Chương 221: Chapter 242: Isther Hsia

"Princess," Lere said, dipping a curtsy. I nodded back, and she straightened. Most don't bother to curtsy, not on school grounds. But Lere and I know each other, barely, from back in Meadowtam. Just enough that we're not nobodies to each other, not so much that we're familiar at all. Her family offers vassalage indirectly up to my family, so we're just a little extra formal. I'm not supposed to know that she's secretly part of the Tannerly house, so I don't mention.

"Miss Lowyer," I say, as we both straighten.

"And this is Lady Hsia?" The moppet standing nearby gave me a cool appraising stare.

"Viscountess Isther Hsia, House Skyback," she said after a second. She was barely hiding contempt. I wanted to pinch her cheeks. Even in her shoes she was barely five feet, entirely a head shorter than me. Is this what all those very tall people feel every time I start acting too serious?

"Charmed," I said with a smile. And for once I kind of was. She looked like she had just taken a bunch of ribbons and bows out of her hair, like she was incomplete without some overtly cutesy trimmings.

"I hope you two don't mind me coming over to talk."

"Of course not, princess," Lere said with a stiff smile.

"If you're not currently getting yourself expelled, I don't want to hear anything," the first-year student said. Ah. It's going to be like that. My smile spread, looking at her. It's not my best smile, not even my original smile. It is one that I find myself wearing more and more often as my life starts to take harsher turns. It's not just an overt threat display of teeth. It's also the very real enjoyment that I get when a new tension comes to me, and I find an enemy that I can lay into.

The joyful anticipation of beating down some bitch that deserves it. There was no problem when I started learning to really enjoy venting a righteous wrath onto the deserving scoundrels. But as I learn to anticipate that enjoyment, I think I might be taking a darker turn. Whatever, I just have to hold everything together for a few years. I'll be fine. With all of this in my smile, Lere has taken a step back like I pulled a crossbow on them. Isther is still glaring a challenge at me.

"Viscountess Isther Hsia," I said, through the same smile.

"We always welcome a challenge and we like to encourage others on their paths. But a certain degree of decorum and etiquette is warranted."

"What, I should say please to get some cow out of my way?" she said, tossing her hair. I'm not going to disappear her. Not just like that. But it is fucking on. My senses brush out against Lere, and make sure that there's no poisons hidden about her person. That's her real strength, and I'm holding her skills in reserve for later. Talents like hers were wasted against Nathan's love interest Kiri Sizomaji, who could be chased out of the story with one bad bento box.

I don't want to do anything to piss off Lere because the game never included any mechanic at all to detect her work, her work is absolute. Even Skeici Gianwen can be caught with a high enough skill threshold. For someone in my position, with my plans, Lere Lowyer is a fantastic resource that needs to be courted, cultivated, and kept at a safe distance. Whereas Viscountess Isther Hsia appears to be, above all else, a splendid opportunity for an object lesson.

This fucking half-pint half-wit has called me a cow to my face. That's not courage, it's just audacity. The smile on my face has set in place. Lere cleared her throat.

"Ah, princess, you've never played billiards either, maybe I can teach you both? Perhaps you could find something in common?..." I turned to her with a much different smile. Bless this murderous little gold-digger, she was trying to make peace between us.

"Actually, Miss Lowyer," I said, as I reached for the chalk-block, "that sounds like a fabulous idea. As you know, I've never touched one of these. You've seen me every night of the past year. You have been to my childhood home a few times, enough to know what our game room had and did not have. And to be certain they did not offer me a billiard table when I was in prison. For murder." My gaze and words had gradually turned from Lere to Isther, directing the very last straight at the tiny first-year.

I grabbed one of the cues and the cue chalk next and gave it a couple good swipes, examining the tip. Okay, gotta pace myself. Because I am, honestly, seventeen years out of practice. And this body has never even held a pool cue. There's no rust that's rustier than this. So I gotta make sure I don't overextend myself, The table had already been broken up, a good scatter. Nineball: not really my game but I understand how to play.

"I think the rules have been explained to me before," I said.

"This one is a game about planning and preparation, and finding opportunities faster than anyone else." I don't have the practice in, so I will shoot like a noob. I pick my target, swipe the cue twice over my knuckles, and then I brace up and sight down. I crouch low until I'm almost level with the table, using my own sightlines to make sure of my target. It does not look casual, relaxed or effortless.

The lacquered wood glides back, then forward, and with a nice click the cueball rolls with just enough topspin to make sure it'll roll through after the connect. Click-clack, the one-ball gets sunk in the side pocket, thoomp, and the cue drifts to a stop.

"The goal is the nine itself," I said.

"All the others are distractions, really. And with a really perfect shot you could bypass all of them and win any game in a single shot. In theory. But in practice, the only purpose of the other balls is just to get taken out, one by one." Click-clack-thoomp, the two-ball drops into the corner. The cue did not wind up exactly where I want it, I was looking for it to set up a simple straight shot that would not test my barely-there skills. Still, I can make this shot but it will pull my cue further out of line.

I'll need to re-orient. I walked to the side of the table and leaned low, sighting carefully.

"The game uses a variety of skills. Precision, obviously. But also patience. Geometry and physics, understanding angles and how force gets distributed. Cause and effect." Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. The cue clicked the ball clacked, the three tapped the corner of the pocket and almost deflected back out, but by an inch it dropped in. I stood, and looked at the lie of the balls. I don't think there's a shot here I can make.

Ideally I'd finish off this demonstration with a cool mic-drop like effortlessly sinking the nine from behind and leaving the rest of the table loaded. But I don't think I was ever actually that good, and I don't need to find out the hard way.

"But, little known fact," I continued, walking to the other corner of the table.

"It's also possible to win this game with almost no foresight, geometry, or precision at all. Like most baize games, you can actually win with just brute force." I handed Lere my cue stick with a smile.

"Sorry? What?" Lere said. She was quite confused by where I was going with this. She looked down at the stick in her hand, trying to figure out how I intended to make my next shot without that.

"Calling my shot," I said, putting my hands on the lip of the table.

"All of the balls in the corner pocket." And with a heave I brought the corner of the table up, bringing it to my sternum, a full foot up, balanced only on the opposite leg. And every ball on the table rolled downhill, hit the angled bumpers, and funneled down into the corner pocket. The nine ball dropped in, and the cue ball was last. I set the table back down. There was a lot of silence around us, people staring, nobody moving.

"I believe that finishes the game, Miss Hsia," I said, dusting my hands. That table was at least a full ton of weight. Lere stepped back out of my way as I approached the smaller girl. I reached up and draped my hand onto her shoulder, my fingers closing carefully over her trapezius and collarbone.

"Nineball is an important game, Viscountess Isther Hsia of House Skyback. It teaches you that you have to be careful with what you're planning to do until you are very sure what the results of your actions are going to be. I trust I've made myself extremely clear." I could see several things in her eyes. For one thing, she has just finished realizing that I am a stone-cold killer and that I do have the ability to kill her with very little effort, and that she has been actively antagonizing me to my face.

She just got here to this school, she's never seen me do anything. Every story she's ever heard about me has been hypothetical until she saw me pick up a pool cue for the first time in my life, sink three shots while monologuing about precision and planning, and then lifted enough weight to shatter all of the small girl's bones.

For another thing, she realizes that she's been predicating her conviction in her safety on the presumption that I would not do anything with all these witnesses- but that she had also assumed that all these witnesses were enough to keep me from demonstrating any of my sorcery. That has been the big issue on everyone's mind all day long: new rules, new consequences, Lady Natalie is going to have trouble with this, Lady Natalie is going to need help keeping her secrets.

Isther has thought this made me vulnerable to some loudmouthed tattletale. But if I'm willing to use sorcery in front of everyone, I might be willing to use brute violence in front of everyone. But I can also see in her eyes that these revelations are not reaching deep enough to change who she is. She's scared of me right now. And as soon as my hand is off of her, she's going to be entitled, audacious, and convinced of her own invulnerability.

The minute that curfew is lifted in the morning she's going to run straight to the deans and report me for scandalously using my magic even after the new rules said nuh-uh. So, in the middle of the night I gave her lungs just enough black mold to keep her laid up in bed all day long. Healer Licard was called to her room in the morning, but there is nothing about injecting healing energies into the body that can make mold grow less.

He also has his flesh of clay technique, but it would take a much bigger emergency than this to get him to use that on vital organs. After a week of being kept on bed rest with an ongoing fungal infection, she was removed from classes and moved off campus for treatment. There are damn few sorcerers that mention the essence of fungus, from the temple in Jangale, but those that have it are probably pretty quiet about it, and use it subtly.

Or they just dose themselves with magic mushrooms constantly, which has both occurred to me and tempted me. If the stakes were anything less than the fate of the world.... So the girl that was telling everyone how she was going to rat me out right away got sick in bed with something the healers can't fix, right after I chewed her out and laid a hand on her shoulder. I lifted a ton of table in front of hundreds of witnesses and the wall of silence was unbroken.

The girl who decided to get in my face and challenge me was laid low in a way that doesn't quite look like natural causes but isn't quite bizarre and unprecedented enough to warrant accusations. This is me being subtle. Discreet. Merciful, even. Now I'm not the only one that has trouble with that. The great thing about living in a setting where healing magic is so overpowered, is that basically nobody ever has to deal with illness, injury, impairment, disfigurement.

It takes like fifteen seconds for the resident healer to deal with most issues. A few hours for the equivalent of major multi-system surgery, maybe. So the world is generally a very safe and healthy place. The downside to living in a world with such overpowered healing magic is that there's almost no way to sideline someone without killing them. Poisons basically come in two types: (1) strong enough to kill the victim before they reach a healer, and (2) useless.

I think a lot less people would need to be killed if the healers were less efficient. Fortunately Isther Hsia is such a minor issue that I can actually use a soft touch.

Compared to the grand scheme of enemies I'm up against- crime lords, stalkers, assassins, armies of monsters, mercenary companies, entire Houses, the magister's college, my own brother, Duke Meadwhite the lich, my next dungeon exploration, the royal family, a smartass goddess- it's actually kind of adorable that this first-year student decided she was my most deadly nemesis. I guess on the one hand it's inevitable?

I am trapped inside of a work of fiction that I am forcing to take on enough of its own life to become real. And until I succeed, I'm going to be occasionally be beset by genre tropes like the social-climbing chuuni who intends to "rule the school" or some thing like that. Normally that is completely unavoidable, it's just too prevalent a trope in this genre. The only reason we didn't have one last year was because I was busy.

I'm pretty sure we'll deal with it again next year too, because schools like this just manifest self-important weirdos that treat a learning institution like a microcosm for their dreams of world domination. As opposed to me, who's actually trying for world domination and does not have time for school affairs to take up my time.

On the one hand it's borderline tragic that I just ripped an entire year of schooling away from a girl who otherwise would have been a somewhat-annoying nuisance and a minor second-act adversary for Kurumi to deal with. She really did not have deadly designs, even if she is rude and obnoxious. I'm not even sure she had any kind of free will here, the genre might have pressed her into a mold and used her like a tool.

In every real way, she's probably the victim of this entire circumstance in general, as well as a victim of me particularly. But her stated goal was to get me kicked out of school. If I get expelled, I miss out on dozens of major quests. I will not level up. I will not be ready for the wars, riots, rescues and disasters. I won't have the support, the stats, or the skills to run an army or a kingdom. I have killed royalty for less.

This adorable little moppet missed a week of school and will probably transfer to another institute that enrolls just a little later in the year. My conscience is basically swiss cheese at this point, I'm just glad I didn't have to disappear this kid.