Chapter 86: The Protagonist vs the SSS-rank Villainess!

Serena recovered first. She took a step away from the cart, well clear of it, and she straightened her gloves, and her whole face changed.

"So you saw it."

[I did not.]

"Tsk. You looked into it and you found this room, and you came down here to get in front of me." She started walking along the row of frames, slowly, with her hands behind her back. "I told myself it was a bluff. I have spent so much telling myself the fox is a liar and a fraud and that nothing she said in my doorway was real. And here you are. Standing here, getting in my way."

I was baffled. Bamboozled. Discombobulated, even.

[What the fuck is happening???]

I said nothing, which she took as calm, cold confidence.

"Serena," Lily said. "What are you doing down here?"

"Stealing this sword, obviously."

Lily’s hand went to her sword. Her whole posture dropped into something I’d never seen from her outside of the forest, and I remembered, after a tiny delay, that she’d spent the last four hours checking barrels for exactly this person.

[Ah, shit.]

"Then Kohaku was telling the truth."

"Kohaku is never telling the truth," Serena said. "She simply arranges things so that she doesn’t have to lie." [WHAT?] "Ask her how she knew. Go on."

[Please don’t.]

Lily didn’t ask, because Lily was busy watching Serena’s hands, and thank every god in this world for that.

"I’m taking the blade," Serena said. "It cut down the Calamity Queen hundreds of years ago and it will do considerably less impressive things very well. I’m going to take it, and I’m going to cut your roommate down where she stands, and then, Lily, I am taking you back."

The space went quiet.

Lily turned pink from the collar up. She looked at the floor, then at the ceiling, then somewhere around my knees, and her mouth opened twice before anything came out of it.

"Th-That’s, um... You can’t just announce something like that in front of people!"

"I can announce whatever I like!" Serena yelled back, also blushing.

"And also!" Lily got her sword out, both hands, feet set. "I won’t let you rob a shrine!"

[Excuse me?]

"That sword is under the province’s care, and the warden trusted us, and," she paused, "Stealing. Is. WRONG!"

My jaw dropped.

[Good lord.]

"Fine!" Serena said.

Then the floor froze.

Ice went from her boots outward, all the way across the room, and it climbed the wooden frames and the stone bases and the cart with our boulder still sitting on it. Lily was already moving. She came off the ice at an angle with her sword low. Serena caught the swing on a wall of ice that grew out of the ground in front of her, and the wall exploded.

I dove behind the boulder.

That’s not a joke. Two of the strongest individual people in the world started fighting in a stone box the size of a classroom, so I put a giant rock between myself and them, and I stayed there.

[Oh this is bad. This is very, very bad.]

The noise was unbelievable! Ice hit the walls, then the ceiling, then came down in pieces the size of my head. A spear went past my ear and buried itself in the wood behind me. I looked at it. I looked at where it had come from.

It had missed by about a foot.

[... Oi, oi, why am I in danger???]

I peeked around the edge of the boulder.

Serena had Lily backed toward the far wall with six more spears of ice hanging in the air, and she sent all six. All six went into the wall. Above her, beside her. Hell, one went into the floor between Lily’s feet. Lily came out of the gap they left, swung at her ribs, and turned her wrist at the last second so the flat of the blade hit instead, and Serena went into a frame, knocked four interred swords off it, and got right back up.

"S-Stop pulling your punches!"

"I am not pulling anything!"

"You’ve been doing it since I was fourteen! You did it at the winter drills, you did it in the forest, you have never once hit me with a real-"

"AAAAAAH!"

Lily charged her. Serena put up another wall in front of herself. Lily’s sword crashed into it and split it down the middle like it was made of butter! Then, Serena froze Lily’s glove to the hilt, threw her off with an elbow, and did not follow up.

"You still hold your sword like a girl carrying firewood!"

They went back at each other. Serena froze the ground under Lily, Lily jumped it. Lily got inside her guard twice, and the sword turned both times. A full minute in, and the only thing in that room taking any damage at all was the room.

Neither of them had used even 20% of the magic repertoire they had. They were obviously trying as hard as they could to not actually hurt each other, though the same couldn’t be said about their surroundings.

I sat down behind the boulder with my back against it.

Above me, hundreds of years of holy interment was getting rearranged by two sexually frustrated young adults. The guards were coming back eventually. Marisol could hold a faint for ten minutes and we were well past that. Lily’s sword was still in a rock, my heroine was in a duel with my villain over the prospect of potential robbery, and neither of them was going to win, because neither of them was actually trying.

[What the fuck do I do?]

"Does she know?" Serena said, over the top of a wall of ice. "About the two hours you spent sitting on my bed a few years ago? Have you told your roommate that story?"

"H-Huh!?"

Lily’s foot came down wrong.

That was all it took.

Serena froze her boots to the floor, took the sword out of her hands, and put her flat on her back with a spear of ice hanging over her throat that everybody in the room knew she wasn’t going to use.

Then she stepped over her and walked toward the cart.

[Oh, right, she’s gonna kill me.]

"You don’t have to kill her!" Lily shouted at the ceiling. "Serena, listen to me. You could just talk to me. You could have talked to me at any point in the last two years and I wouldn’t have turned you away! So, killing my roommate isn’t going to make me like you more!"

Serena stopped.

"At this point I think I’ll kill her anyway!!!"

"No, you won’t!"

Lily got her boots free, got up, and hugged her. Serena stood there with her arms out to the sides for about four seconds before they came down, and then neither of them said anything for a while.

Lily broke the silence first.

"I never started hating you or anything! You don’t need to do all this to g-get me back or whatever! We can just be friends!"

"Impossible," Serena replied. "You’ve seen... t-that thing I’ve been cursed with."

"I don’t care!" Lily declared. "Didn’t I tell you already!? I don’t mind it!"

"You don’t mean that."

"I do! Besides, Kohaku’s my friend! If you kill her, I will never forgive you!"

[... Nice of you to throw in that last little afterthought. Very moving.]

Serena sank to her knees.

"Then... But..."

"Calm down already!" Lily finally said. "And... walk away from this useless life of crime."

[Good lord.]

But, that seemed to have done the job. Serena turned away.

"... You really mean it?"

Lily said yes.

And then, they hugged it out.

It was all very moving. But, in my head, all I could think about was the very relevant fact that guards were almost certainly on their way to this position, right now.

"Okay... So, the sword," I finally said.

They both looked at the boulder.

"I don’t want it," Serena said.

"Yeah, that’s fine. Lily? You wanna...?" I gestured at it.

"Huh? N-No, I only came down here to stop her taking it," Lily said.

Immediately, life threw a new problem at me.

As awesome as it was that they’d made amends and all that... Them leaving this room without Lily absorbing the sword was not an option.

This was the only night that boulder was ever going to be in a room I could reach. Tomorrow it goes east on a cart with fresh horses and forty guards, and Lily never touches it, and in eight months or whatever, there’s no continent left to argue about it on.

So I put my hands under the cut edge of the boulder, and I pushed mana out through my arms and held it there until my elbows screamed, and I snapped both knees at once.

It came up.

[OH GOD IT’S HEAVY! IT’S SO HEAVY!]

But, I had to do this. I had one act left to do.

"Lily! CATCH!"

I threw a boulder at my heroine.

Lily’s hands came up. Serena’s came up faster, because Serena has spent her entire life being faster than everyone, and she caught it out of the air with one hand on the stone and one hand closed around the grip.

The room went white.

When I could see again, Serena was standing there holding a sword, and the boulder was in eleven pieces on the floor around her boots, and Dawnlight was glowing in her hands.

[Oh no.] I fell to my knees. [Oh fuck.]

The sword...

... Bonded with Serena instead.