Free Web NovelChapter 28: The One Thing You Never Do to a Yandere
I woke with her warmth against me.
Alice was still asleep, curled into the crook of my arm, her head on my chest, her white hair spread across the sheet. She wore a faint smile, even sleeping. I stayed still a while, listening to her slow breathing, feeling her breath on my skin.
The night came back in fragments. Her voice, her skin, her hands. The weight of everything we carried, gone for a few hours. I’d never known anything so gentle.
She finally stirred, blinked, and when she found me already watching her, her smile widened.
"Morning," she murmured, her voice still thick with sleep.
"Morning."
She nestled a little closer against me, with no desire whatsoever to move.
"I could stay here forever," she said. "Just like this. You and me, this bed, and nothing else in the world."
"We’ve got a road to get back on at dawn."
"The world can wait." She ran a lazy hand across my chest. "It’s taken enough. It can spare us a morning."
We stayed there a long while, dawdling, talking about nothing. She laughed easily that morning, lighter than I’d ever seen her. Happy. Truly happy.
We did get up eventually, reluctantly, and went back down.
Elsa was waiting for us in the hotel lobby.
She wasn’t alone. Beside her stood a hooded woman, tall, whose face I couldn’t make out beneath the fabric. A long, motionless silhouette, a presence that my Eye — when I cracked it open on reflex — read back to me at a density of mana that took my breath away. Far more than anything I’d come across.
"Ah, there you both are," Elsa said as we came down. She didn’t introduce the stranger, didn’t explain — she just gestured toward the door. "Come on, let’s walk a bit. What I’ve got to tell you isn’t the sort of thing you say in a hotel lobby."
Alice shot me a look. I shrugged — I knew no more than she did. We followed them out.
Elsa led us through the town without another word, the hooded woman bringing up the rear in silence. We passed the gates, left the last houses behind, and kept on down the road until the town was nothing but a smudge in the distance. A deserted spot, away from everything and everyone’s ears.
She finally stopped, and turned to face us.
"Right. Let’s start with the pleasant part." She handed us back our two bags. "Your things. And the rest of the order’s inside — your bags are bottomless as long as it’s your mana sealing them, so I had everything loaded up before I came to meet you." Then she picked up a long cloth-wrapped bundle at her feet and held it out to me. "Except this. This one I wanted to put in your hands myself."
I took the bundle and opened it.
Two sabers. Two twin blades, curved, long, in dark sheaths. I’d ordered them at a time when I didn’t yet know how badly I’d need them. I drew one.
The steel was beautiful. Bright, dense, perfectly balanced, with that quality you feel at the first touch and that no garrison blade had ever had.
On reflex, I let my Eye settle on it — and a window opened.
[ Laia & Naia — Rarity: Rare ]
Twin sabers forged from lunar steel, meant to be wielded as a pair, their blades honed along the mana to conduct the wielder’s element without scattering it. Laia: +2% agility · Naia: +2% strength. Two That Are One: wielded together, the blades attune themselves to the mana of the one who carries them.
"The System’s reading them for you, I see." Elsa had followed my gaze. "That’s normal. It reads what you own, and what others allow you to read, nothing more. An object belongs to whoever holds it — until they’ve given you their consent, you’ll stay blind to whatever they carry."
Alice then drew a long dark staff from her bag, crowned with a set amethyst crystal — her focus, the one she’d been waiting weeks for. She spun it once in her hand, and the mana answered around her at once, sharper, better channeled than with her bare hands.
"Here, look at mine," she said with a smile tugging at the corner of her lips, holding it half out to me. "I’ll allow you."
I laid my Eye on it.
[ Verdict — Rarity: Rare ]
A focus carved from yew heartwood, crowned with a set amethyst, made to amplify and channel its bearer’s magic. +3% mana · Through-line: tightens the trajectory of spells and reduces their scatter.
Three percent. On anyone else, it was negligible. On Alice, with the reserve of mana she already dragged around, those three percent came to more raw power than I would ever have. The focus simply made her frightening.
"Not bad," I said, and she got that little satisfied look she wore whenever I acknowledged her strength.
I sheathed my sabers and slid both scabbards across my back. They found their place there as if they’d always been meant to be. At last. The Dance of the Tidal Widow was no longer bridled. With these in hand, it would give everything it had.
"Good," I said, straightening up. "Thank you."
But something was wrong. Elsa hadn’t brought us all the way out here, alone, far from everything, just to hand back a pair of sabers. And the hooded woman still hadn’t spoken or shown her face. Alice felt it too. I saw her go tense beside me.
"Elsa," she said, and her voice had changed. "Who is she?"
Elsa looked at her a moment, then sighed, like someone broaching a conversation they’d have preferred to avoid.
"Her name is Sylwen Thalorë. She’s a high elf." She paused. "And she’s here for you, Alice."
A silence fell.
"Excuse me?" said Alice.
"You’re going to go train with her people for a while. A month, roughly. The high elves have no equal in this world when it comes to magic — there’s no one else who can teach you what they can. And in the meantime, Kuro will train on his own side, with me."
"No."
The word cracked out, flat.
"Wait." I’d spoken at the same time as her, and I took a step forward. "You want to separate us? Right now?"
"Yes."
"No," I repeated, and I felt something harden in me. "It’s out of the question, Elsa. We fight better together, we came through that whole dungeon together. And you show up one morning to decide you’re taking her to the other end of the world for a month, just like that, without even asking what we think?"
"I’m not asking, no." Her voice stayed calm, and that was the worst of it. "I’m telling you how it’s going to go."
"Then the answer’s no."
I’d placed myself in front of Alice, half in front, without even thinking about it. My body had done it on its own. Elsa noticed the gesture, her single eye lingered on it, then came back up to me.
"Think for two seconds, Kuro."
"I’ve thought it through."
"No, you’re not thinking. You’re reacting." She took a step toward me, and the air changed between us, heavier, tenser. "So listen to me, just once, and then you can decide if I’m wrong."
Behind me, I could feel Alice’s mana swelling, the air starting to hum, that cold thing rising in her. But Elsa wasn’t looking at her anymore. She was looking only at me.
"How many times have you nearly died, since we started traveling together?" She didn’t wait for my answer. "How many times have you thrown yourself at something far too big for you, because you knew, somewhere deep down, that she’d be behind you to stitch you back up? The castle. Your trance. The queen, the day before yesterday. Every single time, you went further than you should have, because Alice was there."
I didn’t answer. Because it was true.
"There’ll come a day when she isn’t there — and that day always comes, Kuro, in a war. That day, you’ll make the same gamble you always make, and there’ll be no one to pick up the pieces. You’ll die. Stupidly. For having counted on her one time too many." She let a silence fall. "And the day you die, what do you suppose becomes of her?"
That cut me clean off.
"You’re too dependent on each other, the two of you," she went on, lower. "It’s not a reproach. You’ll fight side by side almost always, and that’s exactly as it should be. But each of you has to know how to stand on your own, even just once, the day it comes to that. Otherwise, when one of you falls, the other falls with them."
I stood there, without a word. The anger was still there, but underneath it, I knew she was right. I’d known it from the start, maybe. I’d leaned on Alice like a safety net, over and over, and one day that net wouldn’t be strung.
"And there’s more to it than that," Elsa added. "You each have very different things to work on, and neither of you can learn in the other’s place. Alice has to push her magic as far as she’s able, and for that there’s only the high elves. You’ve got your own skills to develop, and that’s worked elsewhere, in a place I’ve already chosen. Each to their own path, each to their own master. That’s how you both come back stronger. Stay together, and you’ll each just train up to your own limits, without ever getting past them. Apart, you’ll go beyond."
To that, too, I found nothing to say.
"One month," I said at last, and the word cost me.
"One month."
But behind me, Alice — she hadn’t heard any of it. Or rather, she’d heard all of it, and none of it changed a thing.
"NO!"
The cry made me jump.
This was no longer the woman who’d been laughing in the bed an hour earlier. Her face had come apart, twisted by that cold, bottomless thing I’d seen only once or twice. She’d seized my arm, and her hand gripped it hard enough to hurt.
"You agree with this?" She stared at me, incredulous, betrayed. "You’re going to let them take me? After last night?"
"Alice—"
"No. No no no." She backed away, head shaking, tears rising in her wild eyes. "You will not take him from me. You have no idea what I’m willing to do to stay with him. None."
The air vibrated harder around her. A red flash crossed her eyes, her mana overflowed, and I saw her — truly — ready to fight. Against Elsa, against the elf, against me if it came to it. Her free hand had clenched, ready to strike.
"Alice, listen to me—" I began, turning toward her.
I didn’t see Elsa move. ƒrēewebnovel.com
A single blow, sharp, with the edge of her hand, to the base of Alice’s neck.
Her eyes went wide. Then clouded over.
And she collapsed all at once.
