My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 171: Every War I Won This Year Made Me Stronger But I Still...

The liaison paperwork cleared on a gray morning, and for the first time since he’d arrived in this world, nobody anywhere was scheduled to do anything to Soren Kane.

He checked. That was the joke of it.

He sat at the booth terminal with Dani’s access and went looking for the next fight, a habit by now, routine as checking weather, and there wasn’t one.

No hearings docketed, reviews pending nor office left standing with both a motive and a budget.

The machine that had spent a year grinding at Class Z was off.

Soren should have felt lighter.

He spent the morning feeling the opposite, and by noon he’d stopped pretending he didn’t know why, and he took the count for a walk.

◆◆◆◆

He laid the unowned entries out in order, because order was where hands showed.

The coordinate before the committee ever drafted the fight he’d won to stand on it.

The shell’s founding, registered and renewing since before there was anything here worth a shell.

The chains, oiled inside the year, wear-faces polished into a groove that taught a god-piece where to file.

Three entries. No owner. He’d carried them for weeks as separate stones.

Standing over the seal, he finally weighed them together, and together they stopped being stones and became a sequence.

Somebody built the account early, kept the grave in working order and wrote the coordinate that put his pack on the lid.

One hand, working across a span of time that reduced the Vasquez operation to a season’s hobby, patient in a register no office he’d met all year could hold a note in.

The room had gotten its villain.

The villain had gotten a room to be hung in, and the hand had gotten a year of everyone, including Soren, looking at the room.

He stayed there with his boots on the pale patch and ran the sequence again. Each piece locked into the next without a gap.

The early account.

The maintained chains.

The coordinate dropped at the exact moment the pack needed a fight to stand on.

Nothing random or wasted.

The hand that wrote those lines had known the shape of the year before the year started. He could almost see the patience in it, the way each entry waited for the next without hurry.

◆◆◆◆

Dani found him at the seal an hour later.

She came up quiet and laid her hand on his forearm. Her fingers were warm against the cool of his skin through the sleeve.

"Soren, you’ve been standing on a grave for an hour," she said. Her voice stayed low the way it did when she was watching him too hard. "People are starting to find it thematic. Talk to me."

"I’m re-running my first year."

"I re-ran it twice last night." She stepped closer until her shoulder brushed his. Her hand stayed on his arm and her thumb moved in a slow pass across the fabric. "You want to compare failures?"

"Go."

"I can’t make the shell spend wrong." Dani said it while she kept that light contact. "A year of purchases, and every single one is efficient. Whoever ran that account bought exactly what each crisis needed and not one unit more. Do you know how rare clean spending is? Offices leak. People skim. Vanity line-items creep in."

"This didn’t leak."

"This account spent money with your exact discipline. It fought on a budget and never missed."

She glanced up at him and her fingers tightened just enough for him to feel the pressure.

"That was the sentence that kept me up, so now it can keep you up too. Come inside soon, alright? You’re cold."

She gave his arm one last squeeze and left her hand there a second longer before she pulled it away.

The place where her fingers had been stayed warm after she stepped back.

Soren took the sentence home and it did.

He lay in the dark of the shared room with Maren’s heat on one side and the cold spot of a wolf under the bed below him, and he ran the last pass, the one he’d been circling all day and not landing.

Forget who. Ask what for.

He went through every crisis of the year looking for the one that had cost him something he never got back.

There wasn’t one.

Every fire he’d walked through had come with its own lesson packed inside, sized to him, sequenced, each one a degree harder than the last, and he’d come out of every single one stronger, better positioned, holding more.

A year of enemies, and the sum of all their work was the strongest version of Soren Kane that had ever existed.

He counted them in the dark.

The first ambush that forced the bond. The shell contracts that taught him how money moved when no one was watching.

The committee fights that made him learn the shape of a room before he entered it. The chains that showed him how a god-piece could be trained.

Each one left him standing in a better place than the one before.

No loss stayed a loss. Every cut closed into something useful.

The year had not wasted a single blow. Even the ones that left scars had turned those scars into tools he still used.

◆◆◆◆

He got up without waking anyone and stood at the window.

There was a word for a sequence of escalating fights, each one survivable, each one instructive, each one arranged in rising order with recovery time in between.

The word was a training program.

He looked out at the dark campus, at the east yard, at the whole gridded stage of his year, and the count settled into its final shape and the shape had been staring at him since the coordinate.

Not attacks that failed.

Lessons that worked.

Whoever held the hand didn’t want him destroyed.

Whoever held the hand wanted him excellent.

The glass under his palm was cold.

Outside the yard lights cut thin lines across the empty ground. He stayed there until the cold reached the bones of his hand and then he let the glass go. The dark beyond the lights held no next fight.

◆◆◆◆

Behind him, under the bed, the wolf’s breathing stayed slow and even.

"Grimm" he said quietly, to the room, not through the bond.

The shadow under the bed shifted.

The wolf’s head came out of the dark, shut eyes aimed up at him, waiting.

He looked at her for a moment, his first bond, present at every lesson from the first night to the sealed grave.

The question got as far as his teeth and stopped there, because it wasn’t ripe.

"Nothing," he said. "Go back to sleep."

She held the pose a second longer than nothing deserved.

Then she withdrew into the dark, and he lay back down between his open questions.

Somebody out there thought his peace was a waste of him.

The worst part came just before sleep took him, dry and honest and his.

Whoever it was, they weren’t entirely wrong.