Rex was sitting in a chair when he woke up.
He felt dazed right away due to the effects of the beer. "Huh...? What...?"
He took a mont to gather his thoughts, not out of confusion, but because the light filtering through the high windows of the training hall indicated he had about forty minutes until sunrise.
He used the first few seconds of silence to think about where he was and what had happened between the archery range and this chair. "Ah fuck... I was so fucking close...!"
There was no noise in the training hall around him. Two of Theo’s friends who had stayed the longest were asleep on the other side of the room.
They were sprawled in a way that suggested they hadn’t intended to stay the night but had reached a point where getting ho felt like more trouble than it was worth.
Theo remained exactly where Rex had last seen him, slumped over the table with his head resting on his arms. His breathing was slow and deep, indicating he had fully surrendered to the situation he found himself in.
But...
Diana was not there.
Rex stood up, rolled his neck once, and walked to the back door that led to the courtyard. He did this because the last things he clearly rembered happened at the archery range, and his instincts told him to check the periter before making any other decisions.
There were no people in the courtyard, and the targets were still set at forty ters. The arrows from the night before were still on the board.
The second one, his, was dead center and had been there since he put it there. The cold of the night had settled into the fletching without moving it.
’Oh yeah... we’re having a challenge, huh? The loser has to take one piece of clothing, where we both ended up almost naked.’
’She saw my cock, and I saw her massive tits...’
’Those Starlight genes need to be studied; I an, like... their tits are so fucking gorgeous, and I’m so fucking close to sealing Diana’s fate to be mine.’
’But that bastard Theo... he made Diana co back to her senses, and that’s where we stopped.’
’Still... her desire level can’t lie at all.’
He went back inside.
Diana was in the side corridor that connected the main hall to the storage room, the only part of the building that separated the sleeping area from the rest.
She stood there with her arms crossed, her expression reflecting the complex emotions she had shown in fragnts throughout the previous evening, and when Rex ca around the corner and found her, she did not appear surprised to see him.
She looked, if anything, like she had been waiting.
"There you are... I’ve been looking for you everywhere." Rex asked, "How long have you been awake?"
"For... a while," she said.
He waited, because Diana was not the kind of person you rushed, especially when she had clearly organized herself for a specific conversation and was going to have it on her own terms.
"So... about last night," she said with a flushed look.
’There it is...’
"Hm? Which part?" Rex asked. "I don’t rember because of too much beer last night..."
As always, Rex played his role well enough to be the innocent one.
"The part after the second round of beers." She held his gaze steadily. "I had more than I intended, and... I’m aware of that."
"Ah... that," Rex said. "I rember now."
"Good then, I want to be clear about sothing," she said in the sa straightforward way that she said everything else seriously, with no buildup or indirection. "Whatever I said or did after the third cup is not necessarily a reflection of anything I’m prepared to stand behind in the morning."
"So if anything happened that we need to discuss—"
Rex said, "Nothing happened."
Diana’s face changed a little. Not exactly relief, but the specific way soone changed their mind after getting ready for two different conversations and now figuring out which one they are having.
"O-Oh... good, we’re both probably so drunk and didn’t rember a thing," she said. "That’s what I wanted to make sure of."
"You’re sure," she said, and the way she said it made it sound like she wasn’t asking.
"We shot arrows," Rex said. "You nearly won, but still... I got lucky."
"And you’re probably going to tell it was the beer."
"It was definitely the beer, yeah..." Diana replied, her tone confident, but she quickly averted her gaze, which undermined her certainty. "There’s no way I would lose to a beginner like you..."
There was a mont of silence in the hallway between them.
’As always... she still had that pride in her, and I would love to destroy it again for the next ti.’
Rex had noted the direction of her gaze just before she redirected it downward and slightly to the left, a direction that typically indicates soone is not trying to rember an event or organize their thoughts.
It was the direction soone looked when they had registered sothing specific and were hoping that noticing it was not visible from the outside.
And... he didn’t say anything about it.
Diana turned around and said, "So we’re settled, yeah...?"
"Of course..." Rex said, "We’re settled."
She nodded once, like soone who was done with a Chapter, and then she opened her arms and walked to the main hall to get her bow from the rack. Rex watched her go with a blank look on his face.
[DIANA VON STARLIGHT: DESIRE LEVEL — 62/100 → 90/100]
He read the notification with the sa quiet focus he gave to all important information and let it sink in without reacting.
’Ninety... the system calculates everything from the start until now, from what she had seen and turned away from and tried to be honest about even though her face was doing sothing else.’
’The maximum desire threshold was ten points away, and it had moved twenty-eight points in less than twelve hours.’
In a calm voice, he thought, "The beer and the challenge truly helped ," as if he had discovered a useful variable.
"But I know that the beer isn’t what made it go up to ninety..."
"She’s surprised to see my cock... that’s all..."
"All of them will surely get dazed just by seeing the sheer size of it."
He followed her back into the main hall, refraining from ntioning the notification, and spent the next five minutes quietly contemplating whether it would be pleasant or botherso to wake Theo up. He concluded it would be botherso and chose to leave him undisturbed.
The walk back through the city in the early morning was so serene that it felt as if the day had yet to begin; the rchants had not opened their stalls, street traffic was still sparse, and Aethelgard had not yet comnced its usual activities.
Rex walked through it like soone who was just up early and didn’t care who saw him, and then he thought about the Apostle gathering that finally cos today.
He considered what kind of person he needed to be when he entered the gathering. It was always the sa; he had to be in rooms filled with people who scrutinized everything around them, expecting to see exactly what they anticipated.
He reflected on the thoughts he had been mulling over since the Thornmaze, particularly the disparity between his actions in that dungeon and what anyone could substantiate about them. He contemplated how that gap could be molded with the right additional elent.
By the ti he arrived at the Silver Rest, the first light of dawn was beginning to illuminate the rooftops above him.
...
Rex walked through the main door of the inn while it was still getting ready to open. Mara was behind the service counter, working quickly and efficiently as if she had been doing several things for hours that morning.
When he entered, she looked up with the sa expression she always wore when trying to determine how long he had been gone, reaching a conclusion that she understood but did not express aloud.
"Morning," Rex said.
"Morning." Mara said, "Where have you been all this ti?"
"Just staying out at soone’s house... nothing important."
"I see..." Mara nodded and poured so coffee into a glass. "You have ti to change, and breakfast will be ready in twenty minutes."
"Got it."
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