My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 173: Second Year: The Charity Class Came Back a Legend

The break ended, and Soren came back through the academy gates carrying one bag and one word.

Soon.

It had followed him the whole break, through the market mornings and the pack’s borrowed coast week and Maren’s campaign to teach Mona swimming, which had ended in a hole dug to water and everyone conceding the mole had technically swum.

The word didn’t repeat.

The dream didn’t return.

It just sat where it had been set, and he’d stopped waiting for it to explain itself and started waiting for it to be due.

The gates were the same gates.

Nothing else was.

◆◆◆◆

The first-years saw him before he’d cleared the courtyard.

He watched it move through them, the turn, the lean, the word passed mouth to mouth, that’s him, that’s the class, and a boy with a new uniform and an old scanner actually raised the scanner before his friend slapped it down.

Soren walked through the middle of all of it with his bag on his shoulder and his face bored.

A year ago this campus had needed a posted notice to remember Class Z existed.

Now the notice was him.

"You’re famous," Dani said, falling in beside him, terminal already out. "Want the numbers?"

"No."

"Three continents ran the reception footage over the break. The delegation’s home press did a six-part series. There’s merchandise." She let that word sit there, monstrous. "Unlicensed. I’ve begun proceedings."

"For what?"

"The pack has image rights now. I filed them in the winter." She kept walking. "Somebody was going to own your face, Soren. I decided it would be us."

◆◆◆◆

The new room was on the second floor of the renewed housing block, bigger, with a window over the east yard, which was either the registry’s idea of an honor or its idea of a joke.

Move-in ran the whole first day and settled nothing.

Maren claimed the warm corner by the heating line before her bag was open.

Selah annexed the window ledge and had frost ferns established on it by dusk, territorial markers, visible from the yard.

Mona’s crate went under the desk and Mona went under the floorboards, excavating an annex nobody had approved, and the room voted by not stopping her.

Joan took the wall shelf by the door for her folders.

Yara took the room’s darkest corner without discussion.

That evening, she watched Soren stand at the new window and look down at the pale patch on the east yard.

"You can see it from here," he said.

"Yes."

"The registry assigned us this block. Out of six available." He watched the seal in the last light. "Someone wanted the guards sleeping over the vault."

"Or someone knew you’d check the sightline first thing," Yara said, from the dark, "and wanted you to have it."

◆◆◆◆

The seal itself had wintered well.

He walked the yard his first morning back, custody papers in his jacket in case any new functionary needed educating, and found the pale patch exactly as Selah had left it, her plug holding, the ground silent, the pull absent.

The monitoring station was new.

Dani had spent break designing it remotely and the registry had built it to her print, a low gray cabin at the yard’s edge with feeds running to the pack’s room and nowhere else.

The Bureau’s liaison, a mild man named Petty whom the pack had approved precisely for his mildness, got a weekly summary and had already learned not to ask for the raws.

Selah met him at the seal for the first inspection of the term.

She walked the plug’s border, palm down, reading her own ice through the ground.

Soren watched her do it and thought about frost ferns with clean inch borders and said nothing about that either.

"It held," she said. "All break. No decay at the edges, no pressure from below."

"Nothing pulled?"

"Nothing pulled." Selah straightened. "It’s quiet down there, Soren. Before the reception there was always a texture to it, even sealed. A presence at the bottom of a well."

"And now?"

"Now the well reads empty." She looked at the pale patch, and the frost climbed one knuckle before she pulled it back in. "Which should be good news, and instead I keep checking it twice."

◆◆◆◆

The term posted its schedule at week’s end, and the schedule had his name in the first slot that mattered.

Rank evaluation. Kane, S. Class Z. Candidate, C to B.

The notice went up on the public board, which was new, evaluations had always been private.

Dani pulled the change order and found it signed by the registry’s press office, and the press office, asked by Petty on the pack’s behalf, explained that continental interest in the response asset warranted transparency.

"They’re selling tickets," Maren said, reading over his shoulder at the board.

"They’re selling me."

"Can they do that?"

"They can post a notice." Soren read the evaluation format underneath, three stages, closed criteria, board of five. "What happens in the room is still mine."

That night the pack turned his preparation into a war council, because the pack had exactly one doctrine and it was overpreparation.

Yara sat in her corner through all of it, watching him.

"You’re quiet," Soren said, after, when the room had emptied toward its beds.

"I’m early," Yara said.

"For what?"

She rose out of the corner’s dark and crossed to him and put one hand flat on his sternum, over the place the year had thinned and the alignments kept refilling.

"For the part I’ve been waiting for," she said. "Sleep well, master. The board sees you at week’s end."

She stepped back into the shadow and was gone to wherever she went.

Soren stood in the middle of his new room with his sternum still holding the print of her hand.

He added the touch to the count.

The count noted, in return, in his own dry hand, that Yara Hale had never once in an entire year called anything about their life the part she’d been waiting for.