Law of Attraction 4

"Yildiz!!! You and I have unfinished business!!!"

This was not the first time Rafinya had chased down a Diablo in human form, and it would not be the last.

She sprinted after Yildiz through the sunlit grasslands without letting up, while Yildiz kept glancing back to find that he still hadn't managed to shake her.

He ran uphill. She followed. He leaped across a rocky outcrop. She stayed right on his tail without much trouble.

Truthfully, if Rafinya was chasing someone, that person wasn't getting away easily.

Even Fury had learned that the hard way once.

But then, suddenly,

something strange happened. Yildiz's speed abruptly surged, and he began pulling away from her.

Looking closer, she saw that his "legs" had shifted from human legs into something else entirely, indistinct, black, crackling with electricity.

{Physical enhancement magic} was invoked. Her body received a special buff. Her speed caught up to him in an instant.

Wait, what?! Still not losing her?!

Yildiz's mouth fell open. His plan to simply outpace the human and force her to give up had failed. Or perhaps it would be fair to say he simply hadn't known Rafinya well enough.

And for Rafinya, this was her absolute top speed. But the distance between them wasn't shrinking, nor was it growing.

Which meant their top speeds were remarkably close.

And one of them was bound to collapse from exhaustion first.

Another concern crossed his mind: no matter what, Rafinya wasn't going to shake off. If this chase continued past this point, she would enter the territory where he and his companions lived, and she would see things Diablo's officials didn't want a human to see.

Thinking that far ahead, Yildiz could already picture it clearly: if anything happened to Rafinya, he'd be executed and have his guts strung up on a ship's mast for sure.

With the risk no longer worth it, his speed gradually slowed. His legs, once black and demon-shaped, reverted back to ordinary bare human legs.

He had slowed down. But the person behind him hadn't. Which meant she plowed straight into him, and both of them tumbled down the grassy slope together, crashing through bushes and shrubbery, scattering rocks and dirt along the way.

"Ow!"

Rolling and tumbling down, Rafinya seized the opportunity to grab his collar tight enough to make Yildiz's eyes bulge.

"Ow! Let go of me!"

"Not letting go!"

"Come on, let go..."

Rafinya ended up pinning him down, straddling his body. One hand planted on the ground beside his shoulder, the other still gripping his tattered shirt collar tightly, both knees locking his hips in place with the instinctive precision of close-combat reflex. Her hair fell forward, brushing against his cheek.

"What did you do to me last night?!"

"You dozed off on your own last night, that's not on me!"

"After that! Who gave you permission to touch me!"

"I saw you napping so peacefully, how was I supposed to wake you? I know exactly how infuriating it is to get woken up mid-sleep."

"Don't change the subject! What did you do!"

Getting choked out, Yildiz tapped frantically for her to let go, then spoke as though in agony.

"I carried you back to your room!"

"Into my room!"

"I brought you all the way to your bed! Isn't that enough already!"

"You disgusting creep!"

"AGH!"

His throat nearly seized shut. Yildiz and Rafinya wrestled briefly, both of them tumbling further down into a nearby ditch.

"I even tucked a blanket over you! Was that the wrong angle or something?"

"Shut up!"

Yildiz genuinely shut up, leaving a dead silence.

"...."

"Or are you just embarrassed about being carried by someone?"

"!?"

"...So that's it. It must be an embarrassing thing for humans, isn't it? I don't know why exactly, but I can sense it."

Rafinya's hand lunged forward first, but Yildiz caught both her wrists before they could land.

But then, suddenly...

"Rafinya! Rafinya!"

The voice of Princess Nora Ophilis came sliding down the hill after them, but when the Princess looked left and right, aside from that deep ditch, there was nothing but open field as far as the eye could see.

"...That was fast."

She paced around near the ditch.

Cutting back to Rafinya, she stayed hidden with Yildiz without making a sound, silently praying Nora would pass by.

Because if Nora were to see the current state of things... rumors would surely spread. Especially given the position right now: Rafinya straddling Yildiz, one hand clamped over his mouth, her body pressed flat against his, her face turned away but still lying cheek to cheek beside the young man's.

The image itself wasn't so bad, but there was absolutely no way Nora could find out that Rafinya had been carried up to her bedroom by a man. That would leave a stain on her reputation for life. How could a knight lose face like this?

The sound of Princess Nora's footsteps drew closer, as she continued calling Rafinya's name.

Yildiz tilted his head slightly, until the tip of his nose nearly brushed Rafinya's ear, before whispering in a hushed voice.

"Rafinya, my heart's beating strangely fast."

She clenched her jaw, the hand braced beside her body giving his chest a light thump in warning, her eyes flashing red as a threatening command for him to zip his mouth shut.

Until Nora's footsteps faded away, further and further, until silence settled back over the area once more.

Once certain it was safe, Rafinya slowly rose to her feet, hurriedly straightening her dirt-smeared clothes.

Yildiz sat up, knees bent, his head poking out from the mound of earth.

"If you don't tell the Prince about me napping, I won't tell Nora about carrying you."

"Are you threatening me?"

Rafinya turned to glare at him with a fierce, intimidating expression... but it had no effect on Yildiz whatsoever. He already knew that, and he let a bit of it show.

His cunning.

"Then how about I tell Princess Nora I also heard your heart beating fast?"

"Try it."

"...Never mind then."

"Don't tell anyone about this."

Rafinya straightened her collar,

"And don't you dare even think about last night. Absolutely not."

"If someone tells you not to think of an elephant, what do you think of?"

A murderous glare

"...Understood."

As they were about to part ways, she noticed a black tattoo on one side of the young man's chest. A tattoo shaped like a "black panther."

But she said nothing about it at the time.

"Rafinya."

Princess Nora, having finally found her friend, came running up from behind, looking rather disheveled.

"Did you find him?"

She shook her head.

"He's fast."

"Faster than you?"

She didn't answer.

"He's probably gone back to his own territory."

Nora shook her head with a hint of disappointment, but she understood he had to follow Fury's orders. The two of them walked back together.

But along the way,

they ran into a familiar face.

A young man with white hair and shark-like eyes, carrying something across the field, accompanied by two other Diablo underlings.

He turned and spotted the two of them, catching sight of Rafinya first.

His eyes widened.

"Rafinya?! What are you doing out here?!"

"Benfiga?"

Nora watched from beside her, gathering that he was a Diablo Rafinya was more familiar with than she was.

"You doing alright on land?"

"As long as I'm in this form, I'm perfectly fine."

He slapped the two Diablo companions who had followed him and pointed at her.

"This is her. That Rafinya."

"The one who beat Jaiba?"

"Yeah, I saw it with my own eyes."

"You're overselling it too much, Benfiga. I heard Jaiba wasn't even that hard to handle. I've already been through Mr. Fury, after all."

"Jaiba, not hard to handle?"

Benfiga narrowed his eyes, looking at Rafinya as though she'd said something wrong.

"That guy is the captain of the seventh patrol unit."

"...He's not just an ordinary soldier?"

"No. That guy is captain of Unit 7. I'm captain of Unit 2. We patrol the same waters, but that guy loves to fight."

Rafinya and Nora exchanged a glance.

"Where did you hear that Jaiba wasn't hard to handle?"

Benfiga asked. Nora turned to wait for her friend's answer, confusion on her face, and Rafinya answered.

"Yildiz told me."

"Yildiz? That guy's been napping around here? Didn't the Prince order him to stay in his own territory?"

"Looks like he just headed back."

Nora pointed off behind him.

Benfiga's face twisted into deep confusion, which only made Rafinya sense that something wasn't adding up.

"It wouldn't be strange at all for that guy to say Jaiba's easy to handle."

"Why's that?"

"Yildiz holds the seal ring."

"Meaning what?"

"He's part of our highest-ranking unit. Top tier."

"...Him? The lazy-looking one?"

"That's just his nature."

Benfiga said,

"His prime time is at night. During the day, he just wanders around looking for somewhere to sleep. Sleeps and sleeps, all day long."

And the image of the tattoo Rafinya had glimpsed on him flashed back into her mind.

A black panther.

A wild animal that, by nature, was a nocturnal predator.

"He constantly dodges Prince Fury's orders, but it'd be a waste to execute someone with his skill. Prince Fury often lets the small stuff slide for him."

That made both girls turn to look at each other once more.

The scene cut ahead to when they had returned to the human residential district.

The view of the waterfall outside their bedroom window shimmered with the glow of fireflies at night, casting a soothing light through the room.

Princess Nora and the noblewoman of Saint Pauli spent their final night residing here.

When Rafinya glanced over at Nora's journal, she noticed it was nearly full to bursting, and the very last entry Nora had written was:

Encounter with a human-Diablo named Yildiz.

"'Human-Diablo'? Is that what we're calling them now?"

"Reading someone else's journal without permission isn't very nice."

Nora sealed it shut with a high-level protective enchantment and tucked it back into her personal bag.

"That guy's probably just going to end up as one sentence in your journal. Did it really need writing down?"

Nora didn't answer, gazing instead out the window, toward the far edge of the island.

She spotted a great ocean liner, lit up from bow to stern, weighing anchor and pulling away from the harbor.

It was Senior Thomasin's group's ship.