Chapter 492- Jacob Need some Beating

The vein at Edda’s temple became visible.

Her fist found his arm before the sentence was fully finished—a compact, controlled punch that had thirty years of muscle behind it, landing on his bicep with a crack that made two of Raven’s women flinch at the pool edge of the street.

"Shut up," she said, very precisely. "You punk." Another hit, to his shoulder this time. "Can’t you see—you brat—in front of you have arrived the—"

"Wait."

Raven’s hand found her shoulder.

Not grabbing. Just resting. The weight of it landed on her like a beam of sunlight that turned out to have mass—warm, present.

She stopped speaking immediately.

She was furious about stopping immediately.

"You don’t need to say that," he said.

He looked at Jacob.

The young man looked back with the expression of someone who has just registered that the man his grandmother is apparently with is radiating enough ambient power to make the hair on his arms stand up. His nose continued bleeding. He appeared to feel that acknowledging this would be inappropriate.

"You can simply call me Master," Raven said.

The word landed across the street.

Edda flinched.

The full-body flinch of a Dragon Slayer processing the word Master being applied to a situation she was standing in the middle of.

Jacob’s expression went through four phases in approximately two seconds: confusion, doubt, consideration, more doubt. He rubbed his nose again, which was a mistake structurally.

Raven stepped forward.

He extended his hand to Jacob with the casual, unhurried motion of a man who has already decided the outcome of every interaction he is about to have.

Jacob looked at the hand.

He looked at the man.

He looked at the hand again.

"Didn’t you," Raven said, "are you about to give the entrance test of Valhalla Academy?"

Jacob’s face went still.

"What?" he said.

The word came out quiet. Not casual. The quiet of someone who has been handed information that they had not given to the person holding it.

Raven smirked.

"I can see your fate," he said. "It’s clear as day."

The street went quiet.

At the windows, every eye in Edenveil went slightly wider.

Behind Raven, Edda felt her breath leave her body in one slow, involuntary exhale.

"Fate."

She had heard it—every veteran had heard it, every person who had spent real time in the Labyrinth’s upper strata had heard the stories, the academic claims, the philosophical arguments about whether dragons could actually read human destiny or whether it was sophisticated mana-reading that only appeared like fate.

She had filed it under "plausibly true but unverifiable."

She was now standing close enough to the source of the claim to feel her thoracic wound react to his proximity, and the Truth-Sight ability in the woman beside her had not once returned a false reading on anything he had said, and he had just named Jacob’s private ambition in the first sentence of their interaction.

She looked at him.

The way she looked at him was different from how she had been looking at him.

She had been looking at him as a threat. As a power to be measured and managed. As the thing she was going to stand in front of because someone had to and she was what the village had.

She was now looking at him as something she did not have a category for.

Her lips trembled slightly.

She looked at Jacob.

Jacob, who was standing with his mouth slightly open and his bleeding nose and his lit eyes—eyes that had gone bright with the illumination of someone who has just been recognized by something that should not be able to recognize them.

He was doubting. She could see it. His mouth was doing the twitching thing it did when he was running calculations, when he was deciding whether something was real.

She moved before she thought about it.

She gave a bow.

Deep. Real. The full inclination of a Dragon Slayer who has made a tactical and personal assessment and is acting on both simultaneously.

"Forgive that brat, Master," she said.

The word came out of her mouth.

Master.

She was not thinking about the skirt. She was not thinking about the window watchers. She was not thinking about anything except the overwhelming arithmetic of being thirty years old in warrior years, carrying a wound that had never healed, standing in front of something that could read Jacob’s fate in the first sentence and whose inferior kin had been the black dragon that had killed her entire team.

"I don’t know who you are," she said. "But I apologize."

Raven chuckled.

The sound was low and genuine and carried no cruelty in it.

"No," he said. "It’s fine." He looked at Jacob. "He at least seems useful."

Jacob’s eyes lit.

The brightness in them was immediate and involuntary and slightly embarrassing for a young man trying to project skepticism. He watched as Raven moved toward the hut—his women following in their particular procession, Preet’s compact frame, Fatima’s enormous swaying tits, Nara’s asymmetric animal grace, Celia and Gia pressed together, Marla adjusting her glasses.

One by one, they entered.

Jacob watched them.

His eyes moved over the warrior-dressed women with the involuntary tracking of a young man encountering a procession of bodies he has no appropriate context for.

The temperature in the street dropped by one degree.

"I hate it," Raven said, from the doorway, not turning, "when someone eyes my women."

The sentence was quiet.

It was not loud. It did not carry threat in the way threats usually carried threat—raised voice, direct confrontation, the declarative architecture of someone who needs you to feel intimidated. It was simply a statement, delivered with the flat certainty of someone describing a preference that the universe consistently accommodated.

Edda felt a chill move through her that had nothing to do with the air temperature.

She turned.

She looked at Jacob.

Jacob was looking at the doorway with his mouth slightly open.

Her fist found the top of his head with a sharp, percussive crack.

"You brat," she said, very quietly. "What the hell are you doing?"

"What?" Jacob grabbed his head with both hands. His expression was the expression of a man who has been hit multiple times today and is losing track of which one was deserved. "What happened, Grandma? I was just—" His face averted. His eyes went to the dirt. "I was just looking."

"Looking," she repeated.

Her voice was very flat.

"At his women," she said.

Jacob’s ears went red.

He said nothing.

From inside the hut, there was the sound of Fatima’s enormous tits swaying against the doorframe as she adjusted her position, a soft, wet sound of warm flesh against wood that was completely audible in the silence of the street.

Jacob’s ears went redder.

Edda’s vein reappeared.

Then the sound came from the hut’s interior—a low, deep, rhythmic pulse, like a heartbeat that was too large and too slow to be human, a vibration that moved through the hut’s walls and into the earth and up through the soles of Edda’s boots.

The windows of every house in Edenveil closed simultaneously.

Not in panic. In the collective instinct of people who have decided they have seen enough.

The door of the hut swung open.

Raven stepped back into the street.

He was no longer simply a man in the street.

From his back—from the point between his shoulder blades where the garment had been—two wings unfolded.

Not gradually. Not with the hesitation of something emerging.