Chapter 8: The Ethical Way to Exploit Your Friend

My memories of my own novel were, as established fact, a landfill.

Whole volumes gone. Character names reduced to vibes. Etc.

But teenage me had been deeply, DEEPLY unoriginal, and unoriginality is reliable. Whatever I couldn’t remember, I could reconstruct by asking one question: what would every other author have done? And every other author had monster hunting. You kill the monster, you harvest the parts, you sell the parts to a guild or an alchemist or whoever, and money happens. Cores, pelts, fangs. A whole economy of built on carcasses.

And, conveniently, the academy bordered a forest. This was the starter zone of the Spirit Forest Exam, stocked with low-rank monsters.

[See? Improvisation. This one has to work!]

So, two hours after discharge, I was strolling a forest path with a training sword on my hip and the heroine of the apocalypse at my side.

"So the guild really buys anything?" Lily asked, stepping over a root. "Even from students? That seems... I don’t know, too easy?"

"Anything with a core in it. Monster parts are this kingdom’s second-biggest export." I had no source for that statistic. I made it up on the spot, but it felt true. And when you’re the creator of this entire world, that counts for something.

"M-Monsters?"

"Don’t worry, they’re small fry."

"How do you know all this stuff? The guild, the prices, the forest rules... You even knew where the nurse kept the discharge forms."

"I read a lot."

She giggled, and making a cute girl giggle brought a smile to my face.

I let myself enjoy the walk and, fine, I let myself flirt a little. Sue me! A woman can’t run damage control on a collapsing timeline every waking second. It’s bad for the heart, and, let’s be honest, I’d know.

"You know," I said, "when the guild ladies see us walk in dragging monster parts, you should do the talking. Pretty girls get better prices. It’s science."

"Oh, stop it," she replied, rolling her eyes and blushing.

[God, she’s easy. Whoever ends up with this girl is going to have the most fun... which will be Aldric, right? Or Cassian.]

Suddenly, the bushes to our left exploded.

I say exploded because that’s what it sounded like, a full crunching burst of branches, and out of it came trundling something I recognized from my own bestiary, in the sense that I recognized the vague silhouette.

An Ironhide Digger!!! Picture an armadillo. Now picture it the size of a Rottweiler, plated in overlapping slabs of grey natural armor, with claws like garden trowels and small, furious eyes. F-rank, common as gravel, worth about two silver in parts.

Two silver each. The dresses needed roughly forty.

[Twenty armadillos. That’s the grind. Welcome back to gacha, baby.]

It pawed the dirt and hissed at us like a kettle.

Now, here’s where preparation paid off. I’d thought of something key long before we actually left the campus.

This was Lily’s first real fight. Standing before her was an actual wild monster with the intent to kill. And, well, I knew exactly what happens to sheltered village protagonists in their first real fight. I’d written it dozens of times across seven novels:

They freeze.

Every time. The freeze-then-awakening is a foundational beat. So there was zero chance I could count on Lily here. At least, not until I could get her to unfreeze.

And what does a frozen protagonist need to unfreeze, awaken, and take her first step toward destiny?

A damsel! A pathetic, shrieking damsel in immediate danger.

[Ladies and gentlemen, I was BORN for this role.]

"Stay back, Lily!" I barked, drawing my sword, squaring up like a veteran. "I’ll handle this!"

"W-What? Kohaku, wait, let me help, I can—"

The Digger charged.

I strode to meet it, blade low, footwork pristine, every inch the hidden master, and then, at the last possible moment, after ten thousand hours of anime, I stepped on my own foot.

I did so deliberately. Perfectly, even. I went down in a flail of limbs, sword bouncing away, landing flat on my back right in the monster’s path, and I clasped my hands to my chest before yelling out:

"KYAAA~! LILY! HELP ME!"

The pitch. The tremble. The little crack on "help." Oh, it was cinema. Years of writing damsels and I’d absorbed the entire craft through my fingertips.

[I should have been an actress. I should have OSCARS. Now, Lily, here’s your cue: freeze, tremble, hear my cry, feel the fire ignite in your heart for the very first time, and... Lily?]

The air pressure changed.

[Oi. Oi oi oi. Lily?]

I turned my head, cheek in the dirt, and looked back down the path, and the heroine had not frozen.

The heroine’s hair was floating. Golden light was pouring off her in sheets, mana surging so thick I could FEEL it on my skin like static, her eyes had gone incandescent, and she’d drawn her cheap standard-issue training sword, which was now vibrating and shining with power.

"GET AWAY FROM HER!" screamed the sweetest girl in the world. "GRAND STARFALL REQUIEEEEEEM!"

And she swung vertically.

That’s not a spell. At least, I don’t think so. She just screamed it, the way you’d scream HIYAH, and the universe, wanting no trouble today, went along with it.

A pillar of golden light took the Ironhide Digger, the path under the Ironhide Digger, and a tasteful semicircle of forest behind the Ironhide Digger, and converted all of it to weather. Light poured out along with heat and a shockwave that blew my skirt straight up over my face and left leaves drifting down onto a smoking crater.

For a moment, there was silence.

Birds, at a respectful distance, slowly resumed singing.

Lily dropped the sword, now a glowing hilt attached to about four inches of slag, and sprinted over to me.

"Kohaku! Are you okay?! It almost got you! O my gods, are you hurt?!"

She hauled me to my feet with both hands, patting me down for injuries, and I stood there in the leaf-fall, staring over her shoulder at the crater.

[Well. That was cool. Genuinely, top ten coolest things I’ve ever seen. But...]

Smoke rose from the crater.

In it was no pelt, no claws, and definitely no core. Nothing sellable had survived. The two silver of armadillo had not been defeated so much as redacted from existence. My monster-parts business model was predicated on the monster having, at the conclusion of the hunt, parts, and my business partner had sort of just... forgotten that part.

"Lily."

"Yes?! Are you hurt?!"

"I’m fine, sweetheart. Great job. Really, ten out of ten." I patted her head. "Quick note for the next one, though... We’re gonna work on something called ’effort management’, you’re gonna love it."

---

We got there a while later. Here are the highlights:

Lily acclimated to hunting at a speed I’d call alarming if she wasn’t a good guy. By the fourth Digger, she’d dialed the smiting down from "biblical" to "merely fatal," and we walked out of that forest by late afternoon, hauling a sack of plates and cores like two girls returning from the farmer’s market. The guild appraiser paid out fifty-two silver and asked us zero questions.

Then, we went into town, found a seamstress, and bought some dresses.

Which brings us to now, the evening of the tea party, in front of the dormitory mirror, where I was having a moment.

The dresses were nothing extravagant. They were off-the-rack with small alterations, the kind of thing an actual noble would clock as budget in a heartbeat. But, it didn’t matter. Lily’s was pale blue, simple, and she looked like the exact girl the word "lovely" was coined for. She kept smoothing the skirt and sneaking looks at herself like she’d never owned anything new before.

Mine was green, and I looked incredible. The tailor had taken one look at my tits, said "hm," and risen to the challenge of her career.

"I’ve never been to a party," Lily said to the mirror, in the exact voice people use to say "I’ve never been in a plane crash."

It was time to fix that. I stepped in behind her, wrapped an arm around her, and pulled her in against my side, cheek to cheek with her reflection.

"W-Whoa." Lily’s eyes widened.

"Look at me. Tonight? Tonight isn’t a test, sugar. Tonight, you and I walk in there and we DAZZLE everyone. Nobles, professors, whoever! They’re gonna take one look at us and forget their own family names. We are going to be DEVASTATING. Say it."

"W-we’re going to be devastating," Lily said, except she said it bright red, staring at our reflection, breath a little short.

[Huh. That’s a heavy blush for a pep talk. What’s...]

I did an inventory of my own limbs and located the problem. The arm I’d wrapped around her had settled low. As in, very low. My hand was resting on the top of her hip, essentially cupping the border checkpoint of her ass.

[Oh, fuck.]

I retracted the hand at a speed that made my shoulder click.

[Sorry, subconsciously gay. Happens. The hand has its own ideas, sometimes.]

"ANYWAY," I said, loudly, grabbing my shawl. "Party, nobles, destiny! Let’s go before I do something I could get canceled for."

"You say such weird things," Lily said, laughing, and followed me out the door.