My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 157: The Scout Called My Fire Fox Charity To Her Face and She Burned His Champion Down

The scout traveled with the delegation and did not have the delegate’s manners.

He found Maren on the demonstration floor mid-morning, and he found her with an audience, which Soren understood a beat too late was the point.

"So this is the charity class," the scout said.

He said it loud enough to carry.

Maren was still raw.

Soren could see it from across the floor, the thing the delegate had opened in her the night before, the hole with no bottom she’d carried home and slept on and woken up still holding.

The scout had no way to know that.

He only knew he’d been told Class Z was the soft spot in the roster and he’d come to press on it and see what it did.

"I heard the fire’s a party trick," the scout said. "Pretty. Warm. Nothing you’d want at your back in a real fight."

Maren wiped her hands on her apron.

"You want to see it at your back?"

The scout smiled, because he’d gotten exactly the rise he’d come for.

"I brought a fighter," he said. "Ranked. From our own floor. I’d offer you a friendly bout, but I wouldn’t want the charity class to strain itself."

"Bring him."

"You’re sure. He’s ranked."

"You said that. Bring him."

The crowd had grown while they talked.

A fight had a smell to it, and a crowd found the smell fast, and the delegation seats up in the stands had turned toward the floor.

The delegate was up there.

◆◆◆◆

The scout’s fighter came down onto the floor.

He was ranked and he carried it in how he moved, economical, warmed up, a young man who’d won enough bouts to expect to win this one and had been told his opponent was a charity-case fox with a party trick.

Maren rolled her shoulders once.

The floor marshal called the bout sanctioned, non-lethal, first yield or first down.

Then he stepped back.

The scout’s fighter opened fast, all early pressure, the opening you throw at someone you expect to fold. End it before the crowd gets invested.

Maren did not fold.

She gave ground once, read his rhythm in the giving, and on his second commitment she was not where he’d thrown himself.

Her fire came up.

Not the pretty warm showcase flame the scout had heard about. It came up her arms in a hard clean sheet.

It went exactly where she put it, controlled to the edge, a wall of heat with a shape.

Soren watched her fight and understood what he was watching.

She was not fighting the ranked boy.

The ranked boy was a stand-in.

She was fighting the thing the delegate had left in her, the empty place under the floor, the question she couldn’t hit because it had no body.

So she’d found a body that would hold still for it, and she was putting the whole weight of a night she couldn’t punch into a bout she could.

She backed the boy into his own momentum and closed the wall around his lead foot.

He yielded before it touched him.

The floor was quiet.

Maren let the fire go out. It went out the instant she was done with it, no smolder, no lingering, a thing switched off at the source.

She wiped her hands again.

"Tell your friends the charity class strained itself," she said.

The scout did not have a loud thing to say to that.

"Beginner’s luck runs out," the scout said, which was the sentence of a man with nothing.

"Come back tomorrow," Maren said. "I’ll run it out for you."

The crowd made the noise the scout hadn’t wanted it to make, and Maren walked off the floor without looking at the stands, which was the most anyone had ever seen her decline to enjoy a win.

Soren met her at the edge.

[DING! — Obsession Index: Maren 84 → 85 / 100. Public loyalty under pressure. Pride and defiance event.]

He read it and put a hand on her shoulder and said nothing about the number.

"You didn’t gloat," he said.

"Didn’t feel like winning." She was still breathing hard. "Felt like hitting something that would stay still. He stayed still. That’s all he was good for."

"I know."

"Don’t tell the others I said that. It’s not nice."

"You dismantled a ranked fighter in front of a delegation with your bad mood. Nobody’s going to think you’re nice."

That got the edge of a smile out of her, the first real one since the night before.

◆◆◆◆

Up in the stands, the delegate had not applauded.

He had watched the bout with the same still, total attention he’d turned on Maren’s fire the day before, a man confirming a reading rather than enjoying a show.

At the end of it he leaned toward his aide.

Soren was across the floor and could not hear him. He could only see the shape of it, the delegate’s mouth moving once, a single word, short, the aide’s small nod after.

The delegate was looking at Maren’s hands while he said it.

At the place the fire had come from.

He said the one word, and the aide wrote it down, and whatever it was did not travel across the floor to where Soren stood.

◆◆◆◆

Soren filed the shape of the moment without its content.

A man had watched his fire fox win and had answered the win with a place.

The place had a name. The name was sitting in an aide’s notes on the far side of a crowded hall where Soren could not reach it yet.

He had spent a season learning to read a room without the sight that used to hand him a man’s intent for free.

He could read almost all of this one.

The delegate hadn’t come to be entertained.

The bout had confirmed rather than surprised him. The word had been waiting behind his teeth since the day before, and the fire had only let it out.

Soren could not read the word.

That was the one thing on the whole floor his trained eyes couldn’t take, a short sound in a language he didn’t have, spoken toward Maren’s hands and written into an aide’s notes he’d never see, and he stood at the edge of the floor with his hand still on Maren’s shoulder and felt the shape of a thing coming that he could not yet name.

"What are you looking at?" Maren said.

"The stands."

"The rude one?"

"The quiet one." Soren turned her toward the corridor, away from the delegate’s sightline. "Come on. You’ve earned a break from being looked at."