Chapter 1860: Voided Wager
Morning arrived in full over the Fujimori estate, and the pale gold coming off the snow garden found the dawn dojo looking like the site of a small, very thorough war.
In the middle of it, the night’s survivors still lay in formation: Quinlan flat on his back, Black Fang stretched along his chest, and Ayame tucked in against his other shoulder, ruined ritual silk and all.
The scoff had barely finished leaving Black Fang’s lips when the morning began filing the rest of its report.
A terribly cheeky little sister was watching her from across the man’s collarbones, chin propped on her stacked hands, wearing a grin that ran from one ear clean over to the other and had settled in for a long occupancy.
The man himself was looking at her too, yet, to her surprise, was not wearing a grin of victory. What decorated his was a mild smile of sheer happiness, asking for nothing, mocking nothing, and his hand began moving along her naked shoulder in slow, soft passes.
Her waking accounting had checked for exits and threats and cleared the room. The second accounting arrived now, covering everything the first had never been trained to look for: bare, in daylight, in a wrecked sacred hall, arranged on top of a primordial, with an audience, being petted.
Black Fang went rigid from crown to heel.
She peeled his hand off her shoulder with two fingers, deposited it back on its owner, and was upright in the next motion, off him and marching, spine straight, for the pile her clothes had spent the night in.
Black Fang dressed through the surveillance as if the hall stood empty. Bindings wound tight, buckles closed in sequence, the needle-fine pins slid back into the seams they lived in, and at no point did she acknowledge the two pairs of eyes tracking every pass of her hands. Acknowledgment would have implied that something worth witnessing was occurring.
Ayame stayed curled against his side in the wreckage of last night’s ritual silk, and her eyes never once left her sister.
Black Fang stood in the middle of the hall, immaculate.
Her hair was pinned high again, without one strand left loose as evidence. She had restored herself to factory condition while the other two were still negotiating with the concept of morning.
She surveyed them, then the hall. Then she issued her ruling to the room at large.
"A battle happened here last night." Flat, certain, a document being stamped. "That is the entirety of what occurred."
The violet moved from Quinlan to Ayame and back, slow and level, daring either witness to append one syllable to the record.
Quinlan nodded along agreeably. "Yeah. A duel of great importance. Nothing more, nothing less."
Ayame propped her chin on his chest.
She possessed, at that moment, the richest teasing portfolio any little sister had ever held. One entire legendary night of material. Sounds, sentences, a nod given twice. She took a long, visible moment to select.
"A settled battle. Understood~" Her eyes shone up at her big sister. "Although, for such simple accounting, you’re checking our faces an awful lot to see whether we believe it."
The temperature in the hall dropped.
But no aura of pure dread followed. Black Fang instead elected to pretend a cheeky samurai brat did not exist in the room with her and Quinlan Elysiar.
"As for the wager itself." Black Fang proceeded to the next item on her docket. "No conditions of victory were ever defined. Where no conditions exist, no defeat can be recorded, and where no defeat exists, there is nothing to honor. The wager is void."
She stood braced, chin high, violet leveled at Quinlan, visibly loaded with prepared rebuttals for the appeal.
"Sure," said Quinlan.
"..."
The silence exceeded regulation length.
"You agree."
"Completely. No conditions, no verdict. Void it is." He slid his fingers into the hair of someone who did not exist in this room with the two of them, at peace with the universe.
Black Fang’s eyes narrowed to needle width as she hunted for the trap. She had prepared for gloating. For refusal. For the insufferable grin and a counter-motion demanding arbitration. After all, she knew very well that if someone won last night’s duel...
It wasn’t her.
That’s why a simple agreement appeared on none of her contingency sheets.
"...Good," she managed, one full beat too late.
Then Quinlan’s pocket ring flashed.
A lacquered case arced across the hall. She caught it one-handed and had it open before it finished arriving.
Pearl-white pills sat inside in ordered rows. [Blessed Seed Pill]. Aurora’s masterwork, the concentrate she had rationed her existence around for weeks, row after row after row of it. A full supply.
"Yours," said Quinlan. "If the wager is void, you’ll need the pills."
The prize of the voided wager had been a delivery schedule: one pill, every twelve hours, for eternity, from his hand. The case now in her possession quietly abolished the schedule, and the visits, and the last operational reason attached to either.
Black Fang looked at it precisely as long as an inventory required.
"..." It vanished into her sleeve.
Both of them watched her stand there, her eyes aimed at Quinlan.
Her mouth opened. Nothing reported for duty. It closed again.
Somewhere behind the violet, an emergency session convened, found no precedent on file, and dissolved without a ruling.
She was truly, utterly, speechless.
She had no idea what to do now. No wager left to argue, no debt left to settle, no enemy anywhere in the room, and not one protocol in her entire arsenal for two people simply being good to her.
Then her body, the only department of her still taking orders, took over.
From one moment to the next, she was gone.
"She ran away..." Ayame giggled, purring, far too joyous, hugging Quinlan close for a long second. "My sister is a tsundere~"
"...Yeah," Quinlan agreed, not even trying to fight the grin down. "What a fucking adorable creature."
"I know right?!" Ayame sang, hugging him even tighter.
Silence descended for a few seconds, save for Ayame’s happy humming. Quinlan used the time to conduct the official damage survey of the most sacred hall on Fujimori land.
Split boards at the center of the floor, radiating cracks, courtesy of a strike that had relocated him mid-duel. The inventory only got worse from there.
’We gave this place a proper trashing,’ he concluded solemnly. ’Historic events demand historic evidence. Or something like that.’
...
Black Fang landed on the roof of the neighboring wing without a sound, and there her body finally consented to stop.
She crouched low and it took her a moment to notice she was shaking, breathing hard, heart slamming against her ribs like it was fighting its way out to go back inside.
Her hand went into her sleeve and came out with the lacquered case. She opened it. The pearl-white rows looked back, orderly, patient, worth more than any treasury on the continent, and his voice replayed over them in perfect fidelity.
’Yours. If the wager is void, you’ll need the pills.’
She ran the words again. Then again. The meaning did not change on any pass.
She was unaging now, for any horizon that mattered. Not by schedule, not one pill at a time: a full case of her own, enough to put entire months between her and the word expiry.
Which meant...
She could leave with the next breath, disappear, do whatever pleased her for as long as it pleased her, and drop by every few months when the case ran low.
And he would refill it. Without one question, without one grievance, with that same mild smile that mocked nothing.
She was certain of it. She could predict the man now.
He had handed her the means to honor her own ruling, smiling.
Nobody, in four hundred years of careful accounting, had ever handed her anything without a price attached somewhere in the fine print. She had been discarded before she could properly walk, and every transaction since had billed her on the back end, and on that constant she had built her entire doctrine: everything given is collateral on something owed.
He had been holding the one leash that actually worked on her, yet now put it in her hands.
’Illogical... I don’t understand him. Why do this?’
Without the wager, she did not have to stay.
That was what the case in her hand meant.
But.