Selthia was not going to take long to fade.
But it was a gradual process. Like ink dissolving in water, the edges of her figure were losing definition while Ren's interior space slowly reclaid its golden quality, patient and inexorable. Her features were still visible. Still readable…
The expression on them was sothing Ren didn't manage to catalogue in ti.
"You were very rough with ," said Selthia, with that tone of hers that skipped dramatic inflection entirely and landed sowhere in the register of calm observation, soone stating a fact they find mildly interesting. "Touching all over like that was cruel." A deliberate pause cleaning an unexisting tear. "Though honestly…" her lips curved into sothing that wasn't quite a smile but occupied the sa neighborhood, "...it didn't feel that bad. A new sensory experience."
Ren unlocked his mouth.
He closed it.
Not because he had no answer. He had an answer... Several, in fact. The problem was that every version of that answer he could formulate in the next two seconds was going to sound exactly like the thing it wasn't, and two seconds was precisely how much ti he had before the three girls reached his back.
He felt them before he turned.
When he did, Larissa was already just three steps away. She moved with that efficiency she had when she had finished evaluating a situation and settled on her next step, no additional processing ti required. Even when the context made composure a genuine effort. Her eyes scanned the space once, the floor, where the traces of the corrupted network had left their marks on the golden surface. From the floor to Selthia, from Selthia to Ren and from Ren back out to the general situation. The full picture assembled and filed under a category Ren recognized imdiately as 'Larissa Arriving At Uncomfortable Conclusions'.
She stopped in front of him and put a hand on his shoulder.
Ren drew breath to explain that it wasn't what it looked like, but she got there first.
"If you want a fourth," said Larissa, with a calm that was sohow more unsettling than outrage would have been, "you'll need to discuss it with us first."
The air left Ren without permission.
He deflated completely. He hadn't prepared a response for that, because preparing a response for that would have required anticipating it, and anticipating it would have required a level of imagination that he refused to credit himself with. The response he had ready was for indignation, or for questions, or for any reasonable variation of what the situation looked like from the outside. Not for that specific calm, the kind that ant Larissa had processed the complete picture and arrived at a conclusion that didn't make sense for him.
He looked for Liora.
She was two steps further back. Her face had the look of soone whose body had finally sent in the bill for everything they'd spent over the last few hours, very tired but arriving while there were still important things left to deal with. She exhaled slowly, the breath of soone preparing to say sothing they already know isn't going to be enough.
"I don't agree," she said. "For the record. Three is already a problem for ."
"Liora, this isn't…"
"I'm not saying I won't accept it in so fair agreent." She cut him off with the sa tired energy. "I'm saying it's a problem. Those are different things."
Ren opened his mouth to explain that nothing they were constructing had any basis in what had actually occurred. That there was a technical explanation for every elent of the scene. That disrupting mana flow through secondary nodes was a perfectly docunted combat technique, one that the sounds a projected entity made when its corrupted flow was interrupted were a natural physiological response to…
A laugh didn't let him start.
Not from the girls.
Selthia, still dissolving at the edges, had clearly decided to make full use of her remaining ti. She was watching the scene with the first expression of genuine amusent Ren had seen from her since she'd entered his interior space, relaxed, open, like soone settling in to enjoy sothing they hadn't expected to find entertaining.
"After everything he made feel," she said, addressing all three girls with a comfort level that Ren found profoundly unfair given the timing, "he can't escape responsibility now." Her eyes moved to him with sothing that in a different context might have been called flirtatious and in this one was specifically engineered to make his life difficult. "I'm keeping him for myself. So he can make feel things like that every day. I'm not sharing." A brief pause. "I don't understand how any of you could…"
"That is completely…" Ren started.
Selthia's body finished dissolving.
Mid-sentence.
Without letting him even finish.
He stood there with his mouth open, looking at the spot where she had been a mont ago, which was now just an empty section of the golden library. He closed his mouth. Opened it again. Closed it again.
He turned slowly toward the girls.
All three of them were looking at him.
Larissa with that composure of hers that had depth behind it, which made it harder to read than simple indignation, because you couldn't be sure what the depth contained. Liora with the face of soone adding new data to an already complicated social calculation and watching the results update in real ti. And Luna.
Luna, who had taken a step forward.
Who had put both hands on his shoulders.
Who was holding him with a firm grip that maybe wasn't aggressive, not exactly, but that still didn't factor in the possibility of him going anywhere. Her grip was unyielding in the way that ant the person doing the gripping had been thinking about not letting go for a while before sothing happened…
Ren registered her mana in the first second of contact because it was impossible not to. The surface was quiet, controlled, carrying that particular serenity Luna used as insulation between what was happening outside and whatever was happening underneath. But beneath that surface the mana was a full vortex. Complex and enormous, the complete storm of soone who had spent a period of ti not knowing whether the person in front of them was going to still be that person when it was over.
He gazed at her.
She looked back at him.
He thought that the most reasonable course of action was to explain everything, calmly and in order. That maybe after the shouting and the scolding, once he could show them the actual state of the mana in his core, they would see that there was nothing to understand in the wrong way. That the truth was simple even if it sounded complicated. That Selthia had said exactly what she'd said to produce exactly this situation, and that the three of them were too intelligent not to see through that if he gave them thirty seconds.
He unlocked his mouth.
Luna pulled him in.
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