The Storm King

Leon told his friends about his relationship with Elise. They had already heard some things about her when the four were at the Knight Academy, but since none of them had actually met her, none had expected to suddenly meet her at Leon’s place—Leon hadn’t warned them ahead of time, giving them only the directions to his place with the intent to catch up there, not at the Knight Academy parade grounds.

Apparently, not even the occasional reference Leon made to Elise back at the Bull’s Horns had been enough to convince the other three that she was both real and still with him. Charles had once seen the two together, but it had been a long time since then. In fact, as Leon was quickly made aware once he finished telling the others about him and Elise, it wasn’t so much her beauty and power that had stunned them in the beginning—though that was certainly a part of it. Rather, it was suddenly learning that Leon’s girlfriend was a real person and not some esoteric concept that Leon could occasionally refer to.

The more troubling explanation was Naiad. Leon hadn’t the intent to tell the truth about her, that she was a river nymph Queen and that she was a stunning eighth-tier being rather than the assumed fourth-tier. However, making something up on the spot wasn’t really Leon’s strong suit, so he gave a few vague details that they’d met when Leon had been transferred to the Horns and they hit it off after that.

Telling people that he and Naiad were a thing was starting to become a habit, he noticed. Telling people that they had an intimate relationship made for a convenient excuse to not tell them much else—and wasn’t that far from the truth, as a matter of fact—but he still felt a bit iffy about it. He realized as he gave half-truths to his friends that there would come a time when he, Elise, and Naiad would all have to sit down and hash this thing out, preferably after he, Elise, and Naiad all spoke one-on-one.

But an hour before Marcus Aeneas’ party wasn’t the time for that conversation. Hearing that Leon was essentially done with his explanations, Elise exited the guest rooms where she had been holed up with Naiad and asked, “How’s it going out here?”

“Just about ready,” Leon had answered, and the other three were suddenly too nervous around her to say much. Her status as the daughter of the local Heaven’s Eye Tower Lord tended to do that to people who were much farther down the social ladder than she.

With that awkward silence, Leon hurried everyone out of the door. They were going to be a bit late as it was, so Leon, a person who hated being late with a passion, got them moving. They didn’t leave through the front door, though. Instead, they left out the back and walked down to the river. Marcus’ estate was in the northern quarter of the noble district, whereas Leon and Elise’s were in the southern quarter, but both were on the Naga River, so the two had decided not to walk or take a carriage.

Consequently, Leon’s friends found themselves once more shocked when they found a small Heaven’s Eye yacht waiting for them at the private dock, though somewhat less shocked as a whole than when they met Elise and Naiad. Or rather, met Elise; Naiad didn’t say so much as a word to them, and, picking up on Naiad’s unfriendliness, none of the three wanted to ask too much about her.

On the short cruise up the river, Elise took the opportunity to ask them about their lives. Alain, having three kids and three fiancés, had the most to say. He was renting a relatively large place in Ariminium, which he could only afford because two of his wives-to-be had taken jobs as well, with the third staying home to watch over the kids. Now that he was a knight, however, they were about to have a lot more money coming into their household. Other than that, his kids were happy, healthy, and had become quite the handful now that they had learned to walk. Fortunately, having so many pairs of hands around the house made taking care of the kids relatively easy.

Alain even mentioned that his family had come with him to the capital, and that he would likely be using the leave time he received after being knighted to take his family back to his and Henry’s home village so he and his ladies could be properly married. As he said this, he gave Leon and Elise a strange smile, one whose meaning Elise clearly gleaned as she gripped Leon’s hand a little tighter, but Leon didn’t quite know what Alain was on about. It took a solid few minutes for Leon to realize that Alain was very pointedly not asking about Leon and Elise’s future plans when it came to marriage, and Leon gripped Elise’s hand a little tighter in turn.

Charles went next. He’d broken up with Jeanne, his girlfriend that he’d met when he and Leon had first come to the capital before the Knight Academy held its entrance tests for their cycle, and he hadn’t found any other long-term girlfriends since. That put him in roughly the same boat as Henry, who was trying to rock the single life as much as he could. Unfortunately for him, though, he wasn’t nearly as much of a lady’s man as he tried to portray—he had less luck than Charles in finding one-night stands, let alone a woman who could stand to be around him longer than a few weeks.

By the time they arrived at Marcus’ estate, the ice between Leon’s friends and Elise had been thoroughly broken—in no small part thanks to Elise’s own aptitude for being social that she, as a noble as highly ranked as she was, possessed. Leon was mostly silent during the entire conversation, but no one really expected him to talk all that much anyway.

Marcus’ servants, stewards, and estate attendants were ready to receive visitors from the river, and there was already another yacht parked in the Aeneas’ significantly more expansive private docks despite the earliness of Leon’s party’s arrival. It had been stamped with the crest of some noble House or other, but Leon didn’t care enough to closely scrutinize it; the only noble he cared about who was going to attend was Tiberias, and he was about ninety-nine percent certain that Tiberias would be arriving by carriage since the Decimius estate had no access to the river.

The group was shown inside and taken to the wing of the estate where the party was located. It was an extremely expansive estate, so it took a few minutes of walking to reach it, but when they did, they found it practically jumping off the ground. Dozens of relatively young and strong mages were in the roughly fifteen-room wing of the estate, and with their recent knighting, they were going wild. Marcus had a local band playing, and the smallish crowd was getting rowdy enough that a mosh pit was all-but certain in the near future.

But that was in the case of the common-born knights—Marcus had truly invited everyone who had been knighted along with them, Leon realized, though there weren’t even a hundred people there, yet, despite it being past the time for the party to start. In fact, Marcus, Alcander, Leon, and Elise were the only nobles who had arrived so far, and the rest of the sixty or seventy other people were common-born.

Perhaps because of this, Marcus gave Leon and Elise a very enthusiastic greeting and invited them over to the corner where and Alcander had been spending their time. To Leon’s friends, though, Marcus gave only the most obligatory of greetings, though he at least did so with all the enthusiasm and energy he gave to Leon and Elise. The three then went and joined the rest of the common-born knights while Leon and Elise let Marcus steer them away from where the party itself was happening.

Leon honestly couldn’t tell if he liked this or not. On the one hand, being away from the crowds was exactly what he wanted, but being in a place where Marcus and Alcander could grill him for more than the cursory details of his previous two years was hardly the most enticing replacement.

Still, Elise was there, and she effortlessly did the lion’s share of the talking, letting Leon be his usual quiet and introverted self. This, of course, didn’t stop Alcander and Marcus, but it did take quite a bit of the pressure to be social off of Leon’s decidedly more untamed shoulders. He’d been in the Bull Kingdom for more than three years, now, but in his heart of hearts, he was still a man of the wilds, a person born and raised as far away from government and societal structures as was possible. In other words, even in his time in the Bull Kingdom rubbing shoulders with high nobles and royalty, he still had little patience for gatherings such as these.

Still, he endured as best as he could, since he knew that Elise had more of a taste than he did for these sorts of social functions.

Over the course of the next hour, a couple hundred more people showed up at Marcus’ estate. Leon and Elise had been fairly early, relatively speaking, so plenty of common-born knights arrived after them, while the nobles tended to be fashionably late so they could make grander entrances. As per his usual attitude, Leon barely even acknowledged their presence. Elise, however, was very conscious of greeting these nobles and made note of their attire, and when it became clear that they were treating this as a more casual get-together, she dragged Leon over to a bathroom so she could retrieve her clothes from his soul realm and change.

When they got back to the party, Leon felt a hint of killing intent wash over him, as well as the attention of almost every noble in the room. They had been gone a long enough time that all but the truly late nobles had arrived, and more than three hundred common-born knights had, as well. However, his senses were sharp enough that he knew exactly where that killing intent had come from: the tall, black-haired and black-eyed boy sitting next to a few other nobles whose names Leon didn’t know.

Tiberias Decimius had arrived, and despite how cheerful and happy he appeared to everyone else around him, Leon could tell that the nobleman was infuriated at him.

Knowing what was to come, Leon let his stoicism drop just enough for the tiniest hint of a smile to appear on his lips, though it was essentially imperceptible to everyone else. He kept his emotions under control, though, and betrayed none of the killing intent he held for Tiberias. He was going to kill that man after the party, and he didn’t want to give himself away with a stray wisp or two of killing intent reaching Tiberias’ senses.

However, Tiberias wasn’t the only noble who had arrived in the fifteen or so minutes it took Elise to change out of her fancy clothes, both Valeria and Asiya had shown up and Elise started almost dragging Leon over to them. She tightened her grip on Leon’s arm and flashed him a tense smile; she had seen what he had, too, and she wanted to be as far away from Tiberias as she could.

Seeing her strained look was more than a little curious. Leon knew that in terms of social skills, Elise had him outclassed.

“Hey there!” Asiya said as Leon and Elise sat down next to her and Valeria.

“Hey!” Elise responded with a beaming smile.

Leon, however, remained lost in thought. ‘Was it something Tiberias did to her to make her so nervous? Or is it what I’m going to do? Or was she worried that I might give up the game too soon?’

Valeria nodded in greeting, and nervously shifted a bit in her seat as Elise subtly had Leon sit between her and her silver-haired friend. Once they were seated, a few more noblemen wandered over, including Marcus and Alcander. Fortunately, though, they had all had enough of hearing about Leon’s exploits and began to brag about their own—possibly for the sake of some of the only women in the noble section of the decidedly male-skewed party.

Marcus and Alcander had both been conveniently assigned to the same unit, a Legion in the Central Territories. Obviously, neither had seen as much large-scale conflict as Leon had, but they had spilled a fair amount of blood in the two years since leaving the Knight Academy. Notably, a rural guild had been extorting small villages for silver and livestock, robbing travelers on the road, and in general acting more like bandits than the usual magical handymen they were supposed to be. Marcus and Alcander’s unit had been sent to arrest the perpetrators and bring peace back to the area.

Things didn’t go so well, and in the end, the guild hall had to be taken by force at great cost to the guild mages. Much like Leon’s experience with rebellious guilds, though, it was mostly the higher-ups in the guild that were to blame, and as soon as they were arrested or killed in the fighting, a majority of the surviving guild mages surrendered.

Other than that, their time was mostly taken up by additional training, drilling with their Legion and familiarizing themselves with the way that they would be expected to conduct themselves once they were knighted.

Leon barely paid attention. His interest was piqued a bit when Alcander mentioned that they had been sent out on a vampire hunt once, but his interest was quickly lost when it was revealed that the two vampires Marcus and Alcander apparently killed were wind users and thus most likely not a part of Amon’s schemes. At the very least, though, he was glad that Alcander wasn’t pestering him for a duel like he used to in their Knight Academy days.

‘Thank the Ancestors for small mercies…’ Leon thought to himself as he did his best to not make it obvious that he wasn’t paying much attention to what the others were saying. Even more, he did his best to ignore Valeria’s presence, especially after Elise floated the idea of him becoming romantically involved with her after sleeping with Naiad.

Throughout all of this, Leon felt Tiberias occasionally give him a wrathful look, though it never lasted long enough to count as staring. It never even lasted long enough for anyone else to notice. In fact, Leon only noticed because he was keeping his magic senses projected so that he could monitor the nobleman, just in case.

On occasion, he saw Tiberias’ gaze shift from him to Elise, and it lost none of its wrath. If Leon had to guess, it would be because Tiberias was furious that Elise chose Leon over him, though Leon would readily admit that he had no evidence for that guess. It made sense to him, though.

It seemed that Tiberias wasn’t all that into the party after seeing Leon and Elise come back. He was there for a grand total of about an hour before he made his excuses and left. Leon watched him intently until he left the wing of the estate where the party was happening.

Leon waited only a few more minutes before he, too, rose from his seat, startling the other nobles around him. He’d noticed several other people coming and going, so he didn’t think it would be too suspicious if he were to leave right now, even if it was quite abrupt.

“I’m afraid I have to go,” he said. He almost left right then without offering any further explanation, but he paused when he realized that that would mean dumping the explanation into Elise’s lap, and he refused to do that. He then added, “I have a bit of extra work I have to take care of back home training my griffin with his beastmaster, I apologize.”

With that, Leon turned and left, pausing only one more time to smile and wave at Elise as she and the others—including a slightly put-off Valeria—said their own goodbyes to him.

In a way, he was somewhat grateful to Tiberias. Now, Leon could both kill him and ditch the party. Still, he felt Elise’s angry eyes boring holes into his back as he walked away. She knew why he was leaving after seeing that Tiberias had also left, but it didn’t stop her from being irritated that he was leaving just like that.

He could apologize later. Right now, he had a nobleman to kill.