Chương 131: Chapter 124

Cale Within two days, Siobhan Morrigan and I had become a trending topic. Whatever the hell that meant. It was a strange experience. I had spent most of my life being looked at by people who wanted something from me, or wanted me gone, and I could read the difference before the look finished landing. This was neither. This was the secondhand curiosity of a few hundred students who had nothing better to do. For the first time, a rumor about me had very little to do with me. I was the backdrop.

The speculation ran on its own, and most of it was not even pointed my way. It was pointed at her. People were interested in Siobhan Morrigan. REALLY interested. She was the campus belle, which as far as I could tell meant she was the girl the most people wanted to take to dinner, which struck me as a stupid thing to measure. Did they all want the same face, the same temperament, the same everything? How did anyone build that comparison? Siobhan was pretty. So were plenty of others.

If pretty was the whole of it, who sat down and ranked them, and why did the rest of us agree to the result? None of it made sense the longer I turned it over, so I stopped turning it over. I tried, anyway. Our names carried up and down the corridors on their own steam, like the rumor had grown legs and no longer needed either of us to keep it walking. Lucky or unlucky, depending on where you stood, the school had spent the better part of forty-eight hours deciding how it felt about her choosing me.

I had seen her three times since. Once at the Crucible, during another of the group exercises. Once on the library stair. Once through a window I happened to be passing, which I chose not to examine. Each time she was turned out like she had somewhere better to be and was standing there instead, and each time she found me before I found her and smiled like we were already halfway through a conversation I did not remember starting. By the middle of the third day I had arrived at a strange kind of exhaustion.

I gave real thought to going home and staying there for a year. I gave briefer thought to dropping a Starlight spell on the school, then decided against it. I did not actually want to hurt anyone. Mostly. I mostly did not want to hurt anyone. Suffice to say I was not in the best mood by the time I got to lunch. I set my tray down between Rade and Ellara. Darren was already grinning. He had been holding it, I suspected, since before I sat down, saving it up.

"Say it," I said.

"I didn't say a word."

"You're vibrating. Say what you need to say." Mikel leaned in.

"Here's the comfort of a rumor about you, Cale. It's false, and we know it's false. Somebody says you cleared a corridor of Shadow Corps with your hands in your pockets, and we relax, because it's you, and nothing that interesting happens to people we eat lunch with." He spread his hands.

"And then Siobhan Morrigan walks up to you in front of the study hall, two of her eternal simps trailing behind her, goes out of her way to stop, and asks you to dinner. Out loud. And you said yes."

"I appreciate the recap," I said.

"I was there. What's your point?"

"The point is this is the biggest thing I have ever personally witnessed." Darren said it to the table like scripture.

"Cale. This isn't just any hot girl. This is THE hot girl. The hottest of the hot. The Supreme Hot. So hot it's almost too hot. You get it?"

"I'm not sure a full set of Technica bros would have gotten that. And I'm sure she appreciates being described that way." Mikel shrugged.

"I've never met a girl who didn't secretly like being called hot."

"Stop saying hot." Ellara was grinning. She turned her cup without drinking from it.

"I tried to warn you, big brother. Dating Siobhan Morrigan isn't like dating a celebrity, she is a celebrity in her own right. At least in this school. I tried to warn you."

"Funny. I don't recall that coming up."

"What do you actually know about her?" I said. I meant the part under the badge and the accent, the part everyone had catalogued and walked past. I had felt three cores standing four feet from her, and an Aura clean enough to score glass. I wanted the rest.

"For everyone that talks about how attractive she is, finding out anything real about her has been harder than I expected." Rade set his fork down, which was how I knew the answer would be worth the wait.

"Siobhan Morrigan is going to be an Adventurer," he said.

"It was almost a foregone conclusion. Her father is semi-retired now, but in his day he was one of the great ones. SSS rank. In case you were wondering, Cale, that is equivalent to Obsidian on the Mercenary list, though once you climb that high the ranking stops meaning much. Siobhan has been on their recruitment cycle since second year. There was talk she might take the military track, or even the Priesthood path. I'm told she is very religious. But I'm not surprised she chose to follow in her dad's footsteps."

"Guild work." Darren said it with open envy.

"You couldn't pay me enough to take the Adventurer path. You go into dungeons, and sure, you can come out rich, but you can also just not come out."

"How is that worse than walking into a war zone as a merc?" Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Who said it was? I don't want to be a merc either. Give me a desk job any day of the week."

"I hate it when people call them that. Dungeons. It's so crude," Ellara said, setting the word down between us, for my benefit or for hers.

"Rift Planes, if you want the Commission's name for them. Pocket-planes. You will get docked by the Plane Lore Professor if he catches you calling them that. You make them sound like a game when you use the slang." I knew dungeons. I had cleared them, regularly. But they did not need to know that. It was how I met Kaereth and his sister Miranda. I would have to check on her. She was a sweet kid.

"Rift Planes are far scarier than skirmishes, or even the wars the mercs fight in. In a war, at least, you mostly know what you are walking into and can plan," Rade said.

"There are too many dungeons to handle properly, so there are several Breaks a year. Picture sitting there, minding your own business, and then all at once, BOOM. Converging Nexus. A Plane Break. And some of the scariest things in existence are suddenly in your face. The Adventurers have to keep it from spreading, usually on a clock, or serve as part of the repelling force. Mercs get called in sometimes too. There are advance units on contract with the major Dominions, but that is only for the biggest ones.

And we have all seen what happens when people don't do their job out there."

"Kelvar's Reach," Darren said, quieter now.

"Kelvar's Reach," Rade agreed.

"Okay, you're going to make me ask, aren't you. What is Kelvar's Reach?" Ellara said.

"Market town, minor plane. A dungeon there went unlogged for a season, close to a full year, because logging it cost money and someone senior in the Orthodox church decided it could wait. It couldn't wait. When it opened, it converged parts of three separate planes that had never touched, and the town was gone inside an afternoon. The monsters in that Rift evolved at a terrifying speed, for reasons nobody has explained. They destroyed the Rift Seed in the end, but a lot of people died first.

That is why the Rift Commission exists. Every Bloc runs its own, a standing office that does nothing but watch the Nexus for the tremors that come before a Break. The Technica and Arcanum mix in that work is almost as important as the Nexus navigation itself. Almost." Darren turned his cup, and for once he wasn't performing.

"It's not only the collapse. It's what lives inside them. Kelvar's Reach had death knights, a Deathlord, a dragonewt, and thousands of undead, goblins, hobgoblins, and kobolds. The response was insane. The fight ran for months. And that was one Break. I know it's important work, but you have to be a particular kind of person to want that job. In the actual Rifts, you don't just need to know how to fight. You solve puzzles, avoid traps, build real-time teamwork against things that are not human.

It's a whole other language of fighting. You can't only be good with a sword, because you are not always swinging at something human." Rade picked it back up.

"The idea of the Rift always freaked me out. The same monsters turn up in the same configurations, over and over. The layouts, the monsters, even the ratings, all out of one Rift System. That only happens if something is stamping them to a pattern. At one point I thought they were pure mana, but the things bleed, they die, they act as alive as anything. And they follow rules nobody ever wrote down." He gave me a pensive shrug.

"The Rift Commission has a whole wing that does nothing but argue about strategy and follow-up." Mikel let that hang, then brought it home.

"Which is my long route to the point. Siobhan Morrigan isn't just a girl who's hot and focused and ripped. She is smart. Wickedly smart. She is choosing to walk into one of the most dangerous jobs on any plane. This is not a woman who gets dazzled by anyone, even you, Cale. Even if you are so handsome it makes me want to punch you in the face. Siobhan walks into collapsing planes for a living and comes back out. And she said you were handsome and interesting." He looked at me.

"She doesn't mince words. If that is what she said, that is what she meant." Ellara had stopped pretending with her tea.

"It isn't surprising. You know her mother was Omazan, right?" Mikel, Darren, and Rade's jaws dropped as one.

"We had no idea." Ellara nodded.

"You probably didn't know this, but her youngest sister, Sorisa, is in my class. Her mother met her father when he came through Kordar as a Seed-Caller, and she left with him. That is at least the story I heard. How accurate it actually is. Cillian Morrigan holds a noble title now but until him it was largely ceremonial. No real power. The man literally conquers the Adventure world, moves to the Northern Bloc, settles in an unknown Plane, and makes himself a king. From what I've heard, a damn good one."

I let that sit. I did not get to sit with it long, because as if summoned by her own name, Siobhan Morrigan stood not ten feet from us and shot me a dazzling smile. She crossed the café terrace like she owned the deed to it, and every head along the path turned to follow, because she had dressed for exactly that. The training gear was gone.

In its place, a cropped green top laced up the front, snug across a torso built by years of Aura work, the ties left loose at the collar to suggest a promise she had no intention of keeping in public. A skirt cut short, made for legs that trained for a living and did not hide it. Boots to the knee. Copper-red hair loose past her shoulders, catching the low sun until it looked lit from within.

She walked the last stretch slower than she needed to, hips unhurried, and let the café finish looking before she reached me. She knew what she was doing to the last inch of it, and she wanted me to know she knew. The table watched her the whole way in. Darren sat up straighter. Mikel gave up all pretense of eating. Ellara went still, which was its own kind of alert.

She stopped at the head of the table with one hand light on the back of my chair, close enough that the clean edge of her Aura brushed mine, and leaned in just enough to make it count. Those eyes, a shade between forest and sea, came to rest on me and stayed. Her smile took in the whole group and gave none of them a thing. She really was striking, objectively so, the softness of her face at odds with the power banked in those shoulders and the fiery confidence under all of it. I kept it cool.

I had stared down Thessaly and the Chieftess of the Omazan, two of the most striking women on any plane I had walked. I could handle this.

"Don't let me interrupt," she said, in that lazy Northern drawl.

"You were clearly discussing something fascinating." Her eyes settled on me.

"Arcanus. Fancy meeting you here. Again. It's like it's destiny."

"Can't be destiny if you're actively looking, Morrigan. I'm starting to think you're stalking me," I said.

"Stalking." She repeated it and wrinkled her nose, like I'd tracked something in off the green.

"Such a nasty word. I prefer following. With an abundance of enthusiasm." The smile tipped devilish, then resolved into something innocent enough to sell to a chapel. The whole devil-to-angel thing again.

"Only one of those is a crime. I checked." Darren made a sound I chose not to identify.

"Next weekend," she said to me, confirming an appointment I might have misplaced.

"I'm reminding you. Wear something fitted. I meant it." She lifted two fingers off the back of my chair, a small salute to the table at large, and left as she had come, then paused after two steps.

"I'm leaving now and I expect you to watch my ass as I leave. You're allowed, Cale. I gave you permission." She walked away, and the little vixen flipped her skirt up and gave us a fast flash of what was under it. Even I was surprised by that one. The table exhaled as one organism.

"I hate you," Mikel said, with feeling.

"I know," I said. I looked at the sky. It kept its opinions to itself, which I appreciated.