Chapter 70: Chani

Chapter 70: Chapter 70: Chani

"Huh? My future husband?" she asked, stepping back.

In all her years, no one had ever met her for the first time and announced she was going to be his wife. She huffed, trying to shake off the jolt of it.

Allan pressed on. "Indeed. You’re Chani von Poseidon, daughter of Lord Archduke Poseidon."

A small smile crossed her face. "I see. Maybe I should keep my hair covered more often..."

"It’s not just that. It’s also your curves..."

He never got to finish. His sixth sense screamed at him to move, and he did. A knife flew straight for his mouth. He snapped his head aside and the blade hissed past, striking the wall behind him with more than half its length buried in the wood.

"You dodged that." She lowered her hand. "Quite skilled."

Allan swallowed and settled back into a steady stance. Truthfully, he was more surprised than she was. He hadn’t expected a noble to take up banditry.

"Mind telling me why a noble like you is mixed up in all this?"

Chani walked to the table and rested her fingertips on one of the ledgers. "My father is dying. Slowly. The plague the cult spreads has a cousin that only nobles of certain bloodlines carry. According to the healers, he won’t last the year. The court already smells blood. If House Poseidon shows weakness, the other Archdukes will carve Atlantis into pieces before the body is cold."

Allan wondered why she was telling him so much. He had only asked to make conversation. Then his berserker skill stirred, and the answer came to him: she meant to kill him, and nobody bothers hiding secrets from a dead man.

"So you built a bandit town to fund a war chest?"

"I built a controlled pressure valve." Her eyes never left him. "Ransom the right nobles, sell the right information, keep the lesser houses afraid and paying. The coin goes into private accounts my father’s stewards can’t touch. When he dies, I’ll have the gold and the blackmail to hold the fief. The bandits think they’re rebels. They’re employees who don’t know the company name."

The old game logic clicked into place with ugly precision. In Yggdrasil, the purge had been filed away as a bug. Here, it was policy. "If your father finds out, do you think he’ll be impressed?"

"Ha! He’ll do what he always does and blame someone else. He loves me far too much to do otherwise." She said it lightly, almost cheerfully.

Allan’s eye twitched. His lips trembled. He forced out a breath, hot with the berserker rage boiling up inside him.

"Your father will eventually arrest the people who made it into the city and kill most of them for the very crimes being committed outside that window," he said.

He had hoped something would flicker in her blue eyes. Nothing did. That cold, menacing smile stayed exactly where it was.

"And why should I care?" Her fingertips settled on the hilt of her sword.

Two of my people died in that purge, he thought. And you cried that day too, before you dethroned your father.

Chani’s expression didn’t change, but something colder moved behind her eyes. "Then you understand why I can’t let outsiders walk out of here with proof. You’re here. You’ve seen the town. That makes you a problem, pretty boy."

"I’m also the only person in this valley who already knows how the next three moves play out if nobody interferes." He let the tip of his sword rest against the floorboards. "I didn’t come to expose you to the court. I came because the Garden of Eden is open, and the plague is inside the Emperor’s walls..."

"...What are you trying to say?"

"I can help heal your father."

Silence stretched between them. Far below, faint shouts rose and cut off. Lira and Amelia were at work. Seris would already be copying seals.

Chani studied him, or tried to, but Allan gave nothing away. "Are you part of the cult?"

So the cult had approached her before, Allan realized, maybe because of what she would become.

"Don’t worry. I’m a baron. Baron Oakwood. If I were part of the cult, my duke would already have my head on a spike."

"I see. Oakwood, Oakwood. Where have I heard that name?"

"Forget that. Change of plans. I only wanted safe passage through Atlantis, and then your... followers? I don’t know what to call them. Henchmen sounds cringe. Anyway, they attacked me."

She watched him. For some reason, she couldn’t look away. He was tall, with good hair and broad shoulders. His face wasn’t especially handsome, but the sheer confidence in his words was another matter. She could kill him in an instant. She knew it, and he knew it.

And he wasn’t afraid. Not even a little.

"So you won’t disturb me if I let you go?"

"Right. And no sudden arrests when I reach Atlantis, please. No shifted blame. In return, I leave your pressure valve alone, and I give you something better than ransom gold."

"Oh? And what might that be?"

"Advance knowledge of every major event that will hit the Empire in the next eighteen months. Including the exact day your father’s illness goes public, and which houses will move first."

Her fingers stilled on the wood. "And if I refuse?"

Allan gave the same thin smile he’d worn the night he zeroed a guild officer in a rest zone. "Then I take the proof. It’s lying around everywhere, and my friends are already collecting it. I carry it to the Emperor, and I let the court tear House Poseidon apart while I take the Atlantis route under someone else’s banner. Either way, I reach the Garden. One path leaves you standing. The other doesn’t."

For the first time, the pressure of a level-three-hundred opponent shifted in the room.

A long moment passed. Then Chani spoke.

"Okay. Let’s say I believe you. Give me the first piece. Then we talk terms."

Allan kept the sword where it was, but he began to talk.

"In fourteen months, the northern grain fleets fail. Not from weather. From a coordinated strike by three lesser houses that currently swear loyalty to your father. They’ll use the same black-market contracts your people are writing up in the ledgers downstairs. The failure triggers a famine vote in the Imperial Council, and House Poseidon takes the blame for not securing the routes. Within six weeks of the vote, two Archdukes move to partition Atlantis’s coastal holdings. ℯℯ𝑙.

"As for your father’s illness, it goes public on the third day of the spring council session. House Veyl moves first. Their agents are already buying grain futures under false names in the capital."

He was lying. Parts of it were true, but most of it he had dramatized for effect.

Chani’s face stayed still, but her eyes followed every word. She pulled a blank sheet from the stack, dipped a quill, and wrote three lines. Then she looked up. "Continue."

He gave her the second piece without pause: the location of the cult’s secondary supply caches along the eastern road, and the name of the court physician who would declare her father unfit. He had come here to take down the person in charge, but that person was someone he had once cherished. Yes, he had liked her, even though she was an NPC in his game.

Still, beating her wasn’t the mission. Getting out, far from her reach, was.

Each fact landed on the table between them like a weight. After those first three lines, Chani stopped writing. She just listened, fingers resting on the wood, firelight steady across her face.

When he finished the third piece, she set down the quill.

"You’re either the most useful liar I’ve ever met, or the one person who actually remembers the board the way it was written." She looked him over again. "Safe passage. No arrests. No shifted blame. Your people leave this valley tonight under my seal. In return, you leave the ledgers where they are, and I’ll hold you to that at three points: the eastern gate of Atlantis, after the grain failure, and the day my father’s illness is announced. Break any of them, and I’ll treat you as the bandit the court already wants you to be."

Allan nodded once. "Done."

She crossed to a side cabinet, opened it, and took out a small iron seal with a silver trident cut deep into its face. She pressed it into a block of blue wax and handed him the disc.

"Show that at the lower gates and the men will let your group through. Don’t linger. The town is a tool, not a sanctuary."

He tucked the seal inside his jerkin. The crystal against his chest pulsed once more, still reading three hundred. She hadn’t drawn a weapon. She hadn’t needed to.

Halfway to the main hall, he met Seris coming the other way, a thin sheaf of copied papers already folded under her cloak. She said nothing, just fell in beside him. At the foot of the stairs, Lira and Amelia waited in the shadow of a pillar, three freed commoners behind them. Their faces were blank with a fear that hadn’t yet decided whether to turn into hope. Amelia’s hands were still stained. Lira’s hex book was closed but warm.

"What happened?" Lira asked.

"Free whoever you can. We pull back before someone realizes we were only buying time." Allan held up the blue wax seal. "We leave now. River side. No more questions."