The dragon that came through the hole in the cavern ceiling first was black and enormous and Lymur stood there looking up at it with genuine wonder.
A shade of black-violet scales, two horns sharp and forward-set beside eyes with black sclera and yellow irises, ridge-spines running down the back, pitch-black feathered wings folding as she descended. The claws that met the cavern floor were with grace despite the size, which said something about character.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Lymur said. "Look at you!"
He walked a slow half-circle around her, looking. She watched him do it patiently. Sylvie apparently decided he wasn't a threat but wasn't quite sure she liked being examined.
This guy's as strange as we first met him, Sylvie communicated to Arthur, to which he can only agree.
"Arthur's bond is all grown up," he said. "Good for you."
Sylvie made a sound that conveyed a specific opinion about being talked about in third person by an acquaintance.
"Okay, okay." He held up the unconscious girl and looked at Sylvie's back. "She's going up there. Try not to drop her."
He settled Samantha onto Sylvie's back carefully, making sure she wasn't going to slide, and stepped back. Arthur came up next through the hole, Elijah and Jasmine helping from below, and the three of them climbed up onto Sylvie. Jasmine went last.
Arthur looked at Lymur. "Are you — "
"I'm fine, I can fly." Lymur waved a hand. "Go ahead."
They rose through the hole and into an early afternoon sky... or what should have been like that. What was actually there when they cleared the opening was a sky above a crater so wide and so thoroughly emptied of anything that several of them went quiet looking at it.
Every tree was gone, or flat, or reduced to splinters at the very outer edge where the blast hadn't been quite strong enough to be thorough. The hills in the middle distance had new shapes. The ground in the nearest radius was scorched smooth. The crater itself was large enough that Lymur estimated it generously from above and then revised the estimate upward.
Sylvie hovered. Everyone on her back looked at the landscape. Then they looked at Lymur, who had floated up beside them and was adjusting his collar.
"What," Arthur said.
"What?" Lymur said.
"What did you do?"
"I told you I was fighting someone."
"You did all of this."
"Hey! It was a mutual effort."
Elijah was staring at the crater looking like his definition of large had just been revised. "That's — how far does it go?"
"Couple kilometers maybe," Lymur said. "Give or take."
"Give or take..." Jasmine repeated.
"The other guy started it," Lymur scoffed.
"What other guy?" Arthur asked. "Where is he?"
"I told you. He ran away."
"He ran away after doing this?"
"After I unleashed a super-secret-horrid-technique, yeah, and then I caught him and we crashed through the ground, and then he escaped while I was distracted, and I'm still annoyed about it." He looked at the crater. "In hindsight the Rupture was probably a bit much but I was trying to catch him and he was very fast."
He just said the technique's name. I thought it was supposed to be secret? Arthur, as of this moment, stopped pointing things out, too tired to wrap his head around the eccentric Special Grade.
"A bit much," Jasmine said.
"Do you want to get out of here or not? I'm hungry."
Sylvie made a sound. Lymur got the impression it meant same.
......
They landed outside Xyrus in the late afternoon and Sylvie shifted back down to her smaller form somewhere during the descent.
The plan was the guild — sort out the dungeon incident, get treatment for the injuries, file whatever needed filing. Lymur said he'd be there soon and peeled off toward his apartment, which needed about twenty minutes of his attention before he was going to inflict himself on a public space.
He washed up, changed into a clean outfit — dark trousers, a loose shirt, a lighter jacket than the one he'd left the house in this morning, since that one had acquired a scorch mark that he hadn't decided what to do with yet — and found a packed snack in his kitchen that he ate standing over the sink while looking out the window at the city.
What even is the deal with these asuras popping out of nowhere? He sighed, grabbing a glass of wine and taking a sip. "They're supposed to be myths and they've been showing up lately. Really beats the whole point."
He'd figure it out. He had a face now, and a name, and Theosophy had been quietly working the whole time they were fighting, filing data he could come back to. It wasn't for nothing.
He put the thought away, finished the snack and the wine, and headed for the guild.
......
He almost walked into her at the entrance.
He stepped to the side to let someone out of the door and that someone also stepped, and they ended up face to face in the doorway, close enough that he had to actually look at the person rather than just the space around them.
It was an elf with shoulder-length white hair and light blue eyes. Taller than average, dressed in a white uniform with gold and red, which he thought was military formal wear. She looked exactly like the person he remembered, except the uniform was new and the expression and vibe were slightly different.
He blinked, nostalgia welling up within him unexpectedly.
"Long time no see, Alea."
···---⚜---···
They somehow ended up in a cafe.
Lymur wasn't entirely sure how. One moment they were standing in the guild doorway doing the mutual surprise thing, and the next Alea had said she needed to eat something and he'd said he could eat again, and here they were.
Same side of the city, a cafe now instead of a restaurant, seated across from each other at a small table while everyone in the surroundings tried to look like they weren't staring and failed.
Two Special Grades, sitting at a corner table, splitting a menu.
It's been around two years if I'm not wrong, Lymur thought, looking at her. She'd changed. Not physically — she looked the same — but there was something more settled about her, like she had taken on something significant and was carrying it well. The military uniform helped. She wore it like she'd had it a while.
He was trying to figure out how to start the thing that probably needed to be started when she beat him to it.
"Sorry," she said suddenly, surprising him.
Lymur looked at her from above the menu. "What?"
"I said sorry." She wasn't looking at him exactly, more at the table between them. "Back then I was — " she paused, choosing her words, "— younger. And I idolized you and I fantasized about you... which was my mistake. I went into it expecting it to mean something more and that was on me, not you. Your intentions were obvious from the start." She finally looked up. "I just needed to say that."
She said it cleanly, which he appreciated, and the expression on her face while she said it was a combination of things — sincere, slightly awkward, and also a little bit upset, which didn't entirely match the apology.
I genuinely do not understand women, he thought.
He caught himself thinking it and immediately felt stupid.
He didn't have enough data. Most of his female social experience was either students arguing philosophy at him, fellow professors twice or thrice his age (or supposed age), or Jasmine looking at him like he was a mild catastrophe, and arguments about Kantian ethics were probably not representative of how women generally operated. Though he'd thought the same thing during certain arguments with Mira, and another girl named Petra, and twice with a girl in last semester's class whose name he kept almost-remembering.
He set that aside.
Alea had finished and was looking at him with the expression of someone who had said the hard thing and was now waiting.
"...Okay," he said. "I should say something as well."
He thought about how to do this without being bad at it, which was a genuine challenge.
"You already know I'm bad at this," he said. "With, uh, social things. I know I have a terrible personality. I know I come off as inconsiderate without really trying to, and I was especially bad at it two years ago." He looked at her. "I was the asshole that day. I asked you to sleep with me in the middle of brunch, which looking back — " he exhaled through his nose, "— yeah. That was me. And then I left the next morning without saying anything." He paused. "Especially given that it was your first time."
He'd remembered that part on the walk over and it had not made him feel better about himself, only worse.
"So... yeah. I'm sorry," he said, scratching his head sheepishly. "I was the asshole."
Alea looked at him for a second. Then she smiled, which was the first real smile since they'd sat down, and it had Lymur thinking it suited her way better than the previous dignified expression she wore.
"Thank you."
"I mean it."
"I know. That's what makes it good." She picked up the menu. "Although — "
"I know, I know. It still seems like a big deal even though it was two years ago, and — "
"That's — " she put the menu down. "That's not — I was going to say thank you for being honest."
"Oh." He looked at the menu. "I thought you were going to tell me off for something."
"I was going to thank you and then you immediately said something weird."
"That's just how I am, isn't it?"
She looked at him for a second and then laughed, properly, the odd sense of humor he'd liked about her the first time surfacing again. "You really haven't changed at all."
"I really have! I'm a professor now, I'll have you know. And I'm a lot more careful about what I say or do nowadays... I think." He was a little awkward about it, which was unusual enough that he noticed. "You have, though. The uniform suits you."
She looked down at it. "It's new. Relatively." She straightened the sash slightly. "A lot happened in two years."
"Tell me."
So she did, and he listened, and the food arrived at some point and they ate while she talked, and gradually the stiffness of the first ten minutes dissolved into something that felt closer to two people who genuinely enjoyed each other's company and had simply gotten off to a complicated and awkward start.
She was entertaining. He'd forgotten that — or hadn't really noted it the first time because he'd been distracted by his own social clumsiness. She had a dry wit that she deployed quietly, landing observations in the middle of sentences that he caught a moment after she said them.
He told her about the academy, which she found funnier than he expected.
"You teach ethics," she said, disbelief in her face.
"I do."
"You."
"Yes."
"Ethics. You, of all people."
"It keeps coming up that I'm a surprising choice," Lymur said. "I've made my peace with it."
"How are the students?"
"Good and annoying. One of them wrote a twelve-page essay arguing that my philosophy constitutes a formalized system of ethical egoism and I had to give her a high mark because she wasn't wrong. That was during my first sem."
Alea covered her mouth.
"Her name is Mira. She's already passed my class but I still can't forget her," Lymur continued. "She's going to do something important someday and it's going to be a problem for everyone around her."
"You like her."
"I like all my students," he said, with a tone like he had only recently admitted this to himself and wasn't fully comfortable with it yet.
Alea only smiled at that, and the two of them stayed at the table long enough that the staff started giving them looks, and neither of them particularly noticed.
···---⚜---···
The day after, Lymur made his way back to the guild.
He was supposed to go yesterday, but he ran into Alea at the entrance and that had turned into a cafe and several hours, so...
He found them in the legal department — Jasmine, Arthur, and Elijah on one sofa, Kaspian in a chair across from them with an assistant at his side. The room felt full of people who had been sitting with something very unpleasant for too long.
Kaspian looked up when he walked in and immediately frowned.
"You shouldn't frown so often," Lymur said. "Your wrinkles will get worse, bro."
Kaspian looked at him for a long moment. Then he exhaled. "Your concern is much appreciated, Lymur."
"Thought you were coming yesterday," Jasmine said.
"I ran into an old friend." He sat down on another sofa across from the three of them. "We had to catch up."
Arthur — masked today, so Lymur was calling him Note in his head — looked at him sideways. "Didn't know you had that many friends."
"Oh yeah?"
Lymur raised one finger. A thin Incision line drew itself through the air, close enough to singe the edge of Note's hair before burying itself cleanly in the wall behind him.
Note went very still.
"Sorry sir," he said. "It was just a joke sir."
Lymur smiled pleasantly. He wasn't even annoyed. It was just a funny response.
Kaspian pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Where's that Samantha girl, by the way?" Lymur asked after a short snort.
"Her injuries were a lot worse so she's still getting treated," Kaspian replied.
"Is that right? What actually happened down there? I only caught the end of it."
So they told him.
He listened to the whole thing without interrupting, starting from the point where the dungeon started feeling wrong, the moment they pressed forward anyway, the AA-rank adventurer Brald losing an arm and then losing the rest of himself not long after. The fog on the final floor that took one more of them before they ever saw the Elderwood Guardian, and the fight that followed.
And then Lukas Wykes, who had shot a spell at Note and nearly crippled Jasmine on his way out to escape.
By the end of it, the room was deadly quiet. It was clear they were still angry and hadn't figured out what to do with the rage yet.
Lymur nodded slowly. "That's genuinely awful," he said. He meant it. Then he looked at Kaspian's assistant. "Is there any apple juice?"
The assistant blinked.
"Apple juice," Lymur repeated. "Do you have any?"
Kaspian stared at the middle distance with the thousand-yard look of a man reconsidering his career.
But then the door opened, and Lukas Wykes walked in with enough guards to suggest he'd thought about this entrance. The bandaging on his arm was done to a level that had nothing to do with medical necessity and everything to do with exaggeration. He looked around the room, and his face arranged itself into what could've been concern if he had a more convincing face.
"Whatever could you have done to survive that?" he said. His eyes moved across the three adventurers on the sofa with the particular interest of someone expecting devastation. "I hope you didn't have to make any terrible decisions. In a situation like that, I imagine the temptation to—"
"Thanks," Lymur said.
The assistant had appeared at his elbow with a small glass of apple juice. He took it.
The moment Lukas heard Lymur's voice, he stopped. He turned, only now spotting Lymur happily sniffing his juice, and the expression on his face went through three things: realization, then panic as he realized which room he had just walked into, and then a step backward that he probably didn't mean to take.
Lymur stood up, apple juice still in hand.
He crossed the room at a pace that suggested he had nowhere urgent to be, while the guards behind Lukas did nothing. They managed a half-step, but as they looked into Lymur's eyes, theyh ad found that their legs were not currently taking instructions.
"What am I paying you for — " Lukas whispered in a panic.
Lymur stopped a few feet in front of Lukas and looked down at him. Not really to intimidate, just because there was a height difference and that was where Lukas happened to be. He took a sip.
"Long time no see, Wykes boy." He took a sip and looked at Lukas, deep in thought. "I understand your brother. He's decently strong and I get what he is," Lymur said, genuinely. "But you, on the other hand—" He tilted his head slightly. "I can never figure out what makes you feel so confident. You're pretty mediocre. You're probably going to stay that way for the rest of your life." He took another sip. "I'm not saying that to be mean. I'm just saying I don't see what you're working with. Must be exhausting, carrying all that posturing around for no real reason."
Lukas said nothing. His mouth had opened at some point and not successfully closed.
A few seconds passed and Lymur frowned.
"This is the part where you leave," he said. "In case that wasn't clear. Oh! And do send your brother my regards."
He turned around and went back to his seat. Everyone in the room watched him sit down as Lukas and his cohorts left. He finished the juice at this point, then he set the empty glass down.
"If the Wykes family tries to use their influence to twist how this case lands," he said, to the room, "go ahead and use my name too. I'd be fine with it." He paused. "I find the whole family obnoxious anyway, so."
Then he stood up. There was a moment where he didn't say anything and seemed to be working up to something. His ears were slightly red.
"It's okay," he said, not meeting anyone's eyes, "to rely on me. Since we're — you know, f-friends."
He left immediately, cringing at his own words.