Chapter 90: The Beach Episode*

The training arena was empty at night, and at some point I’d stopped asking whether I was allowed to be in it.

I stood in the middle of the sand with my sword out and got my breathing where it needed to be.

Mana down the arms. Mana down the spine. Coating on, burning immediately, the way it always does. Then I put the rest of it into the blade the way Cassian does it, which is less "channeling" and more "packing a barrel," and I held it there until my whole right side started shaking.

"Haaaah."

I swung.

The light came off the edge in a flat line and went about thirty feet before it broke apart, and it hit the practice dummy low, at the hip instead of the chest, and knocked it off its post.

[Low again. That’s four out of six.]

This was a modified version of the thing Cassian showed me. I’d used this exact attack to put Prince Aldric Stellaris-Vane out of the ring in front of two thousand people, which remains the single greatest moment of my life in either world.

So, I wasn’t just gonna stop using this move. But, I made some practical alterations. No more fighting words, for example. I asked myself, hey, why do I need to yell that shit to cast magic? and, after trying it out, the magic agreed with me. Then, I asked, hey, if I channel it through my sword instead of my hands, won’t it be more accurate? Again, the magic agreed.

I walked over, set the dummy back up, and did it eleven more times.

Then I did the new thing.

Sabine had shown it to me on Thursday. She called it Tide, which she says is a Seventh Form, and which is less a sword technique than a way of showing off mana. The idea is that instead of Coating everything at once, you run the layer through the body in a moving band, arms to hips to legs and back, so that whatever part of you is doing work is the part that’s armored, and the rest of you is whatever. It costs about a third of what a full Coat costs. It also means that for a quarter second, every quarter second, some part of me is completely unprotected, and Sabine’s exact words were that anyone who can read the rhythm will put a blade through the gap.

So, I had to be perfect. I ran the sequence. Guard, step, cut, turn, cut, drop, rise.

The band moved. My legs went light on the turn and I felt the layer come up my back in time for the second cut, and I got all the way to the end before it collapsed and I had to stand there with my hands on my knees.

Seven seconds. On Thursday it was four.

[Okay, that’s progress. That’s real progress.]

I sat down in the sand to let my arms stop buzzing, and while I sat there I did the thing I do every night now, which is go through the schedule.

Six days at the coast. Open-water endurance, spirit handling, one social.

And honestly? Out of everything left on the calendar, this was one of the easy ones.

I knew this arc. I remembered building this one. It was the breather Chapter, the one that runs after a tournament so the reader gets to look at everybody in swimwear for a while, and the plot content in it is almost nothing.

What little was in it though, was as follows:

Lily and Aldric fight a giant crab. They fight a crab the size of a wagon and he says something about how a true sovereign protects his people, and she decides he’s not as much of a rich prick as she thought. I gave them nine pages of that. It was enough filler to make old-school shounens blush.

Then, on the fourth day, Lily goes into the water and Cassian pulls her out.

And I remembered exactly why that works, because I remembered writing the line. Lily Everdawn, the strongest person who will ever live in this world, cannot swim.

Fifteen-year-old me needed the heroine in danger somewhere a reader would believe, and the sea was right there, and "she never learned" took four seconds to type and solved the entire problem.

So Cassian goes in after her. He carries her up the sand, he says something rude that’s secretly kind, and she looks up at him with the water running off her face, and her heart goes doki-doki.

I let out a long breath.

[This one’s fine. This one I literally cannot screw up.]

Because that was the beautiful part. It didn’t need me. I didn’t have to coach anybody, or run a loophole, or blackmail a professor, or steal anything. Cassian would be there because attendance is mandatory. The water would be there because it’s the sea. Lily would go in because she’s Lily and somebody, probably me, would dare her to do it.

All I had to do was stay out of the way for six days and let two idiots look at each other.

[Ha. Easy. Maybe I’ll even get a tan.]

I stood up, shook out my arms, and got back into position.

[Now. More practice.]

Mana down the arms. Mana down the spine. Coating on.

I swung.

---

"So the way I see it, we’ve got six days where nothing is actually required of me."

I had my hands behind my head and I was talking at the ceiling.

"And I want to be clear that I’ve earned this... Haven’t I? I mean, I stole a legendary sword. I got hit by a moth the size of a dog and nearly got dissolved. I have been strangled by the strongest woman in the world on three separate occasions, and at no point has anybody thanked me for any of it. So this time? I’m going to lie in the sun. I’m going to eat something fried on a stick. I might go in the water up to about here, and then come out, because the sea is full of things with more legs than me."

The blanket over my hips moved.

"And Lily’s set. She’s gonna have this whole moment that’s gonna be great for her, she’ll get her feelings confused, and then on day four something big’s gonna happen that doesn’t need my input. And that’ll be that."

There was a wet noise from somewhere around my waist.

"All I have to do is stay out of it. That’s the entire plan, Marisol. For once in my life, the plan is to do nothing. Isn’t that beautiful?"

No answer.

"... Marisol."

I lifted the blanket.

Marisol Vantecca was between my legs with her hair pushed back off her face, most of my cock in her mouth, and both eyes closed. She had been down there since roughly the beginning of my speech. She was going at it slowly and thoroughly, and she did not stop when the light hit her.

I gave her about four more seconds. Four seconds that, of course, I enjoyed but was confused by.

"Hey. Did you hear any of that?"

She came off with a pop, took a breath through her nose, and looked up at me with her lips shining.

"No."

"No?"

"Not a word. You started making noise about ten minutes ago and I decided it wasn’t for me." She wrapped a hand around the base and went back to it for a moment, which I felt was rude in the middle of a conversation, then came off again. "Was it about the operation?"

"The lack thereof. It was about the entire next six days!"

"Then it’ll still be true tomorrow."

[Oi, oi. Aren’t you getting a little too lewd?]

This was the same woman who, five weeks ago, thought of me as some criminal mastermind. She used to take notes. She had a system of hand signals. And now she’s lying on her front in my bed with her skirt still on, humming about it, and treating strategic briefings as background noise.

"You’ve changed," I said.

"I’ve prioritized. Your cock is amazing~" She looked genuinely pleased with herself, and then she put her mouth back and stopped participating in the conversation entirely, and I stopped having opinions about it shortly after that.

[I mean... I’m flattered, but damn.]

---

We came out into the courtyard about an hour later, both of us looking slightly assembled, and found half the year already loading trunks onto the carts.

Off to the left, on the grass, Serena had a practice sword in each hand and was throwing one of them at Lily.

"Your guard drops every time you step back. Again."

"It does not!"

"It dropped just now. Again."

Lily caught the sword, reset her feet, and went again, and this time Serena tapped her wrist with the flat and Lily made an outraged noise and Serena almost smiled.

Marisol stopped walking.

"They’re getting on," she said. "Those two. Really getting on."

"Mm."

"A few weeks ago that woman wouldn’t have so much as looked at anyone below her on the social ladder unless it was to call them a gutter rat." She glanced at me. "What happened?"

I watched Lily lose her sword for the third time and start arguing about it.

"They knew each other," I said. "Before."

"That’s not an explanation. They weren’t talking before but they are now."

I shrugged.

I wasn’t about to explain that Lily learned about Serena’s dick and decided it was fine, which in turn made Serena’s insecurities evaporate.

Marisol waited for more, and when more didn’t arrive she made a small noise and let it go, because she’s good at that.

Up at the front of the column, Sabine climbed onto a cart and clapped twice.

"First-years! If your name is on the list and you are not in a coach in ten minutes, you will be walking to the coast!"