Chapter 1742: Thank You For Everything
The moment they closed around her, her nose burrowed into the crook of his neck and got to work, quick and determined sniffs cataloguing everything before her tongue joined in to cross-check the findings, the dogkin conducting full-on field research into all that her master had gone through since she last held him.
Not one thought in her fluffy head went to the question haunting everyone else, namely how Ayame was supposed to win alone when the two of them together had at best fought the cheater and her relic to a standstill.
Her master had looked so confident and so charming saying those words that every last worry simply left the dogkin.
Master was in control, and that was all Blossom needed to know.
The rest of the field lacked her faith.
Kaede stared at the man cradling an assassin like a puppy, confusion cutting through the fury on her face, and Quinlan answered the look over the top of Blossom’s busy head.
"Because you’re a crook who uses external forces to overcome the permanent self-debuff that is your laughable talent as a warrior, I will raise Ayame’s stats until she’s only ten levels below you."
The duel ground detonated.
"He can do that?!" someone blurted from the dwarven rows, and for once nobody shushed him, because every veteran in earshot was asking the same question.
Levels were the one absolute of this world, the ceiling mortals spent their entire lives clawing at, and the man in question had just announced a more than ten-level correction the way other people loaned out a coat.
The woman at the center of the correction, meanwhile, hadn’t so much as blinked.
Across the ring, Ayame’s mouth curved into the faintest smile, because of course her Arrogant Primordial Lover had conjured such a great duel out of thin air for her.
Alexios closed his eyes with a long exhale, adding one more entry to a very long list, and across the commotion, Lilith wore the exact same wry expression while dragging the howling Arch Priestess another step backward.
The shrine maidens’ quills reached speeds that threatened the structural integrity of their parchment, and through the elven host, hushed gossip raced from rank to rank.
Who was the samurai girl exactly, why was she sold by her sister, what in the world even was a Fujimori, and much more. The family dramas of human clans had never been worth a single elven ear before today, but the woman in the ring was the first ever ally of the man their whole race now revered, and many, many elven eyes settled on Ayame.
Beside the scribbling column, their queen decided that rumor was beneath her and went straight to the source.
Myrasyn grabbed onto Black Fang and tried to pull her over from the ringside.
When the Venomborne Terror stared back without moving a muscle, the queen simply stopped trying to physically displace the woman and instead began hammering questions against that poker face in rapid succession.
Black Fang answered the first question with silence, then ignored the rest, looking toward Ayame instead. "I’m busy."
That was all she said.
"After all that we’ve been through, I get the cold shoulder treatment?! We’re best friends, did you forget?!" Not even Myrasyn’s begging puppy eyes changed the decree.
"...Since when?"
"Hie?!"
Black Fang nearly one-shot the queen on the spot with emotional damage.
"I’ll handle all your questions, ladies~" Seraphiel slid between the two with a grin that said she was more than ready to begin slinging gossip that would traverse the entire elven race within hours.
The Dawnbringer escorted the now happily yapping queen back to the elven ranks and the rest of them converged on the blonde elf in a heartbeat.
"Ohh, the Holy Son’s elf wife!"
"It’s really her! Tell us everything, sister!"
"Especially how he is in bed..."
"Have you no shame, you slut?!"
"I-I’m dying to know!!"
The gossip warfare resumed at ten times the intensity now that they had found a willing source, queen included, and Black Fang stood abandoned at the edge of it all.
...
"First of all, I’ll make you eat those words," Kaede spat, then asked, "Second, what if I decline your conditions?"
The duel ground darkened beneath Quinlan’s aura as he declared, "I will enslave you and order you to conduct the duel."
He delivered it as pure logistics, level and conversational, the fate of a duchess and the last sacred rite of her broken clan reduced to a single line of scheduling, and the field understood as one that the choice he was offering had never included refusal.
Hearing the underlying tone with which he spoke, dozens of shrine maidens trembled where they stood, a shudder running from toe to spine, and their quills stalled mid-word for the first time since the recording began.
’Ten levels below me, and without the hound at her side...’ Kaede looked from the monster to the sister waiting across the frost, the numbers assembling into the first path that didn’t end in chains.
Kaede scoffed and turned her back on him to face her sister.
She drained a healing potion in one pull, the gashes across her back and shoulder crawling shut while the last of the fog burned out of her skull, then cast the empty vial into the frost and decreed:
"I accept."
Before the duel could claim her in full, Ayame’s eyes left her sister and found Quinlan across the ring.
He had sworn an oath, pulled her hunting partner from the fight, and bent the world’s logic, all to deliver her vengeance whole and unshared, exactly as she had asked for it on the day a level 1 nobody shook her hand over a slave house table.
Gratitude filled the samurai to the brim, warm and quiet, and none of it required saying.
She said it anyway.
<Thank you, Quin.>
<Thank you, my precious teacher.> He smiled at her. <For everything.>
<...> Nothing made it back through the link.
He was thanking her, after laying a continent at her feet, and the love that surged up in Ayame’s chest nearly cracked her composure for all the world to see.
Through great effort, she forced herself to steel her heart and focus.
The sisters stared each other down, and Quinlan stepped back to the spectators’ line with Blossom in his arms, his voice rolling out over the hush.
"[Overlord’s Magnanimity]."
