Chapter 111: Black Glass*

The next morning, I had training with Sabine.

We were in her private practice room on the top floor of the mage tower. I stood in the middle of the floor holding Tide, with the mana band running down my arm and into my leg, while Sabine circled me with a long wooden rod and tapped me wherever the band wasn’t.

"Six," she said, tapping my elbow. "Seven." She tapped my knee. "Eight."

"ACK!"

On nine, the rod caught me right in the ribs while the band was down in my ankle, and I folded over with a wheeze.

"Better." Sabine twirled the rod. "Eight and a half seconds. That’s an improvement of a second and a half since last week. I’m very pleased with your progress, Kohaku~"

"Thanks," I gasped.

I wasn’t happy about it, though. The whole time I’d been counting, my attention had been on Lily, standing in the training yard with her eyes closed and her mana sliding through her body. She had held it for thirty seconds without even trying.

In other words, I had worked myself half to death for a week to get one and a half seconds, and I was still twenty-one and a half seconds behind my own student.

"Again!" I straightened up and started the band. "From the top!"

Sabine raised an eyebrow, but she lifted the rod.

"So, professor," I said, as casually as I could while she circled me. "Hypothetically, how would you fight in a really small room? Like a box. A small, fancy box with chairs in it."

"Hypothetically?" She tapped my shoulder. "You wouldn’t swing anything. There’s no room. You keep Tide in your arms, you close the distance, and you keep your back to a wall so nobody gets behind you."

"Cool! Great! Very useful." I ducked under the next tap. "And, also hypothetically, if someone was about to pull a knife out of their coat, how would you stop them without making any noise?"

The rod slowed down a little.

"Uh... You grab the wrist, not the knife," Sabine said. "Then you Snap your grip and break it before he can scream. Wrists are very quiet when they break, if you do it right." She tilted her head. "That’s a very specific hypothetical, Kohaku."

"I’m a very specific girl!"

She hummed and tapped my thigh. It was the one spot where the band actually was, so she left the rod resting there and ran it slowly up toward my hip.

"Postural correction," she said.

"Uh-huh," I said. "One more question! Is there anything special about black glass?"

Sabine stopped walking.

The rod came off my hip. She just looked at me, with her violet eyes very still, and the room went so quiet that I could hear the wind outside the window.

"Where did you hear about black glass?"

"N-Nowhere!!!" My band collapsed completely. "I read it in a book! A library book! It was a very old, very boring book, and I don’t remember the title!"

Sabine looked at me for a long time.

"The Church of Lux makes its relic blades out of black glass," she said finally. "You can’t buy it, you can’t steal it, and anyone who’s carrying it is doing the Church’s work. That’s everything I’m going to tell you."

Then she turned around and walked to the window, with her back to me.

"I’m not going to ask why you want to know." Her voice was cheerful again, but it sounded forced. "If I ask, then I know. If I know, I become a witness, and I’ve managed to avoid being a witness to anything for twenty-two years. It’s one of my proudest accomplishments."

"That’s... very responsible of you?"

"It is." She turned back around, and she pointed the rod at my nose. "But I have a duty of care toward my students, so I’m going to say this once. I already told you that trouble follows royal types, and that when it does, they find a fox to blame. Whatever you’re planning, don’t do anything stupid."

"I would never do anything stupid!"

"You fought a Forest Warden with your face."

"That was one time!"

Sabine sighed through her nose. Then she lifted the rod and stepped back into position.

"Again," she said. "From the top."

This time, she didn’t call out the numbers, and she didn’t tap. She swung for real. The first hit cracked across my shoulder hard enough to make my eyes water, and the second one came before I’d even finished wincing.

"Faster!" Sabine snapped. "If you’re going to be in a small room with someone who’s carrying black glass, the band needs to be where his hand is before his hand gets there!"

"I thought you weren’t asking!?"

"I’m not asking! I’m teaching! Again!"

By the end of the hour, I was covered in bruises, I could barely lift my arms, and I had held Tide for ten whole seconds.

In other words, Sabine had decided that if I was going to do something stupid, she was going to make sure I lived through it.

---

I limped back to the dorm that evening with bruises on top of my bruises.

My shoulder throbbed every time I swung my arm, my ribs hurt every time I breathed, and my legs were shaking with every step. All I could think about was falling face-first onto my bed and not moving until morning.

I pushed open the door to our room, and steam rolled out of the washroom.

Lily stepped out of it at the same moment, wrapped in a single white towel. Her hair was dripping down her shoulders, her skin was pink from the hot water, and the towel only came down to the very tops of her thighs.

Then, she saw me, and her whole face lit up with determination.

[Wait. She practices her speeches in the bath. OH FUCK.]

In other words, she had just finished rehearsing.

"Kohaku! Perfect timing!" Lily marched over, grabbed both of my hands, and pulled me down until we were both sitting on the edge of my bed. "Don’t move. I have something very important to tell you, and this time I’m not going to forget it, because I said it out loud eleven times in the bath!"

"Eleven!?"

"Eleven!" She took a deep breath, and her grip on my hands got tighter. "Kohaku, ever since the forest, every time I look at you, my chest gets warm, and I..."

[Oh, crap, she’s skipping the whole intro and going straight to the end!]

"So, what I’m trying to say is, I..."

"LILY!!!"

I tackled her backward onto the bed.

It was the same move as last time, and I knew it. Unfortunately, it was the only move I had. The real difference was that last time, Lily had been wearing a nightgown. This time, she was wearing a towel, and the towel did not survive the tackle.

We both looked down at the same time.

"Ah," I said.

"K-Kohaku..." Lily’s face turned bright red, but she didn’t reach for the towel. Instead, she wrapped her arms around my neck. "I’m still trying to say something..."

"Uh-huh~" I kissed her, and her mouth was warm and tasted faintly like the mint tooth powder she always used. "Keep going. I’m listening."

I was not listening.

Her skin was still hot from the bath, and when I kissed my way down her neck, I could taste the soap on her collarbone. She arched up against me with a little gasp. Her nipples were stiff against my palms, and when I rolled one between my fingers, her whole body jolted.

"Kohaku, I l... ah! Wait, that’s not fair!"

"What isn’t?"

"You know what!"

I kissed down her stomach and settled between her thighs. She was already wet, and when I licked her slowly from bottom to top, she grabbed two handfuls of my hair and pulled hard enough that my eyes watered. I kept going anyway. Her thighs started shaking on either side of my head, her heels dug into my back right on top of Sabine’s bruises, and less than a minute later she came with a high, squeaking cry that she tried to muffle with the back of her hand.

I crawled back up and kissed her, and she clung to me, panting.

"I-I still wasn’t done talking..."

Then she reached down and found my cock straining against my trousers, and she stopped talking again on her own.

"Should I stop?" I asked, cock hard, grinning down at her.

She looked away.

"... No."

When I finally slid inside her, she was hot, tight, and soaking wet. She gasped and dug her nails into my shoulders, right into the biggest bruise, and I hissed through my teeth. Her legs wrapped around my waist and pulled me in deeper. Every time I thrust, the bed frame creaked, and she made a soft little sound right against my ear.

She came the second time while I was still moving, squeezing around me so tightly I nearly lost it right there. The third time, she pulled me down with her, and I spilled inside her while she shook and whimpered my name into my neck.

Afterward, we lay tangled up in the sheets. My bruises were screaming, my legs had officially stopped working, and Lily’s damp hair was spread out across my pillow.

Lily stared up at the ceiling for a long time.

"You didn’t let me finish," she said.

I rolled my head on the pillow to look at her.

"I made you finish three times. Doesn’t that count?"

Lily’s mouth fell open. She grabbed the pillow out from under my head, pressed it over her own face, and groaned into it.

"UGGH!"

Then she tossed the pillow away, rolled over, and buried her face in my chest anyway.

Crisis averted.