Chapter 491: Chapter 491- Edda’s Guard Dripping Down

The village was watching.

Not openly. Not the way a crowd watches—standing in the street, faces forward, attention declared. This was the watching of people who had decided the street was no longer safe but could not make themselves stop looking.

Every shutter in Edenveil had a gap in it.

Raven noticed all of them.

He noticed the elderly man at the farthest window whose white eyebrows were visible above the sill. He noticed the two children who had given up pretending to hide and were simply kneeling on the window bench with their chins propped on the sill, watching with the complete, shameless attention of people who had not yet learned that observation required discretion. He noticed the woman across the square who had cracked her door open three inches and left it there, her eye visible in the gap.

The corner of his mouth moved.

He found it genuinely amusing—this village performing its own absence while failing comprehensively at the performance.

Edda did not find it amusing.

She was aware of every window. She could feel the collective gaze of Edenveil on the back of her neck like the heat of a fire you are standing too close to—not burning, but informing you, continuously, of its presence.

"They are watching me walk beside this," she thought.

She could not finish the sentence.

What was the word? Dragon was not sufficient. The level-thirty designation—the highest in the region, the thing that had made her the effective protector of every village in the outer ring—was not a unit of measurement that applied here.

She had spent three years understanding herself as the strongest thing in her vicinity.

She had been standing in front of this man for approximately seven minutes.

Her thoracic wound had been aching since the first thirty seconds.

Not in pain. In recognition. The tissue around it—the legacy damage, the incomplete healing, the thing that had never closed properly—was reacting to the proximity of his mana the way a compass reacts to a magnetic field: not choosing, just pointing.

"He could heal it."

She pressed the thought down immediately.

It came back up.

"He said Dragon’s Heart. He said Pure Mana. He said Mating."

She pressed harder.

She focused on walking. On the dirt beneath her boots. On the tight pull of her garment across her thighs with each stride. On the ordinary architecture of a village street that she had walked a thousand times.

"How did you find it here?"

His voice came from just behind her left shoulder.

She did not turn.

"I beg your pardon?" she said, keeping her voice in the register of a woman asking for clarification rather than a woman whose heart had just lurched.

"The village," he said. "A woman like you." A pause—deliberate, she was sure, because everything he did was deliberate. "You should be in the eastern valleys. Not here."

Her shoulders drew slightly inward before she caught them.

The eastern valleys. The high-rank staging grounds. Where the Labyrinth’s third and fourth stratum adventurers maintained their bases, where the serious guilds ran their operations, where a Dragon Slayer title would have placed her at the absolute top of every hierarchy.

She swallowed.

"I was injured," she said. "In the hunt."

She stopped.

Caught herself.

Turned her head slightly—not looking at him, looking at the middle distance beside him.

"Of one of your kin," she corrected, her voice dropping half a register. "My team was annihilated alongside them."

The words came out with the flatness of something she had said before. Not rehearsed—worn. The edges of it smoothed by repetition into something that could be said without breaking, as long as she kept her voice in the right range and did not let her eyes go anywhere near the memory.

She grunted softly. A sound that was not grief, technically, but lived in grief’s territory.

Something touched her side.

She looked down.

His hand had found the hilt of her great sword—the sword she had been carrying in the scabbard at her back, the handle visible above her shoulder—and his fingers had tucked beneath the band, the strap that held it secure. The sword shifted. The weight of it pulled slightly, the hilt tilting outward from her back, the blade’s angle changing by a degree.

She stared at it.

She stared at his hand.

She looked up at his face.

He was looking at her with the expression of someone who has asked a question and is waiting for the answer to arrive.

"Will you wear a skirt for me tonight?"

Edda’s brain stopped.

Not briefly. Comprehensively. Every thought she had been managing—the wound, the memory of her team, the watching windows, the logistics of feeding his women, the ongoing project of maintaining composure—all of it ceased simultaneously, leaving a complete, white silence where her internal monologue usually lived.

She stared at him.

"What?" she said.

The word came out at full volume. More volume than she had intended. More volume than any exchange in this village had produced today, including the moment she had told the whole street to go inside.

Her face.

The heat arrived in her face all at once, moving from her sternum upward—not a gradual flush but a comprehensive flooding, the particular crimson of a woman who has spent thirty years managing her own dignity and has just had a significant portion of that management disrupted by a single question about a garment.

She opened her mouth.

She closed it.

Her hands, hanging at her sides, made brief fists.

"What—" she said again, lower this time, and then stopped, because the question had the same answer regardless of how many times she asked it, which was: he had just asked her to wear a skirt. For him. Tonight.

Her warrior’s brain tried to categorize this.

It failed.

She was standing in the middle of the street she had protected for three years, with every window in Edenveil cracked open and watching, in front of the most powerful entity she had been in proximity to in her entire career, being asked about a skirt.

Her mouth was very dry.

Her thoracic wound pulsed once—warm, insistent.

The door at the side of the street opened.

It opened with the particular speed of someone who had been watching through the gap in it and had decided, incorrectly, that now was a good time to participate.

Jacob stepped out.

He was a young man with the lean, still-forming build of someone between boy and soldier, his nose recently encountered with something that had not been good for it—the cartilage slightly swollen, the skin around both nostrils carrying the particular tenderness of the recently-punched. He had clearly been inside for the last several minutes, clearly had been watching through whatever gap the door provided, and had clearly made the decision to emerge based on some calculation that had not adequately weighted the current situation.

He stepped into the street.

He looked at Edda.

His grandmother.

Standing with her face crimson and her hands in fists and her great sword listing at an angle from where someone had touched the strap, her expression carrying the combination of fury and confusion and mortification that he had never seen on her face in his entire life.

His mouth twitched.

He rubbed his bleeding nose.

He looked at Raven.

He looked back at Edda.

"What happened?" he said. "Has Grandma brought her lost grandchild? Or something?"