My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 828: Mutual Loathing: One Above’s Gift

Phei didn’t know why.

...Perhaps because the alternative — a being of her lethality performing cordiality — would have been infinitely more harrowing.

Consort’s open antipathy was at least legible...

’At least veridical; in a world of Legacy smiles and Paradise pleasantries and men who clasps your hand while draughting the blueprint of your annihilation, there is something almost salubrious about a woman who wanted you dead and didn’t dissemble.’

Usually, Phei would opt to needle these beauties. To prod and find the precise frequency of irritation that made celestial-tier assassins make undignified facial expressions and provide him with entertainment at their expense.

’But this is Consort...’

And while Phei teased her freely when she thought herself invisible — when Eira would point out her positions and he’d turn his gaze to that exact spot and let her feel him watching, let the dread settle into whatever she used instead of a stomach — he didn’t do it when they were alone.

Not face to face without an audience to dilute the consequences.

’Also, the short woman is impulsive.’

Who was to say she couldn’t simply decide, right now, in the dim silence of a penthouse at the apex of Hell’s Paradise Island, to educate him on the practical applications of a katana named after a ghost?

Her master hadn’t explicitly prohibited it... she could fabricate an excuse and claim provocation.

Heck, Consort could simply not bother claiming anything and leave his bisected self for housekeeping to discover in the morning.

’Today has been too auspicious to antagonize the shorties.’

She despised him and he despised her in equal and opposite measure, and the equilibrium of their mutual loathing was, for tonight, a thing he preferred to leave undisturbed...

’When am just me and her.’

Consort stepped closer.

Phei crossed one leg over the other and settled deeper into the chair with the unhurried, proprietary ease like he was determined to appear relaxed in the presence of something that could unmake him.

’A performance; but a good one, really.’

"Master has sent me." Her voice was clipped. Taut. The vocal equivalent of a blade drawn halfway from its scabbard — not yet committed to violence, but advertising the possibility.

"He is not pleased."

Phei chuckled. Low. Dry.

"Oh, really? He’s not pleased?" he paused a beat. "And guess who else isn’t pleased? Someone who was supposed to be enjoying a free evening but can’t even savor five minutes of solitude in his own penthouse without being reminded that his life isn’t his. That his shadows aren’t even his own company and even the darkness he sits in has been catalogued and reported to a being who treats his existence like a surveillance project with a particularly disappointing return on investment."

Consort didn’t appear to register the complaint as worthy of acknowledgment.

The silence that followed his words was not the silence of consideration — it was the silence of a being who had weighed his grievance, found it deficient, and declined to spend the caloric expenditure of a response.

"Master gave you a gift," she said. "You haven’t even inspected it. Such—"

The killing intent drowned Phei that very instant.

But it was not gradually with the incremental crescendo; it materialized — fully formed, instantaneous, absolute — like a rampart of glacial pressure that collided with his chest and compressed the air in his lungs into something too attenuated to respire.

The temperature in the penthouse plummeted by a magnitude that had nothing to do with the climate system and everything to do with a World Transcendent expressing, through the medium of ambient malevolence, her professional assessment of his ingratitude.

Phei tensed.

Briefly; a smallest tightening of his shoulders, the faintest adjustment of his posture — there and gone in a fraction of a second, suppressed before it could metastasize into anything she could interpret as submission.

Phei shrugged.

Indeed...

...Before ejecting him from the void like refuse from an airlock, One Above had informed Phei he’d left him a gift.

Phei had seen it the following day after the awakening and the Void-Ice element had fully unfurled itself within his marrow and the world had rearranged itself into a place considerably more dangerous and considerably more his.

He’d seen the gift and then — with the deliberate, calculated indifference of a dargon who did not accept packages from beings whose return address was the entity that nearly killed me— he had ignored it...

...He just went to school with his women like the gift wasn’t there to begin with and played his basketball challenge.

And since then, he’d never checked it again.

For all he knew, it could be a leash in disguise; a collar wrapped in gift paper or binding artifact embedded in whatever cosmic bauble the One Above had selected to purchase his compliance.

The powerful did not give gifts — they gave obligations with superior packaging.

He’d sequestered it from his own cognizance and hid it away from his own awareness, where it couldn’t vex him.

’A tantrum? Yes.’ A puerile, petulant, thoroughly gratifying tantrum waged by a seventeen-year-old boy against an entity older than the concept of senescence, expressed through the medium of aggressive neglect.

But it appeared his tantrum had reached its expiration date.

And they could no longer tolerate his childish games.

Consort extended her hand:

A box materialised in her grip — summoned from whatever interdimensional inventory she maintained, conjured into the dim air of his penthouse with the noiseless precision of a thing that had been waiting for this moment and had grown tired of the delay.

It was ornate, dark and pulsing with a faint luminescence that existed at the periphery of visible light, as though the box itself couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be seen or merely suspected.

She held it toward him.

"Open it."

Phei looked at the box.

Looked at her.

"So now they’re forcing me to accept largesse, is that the arrangement? First the near-death experience, then the ejection from a void dimension via the cosmic equivalent of being defenestrated from a moving conveyance, and now — hand-delivered presents with compulsory unwrapping. What’s next, a birthday epistle? A fruit basket and a formal invitation to my own obsequies?"

Consort said nothing and did not withdraw her hand either.

The box hovered between them — dark, pulsing, patient — a gift from something that did not understand the word no because nothing in its existence had ever required it to learn.

Phei sighed.

The sigh of a man who had been stubborn for weeks and had just collided with the particular wall that stubbornness could not penetrate — the wall constructed from the simple, immovable fact that the being on the other side of this transaction possessed the resources to wait forever and Phei, categorically, did not.

"Don’t hover over me like some overseer." He reached forward. Took the box from her hands. The surface was cool against his palms — not Void-Ice cool like the familiar, kinship-laden chill of his own element, but something else; something older that hummed with a frequency his bones recognized before his mind did.

"I’ll open it at my own pace though."

"Open it."

"I just said —"

"Now, Dragon!"

He looked at her. At the absolute, granite-carved, cosmically immovable certitude in her presence — a presence that communicated, with more eloquence than her vocabulary had ever mustered: you will open this box, you will open it now, and if you do not open it I will stand here until the heat death of the universe or until you comply, whichever arrives first, and I suspect you know which one that will be.

He sighed again.

Opened the box.

’Bitch.’

****

A/N: Guys would you have checked it... it it were you; right after the person literally just tried to kill you?