Ch 91: Lucien’s Lover?

"You speak too much," Lucien muttered coldly, his frigid gaze meeting Joseph's trembling eyes. The boy's stare lacked every quality one ought to carry as a noble, let alone as the prince of the elven kingdom. Is the elven kingdom truly doomed?

As if to answer his question, Joseph's twin sister carefully stepped between her brother and Lucien. The sword still rested against the boy's neck, and the girl turned her head back and forth between the blade and Lucien, measuring both with equal wariness.

"Can you please forgive him," she pleaded, her dark eyes trembling with worry. "He sometimes becomes a dullhead."

Joseph, for his part, seemed to object to his sister’s assessment. Lucien gave the boy one last stern glare before withdrawing the sword. He tucked it back inside his dimensional storage, though not before jerking the blade one final time to clean the remnants of Joseph's blood that had crept along its edge.

Lucien then turned his gaze to the girl. She, for her part, held her ground firmly, carrying herself with both physical composure and sharp-eyed wit, nothing at all like her twin brother who still seemed oblivious to the weight of their situation or to how close death had been even moments ago, despite every one of their chasers now lying lifeless on the ground. After all, Lucien could kill both the girl and the boy this very moment, and no one in the world would ever know of it unless he chose to speak of it himself, which he would have no particular reason to do had he truly gone through with it.

But he had no reason to kill them. And why would he? Even in the original story, he had not killed them. More like he had not met them. As a matter of fact, he had not taken a single innocent life until that sealed, ruinous day when he had driven a blade through one of the students. It was only natural, then, that the thought of killing these two would not so much as graze his mind. As for the assassins, they had been beyond redemption, the kind of men who would have left none of them breathing had Lucien not been strong enough to slaughter them first.

"Sorry." Olivia bowed her head toward Lucien, pulling him free from his thoughts. "Please help us." She pleaded, and Joseph likewise followed, dipping his head in a low bow alongside his sister while still clutching the side of the neck where the sword rested just a few seconds ago.

The boy was shaken to his very core from Lucien's earlier display of putting a sword to his neck, and the fear still etched itself plainly across his features, something Lucien savored with quiet, internal amusement. The boy was too much of a talker with no real grasp of how the world operated, because there was a difference between trusting someone familiar and being this casually open with a complete stranger. What made it worse, far worse than even Lucien's presence, was that they were still standing inside a miasma-drenched forest where powerful beasts could descend upon them at any moment. He was confident enough in his own ability to walk away unscathed, but the same could not be said for the twins.

"Alright, follow behin-" Before he could finish the sentence, the girl lifted her head sharply, eyes wide with barely contained relief. "Thank yo-." She stopped herself just in time, pressing her hand over her mouth to smother the happy outburst.

Lucien gave a small nod, acknowledging her gratitude without comment. She seemed to understand well enough that he could have vanished without giving them any chance to follow. As a matter of fact, with his killing urge fully quenched, he would have walked straight back to his residence had he not stumbled upon the royal twins. Though, if he was being precise about it, they had stumbled upon him rather than the other way around.

"Follow closely behind me," Lucien instructed, fixing them both with the same stern, measured look he reserved for his students.

Olivia nodded immediately, and Joseph followed, still gathering himself after the earlier encounter that had nearly sent him to the death and he would have been at present currently walking down the tunnel that led to afterlife.

Lucien launched himself upward without warning. He had quickly bent his body into a clean posture with one leg forward and the other behind, then he had simply driven his mana into the ground with a sharp tap of his right foot and had shot himself skyward.

The twins' eyes went wide and round with shock. He carved cleanly through the branches overhead with his sword that he manifested just as he jumped off the ground. His hands moved with rapid, fluid precision as he shredded one after another without slowing.

He broke above the canopy line, turned his body in the open air as naturally as if he were standing on solid ground, and swept his gaze across the horizon. An endless dark forest stretched in every direction, the black-green canopy rolling without seam, and then he found it: the mountain range, the natural border of terrain that shielded the city of Solarin.

With his direction fixed, he let himself descend. The cold breeze reached him slowly as he fell, touching his skin gently, sweet and clean in a way he had not noticed during the rush of jumping. The touch of sweet cold air felt like he was eating ice cream. Tomorrow, he decided he would have ice cream. A small, childlike desire rose in him, all due to the influence of his previous life.

He shaped the space beneath his feet with practiced ease and descended not in a plummet but in a slow, steady drop, like an elevator arriving at its floor, no acceleration, no impact, no rush of speed. He landed with a soft thump sound from his shoe hitting the ground floor.

The twins still had their jaws hanging open, staring at him as though they were watching something that had no business being human, as though a god had descended to walk among mortals. He allowed himself the faintest smirk. He was no less than one for them.

Lucien snapped his fingers and drew the twins out of their stupor, then produced multiple vials from his storage and distributed them: a healing potion, an energy potion, and one of those curious refreshing concoctions that was more akin to charged water than a true potion, but its creator had named it a potion regardless since it cooled the body from within and smoothed out the jagged edges of anxiety.

The twins accepted the vials and thanked him in rapid, overlapping voices, bowing their heads in unison.

"Just drink it quickly," he said, leaning back against the thick dark-brown trunk of the nearest tree, his senses stretched wide and alert for any sign of movement beyond the visible treeline.

The girl tipped the first vial back and drank, and the boy followed shortly after.

Now that Lucien had the luxury of stillness and his mind was clear of the killing urge, he studied them more carefully. He had been too focused before, looking at little more than their ears, particularly the girl's, which were elegantly pointed and looked like something lovingly sculpted rather than grown.

Olivia wore a white shirt now stained to ruin, lines of dried red streaking the fabric as though some frantic painter had flung crimson across it. Her long black leggings had suffered similarly, and the tattered cuts in both garments here and there revealed unblemished white skin that Lucien did not linger on. She had a thin, regal build, hovering at the boundary that appeared in paintings more often than in the real world. Her jaw was sharp and perfectly shaped, and her silver hair spilled down her back in loose disorder, some of it resting over her shoulders and curling forward, lending her a slightly untamed, effortlessly beautiful quality. She looked as though she had stepped free from a canvas. And he felt the slight urge to tell the girl to tend her hair and if possible wear good clothes but he refrained from doing it. His ocd was flaring up and it twitched his skin underneath his folded arms.

Joseph shared many of the same features: the same black eyes, the same pointed elven ears, and the same silver hair that were shorter and carried the same silver hue as his sister. He was not thin by any measure but not heavily built either, carrying a moderate solidity that suited him. His brows were sharp like hers, and his face held the composed expression of someone who spent far more time with theories, believing that the world followed those theories instead of acknowledging that life ran on the principle of uncertainties. He wore a plain shirt and dark trousers, similarly tattered and blood streaked like his sister. Despite being her twin, not a single feature of his face seemed to match hers.

While Lucien was still mapping their faces to memory, since he had never truly studied them before now, the elven princess looked up at him after swallowing the last drop from the final vial. Her gaze carried a thread of suspicion in it. "If I may, can I ask your age and your mana core rank?" she said, watching him with a careful, searching look.

Is she doubting whether I am truly Lucien Duskbane or not?

Girl, you should have raised that doubt long before now. She had not once demanded proof that he was the Northern Blade. But he could piece it together: they had been in no position to question him. All they could do was hope that he was who he announced himself as and pray that he would agree to help them.

"Nineteen years old," he answered evenly. "And Sky rank, mid-tier."

Olivia tightened her hand at her side and nodded slowly. "You truly are built from a different mold," she murmured, half to herself and half to him. Then, with a stoic expression, she fixed him with a look more direct and searching than anything she had given him before. "Do you have a lover," she asked, "or perhaps are you already married?"

***

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