Chương 204: 29. Fairy Tavern and Yozora 3

My brain lagged behind my body. My wrists were already pinned. Not painfully. But precisely. That single motion shattered the last fragment of maybe I was overthinking this into fine powder. Son of a bitch. I'd walked straight into it. The most classic, most embarrassing, most textbook-first-page-of-the-Idiot's-Survival-Manual honey trap in recorded history.

"Wait, wait—" I tried to move. Something swept through my muscles—not full paralysis, but like a fine current had brushed every fiber, leaving them functional but drained of half their conviction.

"… What did you do to me?" Click. Light flared. The woman standing over me had shed her cloak. She was, as it turned out, a woman. She was also an elf, and beautiful in a way that felt like a deliberate insult to everyone else in the harbor district. Her black hair caught the lamplight like polished silk, pointed ears tracing clean arcs through the strands. Her eyes were pale and cool—the color of a lake reflecting stars at midnight. Without a smile, she projected an aloofness that belonged behind velvet ropes.

But the corner of her mouth carried faint, constant amusement—the expression of someone watching a fool who had willingly jumped into a trap and was now trying to maintain composure. That fool being me.

"Who are you…" The earlier haze—that too-quick heartbeat, that cotton-soft fog—had burned off completely. What replaced it was the comprehensive awareness of having been calculated from head to toe, followed by the delayed arrival of shame. She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she produced something small and delicate, passing it slowly in front of my face. A slender needle? A fine pendant with crystal? Something between.

"My apologies," she said, using the tone of someone not remotely sorry.

"You carry a very strong scent of dragon." I blinked. She continued: "Beneath the dragon and human both, there's also a faint trace of elf." My stomach dropped. This woman wasn't just dangerous. She was perceptive.

"…You know elves?" She looked down with infuriating calm.

"Most people introduce themselves before asking questions like that," I pointed out.

"I am not most people."

"I gathered that." My patience was wearing thin.

"What do you actually want? Money? My life?" She ignored the question entirely. Wonderful. Truly auspicious start to diplomatic relations. I took a breath and tried the simplest approach.

"Could you at least give me a name?" She was quiet for a long moment, visibly weighing whether a false name or continued silence was more efficient. Finally:"…Yozora." I nearly laughed. Historic breakthrough. Alert the Academy.

"Alright, Yozora," I said.

"If it's money you want, just take it." This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. Damn. If it wasn't money, it was probably my life, which called for immediate strategic adjustment.

"Mercy, milady. Everything's negotiable," I added with what I hoped was convincing sincerity. She finally frowned slightly.

"I'm not going to kill you."

"Then why paralyze me?"

"Until morning," she said simply.

"Then we part ways."

"…That's it?"

"That's it."

"Then why the paralysis?" She looked at me with the calm of someone explaining basic arithmetic.

"Needing a man's shell doesn't mean I trust men." I nearly choked.

"That's not caution—that's binding someone up on suspicion of being human."

"Prevention."

"…You have a profoundly pessimistic view of human nature."

"I don't have a pessimistic view of human nature," she said.

"I simply have a longer one." That was, irritatingly, somewhat convincing. I abandoned the philosophical debate about whether men deserved preemptive paralysis and redirected toward something useful.

"Do you actually live outside the walls?"

"Three kilometers beyond the eastern gate." Yozora answered without hesitation.

"Wave & Tail Caravan. You know it?" I looked at her and blinked very deliberately.

"What's that place for?" Her expression shifted for the first time—visibly, unmistakably. Not surprise. More like the particular wordless assessment of someone trying to determine whether you were mocking them or had genuinely lived your entire life wrapped in protective cotton. The look lasted exactly one heartbeat before she pressed it back beneath that arctic composure that made you want to bundle her in a blanket and stick her in a corner until she thawed.

"Drop the innocent act," she said, finally letting a trace of dry amusement slip into her tone.

"A man claiming he doesn't know what gambling dens and brothels are? That's genuinely hilarious." Ah. So that's the category we're in. I considered it briefly, then answered honestly: "I don't go to places like that." She arched an eyebrow. Before she could process that fully, I added: "If I were a regular at those establishments, I wouldn't have just stood there like a complete sucker and paid for the room upfront." She looked at me, and something shifted in her gaze. Reassessment. I pressed the advantage.

"Besides, I'm a Kingdom noble. Being seen in a place like this creates... diplomatic complications." She made a dismissive sound.

"You?"

"Believe what you want." Silence settled over the room. I had to admit, the atmosphere had achieved a genuinely spectacular level of strangeness. A mysterious elf woman had lured me into the most suspicious establishment in the harbor district, paralyzed me, and then calmly explained she had no intention of killing me—she simply didn't trust that I wouldn't try something inappropriate.

Meanwhile, I, emergency envoy of the Kingdom of Eckhaus, was half-sprawled on a bed like a fish someone had yanked from the river and forgotten to finish off, clinging to the last shreds of social etiquette. At some point, my life had stopped being "eventful" and had clearly become someone's rough draft. Divine comedy. The kind a bored god writes during warm-up exercises. I cleared my throat, attempting to prevent the conversation from bleeding out entirely.

"So… your line of work is—""Let's make one thing clear first." Yozora's stare could have frozen seawater.

"I am not some cheap street-walker. I sell my art, not my body." I blinked. Coming from her, those words carried unexpected weight. Not because of pride—though she clearly had that in abundance—but because there was a cold, clean line beneath them. The sound of someone who had said this far too many times, to far too many people who refused to believe it, and had long since stopped caring whether they did. I looked at her for a moment, then smiled slightly.

"Well, staring at each other all night seems rather wasteful." She frowned.

"How about this," I said.

"Sing something." The look she gave me suggested I'd just crawled out of a well and hadn't yet dried the water off my brain.

"Do you have any comprehension of your current situation?"

"Perfect comprehension," I replied earnestly.

"I've been paralyzed by a stranger, I can't run, I can't fight, and asking questions only gets me dead-eyed stares. Given all that, I might as well come away with a song. Otherwise tonight is a complete loss." She stared at me. I looked back. After a moment, she actually let out a soft breath—the particular exhale of someone making a deeply reluctant concession to sheer audacity.

"…You really are strange."

"Thank you. I'll take that as praise."

"It wasn't praise."

"At this point, it's the only thing I'm in any condition to collect." Yozora stopped arguing. She turned and crossed to the window, settling into the narrow chair beside it. The lamplight traced her profile and the ends of her hair, taking beauty that already felt slightly unearthly and making it look like something that explicitly shouldn't be touched. Then she began to sing. The moment her voice emerged, I knew she hadn't lied. She did sell her art. And she was devastatingly good at it.

This wasn't any harbor shanty I knew, nor the overwrought ballads that slithered through palace halls, and certainly nothing like the tavern noise that made you want to upend your drink over the singer's head. What she sang was older, more distant—a melody like the dark patterns exposed when tide retreats from reef stone. It carried wandering in it, and dampness, and something else that resisted naming—a bone-deep sense of wrongness, the beautiful kind, the kind you leaned toward anyway.

I had intended to stay awake. At minimum, I refused to fall asleep like a dead pig in front of a woman who had paralyzed me twenty minutes ago. There had to be some line I wouldn't cross. But I'd spent the entire day sprinting from the Wyvern Tower to the command post to the morgue to the interrogation rooms, and finally been subjected to a gauntlet of knockout incense, honey traps, and paralysis spells. My body was decidedly not made of iron.

Her voice rolled over me like very slow water, wave after wave, finding the frayed edges of tension and gently, persistently, wearing them smooth. The last thing I saw was her silhouette in the amber lamplight. Proud. Cold. Beautiful. Dangerous. Like a slender blade tucked behind a velvet curtain. And just before consciousness slipped away, I caught something—her voice dropped almost to nothing, the murmur of someone speaking to herself rather than to me:"Not going back tonight… is safer than going back."

I meant to ask what that meant. Darkness moved faster.