three people.

Arthur was wedged against the cold stone wall on one side. Emily had somehow turned herself sideways during the night and claimed most of the mattress, one arm thrown across Arthur’s chest. Her hand had ended up resting on Chloe’s waist.

Chloe was trapped on Arthur’s other side, squeezed between him and the edge of the bed.

The room still smelled faintly of sweat, damp cotton, and the sharp healing solution Chloe kept beside the washbasin. Clothes covered half the floor. A stack of healer notes had been knocked beside the nightstand, and one of Emily’s boots had somehow ended up on Chloe’s desk chair.

Arthur shifted carefully. His left wrist answered with a dull throb.

Chloe was already awake, staring blankly at the ceiling. She felt him move and turned her head.

"Your girlfriend is heavy," Chloe whispered.

Emily didn’t open her eyes "I can hear you."

Chloe sighed and tried to slide toward the edge of the bed. Emily shifted, hooking an ankle firmly around Chloe’s calf to keep her from moving.

Chloe elbowed Emily’s knee.

Emily grunted, finally unhooking her leg, and let her go.

Chloe rolled off the mattress and walked toward the scattered pile of clothes, picking up whatever she could find. She pulled on a pair of clean underwear and winced sharply, her breath catching as the fabric dragged across the tender skin of her ass.

Emily cracked one eye open. She watched Chloe wince and looked visibly pleased with herself.

Chloe caught the look and gave Emily a flat, entirely unimpressed stare.

She finished buttoning her pale infirmary blouse, straightened her skirt, and walked back to the bed. Kneeling beside Arthur, she pressed a glowing hand over his left wrist, pushing a cold, steady pulse of magic into the inflamed joint.

Arthur kept his hand perfectly still.

"Learning?" Chloe asked quietly.

"Temporarily," Arthur said.

Chloe moved to Emily next. She pressed her hand against the dark, spreading bruise on Emily’s ribs where the Keeper had caught her. Emily sighed in annoyance, batting half-heartedly at Chloe’s wrist.

"Your hands are freezing," Emily complained.

"Your ribs are bruised," Chloe countered, keeping her hand exactly where it was until the magic finished cycling.

A few minutes later, Chloe stood in front of the small mirror above the washbasin, attempting to fix her tangled hair.

Emily walked up behind her, reached out, and pulled a heavy section of Chloe’s hair aside to inspect a dark, reddish-purple mark blooming across the side of Chloe’s neck.

Chloe watched her in the mirror.

"That one yours?" Chloe asked, looking past Emily to Arthur’s reflection.

Arthur looked at the bite mark.

"No."

Chloe’s eyes moved back to Emily.

Emily let the hair drop and went back to buckling her field jacket.

Arthur slung Whisperwind over his shoulder and they headed downstairs.

A second-year healer student passing through the hallway stopped dead. She stared at Arthur, looked at Emily, and then stared at Chloe as the three of them walked out of Chloe’s single-occupancy room at seven in the morning.

Arthur kept walking.

Emily didn’t even look at the girl.

Chloe kept her eyes fixed straight ahead and quietly swore under her breath until they cleared the building.

The academy dining hall was loud.

Arthur sat down next to Felix and Leon, pulling a massive plate of eggs and cured meat toward himself. He was starving. Emily sat across from him with a plate twice the size of his. Chloe set her tea and toast down beside Emily.

Felix was in the middle of complaining about the grading curve on an upcoming defensive-warding exam.

"You’re confusing physical mana anchoring with standard arcane shielding parameters," Leon corrected dryly, not looking up from his book.

Emily reached over and stole a piece of toast off Chloe’s plate.

Chloe immediately slapped her hand away.

Emily picked up the toast anyway and took a bite.

Chloe reached directly across Emily’s plate, grabbed a strip of cured meat, and ate it without hesitating.

Felix stopped talking. He looked at Emily, then looked at Chloe, noticing the way Chloe was sitting rigidly on the very edge of the wooden bench.

"Did you get injured at Saint Orlan?" Felix asked, entirely genuine.

Chloe took a sip of her tea. "Yes."

Arthur coughed hard, nearly choking on his water.

Emily casually finished the toast.

Outside the dining hall, the paths split. Chloe adjusted the strap of her bag, turning toward the infirmary for her morning rotation.

"Hey," Emily called out.

Chloe stopped and looked back.

Emily tossed a small, silver hair clip through the air. Chloe caught it instinctively, recognizing the clip she had left on her nightstand.

"Tonight?" Arthur asked.

Chloe gave him a long, measuring look.

Emily answered before Chloe could open her mouth. "She needs sleep."

Chloe blinked at her, slightly surprised.

Arthur looked at Emily. "You’re taking her side already?"

"No," Emily said flatly. "You’re annoying."

Chloe smiled, a genuine, quiet expression of amusement, and turned to walk down the infirmary path.

Arthur and Emily caught the morning transport to Warehouse 9.

The Obsidian Hand office was quiet. Sylvia looked up from her ledger as Arthur handed the Old North Road survey parchment across the desk. Sophia was sitting at a secondary table near the back, sifting through a stack of requisition forms.

Sylvia looked from the report to Arthur. "How badly are you about to make me regret stamping this?"

"Moderately." Arthur pulled out a chair. "In my defense, the road itself was mostly fine."

Sylvia unrolled the parchment and scanned the first few lines.

She stopped. "There is an active crypt under the shrine."

"Adjacent to it," Arthur corrected.

He had kept the report strictly professional, documenting the damaged wards, the concealed lower structure, and the heavier armored undead guarding the lower chambers. He strongly recommended a formal cleansing team. He left the Veiled Knife key and the Assassin Extension Rune completely out of it.

Sylvia sighed, pulling a secondary requisition form from her drawer. She looked at the detailed map of the lower chambers attached to the back of the report. "Who mapped the lower section?"

"Chloe," Arthur said. "The structural notes are hers."

"The entrance to the Keeper’s chamber is ten feet further left than the map shows," Emily added, leaning against the wooden counter. "But the rest is accurate."

Sylvia stamped the hazard addendum. "I’ll forward this for cleansing and mark the branch unsafe until somebody clears it. Chloe’s notes should save them a lot of blind surveying."

Sylvia took the paperwork into the back room to file the hazard addendum. Arthur leaned back in his chair and opened his interface.

[Level 37]

[Unspent Attribute Points: 2]

Two points.

Dexterity and Perception were still the obvious choices, but there was no reason to spend the points yet.

He was already chasing a second class built around the same stats, and he still had no idea what thresholds the Assassin rune might care about. He still needed two more keys. Kaelen was the next one he could actually track, and the Black Prayer Bead was going to be the real pain in the ass.

Better to hold them.

Arthur closed the screen.

Sophia walked over to the desk and dropped a rolled map over the empty space where the report had been.

"I found something on Kaelen," Sophia said.

Arthur sat forward.

Sophia unrolled the map, revealing the eastern foothills and the Old Quarry Roads. Several recent caravan hits were marked in red ink.

"I went through the old bounty records, caravan complaints, and insurance filings," Sophia said, tracing a finger along the trade routes. "Kaelen’s name disappears after the old bounty, but the attacks don’t. Some of the later robberies were blamed on different crews. Same kind of caravans, same stretch of road, and they keep taking the valuable cargo while leaving half the easier goods behind."

She circled the cluster with her finger. "Every hit that matches the old pattern falls somewhere in this corridor."

Arthur recognized the stretch of foothills. Kaelen had operated around the same quarry roads in the game, though the routes on Sophia’s map weren’t exactly the ones he remembered.

Emily leaned over the map, studying the distance from Lornfell.

"How far?" Emily asked.

Sophia pointed to the scale at the bottom. "Far enough that you aren’t going today."

Arthur looked at her.

"You both look like shit," Sophia said dryly.

Emily looked at Arthur.

Arthur folded the map. "Tomorrow."