The corridor stayed silent for a moment.
Crow kept his hand on the latch a moment longer, listening to nothing. The quiet felt heavier now, settled in after she left. He couldn’t decide which was worse: the silence before Sha-sha had leaned in and whispered against his ear, or the one that followed when she turned and walked off down the hall, torchlight sliding over her shoulders like the place belonged to her.
He pulled the latch.
The locker swung open.
The Claymore hung on the left bracket. Beside it, the Zweihänder took up the entire right side. Wedged between the two scabbards at the back sat the ring.
Crow pulled the Claymore first, slinging the canvas strap across his back. The Zweihänder followed. He tucked the ring onto his right index finger without ceremony and closed the locker.
He stood there, still in front of the locker with two swords on his back, chalk dust still in his hair, and a marriage proposal lodged in his ear like a splinter.
Then something shifted in the air behind him. A displacement that happens when a large man tries to move quietly and fails.
Crow didn’t reach for a hilt. He didn’t turn right away. He simply perceived the presence, the same way he’d perceive a change in weather.
He turned.
The brute from the ring that was built like a fridge stood 11 paces back, spine pressed against the far wall, one hand frozen mid-reach toward a torch bracket he clearly had no intention of touching. His equipment bag hung limp from the other fist.
He’d been trying to get to the lockers on the opposite wall. The ones that required passing within two meters of Crow.
He hadn’t made it.
The big man’s face, broad, split-nosed, one cheek still swollen from the beating, had lost all its earlier bluster. What remained was raw unease. He looked like someone who had just stepped on thin ice and felt it bend.
His mouth opened, then closed.
“Y-you can have her,” he stammered, both hands rising in a clumsy, reflexive surrender. “S-sophia. She’s yours. I won’t get in y-your way again. Just… let it be, please.”
Crow looked at him.
Two swords on his back, the Ring of Wisdom on his finger, and a headache already forming behind his eyes, Sha-sha’s voice from earlier, still whispering that marriage proposal in his head.
He exhaled through his nose.
“Man,” Crow said, adjusting the Zweihänder’s strap on his shoulder as he walked past. “Like I told you, I don’t care.”
He paused at the end of the corridor, half-turned, and glanced back at the brute still plastered against the wall with his hands up.
“You really are a muscle-head, aren’t you?”
The big man blinked.
“Y-you think you’re better than me, don’t you?” the brute muttered, his voice shaking with a mix of terror and bitterness. “J-just because she looks at you. J-just because she’s a-always around you. She... she used to always smile at me, you know? Before y-you showed up with your s-stupid swords and your s-stupid ring.”
The brute pointed a trembling finger at Crow’s back and continued,
“I’ve b-been trying for months to… you don’t deserve her, you—I mean, you’re just some o-outsider, right? Why does she always—I-I-I mean, you’re not even that—you j-just have to back off, okay? Just—”
Crow stopped. He didn’t turn to look at the man’s face, but his eyes narrowed on the rough stone wall.
“—I’m the one who d-deserves a chance,” the brute whined, his voice rising in an annoying, petulant pitch. “I’m here every day! If you would just back off and let me talk to her! She’d see that I—I-I mean, y-you can see that, r-right? Y-you’re just confusing her. It’s not real. Y-you don’t even like her anyway, I-I mean, I-I was almost there, and then you just had to show up and ruin everything—”
Crow’s jaw locked with a sound that was nearly audible. A single, violet vein at his temple pulsed violently, matching the throb of the headache that was now pounding at the back of his eyes. He didn’t reach for his swords. Instead, his right hand curled into a slow, bone-crushing fist at his side. The leather of his glove creaked under the immense pressure, a low, warning growl of hide and bone.
“There seems to be something wrong with that head of yours,” Crow whispered, his voice vibrating with a cold, contained fury that was terrifying because it had no warmth to it. “Want me to fix it for you?”
The man’s mouth snapped shut mid-sentence. He looked at the white-knuckled fist, then at Crow’s profile, the reality of the Zweihänder on Crow’s back finally sinking in.
The Sage’s voice echoed in his mind, casual and bored. “Just kill this guy. He’s a minion anyway; no one will miss a grain of sand like him.”
“I-I-I mean—”
“You’re starting to irritate me,” Crow continued. “Your voice is grating, and the one already in my head is asking me to kill you. Leave now. Before things escalate and I decide that your head needs manual fixing.”
The big man didn’t wait. His resentful courage evaporated, leaving only pure, abject terror. He scrambled backward, his boots skidding, and bolted down the corridor.
Crow lingered for a few seconds before leaving as well, continuing down the amber-lit underbelly of the place, following the distant sound of soldiers moving into position.
The soldiers who’d crowded the rope lines an hour ago now moved in clean columns, equipment shouldered, direction found. Sergeants called cadence from the flanks. Unit banners snapped in the draft from the open archways.
He clocked the hierarchy fast, from rank insignia alone it was easy to tell; but he analyzed too the way men oriented: bodies turning toward certain figures without being told, the unconscious gravitational pull of command. Officers wore it in the line of their jaw. The troops aimed themselves at it.
Crow watched two full companies fold into formation and disappear down the eastern corridor.
He stood against the wall and let the thought surface: who exactly am I supposed to fall in behind?
Nobody had covered that. The tournament had an end. And the Queen’s order too. His position in whatever came next had a distinct, uncomfortable gap where a superior’s name should sit.
“Crow.”
Sophia materialized from the column traffic with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to moving through organized chaos. She carried herself differently out here; completely different from the ring’s judge from before, or the drooling maid she was most of the time.
“The Queen is requesting your presence. New instructions.” She didn’t slow. “Follow me.”
He followed.
She took him up a service stair to the second floor, through a corridor that smelled of chalk dust and something sharper underneath, ozone, maybe, or burnt copper, whatever it was, stopped at a door that opened onto a wide room humming with quiet industry.
Crow scanned it in two seconds.
Robed figures occupied every available surface. Chalk circles on the floor, different geometry than the fighting rings, tighter, more deliberate. Instruments he couldn’t name. Glass vessels catching light that had no obvious source. Two mages crouched over something in the far corner that pulsed a dull, rhythmic amber, and neither looked up when the door opened.
Magic department.
Whatever they were testing, he couldn’t identify it from the door.
At the center of the room, a portal hung open, vertical and stable, humming at a frequency just below hearing.
“Through there,” Sophia said,
Crow stepped in.
Cold hit him first. It wasn’t the outside chill, real cold, from mana, the kind that carries an energy that finds gaps in clothing and settles into joints. His boots landed on stone dusted white. Snow fell at a measured, unhurried pace, the kind that had been falling for hours and intended to keep going. Around him, dock infrastructure stretched in both directions, heavy timber, iron moorings, vessels large enough to matter rocking at their berths.
Nordic. The architecture, the boats, the particular grey of the water beyond the docks. All of it spoke a language older than the capital’s polish.
Twenty two meters ahead, the Queen stood.
Alice wore the royal dress, her attention pointed downward, at a figure kneeling on the dock stones before her: a woman with long dark-purple hair that the wind kept pulling across her face and she kept ignoring. Her posture, spine straight despite the kneeling, hands flat on her thighs, marked her immediately.
A noble.
The kind that kneeled because protocol required it, not because surrender did.
Crow approached, stopped at a distance that kept him out of the conversation’s geometry, and listened.
“—Serana Von Snowblack, of House Snowblack, answering the royal summons.” The purple-haired woman’s voice carried without effort, low and measured. “I present myself to report the situation in the north.”
Alice looked down at her without expression.
“The supply shipments failed to arrive,” Serana continued. “The sea route encountered obstruction, a deep dragon, a young one, by the look of it, but already nearly invincible in the sea, that our naval forces couldn’t clear on schedule. Combined with the region’s interference patterns, the mages I have available couldn’t sustain the transport arrays long enough to move the full cargo volume. I ask forgiveness for the delay.” She looked up and didn’t drop her gaze. “I will dispatch everything within the fortnight. You have my word.”
Alice regarded her for a moment that stretched past comfortable.
Then she snapped her fingers.
Behind Crow, the portal breathed, expanding outward in a slow pulse, its edges widening until it occupied the full dock-end archway, the hum dropping an octave as it settled into its new dimensions. The light through it sharpened.
“That won’t be necessary,” Alice said, “I came to handle the transport personally.” She glanced at the portal with the casual authority of someone citing prior work. “This portal configuration transfers to the capital warehouse 11 minutes post-manifest. You have less than a day to load everything through that gate before it closes.” A pause. “Sustaining it beyond that point compromises what comes next. The window is absolute.”
Serana rose from the stones in a single motion.
Something changed behind her eyes, relief, maybe. She turned toward the dock workers already watching from the berths, and her voice changed tone entirely, to something that expected immediate results:
“Change of plans.” She moved as she spoke. “We’re going to use the portal for the transport to the capital. Pull everything from the holds and the warehouse. Now. Move.”
The men on the docks answered Serana.
They moved the moment she signaled without hesitation or delay. Ropes pulled taut. Cargo hooks swung. Workers flooded the gangways. The portal’s low hum climbed an octave as the first crates broke its threshold and vanished.
Crow watched it for exactly four seconds.
Then he felt Alice’s attention shift to him.
She’d already dismissed Serana with something minimal, a nod, maybe, or nothing at all, and now stood three paces from Crow, her back to the organized chaos behind her, her eyes on him with the calm precision of someone reading a document they’d written themselves.
“Walk with me.”
She didn’t wait.
He fell in beside her.
She moved along the dock’s edge, parallel to the water, unhurried. Snow accumulated on her shoulders. She let it. Below them, the grey sea churned between the hulls of moored vessels, and the wind off the water carried the smell of brine and cold iron and something faintly electric, the portal’s exhaust, maybe, bleeding into the open air.
Crow said nothing. She’d called him here for a reason, and whatever it was, it wasn’t dock logistics.
Alice stopped at the dock’s edge, where the timber planks ended and a low iron railing separated the walkway from the drop to the water below. She looked out at the harbor for a moment, organizing a thought into its final shape before releasing it.
“You passed the tournament,” she said. Not congratulations, just statement of fact.
“You already knew I would.”
Her eyes cut sideways. Something moved in them. “Yes.” She turned back to the harbor. “That’s precisely why I want to discuss what comes next. You have the necessary power.”
The workers’ noise faded behind them. The portal hum persisted, low and rhythmic, a metronome for whatever she was about to deliver.
“There’s a position,” Alice said, “Not a rank or an assignment with a sergeant’s name attached. Something more direct.”
Crow’s jaw worked once.
Direct. Meaning no hierarchy between the assignment and the throne.
“The north is fracturing.” She said it without inflection, the way a person names a problem they’ve already accepted and begun solving. “Not in the way the supply disruption suggests a deep armored sea dragon and pattern interference, those I can compensate for, as you’ve just witnessed. The fracture is political. House Snowblack holds this region, and Serana holds House Snowblack together by sheer force of competence.” A beat. “She won’t hold it forever. There are three secondary houses in this territory that interpret ‘loyalty to the crown’ as a negotiable concept.”
Snow hissed off the water’s surface forty feet below.
“I need someone in the north who isn’t a noble,” Alice continued. “Someone who doesn’t carry a house name that the secondary families can measure against their own ambitions. Someone without existing allegiances who can move through that political geography and apply—” her gaze dropped briefly to the Zweihänder’s hilt over his shoulder—”whatever calibration the situation requires. Preferably, a blunted one.”
Crow turned that over.
Calibration.
Alice seems to enjoy using overly complex language at times.
“You’re telling me the houses are circling Serana,” he said,
“I’m telling you they’re already circling each other.” She glanced at him sidelong. “The war has given them ideas, they see a path to ascension where there used to be only service. Serana’s position becomes a goal the moment they believe it’s possible. My presence today—” a small, precise gesture toward the portal still breathing behind them “—bought her credibility. It won’t last forever.”
The first barge swung away from its berth, riding low under the added weight of cargo. The dock workers’ cadence quickened, the middle-of-a-task rhythm.
“About the prize,” Crow said,
Alice didn’t look at his face. “We can discuss it later.” She held the word a second longer than its face value warranted. “What matters now is in the frontier, and in the north.” She finally turned to him, her eyes hard and searching. “House Snowblack’s ancestral seat has records that predate the capital by a century and a half.”
Here’s my opportunity to leave this kingdom.
Crow held her gaze. “When do I leave?”
The corner of Alice’s mouth twitched, hinting at a satisfied smile.
“The portal closes in—” she glanced once toward the dock’s far end, calculating. “—less than a day. Everything through it after the first 11 minutes travels to the capital warehouse.” She looked back at him. “Everything through it before that travels to the palace; it’s our way back.”
“About that expedition to the Hero,” Alice continued, shifting the subject too quickly. “For it to work correctly, it needs to be tomorrow.” She smoothed a hand over her dress, then pressed another to her cheek, a rare sign of nervousness. “You will escort my bom—cough—my golem to him. Directly to him. Then you withdraw immediately.”
She finally looked up, her expression strained. “That should buy us some time, at least, We already have too many problems to solve at once.”
Crow’s blood ran cold.
Did she just try to say “bomb?”
The cube.
A sudden, terrifying realization clicked into place.
Oh yeah.
Not a single muscle in his poker face twitched.
She really wants to kill my boy, huh? She really wants to cook everyone after all.