Chương 73: “Three Girls and a Pug”

A hangover assailed him first. It struck him at the back of the skull and travelled down behind both eyes. He couldn't quite remember the night before. He lay there for several seconds with one arm thrown across his face, listening to the bedclothes rustle, and to the sound of someone else's slow breathing nearby. Several people, in fact. Bastion, Guild Leader of the Sky Raiders, opened one eye and looked around his bed. Three women were scattered across it. One had pillowed her head on his thigh.

Another was curled at the foot of the bed, her hair fanned over his foot. The third, whose name he had already forgotten, lay face-down in the middle of the mattress with her arm flung over the second's hip. He grunted, rolled, and managed to pull out his leg without waking any of them. He stood, scratched at his stomach through his shirt, and walked to the bedside table where a kettle of water had been left out the night before.

The water was mild and tasted faintly of iron, but he held a mouthful behind his teeth, walked to the window, threw the shutters open, and leaned out. The late morning sun caught him full in the face. He squinted as he swore in his mind, and spat into the alley below.

'Better.' He turned the empty kettle in his hand and tried remembering what had happened; the previous evening came back in bits and pieces, and he recalled that a great many toasts had been made. The Sky Raiders had finally cleared Floor 28. They were a mid-ranked guild with many of its members who lived together inside a refurnished warehouse, and they had finally managed to hit a milestone. Three floors off the top guilds' best, who were at Floor 31.

A few more months of preparation, and an invitation into a top-tier raid was no longer a fantasy. Everything had been going well. Until— A sharp voice rose in the corridor outside. Bastion winced. The throb behind his eyes felt like it was getting more painful. A second voice answered, equally sharp. Then a third, lower than the first two. He set the kettle down with more force than was necessary, dragged on a pair of trousers, and yanked the door open with his shoulder.

"What in the bleeding fuck," he bellowed into the corridor, "is going on out here?" Three men flinched. Two of them had already half-turned to leave. The third was rubbing at the bridge of his nose. It was Oswald, the secretary of the Sky Raiders was a slim man in his early thirties, with small gold hoops at the ears, a thin chain at the collar, and rings on three fingers of his left hand. Oswald lowered his hand.

"Guild Leader. We need to convene an emergency meeting." Bastion stared at him. Behind Oswald, the other two men slipped away down the corridor. He let out a breath through his nose.

"Give me ten minutes."

"Thirty would be better. Make sure everyone is available."

"…Thirty, then." Thirty minutes later, the council room of the Sky Raiders had filled. The top members had taken the long table. Around them, in a looser ring at the walls, stood the core members, the lieutenants, the front-line captains, the heads of the various subdivisions Oswald had built up over the years. He drummed two fingers against the wood.

"Right," he said.

"Talk." Oswald was standing rather than sitting. His hands rested on the back of an empty chair, the rings on his fingers catching the light.

"Our suppliers have cut their contracts," he said.

"All of them." Bastion blinked.

"All of them?" A murmur ran around the room. Bastion waved it down.

"Fine. So find new ones. That's what you're here for, isn't it?"

"I'm already trying." Oswald's voice was even.

"But it's not just our suppliers. The blacksmiths won't even take our orders, not even for simple repairs. The major shops in the markets even turned me away when he saw our guild's emblem. I sent someone to Old Tagg's this morning to restock training equipment, but he was turned away at the door." Bastion's hand stopped tapping on the table.

"What?"

"As of this morning, the Sky Raiders cannot purchase materials, weapons, repairs, or consumables of any kind from any reputable establishment in the city." One of the women at the table, Veila, captain of one of the teams, leaned forward.

"Guild Leader. Did you offend someone recently?" Bastion racked his brain. He ran back through the past weeks despite the throb behind his eyes. Drinking parties. Negotiations. The minor noble whose son had wanted a tour of their guild, whom Bastion had charmed and packed off with a souvenir blade for free. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. But no matter how much he pondered, he couldn't find anything that warranted this reaction.

"…No," he said. Oswald's palm came down on the table with a sharp slam. Bastion flinched.

"Someone," Oswald said, "in this room, or under this guild's roof, has done something. I will offer it this leniency once. Speak now, and we'll think about your punishment." He looked around the room. No one piped up. The captains glanced at one another. The lieutenants studied each other's faces. Vella had even raised both her hands up, shrugging, she had nothing to confess. Oswald exhaled.

"Fine," he said.

"We'll do this the hard way. I will personally investigate every transaction, contract, complaint, and engagement this guild has had in the past week. Until I am satisfied that I have found the source, the Sky Raiders are under lockdown. No one enters the Tower and no one leaves the compound." A ripple of protest went up around the table, and even Bastion tried to complain.

"Hey. Hey. Oswald." He winced as his own voice carried louder than he had intended.

"Do we really have to do all that? Lockdown's a hell of a thing. The boys've just hit twenty-eight, we're three floors off the top, the men want to keep moving—" Oswald turned his head and looked at him. Bastion had known this man for fifteen years, before they had even established the Sky Raiders guild within Summit. He had seen him make calls that kept them alive when they were a small mercenary band, and he knew what Oswald was like when he was angry.

"Get it through your thick skull, Bastion, what all of this means. If this was a normal case of a few complaints, then we could just work around. But who and what do you think happened if everyone we've done business with just cut us off in a single morning? Without even a proper notice or any negotiation! Do you understand how dire this situation is now?" He spread his fingers across the back of the chair.

"Someone with the standing to lean on every business in the major markets have decided that we're done for. It's most likely a noble we aren't even allowed to talk to. And unless we fix this problem by finding out what caused it in the first place, the Sky Raiders are finished." Bastion looked at him for a long moment.

"… Fine," he said aloud. Tell me what you need me to do." * The second semester had begun. For most students, very little had changed. The class schedules and professors were the same as the term before. What was different now, however, were the clubs. Summit Academy allowed its students to found their own.

The rules for doing so were strict: a minimum number of members, a faculty sponsor, an annual showing of activity, and a number of other rules designed to prevent too many clubs from sprouting randomly week after week. With one semester behind them, the first-years now had the courage to look for one they liked, or, if they were ambitious, to start one. That was the long-term concern. The short-term concern was the bulletin board.

A press of bodies had gathered in the main corridor of the academic hall, jostling shoulder-to-shoulder for a clear view of the freshly posted rankings. Someone near the front was reading the top ten aloud for the benefit of those at the back. Names were called out, followed by gasps, groans, and the occasional stunned silence. A head of purple hair was working its way through the squashed crowd.

Anna squeezed between two of her seniors, ducked under an arm, and emerged at the very front, where the names were close enough to read. She skimmed past her own line, that didn't particularly matter, and finally found the ranking of the person she was looking for. She gasped, then she pulled herself out of the crowd, turned on her heel, and trotted off toward the dormitories with her satchel banging against her hip.

Her own ranking on the board was middling, somewhere in the upper half of the class, and she had not glanced at it twice. Anna had changed quite a bit, a semester ago she wouldn't have dared to squeeze her way to the front of any crowd. The kidnapping had been the start of it, and the time after that, spending time with someone she respected, had only cemented that change even further. She wanted to be strong like Celestia.

Over the course of the semester break, she became a bit more proactive with conversing with the maids as well as asking Martha if she could handle some of the ingredients herself, ordering them at the merchants and haggling the price down. And, as of the last week of the break, she had made a new friend who had taken her brewing very seriously. Liana. Quiet, kind, and a great deal more interested in Anna's potions than the academy's alchemy professor had ever been.

During their time together, they had even discovered something that could probably shock Summit as a whole, but they wanted to keep it a secret for now until they actually completed it. For now, she had a roommate to inform. She picked up her pace. The dormitory hall was quiet. Anna's boots tapped softly along the floor as she climbed the staircase to the second floor and made her way down the right-hand corridor. She stopped in front of the door marked 207 and knocked.

"In." The voice from the room responded. Anna pushed the door open and entered. Celestia was at her dresser, fastening the last button of her uniform jacket at the throat. The morning light from the window caught in her hair and lit the edges of it gold. She did not turn when Anna entered, and was simply focused with grooming herself in the mirror.

"Celestia!" Anna said, slightly out of breath.

"You're seventh in the first-year rankings!" Celestia's eyes shifted to her in the mirror.

"That's a given."

'Woahh.' Anna pressed her lips together.

'So composed.' Anna straightened her shoulders.

"Do you need me to pick up Sir Ozy?"

"Yes." Sir Ozy was, as usual, on the floor-bed in the corner of the room, snoring. The pug had grown so accustomed to Anna that she could let herself into Celestia's room without him so much as twitching an ear. The exception was experiments and medicine time; for those, he woke up grumpy and stayed that way for the rest of the day. Sir Ozy snored on as she crossed the room.

She crouched and picked him up, Sir Ozy had long since given up on holding any of his own weight, and she lifted him into the cage-carrier on the floor beside the bed. He made a soft whuff in the back of his throat, settled, and resumed snoring. She fastened the latches.

"I've got him," she announced. Celestia adjusted her cuff, took a final glance at the mirror, and turned. She crossed the room, picked up a small satchel, and inclined her head once toward Anna. Anna lifted the cage-carrier and led the way. They stepped out into the corridor. Celestia closed the door behind them with a soft click, and the two of them walked down, Anna holding the carrier in front of her with both hands. Sir Ozy snored on inside it. At the dormitory's main entrance, someone was waiting.

Anna had not noticed her on the way back. Liana must have come in only a few minutes after Anna had basically run back her way to 207.

"Liana!" Anna called brightly.

"Good morning!" The silver-haired girl turned, holding her own satchel against her front with both hands. At Anna's voice she smiled. Then her gaze moved past Anna to Celestia, still with the same smile.

"Good morning, Anna. And good morning, Lady Celestia." Celestia returned the greeting with a slight nod.

"Do you want to walk with us?" Anna asked.

"It would be my pleasure." Liana's eyes drifted to the cage-carrier, where Sir Ozy had pressed his snub face up against the front grate without bothering to open his eyes.

"Are you going to look at the club lists today?" Anna asked.

"I'm not sure," Liana said.

"Maybe after lectures."

"I haven't decided yet what I'd want." Anna shifted her grip on the carrier as Sir Ozy moved inside it. The three of them walked out into the morning together. The sun lay long across the academy grounds, and it was the start of the second semester, a long reprieve from the next major arc of the story.