Chapter 487: Chapter 487 - Arrival of a Dragon in Beginner Village

Her face was round and warm-toned, a scatter of faint marks along her collarbone where old cattle rope had left impressions after years of guiding stock, and at her upper arm where a small, dark tattoo of what appeared to be a vine — she’d gotten it at eighteen, allegedly to seem interesting, and it had not wound up serving that function. Her hair was pulled up in a practical knot. She had nice eyes. Sharp eyes. Currently narrowing.

"Are you ’really’ eating soil in the morning, Jacob?" she said, clicking her tongue again as she looked at him kneeling in the dirt.

He blinked. He stood. His chest cracked open a little with something warm and idiotic.

"Oh — Rika." The name came out before he had a handle on his expression. "You’re — you’re here. I just—"

She had already lifted her leg.

He had approximately zero seconds to process this information before her sandaled foot planted directly against his face — not a kick, exactly, more of a firm, sustained push — and he went down again into the dirt, her sole pressing his nose sideways.

"’Stay away from me,’" she said, very clearly, while maintaining pressure. "I am already ’married.’ You brat."

He peeled her foot off his face. "I just wanted to ’hug’ you—!"

Her mouth twitched. One corner, involuntary.

"After your ’little story,’ you think you get to hug me?" Her expression compressed into something that was walking a very thin line between fury and the kind of mortification that lived next to fury and borrowed its furniture. "You ’deserve’ a beating."

Her jaw tightened. Her eyes went briefly, involuntarily, to some middle distance.

She was remembering.

It had been three days after the wedding. Three days — and she and her husband Loren had barely made it out of the celebration before they were at each other, which was frankly an indictment of how long the village celebration had dragged. Loren was younger than her by four years, slight-framed, lean — not a fighter’s build, but a guard’s, the specific kind of lean that came from long watches and irregular meals. He’d arrived at Edenveil with a posting assignment and a shy nod and hadn’t known what to do with a woman like Rika until she’d told him, which had apparently been the correct approach because three months later he’d stammered a proposal into her ear while she was milking cows and she’d said yes before he finished the sentence.

They’d gone to the forest edge, where the old moss-covered stones made a natural privacy screen, and she had her hands pressed into the bark of the oak as Loren drove into her from behind, his hips slapping against the wide cushion of her thick ass — both hands gripping the generous swell of her hips as she pushed back against him, her blouse half-open, her heavy tits swinging forward with every thrust, nipples dragging across the rough bark.

’Haah — Loren — ngh—’

It had been going very well.

And then she’d heard the sound.

Rustling, first. Then breathing — the very specific, irregular breathing of someone who had not planned to be there and absolutely was not going to make it better by continuing to be there.

She’d turned her head.

Jacob. Standing frozen in the tree line. Face crimson. Eyes massive. Looking at her exactly the way a man looks when he has stumbled into something and every survival instinct he possesses is fighting directly against the part of his brain that has lost all executive function.

Loren had looked up.

He had made eye contact.

And then Loren, who was built narrow and lightweight and had all the center of gravity of a nervous man mid-thrust, had flinched so hard his hip rotation went wrong, and she’d heard a sound she would describe to no living person for the rest of her life, and Loren had made a noise like a man who has discovered pain in a brand new location, and that had been the end of their forest consummation and the beginning of a four-day period during which Loren could not stand at his post without looking like he was solving a difficult math problem.

Rika had told no one.

She intended to continue telling no one until death.

She wanted, very much, to kick Jacob again.

"Now look," Jacob said, putting his hands up, rubbing his nose. "I know. I ’know.’ I’m sorry. I really am. But listen — Rika, your husband, I need to tell you something important—"

Her eye twitched.

"About Loren."

"’Don’t.’"

"He’s—" Jacob opened his mouth. "Rika, I need you to hear this. Your husband is actually a—"

’BAMM.’

The sound was remarkable. Not a slap. Not a shove. A full, closed-fist, shoulder-rotated punch that caught Jacob directly in the side of the jaw with the accumulated force of a woman who milked cows at five in the morning and carried thirty-kilogram feed sacks and had been waiting three days to do this.

Jacob’s eyes rolled back. His body went sideways. He hit the ground like a sack of rice thrown from a loft, flat and complete, nose bleeding in a bright arc across the dirt, eyes aimed at the sky and understanding nothing.

Rika stood over him.

She was breathing hard. Her knuckles stung. The pot was still somehow in her other hand.

She could feel eyes on her — the neighbor woman had paused at her gate, pot in hand. Old man Berris had stopped feeding his chickens. Two children at the well were watching with open mouths.

Her face went ’hot.’

She could also feel, in the back of her mind — behind the fury, behind the embarrassment — the quiet, insistent ’ping’ of the ability she’d been born with and rarely discussed and absolutely never wanted activated in stupid morning confrontations.

’Truth Sight.’

It was involuntary. It activated on spoken claims. And it had just, without her permission, evaluated Jacob’s claim about her husband and returned a result she was not emotionally equipped to deal with at this hour.

Her mouth went tight. And tighter. Her brow furrowed.

’No.’

’Why did it ping yes?!’

She stared at his bleeding, unconscious face in the dirt.

She looked at the sky.

She looked back at his face.

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her free hand went to the side of her head and pressed there as though she could manually override the information she’d just received.

The ’nerve.’ The absolute ’nerve’ of being right. While bleeding.

"’You—’"

"THEY’VE ARRIVED AT THE TELEPORTATION GRID!"

The voice cut across the yard, across the whole square — a child’s shriek, high and piercing, the kind that carried because children had not yet learned that information could be delivered at a normal volume.

Every head in the yard swung.

A small boy was sprinting up the main dirt path, arms windmilling, sandals slapping the earth. He was one of Berris’s grandchildren — eight, maybe nine, the age where running still looked like falling forward very quickly. His face was flushed to the roots of his hair.

"THERE ARE PEOPLE! MANY PEOPLE! AT THE GRID! COME LOOK—!"

For a single breath, Edenveil held still.

And then the door of the hut behind Jacob opened.

It opened slowly, the way things open when they are opened by someone who is not in a hurry because they have never needed to be in a hurry, because whatever is coming will wait, because it has always been the rest of the world that adjusted to them and not the other way.

Edda stepped out.

She moved onto the narrow porch with her arms hanging loose at her sides, her wide scarred shoulders filling the doorframe. Her white hair — that impossible, dense, gravity-ignoring volume of white — caught the morning light. The scar that ran from her left jaw down her neck and disappeared beneath her collar caught it too, bright as a seam in old iron.

She was not looking at the child.

She was not looking at Jacob, still bleeding serenely in the dirt.

She was not looking at Rika, who had the expression of a woman who has been handed a problem she does not want.

Her eyes — narrowed, heavy-lidded, the particular stillness of a predator at rest — were aimed at the distance. At the direction of the teleportation grid.

The grid sat at the east edge of the village. It was large enough for four adults to stand within simultaneously, and it connected Edenveil to the other base towns along the Labyrinth’s outer ring, and to the upper staging towns within the stratum system. It was ordinarily used for supply transfers and official messenger runs.

Edda’s nostrils moved.

Something shifted across her face.

It was not surprise. It was the settling of something anticipated, a piece moving on a board that she had been watching without showing she was watching.

Her voice, when it came, was quiet. Which was somehow worse than her usual volume.

"A dragon."

She said it the way one says ’of course.’

Not alarm. Not disbelief. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Just the flat, low recognition of a woman who has fought enough things to know exactly what register of sensation in the air belongs to what category of creature, and who had apparently just received data from the teleportation grid’s direction that she had categorized without needing to see anything yet.

The word fell across the yard like a stone into a still pond.

The chickens went silent.

Somewhere, a cow stopped mid-lowing.

Even the child had stopped running, panting at the fence with wide eyes, staring at the old woman on the porch.

Rika’s hand slowly lowered from the side of her head.

Jacob, bleeding in the dirt, appeared to regain some level of consciousness. His eyes focused. He blinked at the pale morning sky. Then he appeared to process the word that had just been spoken, and his expression went from the loose vacancy of the recently-punched to something considerably more alert.

He turned his head.

He looked at Edda on the porch.

He looked at the direction of the teleportation grid.

And very slowly, with the particular weariness of a man who has already died once and is now watching the second act begin roughly twenty minutes after resurrection, he said:

"...Of course."

Edda didn’t look at him.

She was already stepping down from the porch, her wide frame moving with the unhurried certainty of someone going to check on a thing that will still be a problem whether she hurries or not.

Her white hair moved behind her like a banner as she ordered,"Everyone go inside of your houses... And Rika, bring my Great sword. NOWWWW!!!!"