He released.

The warmth arrived inside her ass with the specific, comprehensive fullness of a man whose balls had been carrying several hours of accumulated intention—a flood, dense and scalding, filling her interior with heat that moved through her walls and registered in her spine and her stomach simultaneously. Her body received it and her body clenched around it, the involuntary grip of walls accepting what they’d been given, and the gripping produced more warmth, and the warmth produced more gripping—

Her eyes went white.

Not the edges-white of rolling. The full, complete, bilateral white of eyes that have closed their operational register entirely—both pupils disappearing upward, the irises going, just white showing between her lashes.

Her head dropped back.

The full weight of it—falling back onto his shoulder, her neck going completely slack, her enormous head resting against him with the total, boneless trust of someone who has lost access to the voluntary muscle groups.

Her hands fell from his forearms.

They just—dropped. Hanging at her sides. The same Stone bloodline hands that had crumbled rock, open and loose now, fingers curled slightly inward, not holding anything.

Her breasts had stilled.

Their swing arrested by the cessation of impact, they settled slowly—the weight of them finding their resting position, the nipples pointing downward, a fine tremor still moving through them from the echoes of the last several minutes.

Between her thighs: dripping.

Both of them. Her cunt—bare, spread in the frog position, the exterior of her swollen and flushed—was releasing what earlier had been put there, a slow, continuous leak running down her inner thighs and falling into the pool below in thin, warm rivulets. And from behind—his cock still inside her, still seated fully in the aftermath of his release—the overflow finding the small gaps that physics required, seeping outward, running down the curve of her ass and joining the other things tracking down her thighs.

She hung in his arms.

Completely limp. Completely silent. The specific quality of silence that is not the silence of someone choosing not to speak but the silence of someone who is no longer present to make that choice.

He looked at her face.

The fury was gone.

Not resolved. Not converted. Just: absent. The face that was left—her head back on his shoulder, her jaw slightly open, her dark skin flushed and damp—was a face without its armor on, the specific, undefended face of someone who is somewhere else.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he rose.

The pool fell away.

The narrow cleft of rock that had held the afternoon opened into sky as he climbed—the cold mountain air receiving them, the copper light of approaching evening touching everything. He held her in both arms now, her body cradled against his chest in the frog position that her sleeping body had not released—her thighs still spread, her knees still raised at the angles the position required, his cock still inside her.

It was not, technically, the most aerodynamic configuration for flight.

He flew northeast anyway.

The mountains below him rolled in the amber light—ridge after ridge, the rock faces catching the evening and throwing it back in different colors. The valley between the compound’s territory and the northeast mountain opened as he gained altitude, the mercenary quarter’s copper-stone rooftops diminishing below, the market sounds gone entirely at this height.

He held Rova.

Her head was against his shoulder. Her hair—still wet from the pool, still disordered from everything—spread across his arm in the wind, lifting and settling with each shift of his flight path. Her face was turned toward his neck. Her breasts pressed against his chest—their full, substantial weight redistributed by her cradled position, the heavy warmth of them settling against him, moving slightly with the motion of flight and with the small, involuntary breaths she was still taking.

She was breathing.

Slowly. Evenly. The deep, comprehensive breath of someone sleeping the specific sleep of a body that has been worked past every threshold it had and has requested maintenance.

His cock, still inside her, was warm.

The wind found the wet between her thighs and she made a small sound—not waking, not language, just a small, involuntary murmur of sensation reaching someone who was no longer available to process it consciously.

From his collar, Yuna’s warmth shifted.

It moved—slowly, with the specific deliberate attention of someone who has been waiting patiently and has decided to observe—toward the point where his chest was in contact with Rova’s. It settled there. Not claiming. Just: noting.

’I see her,’ that warmth said, to no one in particular.

He looked at Rova’s face.

At the jaw that was loose now. At the space where the fury had been and would be again when she woke—would come back, all of it, the assembled contempt and the Stone bloodline pride and the twenty different species of profanity she’d been cataloguing since this morning. It would return. He had no doubt about that.

But it wasn’t here right now.

Right now there was just a woman sleeping on his chest at altitude, dripping in two places, with her name said once against her ear and a conversation about freedom confirmed in writing.

He looked at the northeast mountain.

The crack in the stone was visible from here—he’d have been able to find it without Rova’s information, but the information had saved him three minutes, and the three minutes would be useful for something else.

He descended toward the mountain’s face.

His divine sense extended ahead of him—through the stone, past the formation seal, into the mechanism room. One hundred formation crystal screens, still running. A runic chair, still occupied. The qi signature of the mercenary queen’s real body, smaller and more concentrated than its dolls, but very much present and very much watching.

The amber glow at the arch’s base was exactly where Rova had said it would be.

He reached the face.

Hovered.

Looked at the arch.

Then looked down at Rova—still asleep against him, her face turned toward his neck, her thighs still spread in the position he was carrying her, his cock still where it was, the proof of the afternoon still running down her inner thigh and catching the mountain wind.

He looked at the arch again.

He looked at Rova.

He considered the specific experience the mercenary queen was about to have—of her stone door opening, and the man she’d been watching all afternoon arriving through it with an unconscious woman on his cock in both the literal and demonstrative sense of the expression, carrying her like something he’d picked up on the way.

He reached for the left side of the arch.

Pressed.

The right side of the formation seal dissolved. The stone shifted—the mountain’s face opening inward, the dark interior of the mechanism room becoming visible, the amber light of a hundred screens spilling out into the mountain air.

The mechanical chair was at the room’s center.

The runic energy vessels ran in their copper-threaded lines.

The hands at their controls went still.

He stepped through the arch.

Rova’s trailing thigh caught the arch’s edge as he passed through—the stone grazing the soft inner surface of her outstretched leg—and she made another small, involuntary sound.

He walked into the mechanism room.

One hundred screens showed him from a hundred angles.

The mercenary queen—small, in her chair, with no legs and the specific, absolute stillness of someone who has watched this afternoon on her screens and is now watching it walk into her room—looked at the man carrying an unconscious Stone bloodline woman in a frog position with his cock still inside her.

She said nothing.

He stood in the center of her mechanism room, his robe immaculate, Rova cradled against his chest, the amber screen-light running over them both, and looked at the queen with the patient, unhurried attention of a man who has arrived at an appointment.

"’Miss Queen,’" he said.

His voice was conversational.

Warm, almost.

The room was very quiet.

Outside, through the arch, the mountain evening was going from copper to purple at its edges, the stars beginning their appearance above the ridgeline, the distant compound lights just visible as amber pinpoints in the dark below.

Inside: the hum of runic energy vessels. A hundred screens. One man. One sleeping woman on his arm.

The mercenary queen looked at all of this.

Her hands were very still on the vessel stems.

She said, finally—and her voice, when it came, was smaller than any of the voices her dolls had used: 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

"’...You could have knocked.’" Her voice was laced with clear intrigue and, at the same time, fear, simply because she had already seen what kind of man he was, with her prosthetic leg lying beside her as she grabbed it and began to put it on.

Her voice naturally resonated throughout the chamber where Tianlong, who was holding Rova, smiled while looking in the direction from which the voice was coming, as he waved his hand and simply said,

"I would prefer knocking you up than the doors of this place."