She was eighteen, and how could he say that the technique had only contributed a little to his victory, with the rest coming from his passive skill?
It's not like I'd teach her either, Lucian sighed inwardly once again. There would be a problem.
Who knew if the famous butterfly effect he'd read about in those novels would kick in? By then, his other advantages would be gone, wouldn't they?
"So what is it?"
Completely ignoring the subject and her sulking about him not entertaining her question, Lucian asked flatly.
Hands in his pockets. Eyes half-lidded. The dark charcoal fringe hanging over one brow.
Karin looked at him. Her amber eyes went wide, then narrow. Then she clicked her tongue and turned half away, and the low wolf-gray ponytail swung once behind her.
Nothing. He'd given her nothing.
She seemed to realize, then, how close she'd gotten, took a full step back, boots scraping the wet gravel, and went back to sulking.
But her hands were already moving, pulling a crumpled, moisture-stained parchment out of her green canvas tunic.
She dropped into her usual crouch on one heel and spread it flat across the lid of an abandoned crate. The corner tore as she pinned it down; she cursed under her breath and pressed it twice more before it stayed.
The yard around them smelled like rust and machine oil and wet gravel.
Shed C leaned against the training field wall at a bad angle, its corrugated iron streaked with decades of rain stains.
Beyond the wall, the pine tops moved in the wind and somewhere in those trees, ten minutes ago, a man with sulfur on his hands had been standing.
She smoothed the map once with the flat of her palm. It was a surveyor's chart. Faint grey grid lines ran across the whole sheet, and brown contour rings spiraled inward toward the center, the terraces of the pit numbered in small print.
A dotted line spiraled down the western wall: the haul ramp. Two parallel lines ran from the rim to the waterline: the old loading rails. Two small rectangles at the southern rim were marked with X's and labeled DEMOLISHED.
And in the bottom-right corner sat a formal title block, VERIDIA CROWN SURVEY - LIME EXTRACTION SITE 14 - YEAR 683 - and beneath it, in ink faded to brown, someone had written "The Sunken Quarry."
"Look! Look!" she said, stabbing her thumb down on the circle, hard enough to smudge her own charcoal. Her bangs fell forward across the map and she blew them out of her eyes without lifting a hand.
"Back when I was looking for scrap metal, I found a strange-looking crate."
While examining the map, Lucian kept his attention on Karin's story.
He leaned over the crate and traced the dotted haul ramp with one finger, all the way down the western wall, to the waterline. Then he tapped the red circle twice.
"See that red circle? The surveyors marked it thirty years ago, that's the bedrock fissure at the bottom." She pointed, and Lucian followed her direction and nodded. "So I went out to have a look. See if there was anything worth taking."
She made a grand gesture, drawing out the moment, both hands up, fingers spread.
"A snail! I found a pale blue snail." Then, catching herself, she lowered her hands and shot him a sideways look. "So, after yesterday's cooking... maybe we can hunt together again?"
The sulk was gone now. Her shoulders had come down, the ponytail had started swinging again, and the amber eyes had that bright, focused look they only ever got around food.
She even began drooling.
As expected of her.
But Lucian had been silent the whole time, listening with the flat, faint frown that meant arithmetic, a wrinkle deepening between his brows, the half-lidded gray gone narrow.
The Sunken Quarry...
The thing was, he didn't remember a place by that name. Or rather, perhaps because he had skimmed some chapters or binged the novel in one night, the detail had slipped past him.
Not even Arthur had mentioned it.
He tried hard to recall, but nothing came up, not even the name of the creature she had described. That snail, right? Pale blue?
Which meant he was blind. Blind to information.
While Lucian was busy pondering, Karin was frowning at the sky, chewing her lower lip, trying to remember something. Then her whole face lit up.
"Ah! I remember! it looked like a fresh fissure that opened at the base!" Her head snapped up so fast the ponytail cracked against her own shoulder.
"When I went back it was sub-zero down there, and that snail... I think they're called Frost-Borer Slugs. A Rank 1 Hollow Beast. A whole colony of them!" Her blinking eyes grew brighter with each word.
She turned back to the map and nodded at it, like it had agreed with her. "Imagine how rich we'll become!"
"Let's go right now, before the night patrol locks the perimeter!" she said eagerly, watching Lucian's silence with her whole body, weight forward, bangs in her eyes, one hand already resting on the cleaver strap above her shoulder.
And Lucian himself looked at the floating transparent screen hovering in his vision:
Phantom Starvation: 25% (Stable)
That was one more reason not to go. Besides, he had just fought Travis, his muscles were still strained, and...
That spy was still out there.
He glanced at the surrounding trees, the pines beyond the training field wall, still and grey in the flat afternoon light, and then turned his attention back to Karin and shook his head, disappointed.
A pity.
"Not today."
Karin's shining eyes went wide. She stared at Lucian, even gaping, ponytail frozen mid-swing, hand still flat on the crate.
Then she grabbed his sleeve.
"What do you mean, 'not today'?! We have momentum! Do you know how much a cold-core sac sells for on the black market?!"
A cold-core sac, huh.
When the material name clicked against the creature name, Frost-Borer Slugs, something fell into place.
A slug, just as she had described. The name came back to him because, when reading the novel, he had always made a point of noting creature names, techniques, and anything important.
Like in case he ever transmigrated into a novel. Which, of course, he now had. And he was glad he had that habit.
But as for the price: "How much?" He tilted his head.
The excited Karin went silent. She opened her mouth, stalled, scowled, her ears going faintly pink and mumbled: "...A lot. Probably."
Hearing that, he just nodded. That settled it. He wasn't going today.
Too much happening.
By now there was still a spy lurking around, and he had just caused a massive public incident by crushing Travis Cole.
The Committee was probably swarming the campus with surveillance, which meant going to an illegal quarry right now would be an open invitation for expulsion.
Also, his memories were getting a bit blurry. I think it's time to write the plot down. Lucian frowned, then looked at the excited Karin.
"There's a real chance that this open fissure will close and the slugs will retreat or go dormant, so we need to hurry!"
There was urgency in her voice, as if the goldmine before her would vanish at any moment, fingers tightening on the crate edge, bangs in her eyes.
But doing it alone was impossible. She couldn't even eat them, as they were filled with venom and toxins.
As for selling them rather than eating them? That was just as hopeless.
House Blake's trade contacts had died with her father and brother. She couldn't walk into a reagent office with a sack of sacs and expect to walk out with anything but a copper and a summons.
"Let's do it in four days, no, fi-" Lucian said.
Just as he was about to say five, Karin snapped, teeth gritted, snatching the map off the crate so fast the corner tore again.
"Fine! Four days, Croft. But if someone else clears out that slug nest before us, you're buying my dinner for a month."
Lucian just nodded and turned to go.
Behind him, Karin stood over the crate, both hands flat on the wood, jaw working. The amber eyes followed him exactly four steps before she clicked her tongue and started folding the parchment back up.
He didn't look back. Despite agreeing with her, he had been deep in thought, his gaze drifting up toward the high branches of the pines.
Come on, brain. Hold onto the memory.
Then he walked toward the West Annex alone, hands in his pockets, charcoal fringe over one brow.