Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It would be a lie to say that Bam’s party, once reunited, had had an easy time ascending the tower, but it wasn’t until the 105th floor that everything had truly gone to hell in a handbasket.

Shibisu scrambled over a fallen tree, still smoking from where a stray shinsu bolt had brought it crashing to the ground. Visibility was poor even with the help of his Observer, the smoke rendering everything more than five feet ahead of him a dull grey haze. Communications were down, the enemy Rankers clearly having access to some kind of dampening technology that they were making full use of in this battle. But however spotty the reports might have been before being cut off entirely, the picture that Shibisu was able to put together from them and from what he could make out with his own two eyes was objectively not good.

A figure burst into view ahead of Shibisu, and he had his sidearm out and primed to fire before he realized that it was someone he recognized, and certainly not an enemy.

“Hatz?” Shibisu asked hoarsely, voice scratchy from all the smoke. “Holy shit, Hatz—is that you?”

“Of course,” Hatz snorted, lowering his own sword. “If it wasn’t me, you’d be dead by now.”

“Haha, that's our Hatz, you always know how to brighten up a situation. I do love that about you.”

“Oh, shut up. This is hardly the time for jokes.”

Shibisu knew that, obviously. It was just… well, when the situation was this bad and it seemed like you were backed into a corner no matter what you did to try and fix it, what could you really be expected to but make stupid jokes? He was a scout, yet he had no idea where the rest of the party was, and now that he could actually see him, Hatz seemed to be favouring his left side. His hand was held firmly over his lower ribs and… yep, that was a not-inconsiderable amount of blood staining his skin and the fabric around it.

“That doesn’t look good,” Shibisu said, trying not to make his worry too obvious—Hatz never took that well. “We should probably patch it up at least a bit. Ideally I’d like to get Khun to take a look at you, but I can’t get ahold of him because my goddamn communications have been on the fritz for the past two hours. Have you—”

Hatz shook his head. “I have no idea where Earrings is, I haven’t seen or heard anything from him since the first attack. I’m fine though, this is barely a scratch—I mean it, we have worse things to worry about right now,” he insisted waspishly when it seemed like Shibisu was going to interrupt. “Look, it’s not just Earrings who’s unaccounted for, I haven’t heard anything from Anaak in almost as long, and Bam… he’s down for the count. He took a really bad hit earlier.”

“What?” Shibisu asked, horrified. If even their Irregular was out of commission, this was even worse than he had thought. “Is he alright? What happened?”

“I’m not sure, it was around the time when I lost contact with the others,” Hatz said, head dropping as he heaved a shaking breath, shifting unsteadily on his feet. “They were coming at us from above, so Bam was in the air trying to hold them off so we could get away. I didn’t see exactly what happened, but the next thing I knew, Bam was falling from the sky and Endorsi just took off after him. I don’t know what happened after that, I was immediately attacked by another group of enemies—probably some of their scouts—and I barely managed to escape. By the time I circled around back there was no sign of anyone, from either our side or theirs. Best case scenario, he was just knocked out and Endorsi got him out of there before I got back. Worst case….”

He didn’t have to finish. Worst case scenario, they were both dead or captured.

“How… how the fuck did this happen?” Shibisu asked helplessly. He had tried so hard to keep calm when he was separated from the others, tried to calmly assess the scenario as their enemies closed in, but he was nearing his limits. “How did… we were so careful. Khun and me spent weeks planning this out, we had backups for our backups. How did they manage to—”

“Get down!” Hatz hissed, grabbing Shibisu’s wrist and roughly dragging him down, pulling them both down further into the cover of the trees. This close to the ground the smoke was a little lighter, and the scent of pine needles and sap invaded his nostrils. It took several seconds for him to see what Hatz had seen, dim lights up above as enemy Rankers flew overhead, likely looking for survivours.

“Holy fuck,” Shibisu whispered. “Holy fuck."

“Calm down,” Hatz said, although it would be more of an effective reprimand if Shibisu couldn’t see the whites of his eyes. “We can deal with this the same way we’ve dealt with it every time something goes wrong. We just have to be patient and wait them out, then find the others. Everything else can come after that. We can do this.”

Shibisu wasn’t sure who Hatz was trying to convince—Shibisu, or himself.

*

They hadn’t come into this situation with any illusions that it would be easy. In fact, Shibisu and Khun had known for ages that one of the things they would most need to be careful of past Floor 100 were the Ranker warlords.

Many warlords were related to the Great Families, although they didn’t claim allegiance to any of them in particular. They were a lawless group, viciously territorial and extremely powerful in terms of both abilities and manpower. Luckily for most ordinary Regulars climbing the Tower, they often fought amongst each other for control over various floors and their wealth, large-scale battles that meant they were too busy with their own concerns to spare much notice for the Floor Tests going on in the inner portion of the Tower. But less luckily, Bam’s group was not in the slightest bit ordinary.

The Irregular of prophecy, the FUG Slayer Candidate, was not likely to be ignored by these powerful figures when he entered their territory.

There were a variety of reasons for their enmity. For some, it was a simple desire to recruit a powerful new subordinate, banking on the fact that if FUG could turn an Irregular to their side, they could too. For others, it was because they still felt some loyalty to the ruling powers, the Great Families and Jahad, and saw it as something of a moral duty to bring a potential usurper down. Others feared their way of life might be disrupted should the Slayer successfully carry out his task and bring about a new age, as FUG foretold. Others hoped to be able to ransom him off for a fortune to one of the myriad of powers in the Tower who were seeking to capture or kill him. Any one of these alone would be sufficient reason for one of these warlords to seek to bring their party down.

The worst of these warlords by reputation was also paradoxically the most mysterious, a man who went by the name of Albrecht Glass, or sometimes, as he was referred to in dark corners and hushed voices, the Ghost Duke.

Albrecht Glass was a powerful man, his strength and shinsu abilities bolstered by two different Great Family bloodlines, and he had a reputation as something of a king and something of a pirate. He imposed laws and taxed the people who lived in areas he conquered, yet also had been known to raid and plunder these same groups when it caught his fancy, or when he felt like some form of retribution was in order. It wasn’t a particularly original story, just another Ranker who decided to treat the Tower as his own personal playground, but he did seem to be worryingly successful when it came to doing so.

And he also had one major advantage—his base of operations, his fortress, or wherever he actually lived with his mercenaries and the rest of his followers when he wasn’t on a rampage—was, according to all known sources, a complete mystery. It’s location was unknown. Its size was unknown. What was inside was unknown. What method was used to hide it was also unknown (although Shibisu and Khun did have their suspicions about that, but again, no solid evidence).

They had both lost sleep to the endless hours of work they had poured into researching the warlords and their weaknesses, trying to dredge up any new scrap of information on the elusive Ghost Duke. When they had exhausted all possible avenues, they had done their best to lay false trails in preparation for their arrival, confusing dates and times and dropping tidbits of info to the right parties that would cause the warlords’ attention to be elsewhere while they were on floors in their territories. They had hoped that this would allow them to get in, take their test, and get out before the warlords would learn of their presence and come after them.

It had worked quite well for the most part, but their luck had run out on Floor 105.

Shibisu hadn’t had much of a chance to think about it, but despite the disbelieving words of protest he’d given Hatz, there was really only one possible explanation for why the Ranker’s forces had been ready to descend on them the second they entered the pine forest that marked the start of the testing area. At that point it had simply become a matter of forcing them out of the area designated for Regulars and into the no man’s land where the Rankers were waiting for them. They had clearly been prepared for in advance.

The Test Directors for the floor had been in on it. They had to be. Nothing else would make sense.

After that, everything was a blur of trees and ambushes and running for cover. The team had gotten separated, and then the dampening field had come out of nowhere and they’d been forced to run for their lives.

Which brought them back to the present.

Eventually, Shibisu breathed a sigh of relief when he could no longer see the Rankers, and turned to Hatz. “Now that we have a moment free, let’s see about that injury.”

“I told you, It’s fine,” Hatz said, but thankfully didn’t resist as Shibisu began cleaning the wound. He was just in the process of finishing affixing a gauze pad into place when there came a sudden, blessed sound. It was like music, like angels singing. The long-awaited sound of a Pocket chime.

Communications were back. Finally, some good fucking news.

“Shibisu? Shibisu, is this message getting through? Are you alright?” And what a welcome voice that was, too! Shibisu could have wept.

“Bam!” Shibisu exclaimed into his Pocket. “Thank god, we’ve been so worried! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Bam’s voice said, although it sounded a bit weaker than Shibisu would have liked. “I got hit by something—one of them had some kind of weapon that made a shockwave and I must have been knocked unconscious for a bit, but Ms. Endorsi saved me. I didn’t suffer any lasting damage.”

He was probably making light of his injuries to make them feel better, any hit that could take down Bam had to have been devastating, but at the moment Shibisu was simply relieved to be hearing his voice. “Well, that’s the best news I’ve heard in some time. Are you still in contact with Endorsi?”

“Yes, we’re together,” Bam replied and bless him but he definitely had no idea how that sounded.

He couldn’t say the same for Hatz, who snorted, averting his eyes and kicking at a pinecone on the forest floor that Shibisu was almost certain had done nothing to him.

Unfortunately, now that they knew that Bam was at least awake and functional and the most recent crisis was averted for the time being, Shibisu would most likely have to be the one to deal with Hatz’s… pique over the speed at which Endorsi had left him behind to rush to Bam’s aid.

Every day Shibisu wondered what he had done to deserve to spend every precious hour of his life bathing in such a vast cesspool of hormones and unrequited feelings. And speaking of….

Still no sign of Khun. That was worrisome, and now that Bam was awake, there was no doubt that he’d be reacting to this in the same way that he usually reacted when it appeared Khun was in some sort of danger. Which is to say, poorly.

”Hey is anybody there?” another voice joined the call, this one higher pitched and considerably more grumpy-sounding than Bam’s. “Tracksuit, hag, anyone there? Answer your damn Pockets!”

“Anaak?” Shibisu asked. “Anaak, is that you? What’s your status?”

“Who else would I be, Urek Mazino? And don’t worry, it’s all fine on my end,” Anaak said dismissively. “What about the hag? I haven’t heard from her yet, did she get her heel caught in a hole and die?”

For all that her words sounded harsh, Shibisu thought that she wouldn’t have asked that question if she hadn’t been more than a little bit concerned. It was pretty cute actually, although Anaak would definitely kill him if he said as much.

”Who got caught in a hole and died?” a shrill voice came out of the Pocket and Shibisu winced. It seemed like Endorsi had joined the call. “Maybe a poor little toad with short legs, I can’t imagine who else would be so clumsy!”

“This forest is pretty dense, did you run your broomstick into any trees lately, witch?”

“Well at least I don’t—”

“All right, all right, break it up!” Shibisu demanded. “We’re all separated, we need to be using the comms for important messages now, not throwing insults!”

“Who died and made you king, ugly?”

“Yeah, who do you think you are—”

“Guys,” Bam cut in, his voice steady and reasonable and slicing through the chatter like nothing else could. Shibisu could have kissed him. “I know we’re all confused and frustrated, but we really should listen to Isu right now. We still need to figure out what our situation is and what we’re going to do going forward. Are you all okay with that?”

The Pocket went quiet for a few seconds, and then….

“See, that’s just what I was about to say,” Endorsi said with a huff. “Focus, everyone! This is no time for arguing!”

“Says the one who caused the most trouble in the first place,” Anaak grumbled.

“As I was saying,” Shibisu interrupted loudly. God save him from this mess of a team, Khun had better show up soon to restore order or Shibisu was going to kickflip off the deep end. “The first thing we should be doing now is determining who all is accounted for. I can speak for myself and Hatz, we’re both doing alright. Hatz is a little bit dinged up, but he's been treated and isn't in immediate danger.”

“I told you I was fine,” Hatz said, a little moodily.

Whatever, Hatz.

“Ms. Endorsi and I are together,” Bam said, and again with that phrasing. “We’re both fine.”

“Laure?”

“Sleeping Ugly is with me, for all the good he’s doing,” Anaak said, and there was the sound of a distant grunt, like Anaak had driven her foot into a sleeping man’s side on the other end of the line. It sounded pretty much exactly like that, actually. “And obviously, I’m alive as well.”

Shibisu frowned, considering. “So that means that we’re all safe and accounted for except for Rak and Khun, does that sound right?”

There were murmurs of agreement over the comm, the argumentativeness seemingly dying down again as it became clear that not all was well yet.

They stayed hidden for the next few minutes, although it was quickly becoming apparent that none of their party had actually seen the enemy in some time. It was a reassuring development, but not one that Shibisu would trust at face value. They were, however, beginning to cautiously suggest how they could go about reuniting the party.

Another chime, a different one than the Pocket chime earlier, alerted Shibisu to another development.

He had set his observer with the task of identifying the source of the interference that had been messing with their communications. If it was ringing now, it meant that the machine had finished its analysis, and he could finally isolate the identity of at least one of their enemies. When he finally saw it, however, the ID of the source made him do a double take.

The dampening field hadn’t actually been coming from the enemy at all.

That was Khun’s Lighthouse code—Shibisu would recognize it anywhere. There was no mistake, no misunderstanding, the dampening field had been Khun’s doing.

But why? A Lightbearer taking out his own communications network in the middle of a battle would be like shooting himself and his whole team in the foot. Because of that dampening field, they’d all been cut off, separated and forced to take cover. It was incredibly dangerous; they could have all died. So why would Khun do that?

Unless….

Unless it was because they were tracking our transmissions, Shibisu realized. He couldn’t know for sure, but it would make sense. If the enemy was capable of tracing their locations based on the signals their devices were sending out, then it would be impossible to escape as long as they continued sending out communications to each other. Their only hope would have been to cut communications entirely and go to ground to wait for backup from FUG, which the dampening field had essentially forced them to do.

It was likely that Khun had understood how closely they were being monitored and realized that he had no way to share this information with the others without it being picked up by the enemy, and had acted without explanation because of that.

But then where are you now, Khun-my-love? he wondered. What did it mean that communications were back up now? Did Khun disable the dampening field himself because he decided the risk was gone, or had it been unintentional on his part? And then there was Rak, who was still missing….

“... is it on? Turtles, are you there? Can you hear me?”

“Mr. Rak!” Bam’s voice was the first to pipe up at the sound of his friend’s voice over the Pocket. “Thank goodness, we were all worried. Are you alright?”

“I am… fine. Are all the rest of you turtles safe?”

Shibisu thought Rak sounded uncharacteristically subdued, and he was beginning to worry.

“We’re all fine, but we’re still missing Khun,” Shibisu said. “He’s the only one unaccounted for now. We’re just trying to keep our heads down until we can be sure the danger is over.”

“... it’s over now,” Rak said.

A sudden chorus of voices came over the line.

“Wait, you mean the Rankers are gone? Is it safe?”

“How would you know?”

“Where are you--"

“For god’s sake everyone, just give the man a chance to explain!” Shibisu said in exasperation. He’d probably pay for using that tone with them later but… well, he couldn’t really regret it. “All yours, big guy,” he said. “What’s the situation?”

There was a pause.

“Black Turtle’s minions are here.” Rak’s deep voice, when he spoke up sounded heavy and tired over the line. “They came and the enemies ran, but it was too late. Black Turtle, I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop them.”

“Minions?” Bam asked. “Wait, do you mean FUG is here? Who couldn’t you stop?”

Shibisu’s mind was racing. If FUG was here, that could explain why they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of any of their enemies for quite some time now. Shibisu had little love for the organization that had caused his friend so much grief, but if their presence was enough to send a Ranker warlord scurrying for cover then he couldn’t deny that their backup certainly had its uses. The only problem was….

“It was that Ranker turtle, the one we had been warned about.” Rak said, the words plummeting into the expectant silence like stones into a well. “He was here, and there were too many for me to fight off, and when he ran away he took the Blue Turtle with him. I wasn’t strong enough to stop them, I’m sorry.”

Shibisu didn’t need to see Bam’s face to be able to tell what kind of expression he must be wearing.

Far from being over, it was looking like things were going to get very ugly, very fast.

*

“That crocodile creature seemed pretty determined to prevent us from taking you.”

“Yeah?” Khun said, in as disaffected a voice as he could muster. He would have waved a hand dismissively if they weren’t both tightly secured behind his back. “He’s something like a pet, I guess he got attached.”

That idiot Rak, he’d better not have gotten himself killed or Khun would march right back and kill him himself.

When Khun had decided to make himself the distraction, to ensure that the only communication devices the enemy picked up would be his own, he hadn’t expected Rak to have been so nearby or so virulently opposed to letting him be captured. Khun had barely managed to keep himself from screaming at him to run when he saw the crocodilian hopelessly outnumbered and bleeding from numerous wounds, but doing so would have ruined his plans, so he’d held back. He didn’t know how that fight had turned out—he’d been bound, tossed into a ship and carried off before it was over—but one thing he was certain of was that Rak would never have run away, whether Khun had ordered him to or not.

It was true that Khun didn’t love this plan either, but he’d been almost fresh out of options and it had come down to either doing nothing and letting the Ranker’s army pick them off one by one until they eventually got to Bam, or Khun playing the role of bait and hoping that any situation he found himself in would be one he could fight or talk himself out of. He chose the lesser of two evils based on one truth, and that was the simple fact that any option, any result was better than losing Bam.

Maybe if he’d been able to convey this idea more articulately to Rak ahead of time the idiot wouldn’t have had to go and get himself all bent out of shape when he’d emerged from the trees to find Khun surrounded and his Lighthouses in pieces around him. Maybe then Rak could have trusted him and avoided getting so badly injured—it was completely senseless.

“You seem remarkably calm about this. I admit that I did expect considerably more death threats and screaming.”

Albrecht Glass, the Duke himself, seemed to be in a reasonably good mood for someone who had basically just turned tail and run. Khun admittedly didn’t quite have a read on him yet, but he didn’t look like a man who had just suffered a loss of any kind, and it put him on edge.

Albrecht Glass wasn’t very remarkable looking. He was a tall man, dark haired and fairly lanky, not overly muscular in appearance. He was a fairly good conversationalist, and had a resting expression of polite inquiry, like he was genuinely interested in hearing what you had to say. Khun knew better than to be taken in by his appearance, however. If half the things he’d heard about this man were true, he had killed more people than Khun had ever met.

And they weren’t just having a polite conversation, either.

Khun had been carried away blindfolded and restrained, and he’d only been able to see again after he’d been shuffled onto what was presumably Albrecht’s main ship. It was much larger than the one he’d arrived on, but the humming of engines in the background had made it apparent that they still weren’t anywhere on land. He’d been taken to a space like a cozy study where he’d been seated in an armchair across from Albrecht, although his bonds hadn’t been removed and a pair of guards remained at his side, blades at his throat.

Implicit threats under a thin veneer of civility, was his impression of the man and his style of hospitality.

And this wasn’t a polite conversation, it was an interrogation.

“You really think I’d do something as undignified as that?” Khun scoffed. “Please, as if I would ever need to resort to such things to assert myself. You know I got used to having influence of all kinds with Viole. I had a lot of fun horrifying polite society and reaping the rewards of being associated with a Slayer Candidate, even if I knew from the beginning that it couldn’t last forever.”

“So all this time you’ve spent working for the FUG Slayer Candidate, you were simply after the power and prestige that you thought you would get out of it?” Albrecht asked skeptically.

“Of course. Oh, that and the promise of revenge against my scumbag father. As far as I’m concerned, the whole family deserves to go down in flames. Making myself indispensable to an Irregular sounded like the best way to go about making that happen at the time.”

“I see,” Albrecht said with an idyllic smile. “It seems that things didn’t turn out that way.”

“Obviously,” Khun replied just as carelessly, “I mean, he did kind of screw me over in the end. In case you hadn’t noticed, he abandoned me.”

Albrecht nodded, his expression openly sympathetic in a way that had Khun’s hackles immediately raised, although he did his best trying to keep any evidence of that from reaching his face. “That’s true, it seems that Jue Viole Grace did escape and leave you behind in the process. However,” he said, rising from his seat and approaching, making Khun stiffen even further, “perhaps I would be inclined to be more sorry for your plight if not for the fact that I know that any plans that Jue Viole Grace acts on come not from him, but from his favourite strategist.”

Albrecht stopped in front of Khun and his captors, and in a swift move his hand came up to clamp around Khun’s jaw in a vice-like grip, keeping him in place as the Ranker forced him to look into his eyes. Khun immediately stilled, knowing instinctively that any struggling now would only get his throat swiftly cut, and he was forced to stare at his own pale visage as it was reflected back in those cold green eyes.

God but he was actually scared. How pathetic. Thankfully, repression was pretty much second nature to him by now and he managed to force it back down again.

“And as we are both well aware, Jue Viole Grace’s strategist is none other than you,” Albrecht continued, his voice soft and belying his harsh grip. “If you were the one we found and captured, it was because it was part of your plan, not his.”

Khun had somewhat expected this development, which was fortunate because it meant he had an answer ready. In this instance, it actually worked in his favour that Khun had a decently far-reaching reputation for being dishonest, because it meant that whatever he offered as an explanation in the first place would likely be automatically discarded as lies and misdirection. That in turn usually made it easier to sell the second set of lies.

“You’re right,” Khun said. “I wanted to meet with you, so I made sure that I’d be the one you tracked down.”

“Interesting. Why would you do that?”

“Because I’m not getting anything out of working for Viole anymore, so I thought it was time to seek out a better option,” Khun said. “Obviously your intelligence isn’t lacking if you were able to catch us so completely off guard, so you know I don’t have any new information for you. And I can’t be ransomed to my family, either. You know enough about me to realize that they wouldn’t trade so much as a single mouldy crust of bread to get me back.”

Khun paused a moment to let that sink in. “But what I can do is offer you my assistance—I still haven’t achieved my goals yet, and now that Viole’s proven himself to be so easily defeated and I’ve parted ways with FUG, you just might be the best chance I have of getting it.”

Mix lies with the truth. Wrap it up all neatly for him and put a bow on top. Buy it, please buy it….

“So you’re saying you got captured because you decided it was time to cut your ties with the Irregular and seek out stronger allies,” Albrecht said, his hand moving from Khun’s jaw to cradle his cheek instead. Far from helping him relax, the action only scared him more. “It seems that you two didn’t have quite the perfect friendship it appeared you had on the surface. I guess that’s to be expected, you are quite the actor from what I’ve heard, and you have a reputation for being coldhearted. Whether you’re capable of feeling any sort of loyalty at all is up for debate in a number of circles in the Tower… you’d probably be surprised at how far your infamy has spread.”

At any other time the words might have left him gutted, but Khun was simply relieved that the man seemed to have bought it, at least for now. It felt bad to denounce Bam’s importance to him, but it was all he could do at the present to try to prevent Albrecht from using him against his friend. As he’d known before, having a reputation for being treacherous could be helpful when applied correctly.

Albrecht chose that moment to stroke his thumb across Khun’s cheek, tracing the skin right under his eye, and Khun had never wanted to kill someone so badly in his life. “Of course, that only covers how you feel about him, not how he feels about you.”

Khun’s whole body went cold, as if he’d been dunked in a tank full of ice water. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, straining to keep his voice even. “We were useful to each other for a time, that’s all.”

“You said your family wouldn’t do anything to get you back, and I believe you. But if you’re half the liar I think you are, you must have given Jue Viole Grace ample reason to keep you around. Whatever you may say about your relationship, I do find it telling that you had to go to such lengths and plan behind his back just to get away from him. That speaks to a very particular kind of attentiveness on his part. I’m sure you understand what I’m implying here.”

Of course he did. This rat bastard, Khun would kill him one day. He would hardly be the first to interpret Bam and Khun’s relationship that way, and worse…

… it wasn’t even entirely wrong. He didn’t seem to know anything that couldn’t be picked up from hearsay, but it would be a lie to say that his suspicions were entirely off the mark.

“I understand the implications,” Khun confirmed stiffly, eyes narrowing. “I don’t understand why someone in your position would listen to such baseless rumours, though.”

Albrecht laughed, hand dropping back to his side. “No need to get angry, after all, I’m going to give you what you want,” he said, pulling away at a speed that left Khun dizzy. He made his way back to his own chair and sat down, looking him over speculatively, eyes traveling over his body in a way that Khun didn’t like at all. “I’ll gladly accept your services, as it just so happens, I have a position open that would be perfectly suited to someone like you. And I’ll even do you the favour of helping you hide from that clingy Irregular as a bonus. Never let it be said that I can’t be generous with my people. ”

“You say that, but you seem entirely too confident that Jue Viole Grace will care enough to come after me,” Khun said. “I doubt he’s eager to be held up on such an unimportant floor by an unnecessary conflict that is completely unrelated to his mission to destroy Jahad. What’s to stop him from quickly passing the test and leaving this floor while you’re idling away here?”

“Because,” Albrecht said, smiling indulgently. “I am certain he would never willingly leave this floor without you. Especially after he learns what’s become of you in his absence.”

The whole picture snapped into focus, and Khun’s carefully honed brain quickly put together the pieces of what he knew with the little tells throughout their conversation and understood exactly what kind of position the man had in mind for him.

“I’ll kill you,” Khun said slowly, through gritted teeth. The gloves were off, the scenario he’d been trying to construct was a haphazard mess, but at the moment, Khun didn’t care. “You won’t even have to worry about Bam coming after you because I’ll kill you first.”

“Finally, this is the most genuine you’ve been since we started this little discussion,” Albrecht said. “Not that I think you’ll have the chance to try to kill me, but I do think it’s nice to see the face of the real Khun Aguero Agnis. Honesty is important in a marriage, wouldn’t you agree?”

Chapter Text

Through the research he and Shibisu had done in preparation for the 105th Floor, Khun had attempted to put together something of a personality profile using the small amount of information available about Albrecht Glass. Personal reports painted the picture of a vicious man who took pleasure in merciless slaughter and enjoyed battle with the sort of fervor that sometimes occurred in those who occupied High Ranker positions for as long as he had. It also seemed like he was at least reasonably clever, and was an experienced strategist and military leader.

While most of these small morsels of information were useful, they were not unexpected, and the same could have been said for many of the other warlords they might come up against.

More disturbing were the reports that described Albrecht Glass as a hedonist, a man who was easily bored and was constantly seeking rare and unique pleasures to be taken. These were mostly hearsay, but were disturbing for one specific reason, which was in the evidence that supported them. It was a known fact that Albrecht was in the habit of taking captives during his raids. On rare occasions some might be held as hostages in order to extract even more promises of wealth, but not always. Those he took away without ransoming were presumably brought back to his hidden base, and were by all accounts never seen again.

One thing that was consistent with the ones he kept, however, is that they were all described as beautiful by anyone left to tell those sorts of stories.

While it had never been explicitly stated, Khun had several solid, if not disgusting ideas as to why he might have been taking those captives. He had deliberately avoided mentioning it to Bam, knowing that it would only upset him and possibly add fuel to the fire of that noble side of his. At that point they had still naively hoped to be able to slip through Albrecht Glass’s territory as swiftly and quietly as possible, and Bam going on a rampage against someone they essentially knew nothing about in an attempt to defeat him and free his captives would both render that useless and put Bam in unacceptable danger.

It was selfish, perhaps, and unfortunate for any of those captives who might be still alive, but the safety and wellbeing of their own party would always come before strangers in Khun’s mind. He had kept quiet about it, and requested Shibisu do the same.

So any satisfaction Khun might have felt at finally having a solid answer as to what happened to those people was vastly outweighed by the irony of having received that answer by being forced to join their ranks himself.

To be precise, by becoming the man’s husband himself.

It was a mockery of the position, really. Not that Khun had an overwhelming amount of respect for the hallowed institution of marriage in the first place—his first seventeen years as Khun Eduan’s son had quite effectively wrung that out of him.

Because Khun wasn’t Albrecht’s only spouse, oh no. Not even close.

But this was its own special kind of twisted, too. At least in Eduan’s case Khun knew that the women he married actually wanted to marry him, although God knew why. The worst he could be accused of—regarding his marital status at least—was poor taste. Albrecht’s numerous concubines however seemed to be made up mostly of the people he had captured on his raids, either specifically for that purpose or as part of a failed hostage negotiation. It was possible that some were there voluntarily, but if they were then they were well outnumbered by those who weren’t.

And now he was included in that number.

Khun wondered if Rak would laugh if he saw him now. Probably would, damned Gator.

The wedding itself had been quick and without any kind of special ceremony, thankfully. As disgusting as it was to be married against his will to such a person, there was blessedly no damn cake and flowers, just a nick to his thumb and a bloody print pressed onto the marriage certificate, as was apparently binding on this fucked-up floor. Albrecht had kissed him then—on the cheek, possibly sensing that anything more ambitious would have resulted in Khun’s teeth buried in his flesh—and then Khun had been fitted with an ugly shinsu suppression collar and banished to a new part of the ship he’d never seen before.

Khun ended up spending most of that first evening on board Albrecht’s ship exploring the limits of his new cage, and found them to be quite restrictive. He seemed to be in what could most easily be described as a residential area—most of the rooms here seemed to be personal quarters, with other living spaces distributed throughout. Many of the more official-looking doors were locked with key-card access pads on the outside, and Khun assumed that these led to the more functional parts of the ship, like the engine room and bridge.

It was not unexpected that Albrecht would limit his prisoners’ access to the ship’s most vital systems, but it was annoying. Khun wanted to break something and being able to throw a literal wrench into the ship’s engine would have done a world of good for his mood.

He pulled at the collar he’d been fitted with, glaring at what little he was able to see of it. He’d only heard a bit about these things before—they were an old Workshop product that used to be used in high-security prisons, meant to cut off the shinsu abilities of particularly dangerous wave controllers who could potentially use their powers to escape or harm the other prisoners. Khun didn’t think he had much of a reputation of being a shinsu user, but Albrecht seemed to be trying to cover the bases. It would be a problem, but Khun also had a good reason to want to avoid blindly messing with it until he could get a better look at it.

There also seemed to be quite a few guards on duty in the… whatever part of the ship this was, where Albrecht presumably shoved all his concubines when he wasn’t using them. For the most part they had left him alone while he poked around. Probably a combination of lack of motivation at being made to do boring work like this during a period that was likely downtime for the rest of Albrecht’s men and confidence that Khun wouldn’t actually be able to do any of the things he’d so dearly like to. If that was the case then their confidence wasn’t entirely unfounded, he did seem to be pretty definitively trapped.

For now, at least.

One of the guards did, however, have a problem with him when he noticed that Khun had started picking at the card reader on one of the doors.

“Hey, you!” the man demanded. He was young-ish and had a pockmarked face, a truly unfortunate creature. “Get away from that device!”

Khun sighed deeply. “Okay, fine. At ease, soldier,” he said, backing away with his hands up innocently. “Keep up the good work,” he flipped a salute and made to leave.

The man clearly hadn’t liked his tone, because he proceeded to follow Khun as he walked back down the hallway. Khun wasn’t sure where exactly he was going, but he paused when he noticed a larger door that didn’t have a card reader. Curious, he pushed the access button and the doors hissed open, so he went inside.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” the guard asked, following him in. “You aren’t allowed in here without permission!”

It was a wide, circular room, with large floor-to ceiling-windows on one wall. This was the largest room he’d been in so far, and the first one with windows of any kind. It looked like it was designed to be something like a greenhouse. It was objectively a pretty room, full of real plants and ornate tilework and plenty of cozy areas laid out with benches and cushions for relaxing, but Khun had no interest in such things at the moment. He made his way to one of the windows, and, seeing something that looked like a catch, stuck his finger in it and pried the pane open with a bit of difficulty, given the size. An ordinary person would probably not be able to do it unassisted, but Khun was stronger than he looked, so he managed to lift it enough that it clicked into an upright position.

He leaned out the window before the hapless guard could stop him, craning his neck upward as the cold wind blew his hair around him, trying to make some sense of where he had found himself. If he looked up, he could see a massive balloon sac, and he realized that this must be a dirigible-style ship at least in part, although it seemed more heavily-armoured than most ships of that type that he’d seen. Probably shinsu-reinforced too, given that this looked like a warship more than a pleasure cruiser.

The room he was currently in seemed to be situated on the lower back-end of the ship, and he could see what looked like a maintenance ladder bolted down to the outside of the ship several dozen meters above him, but it was much too far away to access from this position. There didn’t seem to be any real footholds to speak of, and it was a long and sheer drop off the side.

He was contemplating risking crawling out a bit further when the guard finally lost patience and hauled him roughly back inside, letting the window slam shut behind them.

“Now that’s enough from you!” the guard snapped, face purpling with rage. “Entering this room unattended is forbidden, as is touching the windows, much less… climbing out of them!”

“But a big, tough guard like you was here to accompany me, so it’s fine,” Khun said.

“It’s not fine! I’ll let you off this once since this is your first day here, but you’re confined to your room for the rest of the evening!”

Khun sighed, exasperated. “Fine,” he said. “Escort me, oh esteemed guard.”

“And watch your tone!”

As the guard led him down the carpeted hallway, he was practically seething with rage. Khun wondered if he was imagining the trouble he would’ve gotten into if Khun had somehow managed to fall out the window. Or if he’d decided that death was preferable to his new life of wedded bliss and jumped on purpose.

Not that Khun would have—he had no intention of dying, if he could help it.

This guard didn’t seem like the sharpest tack in the box. Khun planned to shamelessly take advantage of that.

“Hey, I have a question,” Khun said. The guard bristled at the sound of his voice. “We’re on a pretty big ship and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of cloud-cover tonight, isn’t Albrecht worried that any of his enemies will find him while he’s not paying attention?”

The guard looked at him like he was unbearably stupid. Khun did his best to stare innocently back. “It doesn’t matter if there’s cloud cover or not, the Kraken is undetectable to sensors and can use shinsu camouflage to completely disappear from sight. So if you still had any stupid ideas about your little friends coming to save you, you can give up on them now.”

“Oh don’t worry, my dreams have all been suitably dashed,” Khun said as the man shoved him inside the doorway of the room he’d been led to. Idiot.

He did, at least, also feel fairly vindicated in learning that his and Shibisu’s conjecture about Albrecht Glass having access to some form of cloaking technology similar to the one employed by Madoraco’s Ghost Ship seemed to have been correct. Of course, it looked like their speculations that Albrecht’s main base might also be a ship were right on the mark as well.

Once again, it was kind of an unideal way to have his suspicions confirmed but he did enjoy being right.

The room he’d been taken to seemed to be a bedroom, simple and rather sparse but otherwise comfortable enough. There was a small bed with thin blankets, a side table with a solid-looking lamp (plastic, unbreakable), and a vanity with a dresser and a decent-sized mirror set above it. The mirror at least could possibly be broken in a pinch. There were also two flimsy doors in the room besides the more formidable one he’d entered through, and closer inspection revealed one to be a tiny private bathroom and the other to be a closet that was already fully stocked in clothing that looked like it would fit him.

Khun couldn’t help but wonder morbidly if the items were all new or if there had already been things lying around in his size, although thinking about who their previous owners might have been and what happened to them took him down trails of thought that he didn’t want to follow to their logical conclusion. He decided it was high time to think about something else, or risk his carefully maintained calm cracking under the pressure.

While he wasn’t necessarily ecstatic to be confined to his quarters, it was something of a relief to be in his own space. He was alone and unobserved for the first time since he’d been brought here, which provided its own share of opportunities.

Now he could actually start thinking about how the hell he was going to get out of this.

*

Sometime after the Rankers had been chased off, Bam and his team had, by necessity, relocated to the main FUG ship that had arrived as backup. They didn’t have much choice as several of their number, Bam included, had been injured and needed medical attention. Rak had attempted to downplay his own injuries, but it was obvious that he was in the most need of healing from the moment Bam laid eyes on him after they reunited.

“We’ll fix this, Black Turtle,” Rak had said in a voice that was increasingly dazed from blood loss before he was finally wrestled away into the medical bay by several disgruntled orderlies. “That Ranker Turtle is our prey now… we’ll find him and we’ll fix this.”

“I know, Mr. Rak,” Bam said, offering a gentle smile that he was unable to maintain once his friend was out of eyesight.

Bam had wanted to pursue their enemies as soon as possible, but even if their party had been battle-ready there was nothing to follow, no indication of which way their quarry might’ve gone. And before anything else could happen Bam would have to report to the FUG elders on his failure to pass the Floor Test despite not having a single thought to spare about something as trivial as a Floor Test when his best friend had just been kidnapped.

There wasn’t much they could do for the time being except wait, however. Shibisu was confident that the Ranker warlord who’d taken Khun would contact them first, and they might have a chance to negotiate to get their Lightbearer back. Deciding to trust Shibisu’s judgement, they went to the onboard communications room together and settled in to wait.

Sure enough, it was only a few hours before they received a notification that the ship was being hailed from an unknown source. Bam looked up from where he’d had his face buried in his arms, blinking as his eyes readjusted to the light.

Shibisu regarded the sound of the alert as he would the thud of an executioner’s ax, before turning to Bam, concern obvious in his expression.

“We’re getting a call,” he said. “Look, Bam, you don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do,” Bam said stubbornly. “I guarantee that whoever this is will demand to speak to me regardless of who answers the call. You know that too, Isu.”

Shibisu sighed. “I know, I just thought… well then, nothing to be done about it.” He flicked a switch, picking up the call. “You’ve reached the vessel Apocrypha. State your business.”

The viewscreen flickered and the image of a man appeared. He was almost shockingly normal-looking, sitting in a relaxed pose at what appeared to be a desk that was scattered with papers. He was so ordinary-looking that Bam wondered for a second if there had been some sort of mistake and if this was really the High Ranker who’d ambushed them, but he shook off the urge. He knew appearances could be deceiving.

“Am I addressing Jue Viole Grace, FUG’s Slayer Candidate?” The man asked.

“You are,” Bam said. “And who might you be?”

“Ah, but you’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Grace,” the man said, an amused smile clearly playing about his lips, “but you aren’t exactly what I imagined when I heard that the Slayer Candidate would be visiting my humble floor.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Bam said, ignoring the provocation. “I asked for your name.”

“Of course, of course,” he said airily. “My name is Albrecht Glass. I’m not sure if a man of your stature and fame would be familiar with me, but I’m also known as the Ghost Duke around these parts. I’m ever-so honoured to make your acquaintance.”

Bam was passingly familiar with the name—he’d been briefed on some of the warlords’ identities by Khun and Shibisu, after all—but he felt Shibisu stiffen in alarm suddenly at his side, which made him think there might be more to it than what he’d heard.

“I’m calling because I believe you might be short one Lightbearer after our little encounter today.”

“Is he with you?” Bam asked.

Albrecht made a noncommittal noise. “Yes and no. I would say he’s my guest at the moment, but it is a bit more permanent than that. I married him.”

Bam thought maybe he’d heard incorrectly. “You… what?”

“What can I say, I’ve always had an eye for beautiful things.”

“You’re insane,” Bam said, too stunned to come up with a more nuanced response.

“He’s not much of a crown jewel for my collection, unfortunately, for all that he is my first spouse who’s a direct descendant of the Ten Great Families,” Albrecht said conversationally. “Khuns are pretty enough, but they’re a dime-a-dozen. There’s no mystery, no sense of rarity… I really wouldn’t have minded a Yeon or a Eurasia. And his personality... well, we both know that especially leaves something to be desired.”

Back during Bam’s first miserable days with FUG, Ha Jinsung had once described the Khun family to Bam as “beautiful cutthroats.” There was some logic behind the statement—Khun Eduan was a handsome man who reproduced solely with beautiful women, meaning that a Khun child who wasn’t equally lovely was rare. And because of Eduan’s skirt-chasing tendencies there were also a great number of these children, all in constant and vicious competition to distinguish themselves from the rest.

Bam knew this was a commonly held view in the Tower, and he knew that Albrecht was only saying it now to make him angry, by implying that Khun wasn’t special and was easily replaced. It was also likely that Albrecht didn’t truly believe the words he was saying himself, or else he wouldn’t bother trying to use Khun as leverage. Even if he didn’t know the specifics, he at least knew enough to recognize that Khun had value to Bam.

But it didn’t matter, no amount of awareness of the intentions behind Albrecht’s words would have been able to keep him from getting angry.

“If he’s so unsatisfactory to you then why don’t you just give him back to us?” Bam ground out, trembling hands held in fists at his side. “I swear, if you’ve done anything to him then—”

“I wouldn’t worry, Aguero is quite safe and I’ve been nothing but a gentleman to him—”

“—a gentleman who forced him to marry him?” Bam asked, voice shaking in furious disbelief.

“Trust me, if I had wanted to truly hurt him, I could have done much, much worse than put his name on a marriage certificate,” Albrecht said, and although he was still smiling and his body language was relaxed, Bam really didn’t like the look in his eyes. It was likely that he was being perfectly honest and there were indeed much worse things that he could have done and could still do if crossed.

Bam clenched his fists harder and forced himself to keep from lashing out. He couldn’t forget that if he messed up and made the man truly angry, it was likely that Khun would be the one to pay the price. He couldn’t afford to take that risk.

Bam took a deep breath, determinedly squashing down his feelings of rage and desperate helplessness for a more opportune moment. “What is it that you want?”

“I’ll be brief: I want you to come over to our side. Work for me.”

“I don’t trust that offer from a man who tried to kill me and my friends,” Bam said.

“I was never aiming to kill you, Jue Viole Grace. I admit that I don’t have any particular need for your companions, however. Our goal was to capture you, and the rest were all fair sport. But instead you managed to evade me, and I got your Lightbearer in return,” Albrecht said, shrugging. “So you could say that neither of us got what we really wanted."

So that was what this was essentially going to come down to—a trade. Khun in exchange for Bam. And whatever other conditions the man thought he could get away with.

“So you see, Viole—can I call you Viole? It’s what my latest husband calls you.”

“You—”

“Anyways, Viole, it should be apparent to you by now that I have something to bring to the table that might have an effect on which parties lay claim to your allegiances. I have something you want. I daresay I have something you want more than anything FUG could offer you,” Albrecht said. “You would do well to seriously consider my proposal. If you join me, you can have Aguero back. If you don’t, he stays in my collection, and you’ll consider yourself lucky to never see him again.”

This was a nightmare. It had to be.

“You can’t threaten us with him,” Shibisu said, stepping in quickly when he realized that Bam needed the support. “We both know that if he dies, you have nothing. You’ll have lost your only bargaining chip.”

“There are a lot of things that can be done short of killing him.”

Bam inhaled sharply, breath passing through his teeth in a hiss. “How about this, then? If you hurt him, if you touch a single hair on his head, then you can forget any plans of having me working with you forever,” he said coldly, making even Shibisu back up half a step. “That is my promise. It will be all-out war between us, do you understand?”

“So you’re saying you will consider it if I meet your conditions, then?” Albrecht said. “I’m happy to hear it.”

“You’ll have to give us some time to discuss it,” Shibisu said, shooting a warning glance at Bam. “Disappointing FUG is not something to take lightly, and taking you up on your offer would put us at odds with them. We can’t just jump into this willy-nilly, we will have significant problems to deal with on our end.”

“I’ll warn you, my patience is long but not endless.” Albrecht said. “Do whatever you want to in the meantime—we’ll see how long you can handle the uncertainty before it wears you down. And if you try to search for us yourself, good luck, so far no one has been able to track me down. I wait eagerly to hear from you again, Viole.”

The screen went dark, and the room was silent for several minutes after, the silence only interrupted by the steady buzz of static and the small mechanical noises that could be heard all over the ship as a sort of white noise.

“Bam?”

Bam blinked, shaking himself out of his stupour. “Yes?”

“You alright?” Shibisu asked.

Bam stared for a few seconds. Then he stared for a few more. He honestly couldn’t summon up the words to answer the question, and in the end the best he could manage was a shrug that was more of a slumping of his shoulders than a true gesture.

“I think… we need to take a step back for a moment and think about what we’re going to do next,” Shibisu said cautiously. “We probably bought at least a bit of time to figure something out.”

“That’s nowhere near good enough, Isu!” Bam snapped suddenly, his tone surprising even himself.

Shibisu’s face fell, and it was only then that Bam noticed how much effort he must have been putting in to seem calm. He looked stressed and tired, heavy shadows lingering in the corners of his eyes like he’d been missing sleep. “No, it’s not,” he agreed slowly. “But it’s a start at least, don’t you think?”

Bam wondered how he could have possibly forgotten, even with the dull horror and sense of unreality that had characterized every moment since he’d woken up in the forest to find Khun gone, that however much he was suffering, Shibisu had likely been suffering at least as much. He and Khun were close, and since they often collaborated on plans together it was highly likely that Shibisu was also blaming himself for the way things had turned out.

Bam felt deeply ashamed for lashing out at him.

Idiot. Is this really the limit of how much you treasure your friends? Only until the first sign of trouble, and then you turn on them?

Bam took a steadying breath. “I’m sorry, Isu,” he said regretfully. “That was uncalled for. I know this is hard for you too, and I appreciate you keeping a clear head. And you’re right, buying some time is probably the best thing we can hope for right now.”

“Bam, I get it, you don’t have to apologize,” Shibisu said, punching Bam’s shoulder lightly. “Just try to keep calm, yeah? We’ve been in similar situations before and we’ve made it this far. We can deal with this one too.”

Right, this wasn’t really so different from when they’d rescued Ha Jinsung. This wasn’t the first time Khun had been in danger or even the first time Bam had been specifically threatened with Khun’s safety, and they’d always come through in the end.

But this loss hit him differently. It felt like reality was collapsing in on itself, like the world that he’d always believed in had been revealed to be just a cheap stage backdrop and now the show was over and it was time to tear it all down and leave.

All this time, he had truly believed that becoming stronger would be the best way to protect the people most precious to him. His early years with FUG had taught him that as long as he behaved himself and developed in a way others approved of, as long as he didn’t step outside of his prescribed role, his friends would be safe. Eventually, he’d come to believe that he could protect them with his own two hands, using his powers to crush anyone who came along intending to hurt them. He’d worked so long and so hard to become a person who wouldn’t lose the things that were important to him, but now all too often that very strength was what was putting them in danger in the first place.

If Khun was in danger now, it was because of Bam. If Bam had been weaker, hadn’t been an Irregular, hadn’t been here with them, it was likely that his team would have passed by this floor quickly and easily without ever attracting the attention of Albrecht Glass in the first place.

There had to be a limit to his selfishness. He couldn’t keep putting his own desire to keep his loved ones with him over their safety. He had lost people before and had grieved them deeply, but this time he honestly didn’t know if he could just go on with his life if he lost Khun. Khun was Bam’s anchor and more, the one who made living with himself bearable, who had come to represent the fragile potential of a happy future to him. This loss was one he wasn’t sure he was capable of coming back from.

“And anyways, I doubt we’ll have to do everything ourselves,” Shibisu added, interrupting his downward spiral of thoughts so suddenly that he physically jerked back.

“What do you mean?” Bam asked.

“Well… wherever Khun is now, I really can’t see him just sitting there patiently waiting to be rescued, can you?” Shibisu asked.

“I… guess not?”

“Of course not! If our friend the Duke is stupid enough to give him even an inch of space then Khun will take it a mile. If he underestimates Khun just because he managed to capture him or… marry him or whatever, then I bet he’s in for a truly nasty surprise.”

*

The first thing Khun had done after exploring his new room and finding little of immediate interest or use to him (or bugs or other recording devices, thankfully) was to position himself in front of the vanity and use the mirror to attempt to get a better look at the shinsu suppression collar.

It was a solid and unpleasant looking thing, heavy plastic and metal casing with few seams and no obvious weak points. He very quickly concluded that he would have to give up on doing anything about it for the time being. He remembered reading somewhere that they supposedly had a particularly nasty little feature built into the locking mechanism where if they detected a sudden physical attempt to remove them, they were programmed to deliver a shock to their hapless wearer which could result in permanent injury or even death.

There was a reason why these collars only “used to” be used in prisons. Figured that someone like Albrecht would be drawn to an ugly little fossil like this. Khun would have to be very careful with it.

Which meant for the time being, shinsu was off the table.

It was fortunate that Khun wasn’t a wave controller and had other talents he could fall back on, but the loss of his shinsu was an unpleasant blow. It would make pulling everything off at least a bit more difficult, and not to mention that the complete absence of the Firefish in his head was just downright weird. He hadn’t realized how much he’d gotten used to its presence until it was gone. And, he thought uncomfortably, how used to being instantly healed from most life-threatening injuries he’d become.

He was more vulnerable than usual, in a lot of ways. He’d have to be careful.

It was infuriating to think about and a blow to Khun’s pride to be reminded that this is what he'd been reduced to, despite all his cunning and skill and powerful allies, but he forced himself to step back and see the facts as they were. He couldn’t afford not to, if he was ever going to get back to Bam.

Poor Bam. Khun wondered how much Bam knew, and hoped that he didn’t actually think Khun had abandoned him like Rachel had. Isu was clever, at least, so he should be able to put together what had happened if no one else could—he wouldn’t let Bam believe it had been his fault.

If this was anyone’s fault, it was Khun’s. He couldn’t believe he had messed up this badly. For the one who was responsible for implementing the plans the team followed, this was a pretty tremendous failure. But he also knew there was a time and a place for self-recrimination, and it was not—could not be—here. The only way he could be forgiven for his actions was by getting out and returning to Bam’s side, to where he belonged.

Khun hadn’t seen much of Albrecht's other spouses yet since he’d been too busy poking around the ship, but he’d caught glimpses and knew there were a lot of them, probably at least several dozen. He didn’t know for sure yet, but a group this big had to have politics of its own. It was probably rife with rivalries and alliances, power struggles and betrayals. Khun doubted Albrecht had much use for the petty squabbles and power dynamics of his concubines, though. A man like that probably saw his spouses as tools for leisure or colourful decorations to look at and little else—something like how one would keep a pretty flower garden or a tank of tropical fish for their own enjoyment or to impress any guests that might come calling.

On the surface, Khun’s situation was extremely disadvantageous, it was true. Albrecht had clearly known what he was doing. In one move, he had stripped any and all sense of personal power and agency from Khun and put him in a situation that was designed to humiliate him, both on a personal level and as a child of the Great Families. And if Albrecht decided to enlighten Bam as to the fate of his Lightbearer, there was no doubt it would be viewed as a provocation.

That was likely his real intent with this whole scenario. Particularly, Khun thought ruefully, since Albrecht seemed to be operating under the assumption that he and Bam were… otherwise involved with each other. Even if his interpretation of their relationship was not quite right, he was correct in assuming that Bam would not take this lying down.

Khun knew that Bam would walk into an obvious trap every single time if he thought he could save a friend, and while Khun loved him for it, he couldn’t afford to become Bam’s downfall. Which meant he would have to act on his own to make sure that didn’t happen.

He did have an unexpected advantage, after all.

While in some ways it was the height of irony that a child of the Khun family had ended up being forcibly added to what was essentially another man’s multi-spousal vanity project, he couldn’t ignore the fact that he had—however inadvertently—been primed for his whole life to act with exactly this situation in mind.

Khun was going to make his beloved new husband see why it was a mistake to make him his enemy if it was the last thing he did.

Chapter Text

Shibisu was working in the chart room today. He had, until recently, been all but camped out in the communications room in case of further contact from their new warlord nemesis, but he’d been forced to move the previous day. Apparently, some FUG member hadn’t taken kindly to his monopolization of the communications system and had complained, which led to Shibisu being firmly escorted out and told that he could come back if and when they were hailed by Albrecht again and not a minute before.

So, the chart room it was. Since the ship was currently not moving and had no immediate plans to do so, much to the disgruntlement of their hosts, the chart room wasn’t being used for much at the moment and he had yet to be disturbed here.

Well, disturbed by anyone new, at least.

Hwaryun had found him easily enough, and had dropped in. She looked like she was dressed for a slumber party more than a major crisis, wearing a big purple hoodie and joggers and carrying a canned beverage.

“FUG is not happy about this delay,” she said, cracking open her soft drink and taking a sip. Like that was any news to Shibisu, she wasn’t the one who’d been thrown out on her ass the day before. “I thought I’d warn you, the longer this takes the more difficult it will be for your cause to find support in our ranks.”

“Shouldn’t you be telling this to Bam?”

“My God is otherwise occupied at the moment,” Hwaryun said diplomatically, which meant that since he wasn’t hovering nearby while Shibisu was trying to concentrate on his research, staring at him with those big gold eyes silently demanding answers, he was likely off training. Probably beating the stuffing out of some unfortunate training dummy, or maybe he’d moved on to kicking holes in the ship. He’d certainly seemed angry enough for it the last time Shibisu had seen him. “I’m sure you’ll be able to pass on the message.”

“I suppose so, he’ll be back here soon enough,” Shibisu agreed. Bam was never away for long, these days.

That should have been the end of the conversation, but Hwaryun didn’t leave, sipping her drink leisurely as Shibisu continued to work.

“Why do I get the feeling you’re not done yet?” Shibisu muttered, half to himself but loud enough for her to hear. “Yes? What else did you want to say?”

“You might also consider informing him that he’ll need to take appropriate measures to placate the elders and reassure them that he and his team still have their interests at heart,” she added, pausing briefly to look at him over the top of her can. “They are not pleased that Khun would make a mistake severe enough to throw our God into this sort of turmoil, and several are once again reconsidering the wisdom of letting the Slayer Candidate choose his own companions.”

“Wait,” Shibisu said, narrowing his eyes. “What do you mean by ‘mistake?’”

“We’re in this situation now because Khun was rash and miscalculated,” Hwaryun said simply. “He should never have allowed himself to be put in the line of fire. As Viole’s strategist, he should have known better.”

“Hey,” Shibisu said warningly. “Not all of us can see the future. Khun chose the best option he had at the moment. If he hadn’t done what he did, we could all have been captured or killed.”

Hwaryun didn’t reply for a moment, but when she did, her single visible eye was canny and she stared Shibisu down like a predator. He resisted the urge to shudder.

“You’re very confident that what played out was a lesser of two evils and not one of the worst possible conclusions.” She cocked her head to one side. “I’d be interested to know what exactly you’re basing that assumption on.”

“Well... “ Shibisu said. “The fact that out of all of us, only Khun was captured and he’s valuable enough for them to keep alive?”

“And would my God agree that this was the most desirable outcome?”

Shibisu glared. “Don’t put words in my mouth, you know that we all feel awful about this and are doing everything we can to get Khun back. Would Bam really be taking this any better if any of us had been taken instead?”

Hwaryun seemed to have been anticipating this reaction, and she smiled at him, the upturn of her lips taking on an unpleasant edge. “You’re a clever man, you should know better than to ask a Guide a question that you don’t want an honest answer to.”

*

For the most part, life as a warlord’s concubine was very boring. Or maybe that was just Khun’s particular experience, but for him at least it very quickly became a fact of life.

Khun was used to keeping busy. He didn’t sleep much and he did a lot of reading, planning and research on an ordinary day with his team. It was his natural state to be turning some new idea over in his mind as he went about other tasks, and it had been that way since he was a very small child. These habits had always served him well and were responsible for much of the success he’d seen as a Lightbearer, but they had the unintended downside of making him overly skeptical and prone to anxiety. It was even worse if he didn’t have anything to occupy himself with, and unfortunately, Albrecht hadn’t seen fit to provide him with any Lighthouses before tossing him down here, so there wasn’t much he could do to keep busy in the meantime.

That’s not to say he didn’t have any plans yet. He had the seeds of several germinating in his mind already, but they would all require time and resources that he didn’t have access to yet if they were to come to fruition. So for the moment, there wasn’t much Khun could do but watch and wait, increase his knowledge and be ready to take opportunities when they arrived.

And drink tea.

This was the first time Khun had ever been held captive for any significant amount of time and it was tempting to draw parallels between what was happening to him now and Bam’s years of imprisonment by FUG, although Khun whispered a silent apology to his friend as soon as the thought occurred to him. He knew that Bam had been forced to endure endless hours of training and had suffered a lot during that time, so the fact that Khun’s experience was thus far limited to being married—in name—to a man he hated and made to drink sub-par tea really couldn’t compare.

In addition to drinking tea—or wine, although Khun had been avoiding that half because he didn’t want to risk dulling his senses with alcohol and half because he feared it might actually be worse than the tea—most of what the concubines seemed to do involved lounging of some kind. Lounging on plush couches with the small number of books that seemed to have been deemed “low-risk” enough for them. Or lounging with instruments or needlework or a variety of other useless, harmless hobbies. Or occasionally lounging about with Albrecht when the night came, although Khun preferred not to think about that.

It quickly became apparent, though, that these were just minor diversions and by far the most popular pastime in Albrecht’s harem was the infighting.

Khun had expected that this would be the case. These people were all indefinitely trapped in close quarters with each other, unwillingly in most cases. Tensions were high and there were bound to be clashes between strong personalities. Any power to be had would be minimal and difficult to acquire, dependent on the person’s ability to assert control over others who were in essentially the same position as them, and with no real gain to be had by acquiring the upper hand in the first place.

He understood but at the same time he couldn’t really sympathize, it all seemed like such a pointless waste of time and energy. But the situation was what it was, and this was also something he could potentially make use of.

While it was true that this situation was specifically intended to be a cage for Khun, he had noted before that it was also a setting that was not entirely unfamiliar, given his upbringing. Khun Eduan did have many wives, each with her own household and whose power was defined by her standing with the family head. Khun himself had been kept close by his mother throughout his childhood, so the idea of the wives of a powerful figure competing against the others to secure a portion of that power for themselves was something he felt he knew quite well.

It was slightly frustrating that he was coming into this situation blind, though. He didn’t know much about the people around him yet which made it difficult to plan effective ways to move them. It was a weakness he’d have to remedy as quickly as possible.

To most observers, the scene that was playing out in front of Khun’s eyes was a simple mealtime one—okay, maybe not so simple, most dining areas weren’t quite as… decadent as this one, the ground heaped in rugs and plush couches—but Khun understood it as a mine of potential information and a battlefield combined. Off to one side, there was a cluster of jewel-bright diners, fluttering like butterflies as they ate, their conversation interrupted every so often by peals of laughter. There was a similar group occupying the furthest space away, and Khun immediately latched onto it—was there a reason for the distance, were there bad relations between people in each of those groups, or was it just coincidence? And those who lingered on the outskirts, not part of either, what was their goal in this? Was this indicative of some sort of power structure within the collective or was he reading too much into it?

His thoughts were cut off abruptly as there came the telltale sound of a disturbance from near one of the dining clusters, followed by raised voices. Khun didn’t see the event that caused it, but when he—and everyone else in the dining room—looked over, they saw a woman rise to her feet to stand imposingly over the huddled form of a dark-haired girl on the floor. A guard rushed over to see what the fuss was about as the woman said something that Khun couldn’t make out over the raised voices around him.

This was a potentially interesting development, Khun thought, although he frowned as he took in the appearances of the involved parties. The woman and girl both seemed to be from among Albrecht’s spouses and the guard was large and had a double-band of red around his cuffs rather than a single one. Khun’s gaze stuck on the woman as the central figure and perpetrator of this particular scene, though, and he very quickly decided he did not like what he saw.

Perhaps his automatic dislike of her was fueled in part by the fact that she had wavy blonde hair that reminded him a bit of Rachel’s, although to be perfectly honest, Rachel only wished she looked as good as this woman. She was admittedly quite beautiful, tall with a good complexion and large, striking eyes. She was wearing a lovely blue robe with a less-lovely and rapidly spreading purplish stain near the hem, presumably the source of the near-apoplectic fury that was growing on her face as he watched.

There was a small yelp of pain from the fallen girl as the woman stepped on her fingers and seemed to be slowly putting more pressure on them. Despite what must have been a painful experience, the girl didn’t try to struggle or move away, only bit her lip and seemed to simply be trying to outlast it.

“This little mouse, always scuttling around underfoot,” the woman said, nose wrinkled in disgust. She appeared to be addressing the guard this time. “And now she has the nerve to spill wine on my dress! Kill her!”

The other concubines, whose heads had all raised as they looked around for the source of the commotion all returned determinedly to their plates when they recognized that source. Of course. No one would want to be dragged into this confrontation by mistake just for seeming too interested. Clearly this blonde woman had some level of prestige among Albrecht’s spouses, although what kind was uncertain. Enough for people to be wary of her at the very least.

The brutish-looking guard already had his needle in his hands and looked like he was honestly considering following through on her words and Khun sighed, resisting the urge to rub his temples. No matter where you looked in the Tower, people were idiots everywhere.

So much the better for him, though. He schooled his expression into something he believed was appropriately deferential and prepared to take advantage of this opportunity.

“I don’t know if that’s the best idea, it’s such a lovely dress,” Khun said, rising to his feet and smoothly stepping in, making a show out of ducking down to examine the splash of purple. She took a single step backwards in momentary surprise, freeing the girl’s trapped fingers. “The last thing it needs is even more stains if you do kill the girl… and anyways, our lives all belong to Albrecht, he’d probably be angry if she were disposed of without his consent.”

“Without his consent, please,” she laughed, her composure returning with impressive speed. “He wouldn’t miss one stupid little mouse with creepy eyes, always sitting there and staring like she’s cursing you.”

Despite her words, she didn’t seem to be too interested in belabouring the point after hearing his warning, and the guard seemed to have thought better of using his needle and had returned it to his arms inventory.

“But tell me, who are you to think you can so casually interrupt my business?” she continued, green eyes sparking as her anger instead shifted to Khun. “I don’t recognize you so you must be new here, so who are you to question me? Don’t you have any idea who I am?”

God help him but she was worse than even some of the Great Family children he’d met, and she was likely just some nobody from a backwater on Floor 105. Was this the best that being Albrecht’s concubine got you, the flimsy power rush of being the biggest fish in a very tiny pond?

Pond was perhaps even being too generous, this place was more like a water glass.

But this had been the kind of opportunity he had been looking for, so he swallowed his instinctive disgust and smiled at her. “My name is Khun Aguero Agnis, my lady. And you’re correct, I am new here and haven’t had the chance to be introduced to everyone yet. I’m sure I wouldn’t have forgotten a face as lovely as yours if I had.”

She visibly hesitated, and Khun could see her thought process written on her face as she registered the compliment and, more importantly, picked up on his highly recognizable name.

Khun remained facing the woman, but watched out of the corner of his eye as the girl she had been threatening took advantage of the distraction and scurried out of the room. He memorized her face for later before turning his attention back on the woman in front of him.

“Oh, well I suppose I can forgive this oversight just this once,” she said, waving the guard off. “Run along now, I’ll be heading back to my rooms to change. And as for you,” she turned back to Khun as the man obediently moved off. Interesting. “I’ll do you the service of introducing myself. My name is Aleksandra Voss. I’ve been married to Albrecht for seven years, which means that I have seniority here. It would serve you well to remember that.”

Aleksandra’s words were arrogant, but there was a hint of uncertainty in her voice now, and Khun had his guesses as to the source confirmed very quickly. “You… you said ‘Khun,’ right?” she asked, visually confirming all the standard tells—blue hair and eyes, snowy skin. “You mean… you’re a real Khun? A real member of the Ten Great Families?”

“I’m a direct descendent, yes,” Khun said, deliberately not mentioning his… somewhat complex family situation. “And a member of the main family. But that was before. In this case, it is my honour to meet a fine lady such as yourself, even all the way out here.”

Let her think herself a rare diamond in the rough. He’d dealt with people like her in the past, and that method usually yielded results. He graced her with a small bow to accompany his words, and he seemed to have made the right decision because her eyes widened, clearly delighted to have him acknowledge her as his superior.

“By the way, if I could offer a word of advice then after you get changed you should tell the housekeepers to clean the dress as soon as possible,” Khun said. “You could recommend they try applying vinegar to the stain before washing it, it might help to remove it. That’s what servants in my household used to do.”

“Please, I have so many better dresses, I don’t really care that much what happens to this one, really,” she huffed. “It’s just an inconvenience. But… thank you, I do appreciate a word of advice from the household of a noble family.”

“I’m always happy to help,” Khun said, smiling wide enough to show teeth. “Let me know if you ever need anything else.”

While he certainly wouldn’t go so far as to describe Aleksandra as a potential ally, it was very likely that she could be useful in her own way, Khun thought as he returned to his seat and the harmless chatter around him started up again. He picked at his dinner even though he wasn’t really hungry or in the mood for eating, his mind too busy whirling with new possibilities. It was important he at least seem like he was going to finish his meal for appearances sake, though—he couldn’t just leave the dining room at the same time as Aleksandra. Once both of them were out of the room, people would talk, and possibly speculate on where he might be going. He wanted to give the impression that now that the situation had de-escalated, he was happy to forget about it and calmly return to what he had been doing before. That way, when he left the room ten minutes later, no one would believe it was for one very specific purpose.

Khun suffered through those long minutes pretending to finish his mediocre tea and breathed a sigh of relief once the dining room doors finally hissed shut behind him, trapping all of the pageantry and gossip on the other side. Now that that obnoxious chore was out of the way, he was finally free to seek out the girl from earlier—the “mouse” as Aleksandra had called her—who was objectively more interesting and potentially more useful than Aleksandra herself could ever hope to be.

Finding her proved to be difficult, however. If she had gone to her room then it was unlikely he’d be able to find her at all since he didn’t know which one was hers yet, so he bet on the fact that she’d gone to ground somewhere else and began to painstakingly search the public areas of the ship. Only one guard had questioned his wanderings and he’d mostly cleared that up with the excuse of a lost earring (and a decent impression at being drunk, something that he was sure was well within the range of expected behaviours from the latest victim of one of Albrecht’s shotgun weddings) and had been able to continue on his search without any further issue.

It took him about half an hour to finally find her, tucked into a corner near one what Khun had assumed to be one of the locked auxiliary stairwell entrances. There was a waste disposal unit that blocked the area off almost completely while leaving a fair amount of room for a person or two to sit against the wall. It wasn’t a bad hiding place he supposed, if you didn’t mind the smell.

She became aware of another person’s presence almost before he noticed her, and she visibly tensed, glancing around.

“Frann? Is that—”

“No. Sorry to disappoint,” Khun said, causing her to start at the unfamiliar voice as he stepped into view. “But don’t worry,” he added, “I don’t have anything to gain by telling anyone you’re here, and I won’t do anything either. I only came to talk.”

Her eyes were very dark and as deep as wells. She watched him with a certain amount of wariness but didn’t flinch or attempt to move away. “You’re the new one, aren’t you?” she asked. “Everyone’s been talking about you.”

“That’s right,” Khun said, taking a seat against the wall a good several feet away, close but not too close. She still remained where she was, which was a good sign. “You seem to be well-informed.”

“You’re from the Great Families,” she said. When she uttered the words it was in an entirely different way than Aleksandra had earlier. It didn’t sound awe-filled or even accusing, just a statement of fact. Khun took note of that, just how little her voice revealed about what she was thinking. He had rarely met someone with so little intonation. Her face was more expressive, but only slightly.

“I am,” Khun replied.

“And you stopped Aleksandra earlier. Why?”

“It was a good opportunity,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Aleksandra seems to be well-placed here, so I thought it would be advantageous to be on good terms with her. That’s all. I’m not such a good person that I’d interfere just to stick up for a random stranger, sorry.”

“I see. Then why come to talk to me now?”

She didn’t seem disappointed or surprised, but he supposed that could just be her low expressiveness at work.

“I wondered if you might like to work for me,” Khun said, keeping his voice friendly. “I feel like a partnership between us might be to both our advantages, don’t you think?”

“A partnership?” she said, only the slight question in her voice betraying her surprise.

“Would I be correct in assuming that you’re not happy with your current circumstances here?”

It was a question with an obvious answer. Nobody could possibly face the kind of situation he’d seen earlier and say they’re content with the way things are. Her fingers were still bruised from being stepped on, and if this sort of thing happened regularly….

“I won’t protect you,” Khun said, continuing. “But if you help me to carry out my plans successfully, I’ll help you get out of here.”

She stared at him for several long seconds, and he could sort of see why Aleksandra thought it was creepy except that it actually reminded him a bit of Bam, which made it difficult to associate with anything negative. She actually looked a bit like him too, if he squinted and looked at her sideways. She had a soft, round face with fawn-coloured skin and short brown hair, which made her resemble the Bam he’d met on the Testing Floor more than Bam as he’d last seen him, however. It made him feel slightly nostalgic.

“What could someone like you possibly need someone like me for?” she asked.

Khun didn’t know enough about her yet to understand what she was implying with her use of the phrase “someone like you,” but it was fairly safe to assume it was an expression of distaste toward someone of his family, or potentially just toward Khun himself. But it was alright, she didn’t have to like him in order for his plan to work, she just needed to want to escape badly enough that she’d tolerate him for a while.

“Several reasons,” Khun said, shifting closer until he was only a few feet away. He drew his knees up to his chest, his gaze never leaving the girl beside him. “You’ve been here longer than me and you seem to be good at getting around places without being noticed. And you watch and listen instead of speaking.”

“And those are good things?”

“Those are very good things,” Khun confirmed. “I can use those things. You do want out of here, don’t you?”

“But it’ll be dangerous.”

“More dangerous than keeping your head down and doing nothing, maybe,” Khun agreed affably, pondering which angle he should take. “But you seem to be pretty experienced in doing just that, and yet you’ve still been threatened with death already today. I’ve only been here a short while but would I be wrong to assume that danger can potentially come from anywhere at any time in this place?”

Her silence was enough answer in itself.

“My name’s Kima,” she said eventually. “I’m not sure if I’ll do you any good, but if you promise to get me out then I’ll help you.”

“I’m Khun Aguero Agnis, nice to meet you, Kima,” Khun said, offering a hand for her to shake. That had actually been simpler than he had thought it would be, he had expected to have to do a lot more to convince her. “I’m sure this will be a profitable alliance for both of us.”

Her hand felt very small in his, but now that he saw her up close, he could see she was older than he'd assumed, a young woman rather than a girl. She was calm, and her gaze was direct and ready. He could do a lot worse.

“Well then, Kima, I have your first assignment now.”

“What would that be?” she asked cautiously.

Khun smiled at her, a twin to the one he’d given Aleksandra. This was the necessary first step, the point from which all other plans would develop.

“Tell me everyone’s secrets.”

Chapter Text

“Don’t you think it’s kind of funny how things turned out, though?” Endorsi asked. “The cafeteria crowd from the Testing Floor becoming the mess hall crowd on a FUG ship?”

Anaak glared at her cards like the power of her anger would be enough to change them into the ones she wanted. “Speak for yourself, I was never a part of your stupid cafeteria group in the first place.”

“Ah, that’s right,” Endorsi said, parodying a thoughtful expression as she tapped her chin with one perfectly manicured finger. Her colour of choice was pink today, which paired nicely with her blush-coloured peplum blouse and caramel flats, if she did say so herself. Not that anyone was actually taking the time to properly appreciate the effort she was making, which was practically a crime in itself. “You always were so unsociable, even back then.”

Endorsi and Anaak were eating their breakfast alone together, as was often the case these days, although they usually attempted to time it so that they could have the mess hall as much to themselves as possible and it was really more of an early lunch at this point. The food ranged from bad to mediocre and there were a few FUG members scattered here and there throughout the room, but it was passably quiet, and the two had gotten into the habit of playing cards to pass the time and try to regain a small piece of normalcy while the rest of the team seemed determined to implode around them.

Endorsi didn’t like being made to do any excess work that she really didn’t have to—made a point of avoiding such things, really—but even she had her limits before relaxing turned into mind-numbingly boring.

The cards—and Anaak herself—helped with that a bit.

“Unsociable, huh? I prefer to think of it as being not easily manipulated by a bit of idle flattery and the promise of free food.”

“Ah, ah, there it is, my niece, the mark of your immaturity,” Endorsi chided, pointing to the leftmost card in Anaak’s hand. “That one. When people want to prostrate themselves before you and buy you things, why shouldn’t you take what they’re offering? It’s one of the privileges of being a beautiful woman, after all.”

“I don’t like feeling indebted to anyone,” Anaak said, handing over the card Endorsi had indicated.

“Promises are made to be broken, sweet niece. You can promise someone the world, it doesn’t mean you have to deliver on it. Oh, nice,” she said cheerfully, dropping a pair of sevens onto the table.

Anaak glared. “This attitude of yours is the reason why so many of our team’s problems come in the form of your spurned ex-suitors either gunning for revenge on us or for you to give them back all the expensive crap they bought you. Give me that one.”

“Hey, they gave those things to me of their own free will, as gifts, and it’s totally unfair to demand a gift back from a lady,” Endorsi protested, relinquishing the card Anaak had chosen. “And what were they expecting, anyways? I’m a Princess of Jahad, did they honestly think that I’d sleep with them just because they complimented my eyes and had a not entirely abysmal haircut? Because they owned the fifth-biggest house in town? I mean, come on, talk about unrealistic expectations.”

“Hey… you might want to tone it down a bit about the Princess stuff,” Anaak said under her breath. “We’re getting weird looks.”

Endorsi sighed, her face hardening as she recognized the truth of Anaak’s words. While it was true that the mess hall wasn’t particularly crowded, there were scattered groups of people and none of them were looking favourably toward their little corner.

This was truly the worst part about any extended stay with FUG—not the weird cult-y behaviour or the fact that Bam always seemed that much more tired and on-edge whenever he had to interact with them for any length of time, but the constant hostility that was aimed toward any of their party with ties to Jahad. Which was, unfortunately, most of them.

Endorsi herself and Anaak were the obvious targets, as a Princess and the daughter of another Princess who both bore Jahad’s blood, but not even Khun or Laure could escape this treatment, being descended from the Ten Great Families. Laure had been dealing with this by all but sealing himself away in the quarters he’d been given, and Khun, well….

Endorsi supposed that at the moment Khun had much bigger things to worry about than a few glares being shot his way.

It wasn’t usually so bad when the others were here—when Bam was present, FUG grunts like these wouldn’t dare openly show such an expression of contempt to any of their God’s precious teammates. But Bam didn’t take his meals with them as often anymore, much less show up to chat or play cards. Shibisu was also busy doing his research-thing, Laure was up to God knows what, probably still sleeping, or maybe he’d expired in his sleep and no one had noticed yet, and Rak was still recovering from the wounds he’d sustained during their last battle.

At the very least Hatz could bother showing up more, Endorsi thought in annoyance. It wasn’t like he was doing anything important. He was like Endorsi, not as much one for the planning stages of things as he was for carrying them out. Someone who handled the fight in front of them well without sweating the annoying little details. He had no excuse not to be spending time with them, in all honesty.

Although Endorsi had to admit, at least in the privacy of her own mind, that the mood thoroughly sucked in their group lately. Maybe she could understand why he didn’t want to hang out with them anymore.

Whatever, it wasn’t that much of a loss. Hatz was the most boring man in the Tower, after all. A complete waste of a good face. He was welcome to do whatever he pleased.

“You’re bending your cards.”

“No, I’m not,” Endorsi shot back, doing her best to smooth them out surreptitiously. “Whose turn was it again?”

“Yours,” Anaak said.

“Don’t mind if I do, then. Watch and learn, my silly niece, why it’s a mistake to challenge a real…” she glanced around, “you know, that.”

“This game is really terrible with just two people,” Anaak observed. “We’re just passing cards back and forth between the two of us. This barely even counts as a game at this point.”

“If you think you can recruit someone else to play then be my guest. Otherwise, stop complaining and hand over that middle card.”

“Oh well, then I guess it doesn’t really matter who wins or who loses anyways,” Anaak continued thoughtfully, tossing the card Endorsi’s way. “Since you’re destined to be the old maid regardless.”

“... I’m going to kill you.”

*

“... and the one on the end is Celene, she doesn’t have anything really incriminating but she’s hooked on hareflower.”

Khun nodded, memorizing the face of the dreamy-looking redheaded woman and filing away the information in his mind as Kima rattled it off. He had never missed having a Lighthouse so much in his entire life. He’d not had one when he was a child helping his mother, but clearly he’d gotten spoiled since then.

He and Kima had joined the others in the greenhouse room—which was apparently known as the Atrium—that Khun had gotten in trouble for entering without permission before. Well, when he said he and Kima had joined the others, what he actually meant was that he was sitting on a garden bench a fair distance away pretending to read while Kima sat on the far end of the bench, facing the opposite direction and pretending not to know him.

“So this ‘hareflower’ is some kind of drug used on this floor, I’m assuming?” Khun asked under his breath.

“It’s the main one in here, at least. It’s a depressant, and is usually ingested. The Duke gives it as gifts to his favourites and some of the guards will too occasionally, so it’s not easy to get in here but not impossible either. Harder if you’re as low in the hierarchy as me, though,” Kima said matter-of-factly, picking at some of the peeling plaster on the side of the bench. “And easier if you’re willing to do favours for the right people.”

So higher status equals improved access to desirable items, it made sense. Khun wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to use this at the moment, but it never hurt to know what made people tick.

“I understand,” Khun said. “Continue.”

“That’s Aph,” Kima said quietly, now surreptitiously indicating a good-looking man off to the far left of the room who currently had his head thrown back in laughter. “If you try to talk to him he’ll sometimes go off on a tangent about how awful it is to be stuck here, but he’s actually one of the ones who volunteered to be here in the first place. It seems like he got in trouble with some of the wrong people outside—one of the other warlords, I think, and agreed to marry Albrecht to protect himself. He’s one of Aleksandra’s followers, though, so he probably wouldn’t want her to know that.”

“Why’s that?”

“It might make her resent him. Aleksandra hates it here.”

“Really?” Khun asked, turning a page of his book. “That’s interesting.” If you’d asked him based on first impressions, he would have guessed she was all too happy to be here and wield whatever little authority she could scrape together.

“She acts like that, but I’ve heard some of the others say that when she first got here, she was desperate to escape. She just stayed in her room and cried all the time,” Kima said. “Now she’s one of the Duke’s favourites. Oh, and it’s sort of an open secret that she’s also having an affair with Fabien.”

“Fabien, you mean that oafish guard she was with earlier?” Khun asked, eyes narrowing. It would do a lot to explain how strangely obedient he had been to her wishes during that last encounter if this was the case.

“He’s the captain of the guard. And yes, that was him.”

“Does Albrecht also know about the affair?”

“I doubt it, he doesn’t believe in sharing his things, so he probably wouldn’t stand for it if he knew,” Kima said, leaning back on the bench. Even in her usual deadpan, Khun though she sounded tired. He had been asking a lot of questions, and she didn't seem like much of a conversationalist in the best of times. “But at the end of the day, he doesn’t spend that much time here. He’ll dine here occasionally, or pick out one or two of us when he has a passing fancy, but we’re usually left to our own devices the rest of the time.”

“I see,” Khun said, then indicated a man sitting just to the left of Aleksandra. He was astonishingly beautiful, tall and slender with a long sheet of black hair. “And that is?”

“Georgios. He and Aleksandra hate each other, they have pretty much this whole place split into two groups. He’s popular, and the Duke’s other favourite. Before you came, he was the only one here who could claim to be related to the Great Families. You might want to be careful around him.”

So he was likely a distant relative, possibly a bastard child of one of the main families at the very most. And someone who would probably not take kindly to some newcomer strolling in and usurping the thing that he used to make himself feel important, which meant that Khun wouldn’t be able to lean on his family name with this man the way he had with Aleksandra.

As if sensing he was being watched, Georgios threw a fierce glare in their direction, to which Khun responded by innocently ducking his head behind his book.

“Mr. Khun… answer me honestly, how is any of this going to be useful to you? I don’t think the majority of people here really have deep dark secrets, let alone ones that you’ll be able to use. Most of what I know is just… gossip.”

“Don’t underestimate gossip. Not to brag, but give me a Lighthouse and I could bring down a nation with just gossip,” Khun said, shooting her his best cocky smirk from behind his book. “But to answer your question, this is information gathering, so anything and everything could become important later on even if I don’t recognize it yet.”

He had to remember that he was starting at a disadvantage. His movements and resources were limited, and he knew almost nothing about the environment he found himself in. He would have to adapt his methods somewhat.

But luckily, it seemed Kima was going to be just as useful as he’d been hoping. She was quiet and often overlooked, but while people and events moved around her, she was always watching. Someone who observed people but wasn’t observed herself was a huge advantage to have on his side. She already had a decent amount of information on Albrecht’s other spouses and fairly good judgement, and he was sure that with time and proper guidance he could turn her into an ideal spy.

And she also nicely rounded out a weakness of Khun’s, which was that no matter what he did here, he was bound to draw too much attention. He was a member of one of the Great Families and had inherited the typical showy Khun genes in spades, making him a rarity in the harem and easily recognizable. He was also known to be the chief strategist for arguably one of the most dangerous up-and-coming figures in the Tower, so if Albrecht and his people didn’t anticipate that he would try something then they were far more stupid than he had ever imagined.

It would be convenient if that was the case, but Khun wasn’t holding his breath. People didn’t live very long or get as powerful as Albrecht without a healthy level of paranoia.

But thanks to Kima, his movements had suddenly become a lot less restricted.

“Here’s something I want to know that isn’t just gossip,” Khun said. “Can you tell me what exactly it is that the captain of the guard does? It sounds like a supervisory position, but is it limited to the concubines’ quarters or does he have duties on other parts of the ship as well?”

Kima blinked, evidently not expecting the question. “I’m… not sure, to be honest? I haven’t been brought past the locked doors in years, so every time I see Fabien he’s here. He also probably spends more time here than he technically needs to since… you know. Aleksandra.”

“Alright,” Khun said. “Then that’s the next thing I want us to figure out—what kind of access Fabien has to the rest of the ship.”

“... Fine. I can’t say I get it, but I’ll see what I can dig up.”

Like many things, this was easier said than done. From that point it took over a week of stealthy observations of Fabien and the other guards as they went about their business, but in that time Kima had managed to uncover an interesting piece of information. She had noticed that there were two different kinds of key cards that could open the doors with the card readers—yellow and red. The yellow ones were carried by the majority of the guards and were capable of opening any of the main passageway doors, the concubines’ quarters and storage cupboards. The red ones were capable of opening all of those and more, the maintenance stairwells as well as some locked access panels that seemed to be involved in the ship’s vital systems.

Fabien apparently carried the second type. Whether his duties involved those parts of the ship or not, it was likely that he had access to them. It was a valuable discovery.

Armed with this knowledge, Khun had taken the initiative to engage in a fawning and thoroughly obnoxious conversation with Aleksandra and the topic had—with Khun’s subtle encouragement—turned to her love life, which had been a truly distressing turn but a necessary one. Twenty long minutes later, Khun had left having gained the precious piece of information that Fabien could never stay the whole night with Aleksandra when they were together because starting at 2:00 in the morning, he had a shift supervising the night watch over on the upper decks of the ship while Albrecht and his higher-ranked officers slept.

Gradually, Khun was beginning to see the pieces of something he could potentially use.

“We should get information on the rest of the guards too, the way we have been on Albrecht’s other spouses,” Khun said during his next meeting with Kima, this time as they were crouched against the wall in the hallway where they’d first met. “I want to know their names and faces, interpersonal relationships, personal beliefs and biases, and also their hierarchy within whatever sort of organization Albrecht has here.”

“... Do you always ask for the impossible?”

“I never said it would be easy, just that it needs doing,” Khun said.

“There are likely at least twenty or thirty different guards all on rotating shifts for this part of the ship, how in the world are we going to get all that information?”

“Slowly and carefully. See what you can overhear when they’re chatting with each other. I’ll see if I can get Aleksandra or her friends to spill anything. People talk about all sorts of things without ever considering who might be listening and saving that information for later. It’ll take time but I guarantee it’s doable.”

“Alright,” Kima said, a bit skeptical. “If you think this is absolutely necessary.”

“It is.”

Regrettable but necessary. Just like this next move would be.

*

He’d decided that just after dinner on a predetermined day would be the best time to act on the next stage of his plan. His main inspiration for it was that little scene he’d witnessed between Kima and Aleksandra the day he’d met them and the chaos that had followed, so he had a pretty good idea of what to expect. He already knew where everyone would be at the time, there were always a lot of guards present, and the crowded room heightened the spectacle value. It was the best opportunity he was likely to get.

Khun spent the entirety of the meal beforehand moving his food around on this plate, trying to make it look like he was fully focused on eating when really he was much more concerned with watching another diner out of the corner of his eye and waiting for him to make a move. He remained seated until Georgios had finished eating and stood up to leave before standing himself and making his way over to the other table. Several sets of eyes followed him curiously, but he had been anticipating that. It wasn't like he was trying to be secretive about this, anyways.

He stopped right in Georgios’s path, blocking his exit in the narrow space between the tables and forcing him to come to a sudden halt himself just to avoid running into him. The man looked annoyed, staring him in the face as if waiting for him to realize his mistake, apologize and move out of the way.

Not one of those things was going to happen, unfortunately for him.

Now that he was this close, Khun could see that Georgios’s eyes were pinkish and he wondered if the Great Family relative Kima had mentioned had been a Yeon. Khun had actually rather liked Ehwa—the one Yeon he was more than passingly acquainted with—once he’d gotten to know her, but if he had been anticipating feeling any similar rush of fondness for this man based on a faint resemblance to her he would have been sorely disappointed.

Which was just as well, considering what he was about to do.

“So, which one was it?” Khun asked.

Georgios looked taken aback and increasingly angry, which was understandable considering Khun had never interacted with him in any way whatsoever before marching up into his personal space and asking this rather abrupt question.

“I beg your pardon?” he asked, expression tightening.

“I heard that you like reminding everyone that you’re related to the Great Families, so I was a bit surprised when I saw you for the first time and… well, given the circumstances I couldn’t help but wonder,” Khun said breezily. “Which parent was it whose genes you inherited to become so abysmally ugly?”

Georgios did what any reasonable person would probably do and punched him in the face.

The shock of the impact wasn’t very severe, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant, either. It sent him staggering a couple of steps backwards with his ears ringing, and when he raised his hand to touch his stinging mouth it came away red.

Despite the blood, it didn’t seem like a lot of damage had been done. Someone with Georgios’ level of upper-body strength would be lucky to manage to split his lip and it was more likely that he’d just received a superficial cut from one of his incisors, but the effect the injury had on the people around him was both more significant and more surprising.

The guards looked alarmed. While he had anticipated an attempt to break up the fight, he hadn’t thought that any of them would have any particular moral objections to watching a member of the Great Families be slugged in the face—if anything, he'd assumed it might be something of a treat to them. Instead, the sight of his blood actually seemed to spook them, and they were quick to pull a confused and increasingly angry Georgios away from him.

“What—what are you… I don’t believe this, he’s the one who started this, get your hands off me!” he said, thrashing in their grasp.

Okay, that was interesting.

Khun was so preoccupied with this new observation that for a second, it overshadowed all thoughts of the plan he was in the middle of carrying out. Perhaps the guards had received instructions from Albrecht to keep his concubines from being physically harmed? That didn’t sound especially likely, given Albrecht’s personality and Fabien’s demonstrated willingness to pull a weapon on Kima. Or maybe….

Well, he’d think about what it might mean later, when the sounds of Georgios complaining in the background weren’t destroying his concentration.

If Khun was a nicer person he would tell the guards to calm down now, gracefully take responsibility for an incident he provoked and request that they not hold the other party responsible in any way. He would assure everyone that his injuries were extremely minor and that there was no harm done, and maybe he and Georgios could come out of this incident with a grudging respect for each other.

But he wasn’t a nicer person, and this chaos suited his purposes, so instead he made a small noise of distress and swayed on his feet as though he was feeling faint at the sight of his own blood. He was immediately caught and steadied by the guard nearest to him and it took everything in him to remain limp and not immediately try to incapacitate or kill the person who’d thoughtlessly approached him from behind, but he had no other choice if he was going to sell this little melodrama.

“I’m fine,” he said testily, making it look like he was attempting to right himself. “You can let go, I’m just a bit… overwhelmed. I need some space.”

The guards did listen, thankfully, but they still looked nervous even as they backed away and were treating him as if he was made of glass. One even tentatively offered him a handkerchief to dab up the tiny bit of blood and Khun had barely been able to keep himself from laughing at both his meek expression and the look of utter affront on Georgios’s face.

In the end, they were both taken back to their rooms, except that Georgios had been all but dragged kicking and screaming while Khun’s escort seemed almost afraid to touch him. When the door to his quarters closed behind him but there was no telltale beep from the other side that would indicate it had been locked. He doubted that Georgios was given the same courtesy wherever he was now—it seemed that Khun really was being given some form of special treatment.

He still didn’t know for sure why that might be, although he was beginning to have his suspicions.

He had planned to sit quietly in his room to wait, but soon after he’d finished cleaning the small cut on his lip he found himself back on his feet and pacing the length of the room anxiously. It seemed like he had been waiting for hours before he finally heard a soft knock on the door, and he immediately made a beeline for it to let his long-expected visitor inside.

“Did you get it?” Khun asked, as soon as Kima was inside and the door was shut.

“Well… yes,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a large perfume bottle. It looked innocuous enough, if a bit gaudy, but Khun knew that the substance swirling inside was most certainly not perfume. “Sorry, it was the biggest bottle I could find in the trash that wouldn’t look too suspicious and was made of glass and not plastic, as you requested.”

“It’ll have to do,” Khun said, mentally running the numbers in his head. “It’ll probably be too risky to go back for more, so I’ll have to make this last. You didn’t get any on your skin or clothes?”

“No, not that you’d guess from our first meeting, but I’m usually not that clumsy.”

That almost sounded like an attempt at a joke. Khun felt a slight smile stealing unbidden over his own lips. “And the card? What did you do with it?”

“I dropped it on the floor near where you and Georgios had been standing, and I made sure it was partially hidden under a table. It should look like it fell there on it’s own during the scuffle.”

Hopefully that would be enough to cover their tracks. Khun wouldn’t have done any different, himself. “Good job, you did well,” he said.

Kima ducked her head at the praise—clearly she hadn’t expected anything of the sort from him. “If you don’t mind me asking, though, Mr. Khun… what is this for?”

Khun hummed, debating actually telling her for the barest second before he decided against it. “It’s probably better if you don’t know for now.”

“I see….”

They both flinched when there came a sudden violent pounding on the door, a sound completely unlike Kima’s quiet knocks earlier. Whoever was on the other side was clearly not happy, and Khun’s mind immediately leapt to the worst conclusion—that their deception had failed and the guards had followed Kima here after seeing her place the card.

Once he had a chance to look at the facts, however, he quickly realized that that wouldn’t make sense. If it was a guard they wouldn’t bother knocking, they’d just barge in on their own. The doors to the rooms couldn’t even be locked from either side unless you were a guard in the first place. So whoever was knocking on the unlocked door was… possibly trying to be polite, in a sense? Or at the very least, likely wasn’t someone in a position of higher power than Khun himself.

At any rate, it wasn’t much of a mystery when there was such a simple method of solving it. Khun opened the door, confronting the person on the other side even as he had his fist raised to knock again. It was a young man, and not one who was particularly familiar to Khun. He was fairly handsome, which was unsurprising given that he was most likely another one of Albrecht’s spouses. He had curly dark gold hair and pleasingly symmetrical features apart from a small scar in the corner of his mouth that gave the false impression of a cheeky half-smile, a noteworthy little quirk that belied his otherwise anxious appearance. And did he ever look anxious.

“Can I help you?” Khun asked.

Rather than answering, the man just shot him a fierce glare and pushed past him into the room, glancing around until he found Kima, evidently the person he came here to find. Khun took a quick look around of his own to confirm there was no one else outside and closed the door behind them, sighing as he turned to face his new... guest. He was already anticipating several new headaches.

“What was that earlier?” the newcomer asked harshly, approaching Kima and gripping her shoulders with hands that trembled. “I saw you steal that guard’s card when he was distracted, but it was like you had been waiting for it to happen. Kima, what the hell were you thinking?”

She shrugged, then began attempting to pry his hands off of her one finger at a time, which only seemed to stress him out further. The kid looked like he’d vibrate into oblivion if this kept up, but Khun needed answers before that happened.

Khun addressed Kima first, “You know him?”

“Yes, sorry,” she said. “Mr. Khun, this is Frann. Frann, this is Mr. Khun. We are… acquaintances, I suppose.”

The name was only vaguely familiar, and Khun pinpointed him as the person Kima had mistakenly called out to the first time they’d met. She had also mentioned his name at one point as one of the other concubines, one not particularly aligned with either of the two main groups, but she hadn’t elaborated much further than that. He supposed he should probably question why she hadn’t mentioned that she knew him by more than name, but that wasn’t the problem that was occupying the majority of his mental processes at the moment.

What they were going to do with this Mr. Frann now, was the real question.

He had seen Kima steal the key card, and he had seen her and Khun together and likely knew they were plotting something. He might even know about the task Khun had gotten Kima to fulfill using the card. He knew far too much and every instinct Khun had was screaming at him to plug this potential leak before he could make trouble for them, but the situation was difficult. He was nowhere near at the point where he could adequately hide or disguise the death of another of Albrecht’s spouses—it would be bound to raise questions, and that was the last thing he needed right now.

And then there was the other glaring problem. Kima had described herself and Frann as “acquaintances” rather than friends, but he still didn’t believe she thought so little of him that she’d be okay with silencing him in any kind of permanent way. And he definitely couldn’t afford to lose Kima’s aid through mishandling this.

“So, then,” Khun said, taking a seat on his bed with a huff. He placed the bottle carefully on the sheets next to him before turning to address Frann specifically. “What exactly is it that you want?”

“Excuse me?” Frann said, face twisting slightly as he turned to answer Khun, and Khun gritted his teeth at his tone. “What do you mean, what do I want? I want you to get the hell away from us, you Ten Families bastard. Go find someone else to toy with.”

Khun thought he heard Kima sigh, and Khun silently agreed with the sentiment.

“Kima’s here because she wants to be, you absolute simpleton,” Khun said. “You don’t even know what we’re doing.”

“I don’t need to know, I just know that if it’s something you’re planning, it’s not going to be good,” Frann shot back, radiating obstinance.

Khun barely resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Okay, then here’s a better question. What are you going to do now?”

Frann opened his mouth, undoubtedly ready to blurt out another round of defiant protests, but almost immediately seemed to think better of it, closing his mouth and drawing back slightly. He was looking less certain by the second, as it finally sunk in that he really didn’t have a plan beyond barging into Khun’s room and kicking up a fuss.

God, what an idiot.

“How about this,” Kima said, glancing between them. “If Frann is worried about me working with you, then maybe he would prefer it if he was able to keep an eye on us? He could help with our escape plans and then we could take him with us when we get out of here. Would that be alright, Mr. Khun?”

Khun looked the man over, sizing him up. He was probably somewhere around Kima’s age but seemed younger in a way that even Kima didn’t. If Kima was all cool concentration then this kid looked to be utterly erratic, overcharged on energy with his emotions all over the place. While he didn’t give off the impression of being especially reliable, there was a determination in his eyes that Khun begrudgingly had to admit he rather liked. He could be useful, and they really did have a lot of information to be gathered by just two people. Kima’s suggestion was probably the best option they had given the circumstances, and it would certainly be safer to bring him into their fold at this point than leave him to his own devices.

He was a Lightbearer, and he'd made do with difficult teams before. He could do it again.

“If he wants to help, then it’s fine,” Khun said, turning back to Frann. “I’ll offer you the same deal I offered her, then. If you help me with my plans and do as I say, then I’ll help you get out of here. What do you think?”

He was greeted by a blank stare.

“How in Jahad’s name are you going to manage that?” Frann asked eventually, skepticism dripping from his tone. “That wasn’t rhetorical. I’m seriously asking, because you sound like you’re insane. Do you honestly think people haven’t tried to get out of here before?”

Khun shrugged, and the kid visibly bristled at his nonchalant attitude. “I’m assuming they have, although I admit I haven’t been told of any specific instances yet. Why, do you know of any?”

“Escape attempts?” he scoffed. “Yeah, I know of one. A few years back there were a couple of idiots who tried to overpower a guard and run for it. One of them took a needle in the gut during the attempt, and the one who survived was recaptured. The Duke shot her in the head himself in front of the rest of us to make a point.”

Khun glanced at Kima. “Interesting that you didn’t think to mention that to me.”

“I already told you it’d be dangerous,” she said, unblinking.

“It happened before Kima got here, it’s not her fault if she didn’t know,” Frann said, sounding oddly defensive.

“So you’ve been here longer than her, then?” Khun asked, deciding to set that particular observation aside for the moment. “How long?”

“... Eight years, or somewhere close to it. I don’t know the exact number,” he admitted.

Khun nodded, humming. “And are you happy here?”

“Hell no! That bastard killed my parents and younger sister, I’d kill him myself if I thought I stood half a chance.”

“Then why are you satisfied with just letting things be the way they are?” he challenged. “If it’s been eight years for you already, how much longer are you going to put up with this? Ten years, twenty, fifty? Rankers live a long time, you know.”

“Yes, but there are always more warlords on the rise and they're constantly at each other’s throats. Eventually someone even stronger will come along to challenge his claim to this floor, and then—”

“And then what, exactly? You’ll be content to just become a different warlord’s property?”

“Shut up, stop twisting everything I say around! This isn’t even about just me! It’s…” Frann’s eyes betrayed him. His gaze strayed to Kima, and whatever words he was about to say died on his tongue.

Oh, so that was how it was. Khun raised his eyebrows at Frann, who turned bright red before rushing to continue.

“... I-I’m just saying,” he said with a slight stutter, although he was obviously being more careful with his words this time, “that however bad you think things are now, they’ll get worse a lot quicker if you’re caught attempting to escape. Kima, whatever this jerk promised you, don’t listen. It’s not worth it.”

“I don’t know,” Kima said. “I think it’s at least worth a try. He seems to have good ideas.”

“Oh really? How much has he really told you?” Frann demanded. “Has he told you what he’s actually planning to do even once?”

She frowned, glancing uncomfortably between the two of them. “I… she said awkwardly. “It’s fine. I wouldn’t know what to plan for anyways. If Mr. Khun says he knows what he’s doing then I believe him.”

That was a show of faith Khun hadn’t been expecting from her, but even if it was an exaggeration it at least served the purpose of taking some of the wind out of Frann’s sails. The kid sighed, the fight visibly leaving him as he scratched the back of his head in resignation. He appeared drained. “Then there really is nothing I can say to get you to reconsider, is there?”

“It’s unlikely,” Kima answered, patting his forearm once in consolation.

Frann frowned deeply, clearly unhappy with the situation, but possibly beginning to realize that they were at something of a stalemate. Kima had made it clear she wouldn’t be swayed and while Frann could ruin their plans, doing so would likely put Kima and himself in danger, which seemed to be the one thing he was most afraid of.

“Fine,” he said after what seemed like an age, shooting a poisonous look at Khun. “I’ll play along. I’ll help you, but you’d better keep your promise and get us out of here safely. Any… alliance or agreement we have now ends once we’re free, and if anything goes wrong then I’m holding you responsible. Got it, princeling?”

Khun rolled his eyes. “There’s no need for dramatics or threats. I’m asking for your cooperation for a mutual goal, not your undying loyalty. And we’re in the same position, I have as much reason not to want to be caught as you two, if not more.”

Frann nodded once firmly. “Just make sure you remember that,” he said.

Khun bit back his instinctive annoyance at being treated like he was the one who owed the other a favour for this. It was infuriating, but he really didn’t have any authority here besides what other people were willing to give him. He had no money or treasures on him, no outside allies to call in, no weapons and no shinsu. If he wanted people to do as he said, he would have to convince them that he was someone worth listening to first.

“We should probably go back now,” Kima said, possibly noticing that Khun’s patience was reaching its limit. “Make sure we’re seen somewhere else just in case anyone notices we’re gone and thinks it’s suspicious.”

Khun nodded, admittedly grateful for the out. “That’s probably a good idea. I’ll contact you later.”

The two of them exited his room peacefully enough, but Khun had a feeling Frann would have a lot more to say to Kima once he was no longer in earshot, judging by the suspicious look he’d leveled at Khun on his way out. It didn’t matter. Frann was free to complain as much as he wanted as long as he remembered that this agreement was as much to his own benefit as it was to Khun’s.

Khun sighed, flopping back on the bed, his exhaustion beginning to truly hit him now. He picked up the bottle Kima had brought from where he’d put it down, holding it up to the light. The glass was stained a very dark blue, but from this angle he could just barely make out the yellowish tint of the liquid inside.

It seemed like an insignificant thing for the product of a considerable amount of planning and no small amount of risk, but Khun could admit he was tentatively excited about this.

The chemical Khun had told Kima to steal, which he had described in precise terms so she knew both what she was looking for and how to safely decant some into a smaller bottle for their own use, was a simple but very powerful solvent. If this had been a normal building then it was unlikely that something this concentrated would have been present, but luckily, this was an airship. Its continued ability to fly depended on the ability of its mechanical parts to function, and the resulting waste could clog up the system if not cleaned out properly. Because of this, normal household cleaning products were not powerful enough, and something more… industrial-strength was required.

There had been a small chance that the locked storage cupboards of the residential area wouldn’t contain this solvent, of course, but Khun had been betting on the fact that there were ventilation and waste-removal systems crisscrossing all over the ship. It would make sense to have at least a small amount stored in as many locations as possible so that it would be close at hand when needed, and the fact that storage areas were only accessible by key card anyways meant it wouldn’t be considered a risk to keep dangerous chemicals so close to people who might use them for evil, like Khun was planning to.

He sat upright and stood, putting the bottle down on the vanity where it looked innocuous enough. He then went back over to the bed, but instead of lying down again he grabbed the bedframe and pulled it away from where it had been resting against the wall. The dull off-white paint on the bulkhead behind it had been scraped away in places to create a simple tally. Khun knelt down and, using the sharpest and strongest thing he had at the moment—a butter knife he’d stolen during his first meal here, they really weren't taking any chances with him—he crossed off his most recent set of four lines.

Thirty days. Almost one whole month since he’d been taken.

It was slow going so far, but at least now he felt like he was finally beginning to make some progress. There were some bumps in the road, true, but those could still be managed. He would just have to keep doing what he’d been doing, playing it safe and being careful, not making a move without thinking it through from every possible angle. He knew he could do this. This was what he was best at, what he was born for.

Please wait for me just a bit longer, Bam. I won’t let you down, I promise.

After all, if he couldn’t manage this much, then how could he even claim to still deserve to stand at Bam’s side?

Chapter Text

It hadn’t taken long for FUG members onboard the Apocrypha to clue in in that they should avoid disturbing their God when he was in the training room at all costs. The reinforced space was both the place their Slayer Candidate went when he was in his worst moods and also one of the only parts of the ship capable of containing him at full-power, which made it a uniquely deadly area to stumble into by accident. Any unwary soul who entered without thinking could very well lose a limb or two if their reflexes were just a bit too slow.

Although today, for once, Bam wasn’t training alone.

Bam was locked in close combat with Rak, using shinsu-reinforced martial arts techniques to parry a series of rapid-fire jabs from Rak’s spear. He had managed to land several hits but they’d been largely ineffective, from what he could see. Rak’s shinsu quality gave him an insanely high level of defense even when he wasn’t actively shielding.

Deciding to try a different approach, Bam leapt lightly back, dodging a horizontal swipe from the spear as he went. He summoned his shinsu wings and materilized several baangs to keep his opponent occupied while he repositioned himself for a midrange strike. Rak weathered the attack while Bam took to the air.

There was a practical reason for their match today. While Albrecht almost certainly had some form of shinsu control, Bam knew that his fame mainly came from his abilities as a Spear Bearer. Rak had suggested that they spar to give Bam a bit of practice facing off against another spear-user, and Bam had been quick to take him up on the offer.

While sound in theory, however, the reality was that Bam found sparring with Rak didn’t really do much to help him at the moment. Rak was of impressively high skill level for a Regular, but he wasn’t yet as strong as a powerhouse Ranker like Albrecht. And in addition, Bam didn’t hate him, which meant sparring with him wasn’t really a viable simulation for fighting the warlord.

But he was stressed, and even he was aware that his frustration was muddling his thoughts. He was still floating in mid-air with the help of his shinsu wings and gathering his power for an orb—not the strongest he was capable of creating but certainly not the weakest—when he finally noticed that Rak hadn’t fully recovered from his last attack and had faltered slightly as he hefted his spear.

“Mr. Rak? Are you…?” he began, as Rak threw the spear and it flew wildly off-course, lodging itself in the wall far away from Bam. When he turned back to look at Rak, he found him nearly doubled over, his broad back and shoulders heaving with effort as he clutched his side.

“Mr. Rak! Rak, are you okay?” Bam asked in alarm as he landed next to his friend, allowing the shinsu he’d been storing up to dissipate harmlessly into the air. He cursed himself, realizing that he should have known better than to take Rak at his word when he said he’d fully recovered from his injuries.

It’s just… Bam hadn’t thought to be careful at the time. He’d been so angry, burning with a fierce desire to do something, anything, and then Rak had offered, and….

It wasn’t an excuse, he knew, but when Bam had met with the FUG elders again that morning, it had not gone well.

They had wanted to give him a new Lightbearer.

It was something they’d been hinting at for a long time, but this was the first time someone had come out and said it to his face. They’d even taken the initiative to compile a list of suitable candidates and urged him to look through them, acting as if they were doing him a great favour by allowing him to choose.

Bam hadn’t responded positively, to say the least. He’d torn up the list and told the elders exactly what he thought of their generosity, but he’d known even as he stormed out that he wouldn’t be able to hold them off indefinitely. The only reason he was still being given any say in this at all was out of lingering respect for his cooperation in the past. They’d bring it up again next time, and the next time, and then again until he caved. Or maybe they’d return to their old tricks and threaten his remaining friends until he complied with their wishes and began climbing the Tower again. He had no idea what he’d do if it came to that.

So his mind had been occupied, yes, but he still should have realized how reckless it was to agree to spar with Rak before now.

“Bahaha, of course I am, stupid turtle!” Rak said, and although he had the approximate correct amount of energy in his voice he was still hunched over slightly, and he was still breathing hard. “I just thought… that I should let you feel like you’re winning, for once. I thought, ‘managing to land a few hits against the great and mighty Rak is just what the Black Turtle needs to cheer up again!’”

“This really isn’t something you should be joking about,” Bam said, coming over and placing one of Rak’s massive arms on his shoulder. This would have been a lot easier if Rak had been in his smaller form, but he hadn’t used that one since before they’d lost Khun. He didn’t seem comfortable with letting his guard down around FUG, and after suffering that loss and being injured on top of it Bam couldn’t blame him for feeling insecure even if he was making an effort to carry on as usual. “Here, brace yourself on me. If you’re still hurting, you should rest and get better.”

Rak scoffed and looked like he wanted to brush off the offer, but necessity won out over pride when he tried to take a step forward and stumbled slightly. He placed some of his weight on Bam and Bam felt as though he’d be squashed flat. Nonetheless, he did his best to straighten his back and take it. This was his fault, after all.

It would make for slow progress, but Bam thought he could manage it long enough to get them seated. Probably.

Despite still not being quite up to his usual standards physically, it seemed as though Rak’s obstinate tendencies had made a full recovery, however.

“Rest and get better… you mean like you did?” he asked critically, leaning on Bam in spite of himself as they began to slowly make their way to one of the benches along the wall.

Bam faltered in his steps. “It was fine. Just a small injury, and I heal quickly.”

“The clever turtle said you were knocked unconscious and then went back to training later that same day.”

“... As I said, I heal quickly,” Bam said after a pause. “Besides, there was too much to be done. I wouldn’t have had time….”

Bam felt rather than saw Rak’s glare. He trailed off, appropriately chastised.

Once they were both seated and no longer had the distraction of adrenaline and danger to distract them, however, the never-far sense of wrongness began to sink in again. It was too quiet, and a little lonely. It was just the two of them in the empty training room, the only sound to disturb the silence the background hum of machinery and their own breathing.

There was no Khun perched on a lighthouse nearby, looking so pristine and elegant while he was occupied with his research but pausing every so often to either offer words of encouragement to Bam or to shoot insults and jeers at Rak. No Khun looking considerably less pristine and elegant once he’d been taunted into coming down and joining their training session and he ended up on the floor in a wrestling match with Rak. No Khun to talk Bam through his troubled thoughts and make it clear what his best course of action should be. No Khun to fix up their injuries while threatening that this was the last time he’d do it, only to say the exact same thing the next time one of them got hurt, and again the next time after that….

“Black Turtle?”

Bam blinked, suddenly painfully aware of the fact that his face was wet. “Oh, sorry,” he said, wiping the tears away. And then he wiped again, and again, as the tears continued falling. “I’m sorry… what were you saying again, Mr. Rak?”

“I said that I’ve been watching trying to shoulder this burden yourself this whole time, and you shouldn’t,” Rak said, arms crossed over his chest. There was no way he hadn’t noticed Bam’s tears, but he didn’t look at Bam or attempt to draw attention to it. Rak was kind in that way. “The other turtles are all worried, and I’m your leader. You should at least come to me for help when it’s too difficult for you.”

Bam rubbed his eyes. “You’re right, I know. But you’ve been hurt and I just feel… really awful around the others lately. They’re all being so nice to me and insisting that we’re going to get him back, and I know Khun’s a friend to all of us, not just me. I have no right to be acting like I’m the only one who’s feeling this way.”

Rak listened to him speak without comment. Bam swallowed and continued, the words leaving his mouth like shards of glass.

“But then,” he said raggedly, “I know I also shouldn’t… resent them for not being him either, but there are times when I almost….” he broke off, covering his face with his hands. “I’m really disgusting.”

Rak, blessedly, seemed to know that another reassurance was not what Bam needed to hear right then. Instead, he settled a heavy hand on Bam’s back and allowed it to rest there, grounding him with its weight as he pulled himself back together.

“And you,” Bam continued, his voice almost accusing as he turned back to Rak. “I don’t know if anyone has even asked how you’re handling this, and you’ve been friends with Khun as long as I have.”

“Me? Hah!” the crocodilian laughed. “I’m fine, Black Turtle.”

Bam frowned. “Are you sure? I haven’t seen you in your smaller form for a while now. I was wondering if you were maybe feeling….”

“What? Feeling what?”

“I don’t know,” Bam said. “Threatened, maybe?”

Rak was perfectly still for several moments. At first Bam wondered if he was even going to reply, but he seemed to be frowning thoughtfully, so Bam decided to give him a few more seconds. For someone as hotheaded and impulsive as Rak seemed, he could be surprisingly patient, still and solid as the stone he had an affinity for.

“That form is for you turtles,” Rak rumbled eventually, staring straight ahead. “When your true size is as large as mine, there are parts of the Tower that are just too small. I knew it would be… difficult to travel with such puny turtles if I stayed that size. When I have my smaller form, I don’t have to take different paths because I won’t fit and I don’t have to worry about squishing you when I roll over in my sleep. That form is for the three of us together, when things are good.”

Bam nodded. Rak hadn’t answered his question in so many words, but he thought he understood what he was saying regardless.

But Rak wasn’t finished, either.

“And this form,” he continued, eye flicking lazily back to look at Bam, “is for hunting down anyone stupid enough to get in the way of that.”

That… that was something Bam could certainly understand.

While it had always been obvious that Rak cared a great deal for both Khun and himself, it was clear that his friendship with Khun tended to be much more fraught than his friendship with Bam. There didn’t seem to be any particular reason for it other than that they were two very different people and each just happened to possess specific qualities that got on the other’s nerves, giving their relationship aspects of a rivalry. In contrast, Bam had always gotten along quite well with Rak. This fact probably wouldn’t surprise most, since Bam usually tried to be agreeable whenever possible while Khun didn’t care if he came across as a cocky asshole, so most would undoubtedly see it as a matter of course, but….

Maybe he and Rak got along better because they were actually very similar.

Bam felt a tiny smile steal across his face, and he raised his own hand to rest it on Rak’s arm, as close to his shoulder as he could reach. “I’m really glad you’re here, Mr. Rak.”

Rak didn’t make idle promises. He didn’t make platitudes or lie to soften the truth. If Rak said he was going to hunt down the ones who did this, who broke up their family, then that was exactly what he would do.

Rak made what might have been a responding hum, but it came out as more of a low rumble, like rocks grinding together. “When we see that stupid Blue Turtle again, don’t think I’m not going to punch him for causing all this trouble, though,” he said.

Right. When they saw Khun again. Not if, but when.

Bam tried to let Rak’s confidence ease his worries, and remained huddled close to the imposing figure of his friend until they had been gone for so long that rest of the team was forced to come looking for them.

*

Although it was common for Khun, Kima and Frann to meet at least once per day to discuss any new developments that might have come up, on this particular occasion it was just Khun and Kima meeting in Khun’s room, as Frann was helping with food preparation for the lower decks and would be busy until after dinner. There was no kitchen on this level, but there was a small waiting room where food could be received from the kitchen via dumbwaiter and plated to be distributed to both Albrecht’s spouses and whichever guards had shifts that ran over mealtimes. Originally, it had been a job that had been assigned to Frann a few years back as a form of disciplinary action. He had a temper, as Khun had personally experienced, and apparently earlier on in his stint on the Kraken he hadn’t been nearly as good at keeping his head down as he was now. He had also privately admitted to Khun, his face red, that he continued helping out voluntarily now because it gave him a chance to save a portion for Kima on the days that she was being singled out by any of the other concubines and didn’t feel comfortable coming to dinner. It was disgustingly sentimental and Khun had told him as much.

On this particular night, however, it was Khun who wouldn’t be going to dinner with the others. For the first time since he’d come here, Albrecht had summoned him. If he were to take the man at his word—which he didn’t—then it was for a harmless private meal together, but Khun had his own suspicions that something else was on the menu.

Khun put only his customary amount of effort into his clothing choices but took care to brush and style his hair very carefully beforehand, making sure the light blue locks fell against his neck exactly as he wanted them to.

“You don’t have to put so much effort in for him,” Kima muttered. Once she had heard about his summons she’d shown up at his door looking pale and serious and proceeded to linger in his room like a lost ghost while he made last minute touch-ups to his appearance in the mirror. Her eyes were intent but her actual expression was difficult to read.

“Oh, but I do,” Khun said, a wicked smile curving across his face like a sickle blade. “Here’s a bit of advice from a Khun: always dress and groom appropriately to fit the occasion, especially when that occasion is arranged by someone you hate.”

Kima didn’t look impressed. “I was just saying,” she said carefully, “that there might come a time when it couldn’t hurt to look a little worse, a little less appealing. And that possibly this dinner might be one of those times.”

Khun really didn’t like the sound of that. He set the brush down on the vanity, his eyes meeting Kima’s in the mirror.

“Did he ever…” Khun hesitated, before deciding that, given the situation, he should probably just come right out and say it. They were married to the same man after all, as strange a thought as that was. “Are you speaking from experience?”

Kima’s expression changed very little, but her lips tightened. “Yes. From when I was still very new here,” she said. “He left me alone after that. He said I was boring.”

Khun mentally filed away that piece of information to add to his collection of potentially-relevant scraps of information about his captor and tried to ignore the anger rising in his gut.

Be patient, he reminded himself. Albrecht would reap what he sowed in time.

“But it’s just as well,” she said, continuing unexpectedly as she resumed her idle pacing. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that in this place it is much, much better to be boring than it is to be too interesting.”

She wasn’t facing him when she said it, but he was pretty sure her gaze was fixed on him out of the corner of his eyes. He gave her a thin smile. “I appreciate the warning, but I don’t know how boring I can afford to be if I want this evening to be useful to me as well.”

She didn’t reply, but Khun was pretty sure he saw worry briefly in those eyes. It really was too bad—from what he could tell, if Kima had been given the chance to live a safe and happy life far, far away from this mess then she probably would have been a naturally gentle and kind person. She really did remind him of Bam sometimes.

“Besides,” Khun added, remembering the fear the guards had shown that time Georgios had struck him, “If my assumptions are correct, I think he’ll mainly just want to talk rather than try anything with me. I doubt he even can do anything as long as he’s still trying to get whatever it is he wants from Bam.”

“Who’s Bam?”

“Oh, I meant Viole,” he said, surprised at the slip. He quickly corrected himself, “I don’t think he'll try anything because of Viole.”

“Well, maybe he won’t plan to, but his self-control is bad and he has a temper.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be careful,” Khun said, before considering. “Well, as careful as I need to be.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” Kima said, and Khun realized that she was staring at his hands. Specifically, the small parts around his fingertips where if you looked closely enough, the flesh might seem slightly reddened and burned-looking. He casually dropped them to his lap so they would be hidden by the vanity.

“Anyways,” he continued, as if he hadn’t noticed her interest, “Since I might not see you again this evening, keep your eyes out for any of the points we discussed previously and be ready to report to me later. And let Frann know that I get it if he was busy but I'm also going to kill him for ditching me earlier.”

“Do you want me to use those exact words?”

“Please do,” Khun said, waving her off. “Now you’d better run along before my escort gets here. I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

Kima nodded, and then she was gone like a shadow, the door hissing smoothly behind her.

It was a good thing she’d left when she did, as the aforementioned guard arrived not five minutes later. It was one of the few female guards, and one that Khun recognized thanks to the exhaustive reconnaissance attempts of Kima, Frann and himself over the past months. If he was remembering Frann’s report correctly, her name was Mei. She was a Ranker who had been a soldier in Jahad’s forces prior to her career change into a mercenary, but she had done pretty well for herself with Albrecht’s crew in the time since. She wasn’t the highest ranking among the guards but wasn’t low either, and her status was bolstered by the fact that she was fairly well-liked.

It also made sense that she was the one who was sent to escort him. It was a task that wouldn’t be entrusted to just anyone since it involved taking him out of the wing of the ship that was specifically made to contain Albrecht’s spouses, but neither was she high enough ranked that it would be demeaning for her.

Khun kept his eyes open and mind alert during the walk over, making note of the layout of the corridors and attempting to build a map in his head. He had been this way only once before, when Albrecht had first brought him here, but now that he had a bit more of a sense of how the ship was put together, his observations were likely to be more accurate.

If the guard noticed his interest, she thankfully didn’t say anything.

The room he was brought to wasn’t the same one he’d been to previously. She indicated to him that he should go inside and took up her position next to the door, presumably intending to remain there for the duration of however long his visit ended up being.

What a terrible job, Khun thought. He wondered if she’d even eaten yet.

Once inside, he was hit by the mouthwatering scent of freshly-cooked food, already laid out in steaming dishes on a small square table covered by a subtly patterned white cloth. Albrecht himself was seated at one end of the table, although when he noticed Khun he rose and came over to the other side to pull his chair out for him. Khun’s eyes narrowed as he took his seat, forcing himself to keep his posture as relaxed as possible and not stiffen up in annoyance at the man’s unwanted proximity to him.

“Sorry, I know it’s a bit cramped compared to what you’re used to, but hopefully this will still be acceptable for you?” Albrecht said once he’d reseated himself. There was a hint of smugness in his voice that made Khun think that making him uncomfortable was part of the point.

He was right, though. The table was not large, so even though they were sitting across from each other, the distance between them was not especially wide. Personally, Khun would prefer to be sitting a whole floor or two away from this man, ideally separated by several miles of stone, but he didn’t imagine that was an option.

“I’ve been meaning to catch up with you this whole time, but I’ve been quite preoccupied for the past few months,” Albrecht continued, ever the gentleman as he poured two glasses of wine. He graciously placed one of them next to Khun’s spot at the table and took the second for himself. “Have you been settling in comfortably?”

“Oh, it’s been lovely,” Khun said. “This is a nice tablecloth, is it new?”

“An antique actually, it came into my possession during a raid on an old noble family in the outer Tower,” Albrecht said. “It’s interesting that you should ask. The person who wove it was considered a master artisan in his day, and it was—”

“Oops,” Khun said, tipping his wineglass over onto the white cloth.

Albrecht visibly twitched, possibly realizing right then that this evening was not going to go particularly smoothly. He downed his drink in one go, giving it several seconds before he spoke again. “I see your time with us hasn’t improved your personality in any significant way,” he said, already beginning the process of pouring himself a new glass. “Even after I went and made the effort to be polite to you.”

“Being married means you should learn to accept the bad with the good,” Khun said, smiling insincerely. “The fact that there’s a steak knife in front of me and I haven’t gone for your throat with it yet should be evidence enough that I’m on my very best behaviour.”

“Your best behaviour? It only goes to show that you’re not suicidal. Dying in such a way would be too much like admitting defeat, am I right?”

He was unfortunately correct, the bastard.

Khun wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of saying as much, though. “So,” he began instead, eyeing the meal setup. It was better than anything he’d had in months, piping slabs of grilled meat, rolls and seasoned asparagus and some kind of sauce—Albrecht was pulling out the stops. “What exactly did you want to speak to me about?”

Khun stabbed the steak in front of him with—he thought—a completely warranted amount of aggression. The plates the meal was served on looked nice, fine bone china edged in gold filigree, so he made sure to grind the knife blade as loudly as he could against his as he cut through the meat. He wanted Albrecht to be counting scratches when this meal was through.

Albrecht gritted his teeth behind his glass at the sound. Good.

When Khun had first received the invitation to dinner from Albrecht, he had figured that the only reason he’d be wanting to meet with Khun now was if things were going poorly with Bam and he was hoping to pry some insight out of the only resource he currently had at his disposal. To be fair, Khun considered himself a fairly good resource—he was clever and knew Bam very well, after all—but he would also never willingly do anything to help Albrecht’s plight. It was a doomed venture from the start, and Albrect should have been at least bright enough to realize that.

Or maybe it was just that he was starting to get impatient enough to try anything. That was more likely, as Khun knew firsthand how stubborn Bam could be when he was intent on getting his own way.

He quickly smothered his smile. It wouldn’t do to have Albrecht think that expression had been for him, after all.

“Checking in on the happiness of my husband isn’t reason enough to meet with you?” Albrecht said, although it would probably have sounded a bit more romantic if it hadn’t been uttered through clenched teeth. Or if he hadn’t already had husbands numbering in the double digits.

“Oh please, like that really means anything to you,” Khun scoffed, twirling the steak knife idly. “On the other hand, it is strange that you’ve only just summoned me now. And don’t give me that garbage about being busy, even I’ve noticed that you haven’t gone on so much as a single raid in months. It doesn’t fit with the pattern of your activity prior to your attempt to capture Jue Viole Grace, and it’s clear you’re still preoccupied with him. The fact that I’m a former teammate of his makes it especially unusual that you’ve waited this long to ask to speak to me.”

“Haven’t you been told that arrogance is an unattractive trait?”

Khun smirked. “I’ll ask again. What do you want?”

Albrecht huffed a laugh before meeting Khun’s gaze, considering. “I think you’re misunderstanding something about me, Aguero. I’m not some evil mastermind, I’m just a simple man who wants to be happy and carve out his place in the world.”

The worrisome thing was, it almost sounded like he actually believed that.

“I have no intention to fight or kill Jue Viole Grace, nor do I wish to hand him over to Jahad or his followers,” Albrecht continued smoothly, his tone conciliatory. “I can’t even imagine why anyone would want to, it would be a tremendous waste of potential. Why eliminate that source of power when it’s possible to harness it, to use it instead?”

Use it indeed, Khun thought. If this asshole wanted to try to use Bam, he had another thing coming. But it did seem that his guess had been correct, and Albrecht was the type of warlord to want Bam’s allegiance and not his death. It wasn’t necessarily a good thing because they had as much reason to avoid that type as the other, but it was still nice to have a theory confirmed.

“And what better way to convince him to see the light,” Albrecht said, eyes raking over Khun in a way that made his hackles rise, “then to have something he wants and offer him the chance to get it back in exchange for his loyalty? And you might like that too, wouldn’t you? You don’t seem to be particularly delighted with my hospitality thus far—wouldn’t you be happier if you had the option to be returned to him?”

Khun was completely unprepared for the sudden rush of longing that surged through him at the thought of seeing Bam again before reality set in. He couldn’t let it sway him, he knew very well that any scenario Albrecht had in mind would almost certainly be a very bad one for both himself and Bam. If he wanted to see Bam again, it would have to be on his own terms, or not at all.

“I believe the reason you gave for tossing me into your little harem was to keep Viole from… what was it… ‘clinging to me?’ If I want to go back to him at this point don’t you think it’s your fault for not giving me a proper position when I first offered to help you out?” Khun asked brusquely, dragging his knife over the plate with one final resounding screech. He tried his best to sound disinterested and not reveal how much the words had affected him.

“I am under no obligation to treat you fairly, especially since I knew you were probably lying about wanting to leave him in the first place,” Albrecht retorted.

Khun set down his utensils, having thoroughly mutilated the meat by this point. He made sure a good portion of the juices from that found their way onto the tablecloth as well. “Ah, well, I guess you got me,” he said. It wasn’t like it was doing any good trying to hide it anymore, Albrecht had believed since the beginning that Khun could be used against Bam, and Bam had clearly done nothing to dissuade him of that notion. That particular deception was already dead and rotting in the ground.

“So now that we’re being fully honest with each other, I’m sure it’s clear to you that we are on the same side in all this.”

“Oh?” Khun braced his elbow on the table, resting his chin on his open palm as he leaned forward. “How so?”

“Because I want Jue Viole Grace to join with me, and you want to go back to him. Jue Viole Grace has also made it clear in our communications that getting you back is his top priority, but convincing him to accept my terms thus far has been… difficult,” Albrecht said, swirling the wine in his glass thoughtfully. A little bit slopped over the edge and ran down his fingers like drops of blood. “Since it’s come to this, don’t you think it would be in your best interest to help me to… put the appropriate pressure on him to get him to agree to an alliance? He does listen to you and take your opinions into account, after all. It’s still possible for us to all get what we want peacefully.”

Yeah, right. By forcing Bam into some form of indentured servitude for the worst man imaginable, earning the malice of FUG for his desertion along the way? Khun would rather die.

In addition, although Albrecht was doing his best to imply that Khun would get his freedom in this scenario, it was incredibly unlikely that he would ever actually be willing to let Khun go. Khun was his only insurance to keep Bam obedient, and without him Bam would have no motivation whatsoever to do as he was told. More likely, Albrecht would keep Khun and leverage time with him, chances to see him in exchange for good behaviour and threaten him with harm in return for instances of disobedience. It would be no sort of life for either of them.

Khun had made a promise to himself years ago that he’d do everything he could to protect Bam’s ability to choose for himself. He wouldn’t go back on that now.

“Viole will do what’s right for Viole,” Khun said dismissively, “and nothing I tell him will change that. If the incentive of getting me back hasn’t convinced him yet then don’t think anything I could say to him would yield better results.”

“You underestimate yourself. Just because you’re like a block of ice doesn’t mean he is,” Albrecht said. “You know, when we first met, I assumed that Jue Viole Grace was fucking you.”

“Your mealtime conversation could use some work,” Khun said, sitting back and glaring. That knife was once again starting to look altogether too tempting. “And you really should try to control your imagination.”

“But that was only what I could gather after talking to you. I’ve spoken to Viole a lot more over the past few months, seen what kind of a man he is, and it got me thinking.”

“Again, I’ll remind you that you should do something about that imagination.”

Albrecht ignored him, taking a long swig from his glass. “I don’t know exactly what I expected, but he’s a lot less stoic than his reputation led me to believe, much more youthful and more prone to childish outbursts. I started to have my suspicions at that point and the more I spoke to him the more certain I was. As incredible as it seems, I think he actually fancies himself to be in love with you.”

It was like the temperature in the room dropped several degrees, and Khun felt ill. There was a ball of something ugly and painful welling up in his chest. Suddenly he was grateful he had drawn the line at massacring his dinner rather than actually eating it, because he knew if he’d managed to swallow even a single bite it would likely be making an appearance again in short order.

Khun forced himself to answer in a steady voice as his nails dug into his thighs under the table. “That’s ridiculous,” he said lightly.

“It is, isn’t it? I doubt FUG’s Slayer Candidate is truly capable of such things, but if a monster was to spend enough time around normal humans, who’s to say he wouldn’t start thinking of himself as one of them and trying to emulate their behaviour? It would be almost precious if it wasn’t so sad—imagine trying to experience a real emotional connection for the first time and the best option you have is a frigid bitch from the Khun family.”

Khun had already been reeling from Albrecht’s comment on Bam’s potential… feelings, but that statement alone was enough to make his vision go red. He couldn’t even remember the last time someone had made him this angry.

“If that’s really all you think there is to Viole then I definitely don’t have to worry about whether it’s possible to make any kind of deal with you,” he snarled, beginning to rise to his feet. “Viole would never want to ally with someone as stupid and self-absorbed as you, and you can bet that I’d never put him in a position where he’d have to make that choice. Forget your deal, I’ll die before putting in a single—”

In a flash, Albrecht had leaned across the table, knocking dishes aside with a crash as he caught Khun by his wrist. Khun stumbled forward, barely managing to catch himself on the table edge with his free hand as the man’s fingers dug painfully into his skin.

“You are at least clever enough to realize what the alternative is, aren’t you?” Albrecht said, gripping his wrist tighter. He smelled strongly of alcohol, and the analytical part of himself that Khun could never turn off wondered if it was just the wine or if he’d already been drinking before Khun had even arrived. “If you won’t willingly help me change his mind, then the only option left is to torture you until he sees reason. You’ve been treated well these past few months, haven’t you? I’m sure we’ll find Viole is much more agreeable to my terms when he personally gets to witness just how much worse I can make things for you. Would that be preferable, Aguero?”

“Let go of me,” Khun said coldly, wrenching his arm away with no small amount of effort. “You called me here because you wanted to pick my brain to see how well I know I know Viole, so here’s what I think. I think he told you in no uncertain terms that you can forget any alliance in the future if I’m not returned to him in exactly the condition I was when you found me. There’s no way you’d ruin months of planning and waiting just to screw it all up now by doing the one thing he told you would be a dealbreaker.”

Albrecht didn’t move for several seconds, staring at him. Khun stared back, almost afraid of what would happen if he was the one who looked away first.

“So? Am I right?” Khun demanded, heart hammering in his chest. “And if I am, are you ready to risk it?”

Albrecht slowly sat back in his chair and didn’t push the point, so Khun could only assume he’d been dead on the mark with his analysis. He rubbed the red marks on his wrist as Albrecht poured himself more wine. He still looked angry and he’d had quite a bit to drink at this point, and Khun figured that any possibility for anything useful coming out of this meeting was rapidly vanishing. Perhaps it was time to call an end to the evening.

“Well then, if that was everything you wanted to discuss then I’ll wish you a good night and a thank-you for the dinner,” Khun said, crumpling his napkin and dropping it on the floor as he stood. He tried to keep his movements brisk enough to disguise the faint tremor in his hands. “The steak was a little dry though, you might want to mention it to the chef,” he tossed back over his shoulder.

“... Not yet,” Khun heard from behind him just as he was reaching for the door.

Khun paused. “What was that?”

“I’m not ready to risk it… yet,” Albrecht said, his voice cold. “That will be all for this evening. Have a good night.”

Khun didn’t turn back to look at Albrecht’s face, but he could feel the bloodlust seeping from him as he exited the room, and he did his best not to seem too relieved once they were separated by a wall and he could no longer sense those eyes boring into his back.

Sorry, Kima, I might have done something really stupid, he thought grimly.

The guard gave him a weird look as he stepped outside, but Khun ignored her and she accompanied him back to the lower decks without protest.

Once he was back in his room, he sat heavily on the bed, burying his head in his hands as he tried to regain his composure. That particular meeting had not gone… especially well. He had gotten some new information out of it, so it wasn’t a total write-off, but….

Damn, he hadn’t expected it to hurt that much.

He lifted his head out of his hands. His gaze fell on the perfume bottle on the dresser, the liquid inside nearly half gone now.

Albrecht was wrong—Bam wasn’t a monster and he didn’t have feelings for Khun, either real or otherwise. He was wrong.

Khun did not come as far as he had by holding onto false hopes and illusions. He knew exactly who and what he was, and he knew the role he had to play. He had made his peace with it long before he’d entered the Tower or met Bam.

Khun had been a sullen and unpleasant child who to no one’s surprise had grown into a callous and untrustworthy adult, but despite what Albrecht had implied Khun knew very well that he was capable of experiencing love. What he couldn’t do was even begin to comprehend a scenario where his feelings could be returned in the same way, couldn’t imagine what kind of person would see anything worth loving in him.

The fact that Bam cared for Khun and held him in the same regard that he held his other friends was nothing short of miraculous, a boon he’d been granted by fate or some other higher power that he could never even begin to pay back. And even if he were to indulge in stupid fantasies where his feelings were reciprocated, the very idea of someone like Bam, who deserved the best in everything, lowering himself to be with someone like Khun was nothing short of despicable.

And Bam was also a FUG Slayer Candidate. It was bad enough to have a Khun as a strategist, but he couldn’t be seen in a relationship with a member of one of Jahad’s Great Families or he’d risk losing all of his support, especially when the person in question was someone with as dubious a background as Khun’s. Bam needed to be with someone who was above reproach, who wouldn’t taint him by association the way Khun would.

He rose from his seat on the bed and pulled the frame away from the wall the same way he did every night. The paint behind it was absolutely littered with scratch marks. His hand trembled visibly as he drew in the day’s line, and he sat back on his heels to take in the full effect of his work.

Three months, give or take a few days. It wasn’t the longest time he’d been separated from Bam, not even close, and he’d known that this would take some time from the beginning.

It wasn’t like he was really suffering here, either. He had food and clothing and a place to sleep, all his basic needs met. Albrecht’s other spouses were no real threat to him, and the guards were stupid. And Albrecht himself… well, Khun could handle him. He was fine—better than fine, even. Everything was proceeding exactly according to plan.

So he couldn’t understand why it was getting harder every day to silence the little voice in the back of his head that told him he would never see Bam again.

Once he’d moved the bed back in position, he crawled under the covers fully clothed like he had sometimes done on particularly bad days as a child. He didn’t sleep, however, and lay there with his eyes wide for hours in the dark until he heard the telltale beep of the lock on his door being activated.

It was only after many, many hours of lying alone with only his poisonous thoughts to keep him company that he finally drifted off into an uneasy sleep.

Chapter Text

It was that dream again.

It was actually a memory more than a dream, but it was one that haunted Khun’s sleep ever since that disastrous dinner with Albrecht. Specifically, ever since the night Albrecht had said that thing about Bam.

The dream itself had nothing to do with Albrecht, but it had quite a lot to do with Bam.

The memory was of an event that had taken place a while ago, even longer if you counted the ensuing time since Khun’s capture. It had started out ordinarily enough. Their team had arrived on the 86th Floor a week before the Floor Tests were set to begin, and Khun had settled down in their hotel room prepared to spend that week on research and prep work, as per usual.

And then, on the third day Bam had invited him out for sightseeing. It had been unexpected to say the least, but Bam had seemed to really want to go and Khun had caved to his wishes, as he always did. He also hadn’t realized at the time that the invitation had been just for him and not the rest of the team, and had been surprised yet again when he’d gone down to the lobby and found only Bam waiting for him there. Bam hadn’t acted like it was anything strange at all, though, so Khun had tried to put it out of his mind as he allowed Bam to lead him out onto the street.

The settlement they were staying in was a pretty town on a river that boasted neatly built wooden houses with red clay tile roofs, a complex series of arched brick bridges over branching waterways and an expansive outdoor marketplace. The climate on this floor was warm and comfortable, and the air was scented with fresh flowers and spiced meat. Khun had already done some research on the locale, so while they explored the market he had occasionally been able to name a particular type of food or point out a certain handicraft that was a local specialty. He also had a basic understanding of the town’s history, which he told to Bam quietly while they took in the sights or waited in line for food. He had worried the topic was too dull, but Bam, as always, followed his words with rapt attention.

Bam had actually been giddy and a bit ridiculous that day, refreshingly not weighed down by worries and responsibilities for once, and it was cute. He had bought Khun a scarf at one of the stalls in the market—a powder blue one embroidered with white thread—and had insisted he wear it immediately, going so far as to tie it up in Khun’s hair himself. Khun had protested, saying Bam didn’t need to and he had his own money and could buy it himself if he felt that strongly about it, but Bam had shot him down every time, saying that it was FUG’s money anyways and that he wanted to and Khun should just let him have this.

Bam had emerged triumphant from that squabble, unsurprisingly, and Khun had been given no choice but to accept his new accessory. Khun was pretty sure that Bam was still smug about it hours later, because he kept glancing at him and grinning throughout the day like he just couldn’t contain himself. Khun would never have guessed that Bam could be so graceless in victory, but here was the evidence staring him in the face.

After wandering around aimlessly for a while they had found a seat on the docks, watching brightly coloured little river boats go by as they ate shaved ice with mint syrup. Khun had looked across at Bam then, studying his profile, and had been taken aback at how happy he looked, content and peaceful with his magnificent eyes burning like twin solar flares. Khun had looked away quickly when his heart gave a painful tug.

Because of the nature of their friendship and their frequent partings, Khun felt like he had met several different Bams over the course of his lifetime. They were essentially all the same Bam at heart, of course, but sometimes it felt strange to look at him now and remember that there was once a time when Bam had seemed so small and helpless and Khun had found it necessary to protect him. The next time they’d met had been post-FUG, and although Bam had been stronger then he had needed Khun in a different way.

He didn’t know yet if this new Bam—having spent the last two years surrounded by friends and formidable new allies—really needed him.

And this day trip confused him too. He and Bam didn’t really… do this. Their journey up the Tower thus far had been frantic and punctuated by constant separations that hadn’t really left much time for just hanging out together. The best explanation Khun could come up with was that maybe this was something that New Bam made an effort to do with his friends, and because Khun had spent two years asleep, he was the only one who didn’t know and whom Bam hadn’t gotten to yet.

“Mr. Khun?”

Khun looked over to see Bam staring at him. There was a strange gravity in his eyes that wasn’t usually there.

“Yes, Bam?”

“Let’s stay together,” Bam said. His voice was steady but he looked a bit nervous. He was fidgeting, something he had done a lot at one time but had mostly grown out of, and it seemed as if there was something else he had wanted to say but couldn’t think of how to say it. “You’re always telling me to be more selfish, so if I could ask one thing of you, just this once… please say you’ll stay by my side from now on.”

Khun didn’t understand at first, but with only a few moments of puzzling it over, it came to him. Oh, and that must be the reason for the day trip too—Bam was probably also feeling a bit insecure about Khun having been gone for so long, so he’d set aside a day for them to… re-learn each other, and to make sure that they still wanted the same things. To check if their goals still aligned and they were still able to keep going up the Tower together even after everything that had happened.

And Khun did have an answer, although he didn’t think it was one Bam would like.

“I’ll climb with you for as long as I can,” he offered. He didn’t want to meet Bam’s earnestness with such a halfhearted sentiment, but he couldn’t bring himself to lie, either. “I promised to take you up the Tower, and I’ll do everything in my power to keep that promise for as long as I’m able.”

He tried to be as reassuring as he could, but Bam’s reaction had been… confusing. He’d looked flabbergasted first, then annoyed, then considering before finally settling on amused. There was something else there as well, but the amusement was most prominent.

“You’re so difficult,” Bam sighed, then gave a rueful little smile as he reached out and tugged the corner of the scarf he’d put in Khun’s hair earlier. “Don’t worry though, Mr. Khun. We’ll have all the time in the world to get you to believe in me.”

“What? Who said I don’t believe in you?” Khun asked, confused and trying not to feel a bit hurt. Did Bam not think he supported him? How long had he felt that way? “I don’t understand, Bam, how do I not believe in you?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bam repeated, leaning back, and Khun didn’t realize how close they’d been until that moment. “And you should eat your ice before it melts.”

Khun obediently took a bite, frowning slightly. His mind was too preoccupied to fully register the cold burn on his tongue. “Are you sure it’s alright, Bam? You looked angry for a second there.”

“Not at you,” Bam assured him. “I just… realized that I might owe Ms. Endorsi an apology.”

“Endorsi? What for?”

“I think now I might finally understand how she felt back then, when… well,” Bam coughed awkwardly, and there was that rueful look again. “It’s really nothing serious, I promise.”

Khun had the distinct impression that there was a whole other level of conversation taking place that he wasn’t privy to, and it was a strange feeling because that never happened. He felt like he’d missed something important, but also couldn’t understand how he hadn’t managed to pick up on it yet. Bam wasn’t exactly a master of deception, why was he suddenly so difficult to read now?

“Alright then,” Khun huffed, recognizing that he wouldn’t be able to get anything else out of Bam for the moment. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“Don’t be mad,” Bam said teasingly. “It would be a shame to end the day on such a bad note. Have you at least been having fun so far?”

“Me?” Khun asked, blinking. Had he been having fun? He supposed he had been, although his positive emotions tended to peak in Bam’s presence anyways, so that wasn’t anything new in itself. “Yes, I have,” he said. “I really should be preparing for the Test, there’s a lot to do still, but… this has been nice. Thanks, Bam.”

“Anytime,” Bam said softly. His eyes had seemed to be saying something else, but again, Khun didn’t understand it.

It had started raining lightly sometime after that, forcing them to go back to the hotel, but whenever Khun dreamed of that day it ended right there, and he would wake up feeling confused and alone, and farther away from Bam than ever.

He remembered that strange, vulnerable look on Bam’s face when he asked Khun to stay with him and the odd conversation that had followed, and how he had never learned exactly what Bam had been trying to imply. There was one point when he'd even almost thought... but no, that wasn't possible. And now it had been months since he’d last seen Bam, and there was a tiny, creeping fear in the corner of Khun’s mind that he never would learn what Bam had actually meant, that he had finally reached his limit just as he’d always known he would.

Bam wouldn’t want to abandon him without saying anything, he knew that. But it had been months now since he had been taken. Whether he wanted to or not he would have readjusted to life without Khun by now. It was inevitable when they parted so often.

He tried not to acknowledge how much that possibility terrified him.

Once his thoughts were slightly more coherent, he also remembered the unwelcome truth he’d learned as he’d made his tally mark on the wall the night before. As of today it was, in fact, officially six months since he’d been kidnapped by Albrecht. Given the nature of his kidnapping, he supposed it was also an anniversary, of sorts.

The reminder had ensured that he started the day in a bad mood. Kima had taken one look at him when he exited his room that morning and her eyebrows had raised nearly all the way to her hairline.

“You look awful,” she said.

Over the past few months she must have gotten quite comfortable with him indeed if she was now willing to utter such a statement to his face.

“You’re hardly a prize yourself,” he sniped back, although privately he did agree with her. He had seen himself in the mirror, so he knew his complexion was especially corpse-like today and the shadows under his eyes were heavy.

She shrugged, the insult clearly nowhere near hitting the mark. “I’m fine with that.”

“What did you just say about Kima?” Frann demanded, offence clearly visible as he came around the corner. Of course he would choose that exact moment to show up.

“It’s fine, Mr. Khun is just in a bad mood today.”

“Yeah, ri—damn, you do look really terrible.”

Frann could kindly fuck off.

All in all, not a great start to the day. Khun sighed, fussing with his hair in dissatisfaction. It was getting longer and was constantly in the way, and not for the first time he wished he could braid it or tie it back. He stared enviously at Frann, who had his hair tied at the nape of his neck today. Yet another reason to hate the man.

Okay, not hate, he reconsidered. “Resent,” maybe.

Something happened to improve his mood, though. When they turned the next bend in the corridor, they found most if not all of Albrecht’s other spouses hovering anxiously in the hall, speaking in low whispers. There was a group of guards nearby, also having what looked to be a very serious conversation.

There had been no announcements made to explain what had happened, but rumours tended to flourish onboard the Kraken, so naturally everyone already knew. It was easy enough for Khun to figure out the details of what had gotten everyone into such a state just by feigning a worried expression and asking around a bit.

The guard captain, Fabien, had apparently vanished into thin air.

It had happened overnight, was the assumption, although no one could seem to confirm who had been the last to actually see him. All that could be stated for certain is that he had failed to show up to his night shift on the upper decks and not a trace of him had been found since. He hadn’t been popular either among the other guards or among the concubines—with the possible exception of Aleksandra—so no one was particularly aggrieved when it became clear that he might actually be gone, and not just a victim of the stomach flu that had been working its way through the guards recently or preoccupied with sleeping off the effects of too much alcohol.

Complicating the matter was the fact that Fabien had been in a habit of concealing his location and activities for years now, due to his relationship with Aleksandra. That wasn’t to say he did it particularly well, but there were certainly times and places where he was unaccounted for before this.

Khun didn’t have much more time to go digging for information, though, Once a harried-looking Albrecht arrived on the lower decks, bringing with him a fresh retinue of guards, he directed all of his spouses to be locked in their rooms again while the rest of the ship was searched. It might have also been an attempt to curb the gossip before it spread too far and people got the wrong—or right—idea. He was a little late on that front though, Khun was willing to bet everyone had heard what had happened by now.

Khun was also certain he saw Albrecht’s eyes on him as he walked past, and tried to ignore the crawling sensation in his skin that accompanied that realization.

Oh, he definitely suspects me.

Well, good luck finding a way to blame him for this, Khun thought as the door to his room hissed shut behind him. Like Khun would actually do something as risky as kill a guard when he already knew he would immediately be isolated as the prime suspect. He wasn’t insane.

Instead of moving further into the room, Khun took a seat on the floor with his back to the door. One of the many advantages of being born from one of the Ten Great Families was that Khun had better senses than most, and that included his hearing. After about an hour of waiting and listening, he finally heard the sound of footfalls and hushed words outside. He pressed his ear up to the door hoping to catch a bit of the conversation, and he was rewarded with what sounded like a brief exchange between one of the guards and Albrecht himself.

“… are absolutely sure that Khun Aguero Agnis wasn’t involved?” Khun heard Albrecht’s voice say. He sounded frustrated, which would seem to indicate that their investigation was not going well. “No unexplained disappearances over the course of the evening, and not a single moment that he was out of sight of yourself or anyone else on shift?”

“I don’t know what to say,” came the helpless reply, presumably from whichever unlucky guard he was grilling at the moment. “He was present at dinner, and didn’t leave until lights out. Myself or another guard was with him up until he was locked in his room for the night.”

“But wouldn’t you agree that even that is suspicious? He’s a Khun, it’s entirely possible that he was making a show of being well-behaved just to throw us off.”

“... It’s possible I guess, but prior to dinner Fabien was definitely still alive—we all saw him there,” she said. “And other than a few petty squabbles with some of your other spouses, the Khun boy’s actually been pretty quiet since he got here. I wouldn’t say he was acting noticeably different last night.”

There was an indistinct pause, but Khun was willing to bet Albrecht was grinding his teeth. “Fine. Considering the information we have, until I’ve heard otherwise I have to assume Fabien is dead. We’ll question everyone individually in due time and try to narrow down who might be responsible.”

“I know that Fabien wasn’t weak, and he did have enemies. With the possible exception of the Khun boy, would any of your spouses even be capable of killing him?”

“That’s the question,” Albrecht muttered. “Anyways, Mei, since you’re the best suited to fill in for Fabien’s shifts at the moment, I’ll need you to make sure to….”

Khun hadn’t been able to hear anything else after as they moved further away, but that was alright. He’d heard all he needed to hear.

About half an hour later another guard came by and they were finally let out of their rooms again, and they gathered in the dining room for a very late breakfast. The mood was rarely jovial onboard the Kraken but it was even more dismal than usual today, with a steady undercurrent of anxiety. In the end, no body had turned up during the search, but there was apparently no sign of a missing shuttle that Fabien might have left in, either. The guards were nervous, no doubt wondering if what had happened to their superior might happen to them as well, and nervous guards made the people they were guarding more nervous in turn. The room was silent apart from small pockets of tense conversation and the sound of cutlery on dishware, and something about the situation seemed almost precarious, like a bubble about to pop.

Aleksandra was seated off to the side, nursing a cup of wine despite the fact that it was before noon. Her face was haggard and her eyes were puffy. She had been very quiet, and her friends clustered around her like cooing pigeons, offering her bites of food and patting her shoulders consolingly. She didn’t seem to take notice of any of this, staring unblinkingly at the table in front of her.

Frann found Khun again and took a seat next to him. To his credit, he seemed to be trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, but his motions were stiff and he wouldn’t fool anyone who was actually looking—which, thankfully, Khun doubted they were. Everyone seemed pretty thoroughly lost in their own worlds at the moment.

“I didn’t want to bring it up in front of Kima earlier, but I meant to ask if you still want me to keep doing the… uh, that thing we discussed?” Frann asked awkwardly. He dug his spoon into his bowl of oatmeal. “Because if you do, I’m going to need more of it.”

“You ran out?” Khun asked.

“Yeah.”

Khun hummed. “No, I think that’s enough, it’s achieved its purpose. Nice work.”

“I’d feel better about it if I knew what we were trying to get out of it,” Frann said. He glanced to the side uncomfortably. “Hell, I even feel bad about it still.”

“Don’t. They’re not your friends, you know that,” Khun said, rolling his eyes.

“I do, it’s just….”

From the far side of the room, a voice raised in laughter. Several heads turned to see who had been responsible for breaking the terse atmosphere, Aleksandra’s included. After she had confirmed the identity of the offender she merely stared blankly for several seconds before she seemed to make up her mind about something, and stood up.

Khun, for his part, watched her actions with some interest.

Making her way slowly but purposefully through the crowded room, Aleksandra stalked up to Georgios where he was in the middle of an almost jarringly upbeat conversation with a member of his cohort. Without so much as waiting for him to acknowledge her—or even finish his sentence—she wound up and delivered such a loud slap to his face that it practically echoed off the walls of the room. Then, as if not satisfied that she’d gotten her feelings across with just that action, she upended her glass of wine over his head.

Since he’d first been imprisoned on the Kraken, Khun had made a habit of spending a lot of time in the common areas, chatting with the others and adding anything new he overheard to the veritable library of gossip and rumours he’d picked up and memorized for later. It was tiresome work for the most part, but it was times like these that made the overall dull experience truly worth it.

Everybody ceased what they were doing, turning to watch as Georgios, dripping, could do little more than raise a hand to his face where a red mark was slowly appearing, the anger seemingly not sinking in yet in the face of his utter shock. “You… what—”

“How could you?” Aleksandra demanded, eyes flashing, bright with unshed tears. “You… you devil, how could you have done this to me?”

Georgios responded predictably. The anger that had been delayed in appearing suddenly flared up with a vengeance, and then he was rising to his feet and shouting in return.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, you stupid woman!” Georgios sputtered back, wine dripping from his hair into his face, which was already looking blotchy with anger. “I never did anything to you!”

“Oh you never did anything to me?” she demanded, grabbing a fistful of his prized mane—now soaked in wine and looking somewhat less luxurious than usual. “What do you call the time you stole my ring? What about the time you put sewing needles in my shoes? And then this time… this time doesn’t even compare to those! You know exactly what you did, you scheming, conniving little snake!”

Georgios grabbed her arm and aimed a solid kick at her shin. She yelped in pain as it connected, but his attempt at retaliation had only succeeded in making her pull his hair even harder, and then they were both screaming.

“Somebody do something, get this madwoman off of me!” Georgios demanded, looking around at the appalled faces of his allies. “Don’t just stand there, somebody… guards, help!”

The guards, still looking hesitant to get between the two of them, began reluctantly moving in to separate the warring pair. Meanwhile, the room around them erupted into chaos as Aleksandra’s and Georgios' respective circles of friends began ganging up on each other as well in an attempt to defend their leaders while bystanders alternately joined in to settle old grudges or ran for cover. It was pandemonium.

Khun sipped his tea, sitting well out of harm’s way and pretending to ignore the fact that even as everyone else was distracted by the overwrought tableau in front of them, Frann was looking at him with suspicion.

“You had something to do with this,” he accused.

“What a bold theory,” Khun said, offering a feline grin from behind his teacup. “When would I have had the opportunity to pull something like that off?”

“I don’t know! I just want to know one thing,” Frann whispered. “Is Fabien really… dead?”

“Most likely,” Khun said noncommittally.

“Then… Georgios killed him? To hurt Aleksandra?”

Khun shrugged, setting the cup down on his saucer. “Possibly. It certainly seems like that might be the case.”

He hadn’t expected Frann’s next question, though.

“... Then does this have anything to do with those secret meetings you’ve been having?”

Khun paused. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play dumb, I know that you’ve been in contact with someone else, for some reason,” he said, watching him closely with his eyes narrowed. “Someone besides Kima and me. There are some nights that we can’t find you anywhere just prior to being locked in our rooms for the night, but you’re always back in the morning. And I’ve seen those notes you have on you at times that you hide whenever you see one of us looking. I thought it might be Aleksandra at first, but it isn’t, is it? I think you should tell us something this important, when it likely involves all of us.”

Part of Khun wanted to be impressed that a hothead like Frann was actually using his head for once and taking the initiative to try to put things together on his own, but it was too troublesome for him to be really happy about it.

“Look, letting you know my every move was never part of our agreement,” Khun said, feeling vaguely defensive. “I’m doing what’s necessary to get you and Kima out of here, which is exactly what I promised you as my part of the bargain. Your role is just to listen to me and do as I say.”

“You keep saying that, but it’s hard to trust you when you don’t tell us anything,” Frann argued. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that if you gave us some solid proof that you’re working in all our interests for once, we would be more likely to listen to you?”

“I just don’t understand why you want to know everything so badly, especially if your last task was enough to turn your stomach,” Khun whispered, but his tone was sharp. “What if I told you that I did kill Fabien, would that make you happy? He’s been causing Kima grief for a long time, after all. In that case, would you be content with just knowing how I did it or would you also like a description of the look on his face when he realized he was going to die?”

Frann physically drew back. “Y-you—”

“Or would you have wanted to do it yourself?” Khun continued cruelly. “Prove to yourself that you’re strong enough to take matters into your own hands? Or rather, to prove to Kima that you are?”

Frann froze. It didn’t even look like he was breathing. It was a vaguely disturbing reaction to Khun, who had been fully expecting him to fly into a blustering rage as he usually did.

“You’re a real bastard, you know that?” Frann said simply, once he finally broke the silence between them. Then, without another word he stood up and walked away.

Khun sighed as he watched him go, feeling tired. Well, at least Frann probably wouldn’t be asking any questions for a while, so he couldn’t really find it in him to regret the turn the conversation had taken.

One thing Khun’s long history of scheming had always made clear to him was that the fewer people who knew the full design of the plan, the better. There were a number of reasons for it. It meant there were fewer chances of leaks and less possibility of outside parties being able to put things together themselves on the offhand chance they were to overhear anything incriminating. Fewer people knowing the plan also meant that each person could memorize and carry out their parts without being confused or influenced by the parts that had nothing to do with them.

Fewer people knowing the plan was also useful when the plan itself contained certain… elements that some might find questionable or even morally repugnant in nature, had they known about it in advance.

Frann—despite his penchant for constantly driving Khun up the wall—and Kima were both decent kids and they would still have a chance to live normal lives outside of this cage. They should be content to leave the truly disgusting, unforgivable parts of the plan to people like Khun, people who had already thrown away any hope at a peaceful life for the sake of selfishly climbing the Tower. He was prepared to do whatever it took to escape, he just wasn’t sure they were.

He couldn’t mess this up now. They were nearing the end, but he couldn’t allow himself to ruin it by being too impatient, or by letting certain people poke their noses into things that they didn’t need to know.

The wait was likely beginning to get to Albrecht too, he could tell. Apparently his dealings with Bam were still dragging on, punctuated by long radio silences as his team “negotiated” with FUG, which Khun suspected was a deliberate move on Bam’s part to buy time while they tried to track down Albrecht on their own. Bam had to know better than most the kinds of atrocities he’d be forced to commit if he were to actually agree to Albrecht’s deal, and he would be doing his best to avoid accepting while also never outright refusing. It was a dangerous balancing act, but with this method, the stalemate would be allowed to continue until something shifted.

The opportunity Khun had been waiting for was finally approaching, and he’d have to be ready.

Which meant it was just about time to issue a certain set of orders to a certain someone.

*

“What if I… ” Bam said, almost unable to believe he was going to suggest this. “What if I agreed to Albrecht Glass’s terms?”

The looks of shock and horror were expected, but they still hurt. Bam looked down rather than face them. He supposed it was something of a heavy topic to drop on his friends in the middle of dinner, but he still hadn’t expected all activity around the table to cease at his words.

Shibisu was, predictably, the first to break the silence.

“Bam… Bam, no,” he said softly, clearly working hard to keep his disbelief under control. “You know that if you agree to work for him he won’t exactly have you… uh, mopping the floors and trimming the hedges, right? You know what he’d want you to do.”

“He’d want me to kill people, right?” Bam shot back, suddenly angry and so, so tired. “It’s what everyone wants from me. I’m not that naive, Shibisu—I’ve also killed people before.”

“Not like this,” Shibisu said. “God… holy shit, Bam, I miss Khun too but I can’t believe you’re even considering this.” He glanced around wildly, probably concerned that there might be some FUG members hovering nearby who would report such careless words back to the higher-ups.

“Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve really thought this through,” Anaak said. Her voice was level but she was looking at him like she didn’t quite recognize him. “There’s a big difference between killing… Regulars and Rankers and the like and killing ordinary civilians. You don’t want to cross that line, trust me.”

“Ordinary civilians have already died because of me, and more probably will in the future even if I’m not holding the knife myself,” Bam said, trying to feel as confident as he sounded. Anaak was right, of course, in most cases he would agree with her, but….

He was getting desperate, it was as simple as that. It had been months now, months since Khun had been taken. Months of purposely stalling Albrecht’s negotiations and months of fruitless searching the rest of the time. Months of trying to placate FUG as he halted his efforts to climb the Tower in their tracks. Months to imagine what exactly might be happening to Khun now and to manifest nightmares about what the rest of his life might look like if he ended up losing him for good this time.

Sometimes Bam caught himself actually thinking, wondering if killing people for Albrecht was really so bad if it got him Khun back. His thoughts would wander down darker turns, and he’d begin to question what was the point of being a “good” person if it meant he was constantly required to sacrifice the things he loved to keep that designation, if people could and did still turn around and call him a monster regardless. It all just felt so pointless sometimes.

Wouldn’t it be so much simpler if he could just go out and be a monster for real, then be able to come home at the end of the day knowing that he could find some measure of comfort in Khun’s arms? Or was the only future he deserved truly just a half-life of misery and loss in the service of some high-minded ideal?

The unfairness of it still tasted bitter, no matter how much he tried to convince himself it didn’t.

“You don’t have to hold yourself responsible for the actions of others, whether they do it in your name or not,” Hatz said bluntly, startling Bam out of his thoughts.

“I agree,” Endorsi said, blowing on her forkful of pasta in a deliberately unconcerned way. “This doesn’t sound like you, Bam. I think you’re too close to this. And don’t think I haven’t noticed how little you’ve been sleeping—you should get some proper rest before you make any rash decisions.”

“And we haven’t given up, yeah?” Shibisu said encouragingly, following up on Endorsi’s lead. “We’re still looking, and sooner or later Albrecht will show his ugly face and then we’ll have him. Just trust us and give it a bit more time, okay?”

There was a quiet chorus of agreement from around the table, and Bam was given the distinct impression the conversation was over whether he wanted it to be or not. It was ironic that the whole group was so against him for suggesting this, when they had been the ones telling him in the beginning that he’d have to be tougher, fiercer, more ruthless if he wanted to climb the Tower. He tried not to resent them for it, since he knew they cared about him and were only trying to talk him out of something he didn’t truly want to do, but it was difficult.

Rak had been curiously silent as he wolfed down his meal, and when Bam looked at him he met his gaze with a level stare then nodded once, a motion so subtle for him that Bam nearly missed it.

He wondered if it should alarm him more that he was pretty sure that Rak had just indicated that he’d follow Bam down whatever blood-soaked road he wanted to go down, but perversely he just felt grateful.

Bam decided then that he really didn’t like the space his mind was occupying at the moment, and that he should probably get out of this conversation before he said or did something he would regret.

“Maybe you're right,” he lied, addressing the group as a whole as he stood, picking up his barely-touched plate. “I think maybe I do need to get a bit more rest. I’ll talk to you guys later.”

“Bam—”

“It’s fine,” he said, offering a carefully blank smile. “I’m fine, I’m sure I’ll look back on this tomorrow and wonder what I was thinking. You guys should make sure you get some rest too.”

“... Goodnight then, Bam,” Shibisu offered cautiously, not looking the slightest bit convinced by his words. Shibisu had always been worryingly perceptive. “Let us know if anything comes up. We’re all here for you still, you know.”

“I know, Isu, and I’m grateful for that. Goodnight.”

After a brief stop to rinse off his dirty dishes and return them to the cupboard, Bam left the galley. He stepped through the door and almost ran into a person who was waiting outside, leaning patiently against the wall as if she’d already known he would be the next one to exit the room.

“Hwaryun,” Bam sighed once he realized who it was.

She inclined her head politely. “My God.”

Bam didn’t really have the energy to deal with more difficult conversations at the moment, so having acknowledged her, he turned his attention away from her and began to make his way down the corridor. She didn’t take the hint and fell into step behind him with a practiced grace, walking just a little behind and off to the left. It was very like her—her words and actions were always deferential to him but she somehow managed to give off the impression that she was silently laughing at a joke that only she was in on.

He stopped a few seconds later, realizing that she would likely follow him until he deigned to speak to her. “You want something,” he said, turning to face her. Or more likely, FUG wanted something, and she was simply the messenger. “I was going to get some rest, can it wait until morning?”

Realistically, he would only sleep for a couple of hours maximum, but he knew that the FUG elders were deeply unhappy with him and if he could put off that particular meeting until the next day then he would.

She smiled at him. “It could wait until tomorrow if you really want—”

“Great,” Bam said briskly. “I’ll see you tomorrow then, Hwa—”

“—but I don’t think you’ll want to wait until tomorrow,” she said, her smile widening even further.

Bam frowned. His curiosity had been piqued, but it seemed that she really was going to make him ask about it himself rather than offering the information voluntarily.

He sighed again. “... What is it?”

“Something you might find interesting,” she said, gesturing. “Follow me, if you’d like.”

Of course, she only offered the option when there was no option at all.

He followed her.

Chapter Text

“There’s probably no point in asking where you were, is there?”

Khun frowned in vague annoyance as he entered his quarters and heard the question Kima had just asked. Not because he hadn’t expected her to be there, no, he’d told her to go in ahead and he would be by soon after, but for another reason.

Based on the question and the way in which she’d asked it, Frann had likely told Kima about the conversation he and Khun had had a few days ago, and also possibly talked his suspicions over with her. It wasn’t surprising since Khun knew they talked over most things privately, but it did make him a little more tense to know that there was a possibility that Kima agreed with Frann, or potentially had even been the one to give him the idea in the first place.

“Nope,” Khun said, plopping down on the bed next to her. He’d ignore it for now, and hope he was just being overly cautious. “But I can tell you that if everything goes according to plan, which it should, then we’re getting out of here tonight.”

Kima froze. “That’s… pretty big news to just drop like that. You mean it?”

“Of course. Would I lie to you?”

“If you thought it served a purpose, absolutely.”

“Well, I’m not lying,” Khun said, somewhat haughtily. “I got the last thing I needed today, and everything else is already arranged. We also don’t have much of a choice in the matter—we need to get out of here as quickly as possible, before Abrecht starts poking around too much. His attention is mostly on Aleksandra and Georgios at the moment, but it’s only a matter of time before he starts looking more closely into my actions as well, and that could be… bad.”

“Do you know what happened to Aleksandra and Georgios, then?” Kima asked.

Khun blinked. He’d expected questions, but that wasn’t one he’d expected her to ask. “They’re both fine—they’re Albrecht’s favourites, after all. I’m pretty sure they’re both just confined to their rooms for the time being, but that’s to keep them away from each other as much as anything.”

“That’s good, I’m glad nothing worse happened to them. As we know, the Duke doesn’t take kindly to people who stir up trouble.”

“But Aleksandra is terrible to you,” Khun said. “Don’t you hate her for it?”

Kima shrugged, looking a bit awkward at the question. She folded her hands neatly on her lap, although her thumbs fidgeted slightly. “I don’t feel like I have the right to hate her,” she said. “She has her own problems that I probably couldn’t understand. And for all I know, she’s right to think there’s something wrong with me.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you,” Khun said and was a little startled at how petulant he sounded. It just irked him a bit, to hear her saying something so blatantly untrue.

“It’s nice of you to say that,” she said. “Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve told you yet about how I came to be in the Duke’s possession, have I?”

“I’m not being nice. And you don’t have to.”

“No, but I want to,” Kima said. “Are you willing to hear it?”

“I admit I have been curious,” Khun said. It wasn’t unusual, it was in his nature to want to know more about everything, his allies included. It just wasn’t always the most practical use of time in the grand scheme of things, and he’d assumed it would have been… unproductive if he’d demanded she spill her own secrets the way he’d had her reveal everyone else’s. “I just thought it was one of those things you wouldn’t want to talk about.”

“It’s alright,” she said. “Really.”

“If you’re sure.”

“Okay,” Kima replied, before pausing to consider. She frowned thoughtfully. “Sorry, I’m just trying to think of how to start. You’re going to be the first person I’ve actually told any of this to.”

“The offer’s still there if you would rather not.”

“It’s fine, I already think about that day a lot, anyways. It was probably somewhere around four years ago already,” she said, although there was something clinical about the way she spoke, as if she was describing someone else’s life. “My family was fairly wealthy… nothing like yours, I’m sure, we would have seemed like specks of dust to someone from your family, but for our village we were pretty well off. We crafted and sold stained glass, and people would come to us to commission windows for public offices or temples. We had some windows set up in the house I grew up in, too. We didn’t really need anything so fancy, but I guess my father liked the opportunity to show off his wares, give an example of the kind of thing he was capable of.

“I didn’t really understand that reasoning when I was a child but I remember that I always loved those windows. There were two of them, one showed a picture of a whale that was expelling a great plume of water and the other one was a hawk in flight, coming out from between two clouds. They were… so beautiful.”

She was silent for a few moments after that, seemingly caught up in the memory. Khun wondered if she could still picture those windows perfectly even after all this time, wondered how many long hours she had spent staring at them.

“We were taken by surprise when the Duke came,” she said, shaking herself out of it. “We didn’t really have much in the way of self-defence in the village, much less anything that would work against Rankers. We had the biggest house so they went there first. There were… negotiations, if you could call them that, but we couldn’t pay them the money they wanted. They killed my parents and took me as compensation, and on the way out, they smashed the windows. They broke the whale one first and I remember crying, begging for them to leave the other, but the Duke just looked at me and smashed that one himself. Told me that from now on, he was the only Glass I had to concern myself with, and then he laughed.”

Khun didn’t know how to respond to that, except that his feeling of loathing for the man grew even more. He hadn’t even known such a thing was possible at this point.

“And that’s what I think about, sometimes, Mr. Khun. How I watched my family slaughtered before my eyes, and as I was dragged away all I was thinking about were the stupid windows and how sad it was that they were broken and there wouldn’t be anyone around anymore to fix them. I’ve already forgotten my parents’ faces, but until the day I die I don’t think I’ll ever forget what those windows looked like. What kind of person does that?” she smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant one and didn’t quite fit her face. “See, maybe Aleksandra is right. Maybe there is something wrong with me.”

Khun was reminded, involuntarily, of deep blue gems hidden under floorboards, of the body of yet another dead Khun child and the tears in Kiseia’s eyes when she told him she never wanted to see him again. Of looking at his mother’s outraged face and feeling absolutely nothing, and the not-so quiet mutters of what is wrong with that boy? following in his wake whenever he left the estate.

But this was about Kima, and not about him.

“Personally, I don’t think it necessarily says anything about you, bad or good,” Khun said, shaking off the memories. “You were probably afraid for your own life, and sad, and angry. Sometimes people don’t always respond to things the way they think they should.”

“I don’t know if I believe it’s just that. It’s just that you like me, Mr. Khun, so you’re willing to make excuses for me,” she said, and he was honestly surprised at the confidence she had in that assertion.

Khun scowled, irritated. “I don’t just make excuses for the people I like.”

He’d been accused of lacking objectivity before, by Hwaryun, but in that situation she had been specifically referring to his inability to be objective about Bam. This was the first time someone had suggested that it might extend to other people as well.

“I don’t know what I can do to convince you, but trust me when I say that if that’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, you have a long way to go before you could be as bad as most people I’ve known, myself included.” Khun said.

“What about your FUG Slayer, then—Jue Viole Grace? What is he like?”

Khun blinked, surprised at the sudden shift in topic. “Bam is… Viole is one of the good ones, actually. He’s incredibly powerful and has the potential to be even more so, but he’s a kind person. He’s too kind, really—he gets all messed up sometimes, trying to make everyone happy and fix things that were never his problem in the first place. He’s hard on himself as well. You would probably get along well with him.”

“Maybe,” Kima said. “It sounds like you really miss him.” Her voice took on a slightly wistful quality.

“I do, he’s my very best friend,” Khun agreed. “And… I don’t know, life just feels… like it’s a lot more when I’m with him,” he shifted, suddenly uncomfortable with the topic. He definitely hadn’t meant to share even that much about himself. “But what about you?” he asked quickly, “I know you said your parents are dead, but don’t you have anyone else out there that you want to get back to?”

“I had some relatives in other towns,” she said. “I have no idea if any of them are still alive, or if they’d even want me back. I’ve never been the best at making… personal connections.”

“Frann seems to care about you.”

“Not from any effort on my part,” she said dismissively. “He just saw the way the others treated me in the beginning and was kind to me. He snuck me food so I didn’t have to leave my hiding places and talked smack about Aleksandra and the others to try to make me feel better. He’s not much better off than me, but he helps.”

“You do know he has feelings for you, right?” Khun asked. It had been pretty apparent to him from the beginning, but he wasn’t sure if she’d noticed or not.

“I try not to think about it,” Kima said, snorting at Khun’s look of mild surprise. “That sounds cruel, but it’s true. He’s been nice, but I don’t like him like that. And I do like him well enough, but… it makes me uncomfortable sometimes that I’m not the person he thinks I am.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“That I’m the kind of person who cares more about a few pieces of glass than people,” she said. “And that I probably would have escaped without him if he hadn’t gotten involved on his own. Trust me, Mr. Khun, he’s better off without me.”

He wished he had some reply to offer for that, but found he couldn’t. Not even he was that much of a hypocrite.

He was saved from having to answer when there came a knock on the door, and Frann entered without waiting to be let in. “Sorry I’m late, I was just… wait, did something happen?” he asked suspiciously, glancing uneasily between the two of them. “You look serious.”

Kima shook her head. “It’s nothing,” she said. “We were just talking about our escape attempt.”

“Ah, I see,” Frann said, shuffling his feet. He seemed unwilling to meet her eyes. “Cool. That’s cool. Looking forward to it.”

“So you’re okay with leaving tonight after lights out, then?” Khun asked drily.

Frann’s eyes snapped straight to Khun’s. “Huh? Wait, what was that?”

“Or not,” Khun said, unable to resist a snicker at his look of honest bafflement. “And yes, I am being completely serious.”

“It’s just… isn’t this too soon? Are we really all ready?” Frann asked.

“Can six months of preparation really be ‘too soon?’” Khun asked.

“I don’t know… maybe? I mean, we don’t even have a way to get out yet, do we?” Frann said, anxiety plain on his features. “Lights out means that we’ll be locked in our rooms, and we don’t have a way of unlocking—”

Khun reached into his pocket and pulled something out, wordlessly handing it to Frann.

It was a red key card.

“Where… did you get that from?”

“This one?” Khun asked, tapping it with a forefinger. “It was Fabien’s. He disappeared so thoroughly and everyone was so busy trying to figure out what had happened that nobody thought to deactivate it. It still works, I’ve checked.”

“But how did you—shit, you did kill him, didn’t you?”

“I got it by knowing the right people,” Khun corrected him. “You or Kima will have to take it in case they decide to search me for anything suspicious before we get a chance to escape. Once it’s lights out, use the card to unlock your own door and then come let us out.”

“And then?” Kima asked.

“And then we dodge the two guards who will still be on duty on this deck and leave via the main access corridor. From there, I know the way we’ll have to go in order to get to the hangar. Then we’ll take one of the smaller ships and get out of here. I know how to fly one, I’ve done it before.”

“You’re saying all these things without any evidence to back any of it up,” Frann protested. His brows were furrowed, like he was really bothered by something. “We could run into way more guards once we’re through the doors, and that’s not even touching on how you know how to find the hangar in the first place. How do we know the Duke won’t just chase us down again even if we do make it past everyone and get out of here?”

“He won’t,” Khun said.

“Why not?”

“He just won’t,” Khun said. “You’re going to have to trust me on that.”

“Trust you, yeah,” Frann muttered, although he didn’t seem willing to argue the point this time. “Sure thing.”

They went their separate ways not long after that, promising to lay low as much as possible and meet up again after lights out. Frann looked worried—a common enough expression for him—and Kima characteristically expressionless, so Khun didn’t think that they would draw too much attention with their behaviour.

The rest of the day crawled by.

It was a normal day, as far as Khun had grown accustomed to. Aleksandra and Georgios were absent, which was new, but that mostly just meant that the mood was quiet, their followers suitably cowed without their leaders to inspire them. Khun also noticed that the guards seemed to be keeping a closer eye on him than usual, but he hadn’t been specifically approached yet. He had meant what he’d told Kima that morning, however—it really was for the best that they leave sooner rather than later, because if they stayed then they would investigate Khun more closely eventually, and that was the very last thing they needed.

Even lights out didn’t mean an end to the waiting—their group wouldn’t be able to make their move until at least two o'clock in the morning, after all. In the meantime, he occupied himself with some last-minute preparations. It felt strange to push the bed back and scratch the day’s tally mark on the wall knowing that, one way or another, it would be the last one he’d make. Six months and three days, and far too long by anyone’s standards. But the clock was ticking, and by the morning this would all be over.

He began putting the butter knife he used to make his mark back under the mattress where he usually hid it, but he hesitated, and on a whim decided to pocket it instead. It wasn’t much of a weapon by any stretch of the imagination, but it felt too strange to be going into this entirely unarmed. Any piece of metal was better than none.

He was unsure what to do with the rest of his… he was hesitant to call them “possessions,” as they’d been given to him by someone who was holding him against his wishes and he had no sentimental attachment to any of them. There was no point in packing them to take with him and he almost wanted to destroy them, but it seemed like far too much time and effort for such a petty thing that might go completely unnoticed.

What he was really looking for, he realized, was something that could distract himself from how nervous he was. He’d thought he’d been fairly successful in remaining levelheaded, but his hands were shaking again.

Calm down, he told himself, forcing himself to sit still on the bed and conserve energy rather than pacing the room restlessly. Everything was still going according to plan. With any luck, by this time tomorrow he would be back trading stories with Bam and the rest of the team, where the worst thing he would have to worry about was putting up with not-so-gentle mockery from Hatz about how only he could have ended up in something as absurd as a hostage bride situation in the first place. He just had to hold it together a bit longer.

It was somewhere around two thirty in the morning when Khun heard the sound of the door to his room unlocking, and he looked up to see Frann’s familiar face.

“No problems getting here then, I take it,” Khun asked, rising to his feet.

“No,” Frann mumbled, glancing away awkwardly.

Khun frowned. “You sure about that? Have you picked up K—”

“No, not yet,” Frann interrupted. “We should stop talking unless we have to… to be as quiet as possible, you know?”

Khun’s frown deepened. Frann was often brisk with him, was a nervous person by nature, but Khun couldn’t quite shake the sense that something was off. It bothered him more than he’d like to admit. But he had gone too far now to call the whole thing off, especially for as small a reason as nonspecific paranoia, so he nodded in reply and followed Frann out, the door shutting behind them. He would have to look into it later, but for the time being this would have to come first.

There was no sign of the guards in the hallways as they made their way toward Kima’s quarters, which was something that Khun had been expecting, but it seemed eerily quiet. Frann padded along next to him, his face wan in the low lighting, but he didn’t stop or slow down.

They turned a corner, and Khun halted in his tracks, unable to believe what he was seeing.

And he suddenly became aware that every bad feeling he’d had about this night was completely justified, because standing in the hall right in front of them, flanked by two of his guards was Albrecht Glass himself.

“Nice night for a stroll, I take it?” he asked in a friendly voice, and Khun knew in that moment that both he and Frann were as good as dead.

*

As he and Frann were each secured by a guard and led down the corridor, Khun could barely concentrate on what was happening around him, too distracted by the overwhelming clamour of his own thoughts. How had this happened, and why had it happened? Had Khun slipped up somewhere? Albrecht was supposed to be asleep—everyone except the night shift was supposed to be asleep, so why had he been awake and waiting for them? He had planned the whole thing perfectly, so where was the mistake?

Unless Albrecht had known, somehow, it couldn’t….

No.

No way. It couldn’t be.

They were brought to a nearly-empty room about the size of one of their bedrooms, and judging by the distribution of doors that was probably what it was, albeit one that just wasn’t in use at the moment. Someone had brought two chairs and set them up facing each other a few meters apart. Khun and Frann were each led to one and forced to sit, their hands bound behind them. There was a very deliberate choice at work here, Khun thought, realizing that for whatever reason, for whatever was to follow, Albrecht wanted Khun and Frann to be able to clearly see each other.

He had a very bad feeling about this. A sick understanding began to coil in his stomach.

“Leave us,” Khun heard Albrecht telling the guards once they’d finished securing their captives. “Don’t enter this room for anything short of an emergency, do you understand?”

Once the guards were gone, Albrecht turned to them and did something absolutely horrifying—he smiled.

“You’re probably quite lost right now, aren’t you, Aguero?”

Khun did his best to glare, and Albrecht just laughed.

“Yes, I’d imagine you are,” Albrecht said, “so I think it’s only fair to inform you that all of this was only possible because of an interesting story young Mr. Frann here decided to share with me today.”

Frann.

Khun looked across at his co-conspirator, not knowing what kind of expression to expect.

… It was underwhelming. It was just Frann. He looked scared stiff, maybe a little bit guilty, and… there it was, that stubbornness that Khun had noticed when they’d first been introduced.

What he didn’t see was a hint of regret.

“You always struck me as the type to prefer to work alone, so you can imagine my surprise when Mr. Frann came to me of his own volition to confess that he’s been working on an escape plan with you for months now. It seems like you don’t exactly inspire confidence in the people you recruit to help you, though.”

Khun had always prided himself on being quick on the uptake, but even with this new information the pieces still refused to line up in his head. In theory, he understood very well what had happened, but it still didn’t make sense to him. Out of the three of them, Frann had been by far the most afraid of what would happen if something went wrong during their escape attempt. He’d seen what happened to the last group to try the same thing and he knew that the same fate would await them if they failed. And Frann hadn’t been lying when he said he hated Albrecht, Khun could at least be certain about that.

And despite all that, he’d still betrayed them.

“You idiot,” Khun said finally, to Frann. He wasn’t sure what he should be feeling, frustration or fury, but it was numbed by the ice in his veins. “You idiot, I told you I’d get you out, and why, after all this time… we were almost there. Why the hell couldn't you just trust me?”

“You know why! You’re a Khun, and besides that, I’ve seen what you’re like!” Frann shouted accusingly. “All of those so-called plans of yours, never telling me or K—never telling me anything you’re thinking,” he stuttered, eyes widening as he realized what he had nearly revealed. He rushed to continue. “You don’t blink when people die and you just go around manipulating everyone you come in contact with. Look at Aleksandra, she trusted you and you were just using her from the beginning—why wouldn’t I think I would be next when I was no longer useful? You’ve never been honest with me, and you blame me for not trusting you?”

“And you decided you could trust this asshole instead?” Khun asked in disbelief. “The one who kidnapped you and killed your family? How is that rational?”

“I did what I had to,” Frann said grimly, his expression frightened but resolute. “I’m sure you can understand my reasons, at least.”

Khun could. God damn him, but he could. He’d put it together when Frann had stumbled over Kima’s name, when he’d made a point of avoiding mentioning her during that little condemnation speech. When he’d taken the key card himself and unlocked his and Khun’s door but not hers.

It was all for Kima. Of course. He’d probably never truly given up on his original goal of trying to talk her out of attempting to escape this whole time. And now at the eleventh hour he’d finally made his decision, and he’d decided that between a life of miserable captivity and her getting killed trying to carry out Khun’s plans, the former was preferable. He decided it would be better if he ratted them out and the plan fell apart, they took the fall for it, and Albrecht never learned that there had been another person involved.

Except that it was stupid, and he couldn’t understand why Frann couldn’t see that if Khun really was planning to betray them, there was no reason to believe Khun wouldn’t just tell Albrecht about Kima himself now that the plan was ruined just to spite him. Frann’s attempted countermeasure was half-baked at best, completely irrational and motivated only by fear and desperation.

But Khun had known since the beginning that Frann was rash and emotional, after all, so could he really be surprised it had turned out like this? He really should have known better than to accept him so easily, should have seen this coming from a mile away. He had so many previous experiences of backing the wrong horse, you’d think he’d be able to recognise another one in the making by now.

“And I… it’s not like I wanted it to come to this,” Frann added in a quieter tone, unable to hide the tremor in his voice. “Just… why did you have to get involved? It wasn’t perfect, sure, but it was fine, everything was fine up until you—” he broke off, head hanging.

Unfortunately for Frann, Khun had no more time or energy to dedicate to feeling guilty. Frann might have made his decision and given up, but Khun couldn’t afford to yet, not as long as the person he wanted to be with the most was somewhere outside and not locked away in here.

The bindings on his wrists were fairly tight, but maybe not impossible to deal with. There was the tiniest amount of give to the rope. If he could dislocate his thumb then it might be possible to free one of his hands, but it was what happened after that would be the real test. Albrecht was a Ranker, and Khun was just a Regular. Aside from the slight advantage of heightened physical abilities from Khun Eduan’s blood, he wasn’t even a particularly strong Regular in terms of combat ability. Fighting Albrecht with these odds would be suicide, but it was an option.

If he’d still had that then maybe he could have leveled the playing field a little bit more, but it was still seemingly just out of his reach. Yet another miscalculation to add to the rapidly growing pile.

Albrecht hummed, drumming his fingers on the back of Frann’s chair, taptaptaptap. “So what have you two really been up to these last few months?”

“Just… spying, mostly,” Frann said, eyes still downcast. It seemed he’d already used up his entire supply of righteous anger, leaving him looking oddly small and very, very tired. “Collecting information, although I don’t know what for.”

“What kind of information?”

Frann lifted his shoulders, the closest thing he could manage to a shrug with his hands bound. “Just… guard backgrounds and rotations, information on the other concubines, information on you when we could get it. But I never knew what it was we were looking for, if anything. We—I was just told to relay everything I found back to Khun.”

“Interesting. Were there any other tasks Mr. Khun had you do?”

“I guess… there were also the guards he had me poison. By putting the drops in their food while I helped to serve it out.”

“Poison, really?” Albrecht looked torn between anger and laughter at the unexpected response, and Khun honestly couldn’t say which possibility scared him more. “So tell me: which guards did you poison? Was Fabien one of them?”

“I don’t think so… and I don’t know, they were just some guards.”

“Oh come on, don’t feel like you have to protect Mr. Khun now. You’ve made your stance quite clear.”

“I’m not!” Frann protested. “I’m really not, I just… they were just guards, I never knew why it had to be them specifically. And I never planned on killing anyone! I really was just supposed to make them sick.”

I see,” Albrecht said thoughtfully, leaving Frann for the moment and circling back to Khun. Khun very deliberately did not flinch, even when Albrecht roughly grabbed a handful of his hair. “And why might that be? Care to enlighten us as to your reasoning, Aguero?” Albrecht asked mockingly, hand twisting painfully and pulling.

Even as the pain hit him, Khun was abruptly aware of the danger this position put him in.

Oh God, please don’t notice. Not now, not after all this time.

“I just didn’t like them,” Khun gasped out, shooting an infuriating smirk at Albrecht, hoping to distract him, to keep him from seeing what he shouldn’t. “They… looked at me funny, I just wanted to mess with them.”

“We both know nothing you do is without purpose.”

“Isn’t getting back at someone I don’t like reason enough?” Khun asked, grinning despite the way his scalp was still screaming in pain. “I am… a Khun after all.”

“That much is true,” Albrecht said, letting him go suddenly and turning back to Frann. It was all Khun could do to avoid slumping in relief. He knew this was still far from over.

“So, Mr. Frann,” Albrecht continued in a good-natured voice, as if nothing had happened. “I mentioned Fabien earlier. Even if you weren’t directly involved, do you have any insight into what happened to him? You were the one who had his key card, after all.”

Frann appeared worn down to his very bones. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have no idea, I’m sorry.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“I don’t know anything,” Frann repeated. “I only had a few jobs to do and I wasn’t told about anything else. I really have told you everything I know.”

Albrecht came up to Frann and cupped his pale face gently in his hands, tipping his head up.

“You’re absolutely sure you haven’t forgotten anything?” Albrecht asked, his voice a dangerous caress. “No last minute details or revisions, nothing else you’d like to add?”

“No, that was everything.”

“I see,” Albrecht said, and his whole demeanor abruptly changed, his face going cold and blank. “Then I guess there’s no point in keeping you alive anymore, is there?”

His hands moved almost too quickly to see, and in a single, sharp motion he snapped Frann’s neck.

Khun didn’t scream, but he wasn’t quite able to stifle his sudden shocked intake of breath at the suddenness, the finality of the movement.

He shouldn’t be surprised, he shouldn’t. He’d known that this was coming. He’d known that Frann was going to die—that they both were—but somehow, he’d hoped….

Ah, that was the mistake. He should have known better than to trust in hope.

“It’s really a shame, I was hoping he would have known more,” Albrecht said conversationally, allowing Frann’s body to slump lifelessly back into the chair as he turned his attention back to Khun. “He was much more willing to talk than you’ll be, I’m sure. I thought I could at least save myself a bit of trouble.”

Khun swallowed, his mouth bone dry.

“What, have I finally managed to make even you speechless? This is a first.”

In his back pocket, Khun still had the butter knife that he’d been using to make the marks on his wall for the last six months. It might as well be a toothpick for a Ranker, but it was better than just teeth and nails. Even a toothpick could be a sufficient distraction if it was rammed far enough into someone’s eye, and he was willing to bet that a butter knife would have a similar effect.

It was difficult to not struggle to free himself as Albrecht came closer. Every carefully-trained instinct in Khun’s body read the approaching Ranker as a danger, as a predator, as a threat to be avoided at all costs, but he fought them all down, forcing himself to remain still until the opportune moment. He would only have one shot, he couldn’t waste it by striking too early.

Not yet, not yet….

His hands twitched in their bonds.

Not yet, not yet….

Albrecht was only a few feet away.

Not yet….

Now.

With all his strength, Khun wrenched his left hand through the loops of rope, ignoring the pain as he flayed a good amount of skin from his hand and wrist at the same moment as he kicked out at Albrecht’s knee with all of his strength. He was satisfied to hear a heavy grunt from the man as it connected, and he flicked the knife out of his back pocket and into his right hand, which was still wrapped loosely in a bracelet of rope but was nowhere near as mangled as his left. Taking advantage of Albrecht’s momentary stumble, Khun held the knife firmly in a backward grip and lunged forward to make a single, decisive stab at Albrecht’s face, aiming for the target he’d decided on in advance—his right eye.

… Only to be stopped in his tracks as Albrecht caught his wrist mid-stab, easy as breathing.

“I thought we’d been in agreement when I said you weren’t suicidal,” Albrecht said pleasantly, the arm held before him not trembling even slightly despite Khun having thrown all of his weight behind his strike. The knife’s blade had halted a bare inch away from its intended target, but the Ranker hadn’t even blinked. “What changed, love?”

His grip tightened even more around Khun’s wrist, causing him to drop the knife. In one motion, Albrecht brought his other arm around in a punch that struck Khun with such force that he went flying. He hit the wall, and he hit it hard. His vision blurred, going dark around the edges, and for a few confusing and terrifying moments he had to fight just to stay conscious. Albrecht’s strike made the punch he’d taken from Georgios feel like the brush of a butterfly’s wing in comparison. His face where he’d taken the hit throbbed, as did the point on the back of his head that had connected with the wall. His ears hadn’t stopped ringing, and it took him several seconds longer than it should have to realize that Albrecht was still speaking. And worse, he was coming towards him again.

“... if you’d anticipated that fighting me in close quarters would be more advantageous to you since the space is too small for me to use my spears, then I’m sorry to inform you that I’ve killed opponents far stronger than you completely weaponless,” he tutted mockingly. He grabbed Khun’s hair again, dragging him roughly to his feet to pin him to the wall. It had hurt the first time, but now it was agonizing. He wasn’t able to completely stifle a whimper. “If you’d just cooperated, then we might not have had to resort to this unpleasantness.”

If he’d had the strength, Khun would have scoffed. They both knew that it was always only going to be a matter of time until he pissed Albrecht off badly enough that he’d lash out at him, regardless of whatever stalemate he was in with Bam. Khun had been very fortunate, and it was only because of the tentative protection provided by his status as a hostage and bargaining chip that he’d been largely left alone for this long.

But he had the distinct feeling that his luck had finally run out alongside Albrecht’s restraint. It had already been six months. At some point, Albrecht was going to get sick of waiting for results and change his angle, and then….

Well, Khun had hoped to be gone before it got to that point. So much for that.

“Now, Frann’s little testimony did raise some questions, and there were some other things I was planning on investigating further that I wonder if you’d be able to shed some light on,” Albrecht said. “I will find out eventually, one way or another, but I do hate doing work that I don’t have to. Who knows, maybe if you say the right thing it’ll put me in a more merciful state of mind. And let me assure you that at this point, you have very little left to lose.”

Khun approximated an expression of regret. “Sorry… I think I have amnesia now. I’ve forgotten everything.”

“You know,” Albrecht said almost conversationally, “I don’t think I’ve ever had a spouse I’ve hated quite so much as you.”

“I aim to impress,” Khun replied through clenched teeth. “I wish I could say that I hate you the most out of all your spouses but you’d be surprised… some of them really hate you.”

Albrecht’s lips tightened, barely reigning in his temper. “Trying my patience even further isn’t going to help you. Why did you poison those guards?”

“They were the ugliest.”

Albrecht punched him, the impact rattling his brain in his skull. He spit blood.

“Where is Fabien? And what else have you been planning this whole time that you didn’t want to share with your little underling?”

Khun pasted on his best smirk. “Wouldn’t… you like to know.”

Albrecht struck him again, probably not with all of his strength—no good interrogating someone with a broken jaw, Khun’s brain saw fit to remind him—but it hurt like a motherfucker. He really did almost pass out that time, but the pain from the fist in his hair, ironically, kept him grounded.

“And another thing… I know that Frann wasn’t your only helper. He slipped up a few times, maybe you were hoping I hadn’t noticed? There were three of you, not two. Who else was there?”

“There weren’t... three of us.”

Albrecht shook his head, as if he’d expected this answer but was saddened to hear it. “It really is too bad you chose to go about this the hard way, or you could have at least left a pretty corpse for me to send back to your Slayer Candidate.” His grip on Khun’s hair loosened, but the respite was brief as the hold was simply moved to his throat instead. It wasn’t a crushing grip just yet, but the threat was there—it likely would become so the second he said something Albrecht didn’t like. “This is your last chance. I won’t ask again.”

There was a note of finality in his voice, and Khun knew that this time they truly were nearing the end.

It was something that had hovered on his awareness the whole time he’d been here, that his death was not the most unlikely outcome of this scenario, nor was it the worst one. Despite how much he wanted to survive this, wanted the chance to see Bam again, he had known from the beginning that in the grand scheme of things, even he was expendable. In the event that he died here, Bam would mourn him but ultimately move on.

Khun hadn’t wanted to die—he still had so many things he wanted to do, and he didn’t want to make Bam sad, either—but over the course of his life, he’d come to understand his own limits. Sometimes you couldn’t get everything you wanted, even if you begged and pleaded and struggled with fate to get just that bit farther, that little bit higher. Even if you deluded yourself into thinking that you were clever enough to outwit your own karma when it had been steadily creeping up on you for your whole life, with every step you took, every person you stepped for your own purposes.

Sometimes you had to face the fact that all along, you were just a sad, stupid little fish who thought that because you ignored the walls of the tank, you were free.

I’m so sorry, Bam.

It seemed he wouldn’t be able to take him up the Tower after all.

“Do your worst,” Khun said, closing his eyes. Time was up.

Albrecht’s grip tightened, cutting off the flow of oxygen to his lungs. Khun thrashed in his hold, struggling even though he knew it was pointless. He hoped Bam would be happy that he’d struggled, that he’d tried his best to survive even if it amounted to nothing in the end. He tried to remember him as he’d been that day on the 86th floor, grinning and laughing, because that was a much better sight to die with than Albrecht’s smug expression as he killed him.

It really was a shame… he’d waited so long, he’d really wanted to see Bam again. The real one, not just the one who lived in his memories. It was a shame to fall short at the last minute.

But then, the impossible happened.

Albrecht staggered with a curse as the ship shook violently under his feet. The lights flickered before going out entirely, and the room was thrown into darkness. The grip around Khun’s neck loosened just enough to allow him to slump to the floor, gasping for breath.

“What the hell was that?” Albrecht muttered to himself, and was barely able to catch himself when it was followed by an even worse tremor. It felt like some sort of impact, and despite being in the process of frantically trying to fill his aching lungs with air, Khun had never wished for a window to see what was happening outside so much in his life.

Some thirty seconds of darkness later, the lights came back on, and there was a humming as power was presumably restored to other areas of the ship as well. These lights were dimmer though, and cast a blue glow as opposed to the white light of before. Some sort of backup power system, Khun guessed. Whatever had happened must have done some real damage.

Meanwhile, the tremors—or impacts, potentially—continued.

The door hissed open, revealing a guard whose expression would be more fitting on a felon being led to the chopping block than a loyal soldier speaking to his superior. “Sir?” he asked nervously, eyes traveling between Albrecht’s pissed-off face and Khun’s beaten-up one, clearly aware that he’d interrupted something.

“Didn’t I tell you not to disturb me?” Albrecht snapped, and the guard took several steps back.

“But… sir, it is an emergency. We’re under attack.”

“We’re cloaked, how is that possible?” Albrecht demanded.

“I-I'm not sure, but… there's a warship, and from what I could see…” the guard’s anxious eyes drifted to Khun and paused there, seemingly involuntarily. “I think it’s FUG,” he said in a near-whisper.

Khun saw Albrecht hesitate, sizing up his options. He looked at the blood on his fist, then at Khun’s battered face, quite possibly weighing his chances of still getting what he wanted even with Khun so clearly injured. Possibly wondering if now that he’d gone this far, was there really any harm in just pushing that little bit further.

The moment held for far too long, and Khun swallowed, tasting metal and the sour tang of his own fear.

“Fine,” Albrecht said finally, shooting a poisonous glare at Khun. “I’ll deal with this later. If this really is FUG he might still be useful. And if not… well, I’ll know where to find him.”

Khun could do little more than watch uncomprehendingly as Albrecht took the guard and left the room, locking the door behind them. It seemed almost impossible to believe, and he could barely wrap his throbbing head around it, but….

“Time’s up,” he said to no one in particular.

*

It was absolute chaos onboard the Kraken.

Albrecht’s first act had been to order everyone who had been asleep for the night shift awake to respond to the threat, sending the majority out to face their attackers, but he’d also been forced to keep a small number back to see if they could sort out their current technical issues. It wasn’t just primary power, most of the main systems on the ship, including the cloak, weapons and propulsion were also down—potentially a shortage caused by the power surges earlier—but for all intents and purposes they were dead in the water. From what he’d been told about the state of the ship, they were lucky to even be airborne still, and the timing could not have been worse.

Albrecht’s pocket chimed as he made his way up the staircase of the main accessway, and he set it in visible mode as he took the call. It was from one of the men he’d sent to look into their failing systems to try to determine a root cause. “Yes, what is it? Have you found out what happened?”

“It’s… it’s worse than we thought sir, it’s not just our systems,” the man on the other end of the Pocket said. His voice sounded haunted, like he’d seen something horrifying. “Nobody who was on patrol tonight was answering their Pockets so we sent someone to investigate. Sir… they’re all dead.”

“What? Who?”

“... Everyone, sir. Every single person who’d been on the night shift. They were just lying in the halls, it looks like they were either poisoned or suffocated but we haven’t had time to confirm. They’re all cold… if I had to guess, it looks like they’ve been dead for a while.”

Just what the hell was going on here?

If they had been dead for a while, then they had likely been killed before the current attackers had even arrived, Albrecht realized. There was someone else, some other factor he’d missed. “Do you have any way of tracking down the person responsible?” he asked, gritting his teeth in frustration. “It sounds like we might have a mole.”

“We’ve been trying, but whoever it was, they were long gone by the time we got there. Our technical problems might have been their work as well, there are clear indications of sabotage in—”

The voice cut off with a gurgle, and only silence followed. Albrecht cursed, putting his Pocket back in invisible mode as he stormed down the corridors. He needed to get to the bridge. The men he’d sent there weren’t responding, and maybe from the command center of the ship he would be able to restore some form of order among his men and get propulsion back online. Rankers were basically human weapons on their own so he was less concerned about that part, but as it stood now, running away wasn’t even an option. They were well and truly cornered, and now it sounded like they might have already been boarded as well.

How could this be happening? Was it really FUG who was attacking them? He had initially suspected that despite the frightened rumours among his men, it could just as easily have been the work of another warlord—perhaps Elias Farys Wesselwick from Floor 106 finally making a bid for control over Albrecht’s territory—but the fact that someone had already taken out a solid third of his crew so quickly and quietly, and presumably from the inside….

Albrecht had received no confirmation of who or what was responsible as of yet, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the answer lay with one particular member of the Khun family. It seemed absurd and Albrecht had no idea how he could have managed it, but it was too much of a coincidence to assume that he just so happened to be planning to stage a jailbreak the very same night everything else went to hell.

Albrecht knew he had miscalculated. He’d been blinded by greed, and now he was paying the price.

Jue Viole Grace had been his goal all along, of course, but when Albrecht and his forces had struck during the Floor Test they had been unable to secure the Irregular before his FUG reinforcements had arrived. At the time he had been annoyed at the inconvenience but was satisfied with the results overall, because fate had instead seen fit to grant him another piece that had the potential to be nearly as valuable, and could still ultimately aid in bringing Jue Viole Grace over to his side.

But it had been a mistake to marry Khun Aguero Agnis, that much was undeniable. He had been aware that he was useful as a hostage but also dangerous and difficult to contain. Albrecht should have kept a much closer watch on him than he afforded his spouses, should have either killed him outright or, if he was absolutely determined to hostage him, thrown him into solitary confinement and kept the door locked tight until the Slayer Candidate caved, even if it took years. But instead, he’d taken one look at the Lightbearer, seen those sharp eyes and that pretty face and he’d gotten ideas.

But it had all come to nothing, and now they were in a situation like this and he was already regretting not having crushed that lovely white throat when he’d had the chance. Surely there had to be other, less troublesome ways of bringing the Slayer Candidate to heel.

What he found when he reached the bridge finally answered the question of why he hadn’t heard anything from this part of the ship in quite some time. He did a double-take, unable to believe what he was seeing.

And at precisely that moment, he also became suddenly, chillingly aware that he wasn’t alone.

Albrecht hadn’t met Jue Viole Grace in person before, but he’d seen him over endless video calls and, frankly, hadn’t been especially impressed. He knew better than to entirely discount the numerous accounts he’d heard of the Slayer Candidate’s strength, but it had been difficult for Albrecht to look at him during their negotiations and not see someone who was still just a desperate boy, helpless and out of his depth. It was easy for stories to get out of hand, he had reasoned, and people were more likely to talk up the power of an enemy they had lost to. It didn’t mean Viole wouldn’t still be a worthwhile ally—on the contrary, in many ways this was actually preferable, as his naivety would only make him easier to control.

He had just assumed that the descriptions of the Irregular as some kind of implacable demon or god were likely the work of overactive imaginations.

But this… this was not the work of some boy.

It was like… some otherworldly force had ripped through the bridge of the Kraken, leaving the ship gutted and mangled in its wake, metal beams torn through like tissue. The power was out on this deck, but cavernous gashes in the hull allowed moonlight to spill into what was left of the room and cast a silvery glow over bodies strewn about the wreckage. It was impossible to determine the living from the dead, and even if there were any survivors they must have known better than to draw attention to themselves, to attempt to fight something that could not be fought.

And there in the center of this devastation, impossibly, stood Jue Viole Grace. His face was terrifyingly blank, cold as stone, beautiful as a carved idol. But his eyes… those burned like suns, inhuman and full of an unspeakable fury as he turned his attention onto Albrecht.

“You,” he said in a voice that might have been a whisper or a roar, Albrecht couldn’t tell. He felt rather than saw the fabled Thorns at the Irregular’s back ignite, radiating a wave of pressure so intense that it nearly knocked him backwards.

Albrecht couldn’t even begin to guess how Jue Viole Grace had finally managed to track them down after all this time, but such concerns fell away as a veritable wall of shinsu began slowly spiralling up from around the man, and for the first time in his very long life Albrecht felt the whisper of death approaching.

FUG’s God had arrived.

Chapter Text

Khun didn’t know how long he lay on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Maybe he even passed out at some point, it was hard to say. Every once in a while the room would shake as if the ship had been hit by a stray shinsu bolt, and he would wonder blearily what Bam was doing at the moment, if that strike had been one of his.

Eventually, his surroundings refocused themselves somewhat, and his thoughts started making a bit more sense. Once the numbness faded he slowly became conscious of the fact that, miraculously, he was still alive. That he hadn’t been killed.

Hadn’t been killed yet, he amended, once the novelty of still being capable of drawing breath had worn off sufficiently.

With that sobering realization, his thoughts immediately turned to the subject of escape. Right, he should probably be thinking of how he could get out of here before Albrecht returned—the last thing he wanted was to still be lying prone on the floor when the man came back to finish what he’d started. The only problem was, he wasn’t sure how many options he had at the moment. Khun flexed his hand experimentally, considering. Soon, maybe? How much longer would it be? He didn’t like unexpected surprises, and he’d had plenty of those already today.

He dragged himself into a sitting position with difficulty, a twofold effect of having been beaten to within an inch of his life and stiffness from occupying the same position for such a long time. He made the mistake of scanning around the room, and his gaze fell upon the still form of Frann, still slumped in the chair where he’d died. His face still looked surprised, one final expression frozen in death.

Khun had seen corpses before. He’d seen corpses he’d made before, so he couldn’t figure out why the sight of Frann’s oddly twisted neck and empty eyes made him feel like throwing up. He choked back the bile as he felt it rising in his throat, his eyes watering at the burn.

Really, Frann had been such an idiot, right to the very end.

He deliberately turned his face away from the sight as he attempted to get his frazzled nerves back under control. But despite resolving to pay it no notice, he could have sworn he still felt that dead stare boring into his back accusingly, and the sensation made him shudder.

Disgusting, he thought, although he wasn’t quite sure who or what he was directing the sentiment at.

He was interrupted by a familiar-sounding beep from the far side of the room, which Khun immediately recognized as the sound of the door being unlocked. He stiffened, dragging himself to his feet in preparation to do… something to whatever guard came in, but when the door slid open it revealed only a small woman holding a yellow key card, her face almost preternaturally composed apart from her wide eyes as she took in Khun’s haggard appearance.

“You’re alive,” Kima said, her gaze scanning first over Khun, then moving on to the rest of the room. Her breath stilled when she saw Frann’s body, and Khun saw something close off in her dark eyes. She cautiously entered the room, no doubt taking note of the fact that there was no point in checking for a pulse as she approached. She crouched down next to Frann’s body and gently pressed his eyes closed, murmuring something so softly that Khun wasn’t able to hear it.

After several long seconds she stood, taking a fortifying breath and squaring her shoulders before turning back to Khun. “I’m glad you’re alive at least, Mr. Khun,” she said, her voice unnervingly calm.

He had never before hated the fact that she was difficult to read so much. He couldn’t tell if she actually was happy or if it was a veiled barb, a criticism of the fact that he’d survived somehow and Frann hadn’t.

“How did you get in here?” Khun asked.

“One of the strikes to the ship earlier knocked out the power for a few moments before the backup system kicked in. Do you remember?”

Khun remembered it clearly despite the fact that Albrecht had been doing his best to kill him at the time. It was probably the only reason he hadn’t succeeded. He nodded.

“I’d already been trying to get out of my room at that point, so when the lock failed I was able to take advantage of the opportunity to force the door open,” she said. “I hid in the hallway and watched the Duke leave this room not long after. After that, the guards down here were called to the upper decks to face the intruders and nobody really noticed me, so I picked one of their pockets as they ran by and got a key card. Then I just waited until I was sure everyone was gone to come investigate for myself.”

“Smart.”

“And I’m assuming you already know about the attack. This was part of your plan from the beginning, wasn’t it?”

Khun couldn’t meet her eyes. “You’re right, it was. The ones attacking us right now are FUG, and the story I gave you about running away was a lie. I never intended to just escape.”

“Was it also a lie when you said you’d get us out of here?” she asked.

“No, I did mean that,” Khun said, sighing heavily. He rubbed the back of his bead, feeling where a large lump was forming with a wince. “I really did mean to get you—both of you—out of here. It would just have been in a bit different way than I said.”

What Khun had wanted from the beginning was to create a situation that would allow FUG to attack the Kraken when Albrecht was at his absolute weakest. Even though Khun had hated having to depend in any way on Bam to clean up this mess for him, this nightmare situation had provided them with the perfect opportunity to eliminate Albrecht as a threat for good, too perfect for Khun to ignore. For him, the battle that had been joined months ago had never ended, just changed form slightly. Khun was still Bam’s Lightbearer, and he knew that as long as Albrecht was alive he would continue to stand in their way of passing the Floor Test and continuing up the Tower. Nothing would be solved if they merely ran away now, he needed to be stopped—permanently.

But Khun also adamantly refused to lead Bam into any scenario where he’d be in real danger, so he’d done everything in his power to make the battle unwinnable from Albrecht’s side… which is why he had made plans to eliminate as many of Albrecht’s people as possible before the battle began and ensured that various parts of the Kraken’s vital systems were all sabotaged. With any luck, that part of the plan had still been carried out, since Frann had never known about it.

“So rather than escaping, the plan was actually to have FUG take down Albrecht, and then we would be free to leave once it was all over?”

“More or less,” Khun said. It would be more accurate to say that the idea was actually to cause Albrecht’s whole setup to crumble from within and then have FUG show up near the end to sweep up the pieces, but Kima’s guess was basically correct. “Most likely, I was going to have you and Frann hide somewhere between here and the hangar so you’d be out of the way when the fight began, and then I would leave you to go do something I had been planning on under the cover of ‘scouting ahead.’ I would have made sure that FUG picked you up once the battle was over so they could bring you back to wherever it is you wanted to go.”

Kima was silent, mulling over his words, maybe thinking about how different things could have turned out if any number of factors had lined up differently.

“Then it’s fine.”

Khun blinked. “What?”

“I said it’s fine. You said you’d get me out, and I decided to trust you. If you believed it was necessary to keep some of the details from us to fulfill your side of the deal, then I understand why you did it. And for my part, I’m...I’m sorry about Frann,” she said softly. “He left a note under my door you know, telling me what he did… and why he did it. I’m sorry, I should never have suggested bringing him into this.”

Khun thought he should be feeling some sort of satisfaction in this scenario, that he’d been right and Frann had been wrong. Frann had tried his best to destroy the plans they’d worked so hard on, after all, had never trusted Khun from the beginning and had even betrayed him to Albrecht. He’d picked his side in the end, cementing himself as an enemy. But despite all of that, he was dead and Khun was alive, and the plan was still progressing along regardless of Frann’s actions. This was Khun’s victory, wasn’t it?

It didn’t feel like a victory.

“You shouldn’t apologize,” Khun said. “It’s because of me that he died.”

Kima shook her head. “It wasn’t,” she said. “He made his own choices and the consequences were his own as well.”

Her voice and hands were steady, but Khun could still see the sadness in her eyes. She wasn’t as unaffected as she’d like him—or herself—to believe.

He wondered if things might have turned out differently if he’d trusted them more, been more open with Frann from the start. Or maybe trusting Frann with more information may have made things worse in the long run for the exact reasons he had feared. He had no way of knowing. Only Frann had truly understood his own mind, and now there was no one left alive who could ever say for sure.

Khun looked at Kima, and his gaze dropped to her hand. Or rather, the yellow key card she was still holding. “Hey, can I have that?” he asked.

She blinked, taking a few seconds to register his question. “Of course,” she said, offering the card once she realized what he was referring to. “It won’t get you as many places as a red one would, but you know that.”

“It’ll get me where I need to go,” Khun said, pocketing the card. “I just need to meet someone, after all. And Kima, I have one last assignment for you.”

“Yes?”

“Find somewhere out of the way and lay low. Even if it hasn’t started yet, this ship is about to become a warzone. It would be a shame if you were to die now that we’re so close to the finish line.”

*

By the time Khun arrived, the upper decks of the ship looked nothing like the clean lines and gleaming hallways he remembered from the last time he’d been escorted through them to see Albrecht. It was clear that the fighting had already reached this part of the ship, and it had left devastation in its wake. There were scorch marks on the walls from shinsu and energy weapon discharge and other portions of bulkhead had been blown away completely in places, leaving smouldering ruins and the charred remains of corpses scattered nearby. The grim scenery painted a compelling picture of what was likely taking place on the rest of the ship at the same time.

If there had been any further attempt at diplomacy between Albrecht and FUG, then it seemed as if it had ended in a spectacular failure.

Khun nudged one of the slightly less-burned bodies with his foot, turning it over onto what had presumably once been the person’s back. About half of the face was gone and what was left wasn’t immediately recognizable to him, so he wasn’t even sure if this was a FUG member or one of Albrecht’s people. He was, however, grateful that it didn’t seem to be anyone he knew or particularly cared about.

The corpse was still clutching an energy rifle that didn’t look too badly damaged, so Khun spent a few precious moments prying it out of stiff fingers with a bit of difficulty. His aim had never been the greatest—lack of practice, for the most part. It was the sort of thing he would usually rely on a Lighthouse to aid with, but if he was close enough to his target he was pretty sure even he could manage to point and fire a weapon well enough to do damage. He wasn’t sure what obstacles he might encounter on his way to his destination, but at this point he was at least reasonably certain that any weapon would beat a butter knife, not that he even had that anymore.

He was given a chance to test that theory fairly quickly, because after only a few short minutes of traversing the empty corridors he came across another person—a Fisherman from the looks of it, leaning against a wall and breathing hard. Possibly a deserter, or possibly on his way somewhere else, Khun wasn’t sure. He was armed, a hefty-looking needle hanging loosely in his left hand, although it seemed as if he had yet to notice Khun’s arrival.

Khun eyed the man warily as he approached. It wasn’t immediately apparent whose side he was on, and he didn’t want to accidentally attack an ally and make things awkward for Bam later. It didn’t take long for the man to look up and notice him, and he looked surprised for only a split second before his expression shifted to suspicion and he lifted his needle threateningly.

“Y-you, what are you doing up here?” he demanded. “Aren’t you supposed to be still locked up with—”

Ah, one of Albrecht’s, then.

Khun shot the man in the face. He keeled over, clutching his face and screaming.

Khun raised his eyebrows, looking over the rifle with a new appreciation as he stepped over the writhing figure and continued on his way. Maybe he’d keep this one to give to Isu later to replace that garbage little sidearm he’d been relying on for the last twenty-odd floors. Khun had always thought he could use something with a bit more firepower.

Having gotten past one person successfully, Khun was feeling slightly more confident. He was hoping that luck would be on his side for the remainder of his errand, but it wasn’t long before he heard the sounds of combat and shouts coming from further down the passageway. This area seemed to have seen some heavier fighting than most, and there was a fair amount of debris blocking the path ahead. It wouldn’t be easy going from this point forward.

As if to confirm his suspicions, five people suddenly piled around the corner in front of him, seemingly on the run from whatever was on the other side. Khun recognized several of these as guards who had been in Albrecht’s employ, and they clearly recognized him as well. And unfortunately for him, it seemed as though dealing with the escaped prisoner with a weapon took precedence over whatever they had been retreating from, or they were at least certain that he could be dealt with quickly, because they were quick to pull weapons on him.

A lone person was one thing, but dealing with five might be a bit more tricky, he thought as he looked between the advancing figures. One of them had four bangs hovering around their shoulders, and at least one other had an energy weapon similar to the one that Khun was carrying and—presumably—was also armed with more prior experience with it as well.

He didn’t get a chance to find out, because at that moment there came a terrifying roar that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and his fingers twitched instinctively on the rifle. He was just in the process of trying to figure out if he should fire and if so, who he should be firing at when he realized something.

That roar sounded familiar.

A massive form came barrelling through the group in front of him, scattering the mercenaries like ragdolls. Before Khun could even fully take stock of the situation, he was swept up into two monstrous arms and without a second’s delay he was being bodily carried down the hall at a breakneck pace.

“Blue Turtle! Are you alright?” Even amidst the chaos, Khun could easily recognize the narrow, reptilian red eyes that were fixed on him, although the look in them was not one Khun was used to seeing directed at him.

“G-Gator?” he asked in disbelief, wincing as the rough handling reminded him of his injuries and the state his body was in at that moment. No wonder Rak looked so uncharacteristically worried. “Fine—I’m fine, put me down.”

“No way, Turtle!” Rak boomed, and Khun winced from the volume of that voice so close to his ears. “You’re lucky I was even able to find you in this mess, I’m not going to risk you running off again before I get you back to the Black Turtle.”

“Black Tur—Bam? Bam is here?” Khun asked breathlessly.

“Of course he’s here, where else would he be?”

Bam was onboard already, which must mean….

“What about Albrecht?” Khun asked. “Where did he end up?”

“Who is Al—oh, you mean that Ranker Turtle we came here to hunt,” Rak said, eyes taking on a somewhat feral gleam. His arms tightened almost imperceptibly around Khun. “Don’t worry, he’s the Black Turtle’s prey. They were fighting outside the ship before, but the Ranker Turtle ran back in here like a coward after Black Turtle got a few good hits in. He was bleeding a lot though—Black Turtle will hunt him down soon enough.”

“That’s a really drawn-out way of saying ‘he got away,’” Khun sighed. Honestly, this guy….

“Didn’t you hear what I said, he has nowhere left to go—the Black Turtle will chase that lousy turtle down no matter where he tries to skulk away to. Now stop squirming and hold still—”

“Sorry, Rak,” Khun said, grabbing a handful of the crocodilian’s cape from over his shoulder and tossing it over his face. He took advantage of Rak’s sudden blindness and the confusion that followed to slip out of his grasp, and he hit the floor running.

“Don’t worry!” he called back over his shoulder. “Tell Bam I’m fine, I just have something I need to do now. I’ll explain later!”

“Get back here and tell him yourself, stupid turtle!” Rak roared, struggling to free himself. “Idiot Blue Turtle, why are you always like this—”

Khun didn’t hear what followed but he had no doubt it was full of insults. Whatever, he’d obediently listen to Rak’s full range of complaints and expletives when this was all over. He figured he had several months worth of them to make up for so it might take a while, and if Bam was already tearing through the ship looking for Albrecht then he likely didn’t have a surplus of time at the moment.

Since the route he had been trying to take was currently blocked by Rankers and one irate and overprotective teammate of Khun’s, he was forced to take the alternate route he had thankfully thought to prepare in advance. Thanks to his brief meeting with Rak, Khun was even more convinced that he had made the correct choice regarding what he’d do with himself while FUG finished taking down Albrecht’s people.

Khun hadn’t been lying when he’d told Kima and Frann he knew how to find the hangar, and there was a good reason for that. He had always suspected that if this scenario played out as he thought it would, Albrecht would attempt to escape. He was a vicious fighter, true, but one of the reasons why he’d been able to hold onto power so successfully in the past was because he knew when to cut his losses and leave, regroup and build his strength up again for later. Rankers lived a long time, and as long as they survived there would always be time for second chances. Albrecht’s past actions would suggest that he was a firm believer in this particular school of thought.

So if Khun was correct and Albrecht was feeling overwhelmed, there was a very good chance he’d make for the hangar.

And Khun intended to meet him there.

Khun had been in the hangar before, although he’d been blindfolded at the time and hadn’t actually seen it. He at least knew what he was looking for now, and when he held the yellow key card up to the reader the door hissed open, revealing a very large space, bowed walls lined with small supply shuttles and fighter-type ships parked in neat rows. The room would probably be well-lit on a normal day, but with only secondary power the shadows were thick, and it would have been difficult to see further than a few meters away on any side if not for the light strips that marked the path ahead with a soft glow.

Well—nothing ventured, nothing gained. He stepped inside the room as the door slid shut behind him. Khun made his way down the walkway, keeping a wary eye out for any unexpected movement out of the corner of his eye. After moving carefully down the rows for a few minutes, he noticed what seemed to be random spatters of red liquid dotting the floor and knew he’d found what he was looking for.

“The fuel lines are cut.”

“What was that?” Khun asked pleasantly, turning to point his weapon in the direction the voice had come from.

As expected, it was Albrecht, albeit an Albrecht who looked like he’d been dragged through hell and back since Khun had last seen him. He was sitting, and while his posture seemed relaxed as he leaned against the side of one of the ships, it was clear upon closer examination that it likely wasn’t so much that he wanted to sit as he had simply been unable to remain standing. His right arm was ragged and hung limply at his side, and Khun was willing to bet that his left leg, which was extended casually in front of him, was very likely damaged as well. There was blood trickling from the corner of his mouth and when he smiled, Khun could see his teeth were stained red.

“The fuel lines are cut on every single one of them, and trust me, I’ve checked,” Albrecht said lightly. “Your work, I’m assuming?”

“Why would I bother doing something myself when I could just get someone else to do it better?” Khun asked, although he didn’t deny the accusation. “As if I would give you the option of running away. This place is crawling with FUG, you know, at this point your best bet would be to cut your losses and throw yourself upon Bam’s—sorry, upon Viole’s mercy.”

Albrecht laughed. “You’re not as smart as I thought you were, if you think that… that monster will have any sort of mercy for me after this,” he said, grin like a bloody slash across his face, and Khun was actually tempted to agree with him this time—minus the ‘monster’ part. Bam must have seriously gone to town on him if he was in this bad shape. All signs pointed to Bam not feeling particularly merciful on this particular day, or possibly just with this particular man.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Khun said with a shrug. “I didn’t seriously expect you to take that option anyways. That’s why I’m here now.”

“Because….”

“Because the truth is that while I have no problems using FUG for my own purposes, Viole is just too nice of a person,” Khun said simply, “so I decided from the beginning that I’d be the one to kill you so he doesn’t have to dirty his hands with you. I guess I was a little late to keep him from dirtying them entirely from the looks of it, but I can’t really take the responsibility for that. I would have been on time if you hadn’t locked me up.”

“It seems unlike you to be so thoughtful.”

“Or maybe I just wanted the pleasure for myself,” Khun said. “While I consider making alliances and ordering people around to be something like personal specialties, some things really are better to do with your own two hands.”

Albrecht shook his head pityingly. “There’s that arrogance of yours again. I wouldn’t be so smug about my ability to make alliances if I were you, considering your last ally was all too happy to betray you.”

“Frann was only one of the people I had working for me,” Khun pointed out. “You even figured that much out for yourself.”

“So you’re finally going to tell me about the other one, then?” Albrecht grunted, face twisting as he shifted his weight. It looked like he was preparing to rise but wasn’t quite able to yet. He seemed to be having some trouble getting his leg underneath him, so Khun guessed his theory of it being injured as well had been correct. “Some other… lost soul you fed the same line about helping them to escape?”

“Of course. And you’re right, it was just a line—I never really thought we could get out of here just by sneaking out. That was just something I told those two because it was an easier story to go with. Easier for them to accept.”

“Easier to accept than the fact that you’ve somehow been systematically killing off my men in preparation for this bloodbath?”

Khun smiled unpleasantly. “Your men on the night shift tonight died under my direct orders, it’s true, but in my defence, your guard captain was actually killed by Aleksandra,” he said. “It’s really too bad that she had to find out that he was cheating on her with Georgios, or poor Fabien might still be alive today.”

“Oh, so now the truth about Fabien comes out? I knew that even if it wasn’t you who actually killed him, it had to have served your interests in some way. His death was necessary because…?”

“Because the person you promoted to replace him with is secretly a FUG sympathizer,” Khun said. “And she’s been working for me—or rather, she’s been working for Viole—since before she came into the position.”

“You… what…?”

“It’s pretty simple actually,” Khun said. “I’m surprised you didn’t think of it earlier. For the job of a spy, pick a spy. And for the job of murder and wanton acts of destruction, hire a Ranker”

*

Apina Mei hadn’t known what to think when she’d first been approached by Albrecht’s newest acquisition, the Khun with the unnerving blue cat-eyes who had been brought in after a battle with Jue Viole Grace’s team almost two months back. During that first short conversation it was clear that he had already known a surprising amount about her, and as for the rest… well, going off of what she knew about his reputation, it was very possible he had simply made a very accurate guess.

Mei had once been one of Jahad’s Rankers before she’d voluntarily abandoned her position. She had only been a mercenary for a few years, and had only worked for Albrecht for two. She was pretty much just biding her time with Albrecht’s crew and wasn’t particularly ambitious for power or money. This was all well-known information among her fellow guards.

Less well-known was the incident that had led to her sudden departure from Jahad’s forces in the first place—how she had lost her faith and grown to hate the Tower’s god-king after his order to massacre everyone onboard the Hell Train had resulted in the death of her only brother during the battle at the Last Station. It severed her loyalty completely, leaving her with only a burning desire for revenge that she knew could never be achieved by her own hands. Jahad was beyond her reach in every conceivable way, and she had almost lost herself in hopelessness.

But there was one person she had heard rumours of who could potentially achieve such a thing—an Irregular of growing fame that the shadowy organization FUG apparently had great expectations for. She wasn’t a FUG member, hadn’t really thought of joining them beyond idle musings every now and then when she was particularly at ends, but she approved of their aims. And she was certainly a fan of the idea that Jue Viole Grace, the single person most likely to be able to kill King Jahad, was on his way up the Tower to do just that even as she lived and breathed.

There wasn’t an overabundance of loyalty to Jahad among Albrecht’s crew, but she still hadn’t been overly vocal about these particular facets of her life, just in case. She had thought she’d been quite discreet, all things considered.

But somehow, Khun Aguero Agnis had figured most of it out on his own, and had confronted her.

But not to fight. No, he had come to her with a proposition.

What he wanted from her was simple enough, but at the same time was something that would require her to uproot her entire life as it stood now. He wanted her to turn on Albrecht, to work for him instead and to do several specific tasks when he required them. In return, he’d promised to put in a good word for her with FUG. He had also mentioned, almost offhandedly, that as one of Jue Viole Grace’s companions he also had reason to believe that the Slayer Candidate would not leave this floor as long as Albrecht was still alive—in other words, as long as Albrecht drew breath, the Slayer would not fulfill his prophecy and Jahad would live on.

Mei had been skeptical at first and not entirely willing to accept orders from a Regular, and a prisoner at that. She had ignored the offer and been content to pretend the conversation had never happened so as to protect her own secrets, but as time dragged on and Jue Viole Grace failed to continue climbing, it seemed as though the Khun boy might have actually been telling the truth.

Jue Viole Grace hadn’t left this floor in months, an almost unthinkable delay in what had thus far been a famously quick ascent. Mei knew that if things continued as they had been, he would likely not continue climbing again for a very long time, if ever. And it would be even worse if Albrecht somehow managed to succeed in his aims of taking possession of the Slayer Candidate. He had no concern whatsoever if Jahad was killed or not—he just wanted to keep enjoying this self-serving little paradise he’d carved out on Floor 105 and use the Irregular’s power to selfishly further his own ends.

She’d never had any particular love for Albrecht—she’d thought him a boor, self-indulgent and tasteless, but she’d been so directionless after her brother had died, and Albrecht had at least paid reasonably well.

But she wasn’t directionless any longer. She took the deal.

The Khun boy managed to make her guard captain just as he’d promised, so on the predetermined night she had used the increased authority her recent promotion had afforded her to wreak havoc onboard the ship. She gathered all of the crew working under her onto one deck and turned off the air exchange, sealing the exits and flooding the hallways with a backflow of toxic fumes—as the Khun boy had suggested—only turning the ventilation back on once she was sure everyone in those areas were incapacitated or dead. After that, she had accessed and set charges to the Kraken’s weapons systems, grinning as wires burned and fused. She’d shot up the navigation array. She’d even taken her ax to the cloaking device that Albrecht had always been so proud of, wondering why she hadn’t decided to do this sooner—it had been almost cathartic.

And then, of course, she had cut the fuel lines in all of the ships in the hangar—her final directive from the Khun boy, to ensure that this was the end of the line, that the Kraken would become Albrecht’s tomb.

These were all things that were necessary to clear the way for FUG and their Slayer Candidate’s arrival, she knew, a slight spring in her step at the idea of one day finally seeing Jahad’s head roll, of helping Jue Viole Grace to achieve his destiny.

Or rather, she corrected herself, of helping My God to achieve his destiny.

It had been about time for another career change, anyways.

*

Simply getting Mei to contact FUG after winning her over would have been an easy enough task for Khun. But he had still needed to move her into a higher position to improve her ability to move freely without being questioned and give her greater access to various ship’s systems, such as the cloaking device, weapons and propulsion—all things she had later sabotaged at his request. It had also been a necessary step to ensure she was able to single-handedly take out the guards on night duty as well, by directing them all to the same location and killing them all at once.

Fabien’s removal had simply been convenient to make those things happen.

“Well,” Khun continued thoughtfully, “I guess I can’t claim complete innocence in Fabien’s case, either. Aleksandra came to me when she heard what he had done, just like I told her to do if she ever needed help. I knew she had one of the biggest stocks of hareflower among your spouses, so I gave her the idea of poisoning Fabien with an overdose when they were alone together after lights out. I also told her and her little group of friends how to dispose of the body in advance. She had his key card so she was able to unlock her own room and the rooms of as many of her friends as she needed to help her, and then all it took was a word from Mei to distract the guards long enough for them to open one of the atrium windows and drop the body out. Mei got Fabien’s key card in exchange for her help, which is how it eventually made its way to me.”

It had also been fairly easy for Mei to get the guards out of Aleksandra’s way at the time. She was already popular and had moved higher up in the guard hierarchy recently, thanks to several of her closest competition accidentally eating food laced with trace amounts of industrial-grade solvent and becoming unable to work. All it took was a few more doses of hareflower to distract the remaining guards, which also had the added advantage of putting them in an awkward position during the ensuing investigation—for obvious reasons, none of them had wanted to say where they’d been when their supervisor had disappeared.

Albrecht closed his eyes, grimacing in pain or anger. “All of this to remove one guard… but then, how did Aleksandra learn about this other affair in the first place?”

“I gave the information to Kima, who told her she’d spotted them together,” Khun said. “Aleksandra doesn’t like Kima but she also thinks that she’s a sneak, so she had reason to believe Kima would know about something like that.”

“How did you find out, then?”

“I didn’t,” Khun said, shrugging. “I made it up. There’s a possibility that it could be true, I guess. It didn’t take much to sell Aleksandra on the story so she might have even had her own suspicions beforehand. It didn’t take much to move her to murder, either—apparently Fabien had promised to take her away from here someday, so she saw his disloyalty as an unforgiveable betrayal. She’d been waiting for a chance to escape for so long… I can’t even imagine how much she must have hated you for all these years.”

Albrecht twitched. “And am I supposed to believe that little show with Frann was all a part of your plans too, then?” he asked.

Khun hesitated. “... No,” he admitted, gut twisting slightly at the sound of that name. “Although I suppose everything worked out well enough for me in the end. I had hoped to get FUG a chance to take a strike at you when you were unprepared, so the fallout of that did serve as a distraction in the end.”

“Hah! Worked out well, huh? Whatever you say. I was going to kill you, you know.”

“Of course I know,” Khun said, gritting his teeth. “You didn’t exactly make a secret of it.”

“It must drive you mad to know that after all of these clever little plots the only thing that saved you in the end was just dumb luck.”

“The thing that saved me was Viole, not dumb luck,” Khun said, offended on Bam’s behalf. “I let him know where I was, and he came. It was never up to chance.”

Albrecht gave an ugly laugh, finally managing to drag himself to his feet. He spat out a mouthful of blood, but it was unclear if it was merely from his split lip or if he was bleeding internally. He looked to be in really bad shape, either way. “You just keep telling yourself that. Mark my words, there will come a day when you’ll call and he won’t answer. After all, a fledgling god like that… he’ll get bored of you eventually, when he realizes that he has the whole world laid out at his feet for the taking. There is no reason whatsoever for him to pick you.”

“You’re probably right,” Khun said, ignoring the twinge in his chest as he acknowledged the truth of the statement. He could give that much to Albrecht, he was a dead man anyways. “Eventually there will come a day when he won’t need me anymore, but when that time comes I at least know he’ll let me down gently. And you….” he shrugged carelessly. “Well, you won’t even be around to see that day, so it’s not like you’ll be able to have the satisfaction of saying you told me so.”

“You really think you can beat me with your shinsu suppressed and a weapon you barely even know how to use?” Albrecht laughed mockingly. “You never learn. Really, I should be thanking you for coming to find me. Now all I have to do is overpower you here and your Slayer Candidate will have no choice but to let me go if he doesn’t want to see your brains splattered on the floor.”

“Well, you do seem to be pretty badly injured, but even then, you’re right. I doubt I could beat you,” Khun said affably. He tossed the rifle to the side, and Albrecht’s eyes bugged out in surprise at the action. “Which is why it’s lucky for me that I don’t actually have my shinsu suppressed anymore.”

With a flick of his fingers, curls of ice rose from the floor, wrapping around Albrecht’s limbs and pulling him back down before he could move even a single muscle to resist, pinning him on his back. Almost as an afterthought Khun sent one more to cover the man’s mouth. He was tired of listening to him speak, and it would be even more tiresome to have to listen to him scream.

“Even after I finally managed to break that damned collar earlier this evening, it took quite a while before I got any control back. Seems like your capacity for shinsu control can atrophy like a broken limb if you’re cut off from it for long enough,” Khun said conversationally, crouching over the fallen man, tapping one of the ice bonds as if testing its strength. Albrecht mumbled and thrashed in response, but Khun merely smiled at his struggles. “I hadn’t realized that would happen. If Bam hadn’t showed up when he did, I probably really would have died without being able to defend myself. Of course, I’m probably not up to my usual standards, but now that I’ve had some time to recover I think I can manage this much.”

It had taken the majority of the months he’d been on Albrecht’s ship to slowly corrode the plastic of the collar away using the cleaning solvent he’d had Kima steal. Just a drop at a time, here and there while the fan in the tiny bathroom buzzed endlessly in the background, the only thing standing between him and an inglorious death by poison inhalation. He knew that any sudden, violent attempt to remove the device would cause a reaction that could kill him, but a slow decay over a long period of time was just what was needed to break through the casing and melt the circuitry inside without triggering the anti-removal mechanism. He’d hidden the evidence of his work by banking on the day-to-day changes being so minimal that no one would notice any immediate differences, and by growing his hair out, concealing it even further with the length.

Never let it be said that Khun didn’t know how to play the long game. These last six months he had existed solely for the sake of getting Albrecht here, into this position, and he thoroughly planned to reap the rewards.

“I guess I don’t really have to be telling you all this, but honesty is important in a marriage, don’t you think?” Khun said with a cold smile, enjoying the sight of the fear that grew in Albrecht’s eyes as he recognized the words he’d uttered during their first meeting. “I’ll even let you see my real face again, as a parting gift. Now then, let’s see….”

A spike of ice shot up from the floor under his body, piercing Albrecht through the thigh. He made an aborted sound of pained surprise from behind his gag.

“Oh, that’s unfortunate,” Khun tutted, although his voice was as unrepentant as it had ever been. “I was aiming for your heart, but it’s such a small target and I’m a bit out of practice thanks to you. You’ll have to be patient but I’m sure I’ll get there eventually. Here, let’s try again—”

The next spike went through his stomach. The blood spattered on Khun’s face but he didn’t make any attempt to move away.

He hummed. “Closer… but still a bit off. This is embarrassing, make sure you don’t tell anyone, okay?”

The next went through his shoulder.

“And now it looks like we’re too far off in the other direction. Well that settles it, I guess I’m just not very good at this,” Khun confessed. “But I think I’ll get it right this time. And Albrecht?”

Unable to answer, Albrecht just stared at him, eyes glazed over with agony.

“Rot in hell,” Khun said, driving the final spike in. This one was much larger than the others and he made sure it went straight through the man’s heart, shooting up several bloody feet in the air even after tearing through his flesh. It was almost unfairly easy after all the trouble he had caused. “Die and be forgotten already, you piece of shit.”

And without even a whimper, Albrecht Glass was dead.

It was done, finally.

Khun’s heart was still pounding wildly in his chest despite the fact that his greatest source of stress within recent memory was finally a corpse, and he wasn’t quite sure if it was brought on by relief or if it was just that he was on the verge of collapse from suddenly using so much shinsu after so many months of being unable to. He could feel the weakened Firefish fluttering anxiously under his skin in response to his body’s strain and his accumulated injuries, and the sensation was almost foreign after all this time.

Khun took a deep breath and let it out slowly, willing himself to relax. He dropped into a seated position on the floor, just far enough back to avoid the puddle of blood that was rapidly dripping down and pooling around the base of the ice spires he had created. When the ice eventually melted and the water mixed in with the rest of the blood it would make for a truly unholy mess, but Khun doubted anyone would have to worry about cleaning it. There probably wasn’t enough left of the ship for that to be even a consideration anymore.

As far as he was concerned, good riddance to all of it. Albrecht, the ship, these miserable past six months.

“I wonder if this is what they mean by ‘til death do us part,’” Khun said, surveying his grisly handiwork. “What do you say, Albrecht?”

He didn’t answer, of course—not as much of a conversationalist in death as he was in life, by the sounds of it.

“Yeah, that’s a bit much, I think.”

*

By the time Khun exited the hangar, it seemed as though FUG had just about finished dealing with the last of Albrecht’s Rankers. The corridors were pretty much deserted as he headed back in the direction of where he had last seen Rak, hoping that he would still be nearby and might have some idea of where to find Bam.

What he found when he turned that final corner was a lot better than that, though.

The whole team was there now. The whole team and Bam.

Bam.

He had clearly only just finished fighting someone or something, his shinsu wings still ready at his back as he exchanged words with Rak. Even battle-worn, he looked almost exactly like he had when Khun had last seen him, although his tied-back hair seemed a bit longer and he looked tired, pale shadows surrounding his eyes and lending him an uncharacteristically haunted appearance. Whatever he was discussing with Rak must be pretty serious to put that look on his face.

And then Bam’s eyes met his and Khun saw his expression change, the stony look melting away into an all-too-human one of disbelief, like he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Rak did a double-take and turned to see what Bam was staring at.

It suddenly occurred again to Khun how he must look, beaten and bruised and covered in someone else’s blood.

“Ah, sorry,” he said, wondering if he’d recovered enough yet to summon the Firefish to fix the worst of the damage. He was prepared to try one way or another, but before he got a chance Bam was flying at him at breakneck speed, eyes wide and blazing and gold, gold, gold.

Khun reached out almost instinctively to catch him, dropping his rifle just in time to be nearly bowled over by the momentum as Bam caught him securely in his arms. He halfway expected to be steadied and set upright again, but Bam instead remained in that position, supporting almost all of Khun’s weight by himself with his face pressed into the crook of Khun’s neck as he took several suspiciously deep, shuddering breaths.

“... you… it’s really you….” Khun thought he heard Bam whisper into his shirt.

Khun’s mind blanked, unable to bring himself to move or do anything more complex than absentmindedly stroke Bam’s head. He could see the others over Bam’s shoulder, their expressions a spectrum of surprise and relief… Hatz, Rak, Endorsi, Anaak, Laure, Shibisu… he was pleasantly surprised to feel a bubble of warmth at the sight of their faces, he hadn’t known he’d missed them that much….

And Bam, whose own face was still buried in Khun’s disgusting and very bloody shoulder.

“Bam!” he exclaimed suddenly, voice horrified. Almost immediately, Bam was back up and staring at him, looking alarmed.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked, glancing around wildly like he was expecting another enemy, some new monstrosity to come crawling out from behind the bulkheads. His shinsu wings, which had dissipated after he’d crashed into Khun were already beginning to reform themselves, and… his eyes looked suspiciously wet. Had he been crying?

“Calm down, calm down, it’s just…” Khun said, the feeling of heat rushing to his cheeks providing the final nail in the coffin that held the remains of his pride after this whole ordeal. If he was lucky enough, the blush might be hidden by his bruises. “I’m really filthy right now, you’d probably do better to wait to hug me until after I’ve had a chance to have a bath,” he said apologetically. “Look, you’ve got blood all over your face.”

He tried to wipe the blood off with the cuff of his shirt, but only succeeded in ineffectively smearing it around on Bam’s nose.

He caught sight of the way Bam was looking at him, his initial shock slowly morphing to a warm, indulgent expression as Khun continued in his pointless task.

“What’s so funny?”

“Khun, I am literally covered in blood,” Bam said by way of explanation. And then he started to laugh.

Khun didn’t know if it was just exhaustion lending humour to the situation, but he supposed that yes, it was actually pretty funny for him to be worrying about getting blood on Bam when it already looked like he’d been wading through the stuff. Or maybe Bam’s laugh was just contagious, who knew.

After Khun let out his first awkward scoff, the others followed suit in short order, and soon they were all standing around laughing, surrounded by bodies and the ruins of what had once been Albrecht Glass’ fortress ship.

And they were all, to a person, absolutely covered in blood.

Good grief, Khun thought. This must be what going insane feels like.

Chapter Text

Bam arrived early for dinner.

The serving station in the galley had already been stocked with the next meal’s offerings in all their limited glory, but it seemed as though Bam truly was the first person to arrive. If the food was a little better it might have even been exciting to get first pick of the batch, but it wasn’t, so Bam found that his mood changed very little for either better or worse as he selected a tough piece of meat and dragged it from the pile with his fork, having little faith that it would be less leathery than its comrades.

Since he was alone, Bam allowed himself a sigh as he stared at his plate. He had been feeling melancholic all day, somewhat at a loss as to what he should be doing. And unfortunately for him, it didn’t look like the steak was keen on giving him any answers.

He had made more of an effort to be on time for social gatherings with the team lately, since Endorsi had threatened him with dire consequences if he continued missing their meals together even now that Khun was back. He supposed he was possibly excessively early this time even by Endorsi’s exacting standards, but there had been a reason for that.

Truthfully, he’d finished up his now-routine “continued failure to meet the needs of the organization” meeting with FUG and had originally planned on stopping by Khun’s room to visit him on his way back, but when he arrived he had, instead of knocking like a normal person or otherwise giving any indication that he was there, opted to waste the next several minutes dithering outside the door, unsure of what he should do next. It was at about that point that he began seriously questioning his life choices and had left, telling himself that he didn’t want to disturb Khun if he was busy or put himself in the position of having to endure more of Endorsi’s death glares for being late.

In his heart of hearts, though, he knew those were just excuses.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see Khun. It was, if anything, the exact opposite—he really, really wanted to see Khun. After spending the last half year missing him, the idea of being able to simply walk a few meters down a corridor to see him was… appealing to the point of being intoxicating.

But Bam was also trying to give Khun the space he needed. He knew that Khun was more introverted than he liked to advertise and that he would probably need his privacy and a chance to collect himself now more than ever, but it was difficult for Bam to keep that at the forefront of his mind when all he wanted was to hold Khun close and never let him out of his sight again. He had been completely serious about what he’d said on their date—not that Khun ever realized that Bam had fully meant for it to be a date. He wanted to be with Khun forever, if he’d have him, but after these past several months apart he was aware that his desire may have become tainted with a note of desperation.

... Standing outside his room like a lost puppy had been the final straw that pretty much cemented this impression.

So for the time being, he took that as a warning sign to back off. Bam had a lot of complicated feelings about his former relationship with Rachel and he still didn’t know exactly where it had all gone wrong, or if there was even anything ‘right’ about it to begin with. He’d wracked his brains for countless hours and even now he was only just beginning to accept that it wasn’t entirely his fault, that whatever else was going on, the majority of the responsibility for what had happened likely did lie with Rachel.

But at the same time, it had provided the motivation he needed to take a good long look at his own behaviour as well, and the unflattering conclusion that he had come to was that he had a tendency to be… clingy with people who were precious to him. If pushed, he could also veer towards selfish or even outright possessive. Albrecht had definitely noticed and taken full advantage of that weakness during their negotiations, realizing that he could make Bam angry by threatening to hurt Khun, and in turn make him jealous by flaunting his position as Khun’s husband, however unwilling that union might be. The sight of the man’s mocking smile was not one Bam would be able to forget any time soon.

Bam broke off that particular train of thought before it further soured his mood, reminding himself that Albrecht was dead now and trying not to feel too vindicated about that fact. Khun had thoughtfully done the deed himself, probably because he knew Bam didn’t like killing, but this had been one particular case where Bam… didn’t think he would have minded as much, to put it lightly.

But at any rate, Bam was clingy, and he knew better than to allow that particular flaw of his to take the center stage when dealing with Khun. He didn’t want to risk his own insecurities making this about what he wanted rather than what Khun needed. He’d waited a long time already, and if time was all that was needed, he would happily continue waiting for as long as was necessary.

Bam was struck with the sudden and uncomfortable sensation of being watched, and he re-emerged from his thoughts to find himself staring at a large vat of mashed potatoes as if they held all the secrets of the universe. And he was no longer alone in the galley—a short dark-haired girl was standing nearby, observing him with a bland expression on her face.

“Are you going to take any of those?” she asked, gesturing towards the dish in front of him.

It didn’t take long for Bam to recognize the girl as Khun’s fellow spouse, co-conspirator, and potentially friend from Albrecht’s ship. It was sometimes hard to tell that last point with Khun, though, since he played his emotions so close to his chest that some days Bam was pretty sure not even Khun himself was aware of them.

“Oh!” Bam said. “Sorry, I think I’m done with them… uh….”

“It’s Kima,” the girl said, dark gaze seemingly piercing right through him.

“Right!” Bam said, embarrassed. He really should have been paying more attention during their introduction, but at the time his thoughts had been otherwise occupied by the welcome sight of soft blue hair out of the corner of his eye. If Bam was being honest, he suspected that Jahad himself could have tapdanced into the room and announced he was abdicating the throne and Bam still probably wouldn’t have spared him more than a glance. “Kima. Have you been settling in alright? Is there anything you need?”

“I’ve been fine, everyone has been kind,” she said. Her eyes flicked to his hand and then back to his face. “Although I wouldn’t say no to some of those potatoes.”

“Ah—of course,” Bam said, realizing he was still holding the serving spoon. He handed it to her, trying to tamp down a bit on the awkwardness of the situation. “Help yourself. Although I did mean… was there anything else you needed besides… potatoes?”

Kima shrugged and began ladling a surprising quantity of potatoes onto her plate. For all that she looked like a sparrow, it seemed that she didn’t eat like one. “Last I heard, your people hadn’t managed to get in contact with any family of mine yet,” she said, “but they’re still working on it. It’s fine even if they can’t do it, though, I’ll just find somewhere else to go. Somewhere new.”

“Are you sure you’ll be alright?” Bam asked. “We could—”

“I am not a Regular, and I have no intention of staying with FUG,” Kima said, a note of finality in her voice. “I’m grateful for your help, but I’ll make my own way.”

Bam nodded a little uncomfortably and was about to excuse himself when he noticed Kima was still looking at him as if she wanted to say something more, even as she continued building the pile on her plate higher.

“Sorry, was there anything else?” he asked.

“Not really. Mr. Khun just talked about you sometimes, and I guess I was kind of curious to see what sort of person you are.”

“Oh… I see. Well, I hope you’re not too disappointed.”

He didn’t really mean to sound so down on himself, but he had the distinct impression that this conversation was not going particularly well. Despite what Khun had said about thinking that he and Kima would get along with each other, he honestly hadn’t found much common ground with her yet, and her attitude suggested that she didn’t seem to particularly like or trust him.

Bam was trying, though. She seemed to mean something to Khun, after all.

“Not really,” Kima replied. “He said you were kind, and you have been. You’re just a lot more normal than I thought you’d be.”

“Really?” Bam asked, blinking. “That’s surprising, Khun’s never really been one to buy into the whole ‘God of FUG’ thing. He’s usually the one who gets stuck reminding me and everyone else that I’m only human.”

Kima shook her head. “It’s not that he described you as a god, more like… you’re the image he has in his head when he thinks of a good person, and everything else can only be described in relation to that. Or something. I don’t really know how to explain.”

Bam nodded, not entirely sure how else to respond.

“But you’re more normal than I thought,” she restated her words from before. “It’s a good thing,” she added, like she thought he needed reassurance.

“Oh. Thank you?”

“Mr. Khun is a good person, too.” she said, and the certainty in her voice took Bam by surprise. She continued pouring gravy on her potatoes as if she hadn’t noticed his reaction, but Bam had the impression he still had her full attention. “Although I assume you don’t need to be told that, if you’re his friend you probably already know.”

Bam knew, of course—he’d known and considered Khun to be one of his closest friends for well over a decade—but he found himself impressed that she seemed to know as well. Khun had a difficult personality and his defenses were almost impossible to get through, so Bam couldn’t really blame the people who wrote Khun off as a coldhearted bastard, but he certainly didn’t agree with them, either.

Bam felt the beginnings of a smile curling around his lips. It was only slightly bittersweet. “You two must have been through a lot together in the past six months.”

“Enough, I suppose,” she said. “He was the one who helped me first, you know. He gave an excuse for it later and he said that he wouldn’t protect me, but….”

“But he did protect you,” Bam guessed softly.

Kima nodded. “He’s clever, but he’s clueless about some things too. He probably thinks he manipulated me into it somehow, but I had decided to help him from the beginning. I felt like I owed him, but more than that I think I just felt like he was someone I wanted to help.”

That… sounded a lot like the Khun that Bam knew. Khun was a rare sort of person, someone who clearly understood the world in terms of probability and levels of power but still rooted for the underdog anyways. He was someone who went through life believing that he deserved to be the one bad things happened to because he was a bad person, and willingly took on that role for no other reason than so that no one else had to. He had always proven himself capable of being terribly kind in his strange, tentative way, and Bam was glad that someone else had recognized that kindness in him.

But it seemed like there’d been some heartbreak this time, too. Khun had told him a bit about Frann and his betrayal, albeit in what was doubtlessly a very simplified form. The story had been delivered in a perfunctory way as he gave the rest of his report, but Bam knew that Khun was more likely to be excessively matter-of-fact for the things that affected him deeply than he was with things that truly didn’t bother him.

And to be honest, a number of Khun’s behaviours as of late had been… worrisome. He had thrown himself back into life with their party with a speed that had surprised everyone at first, powering up his new Lighthouses and filling himself in on all of the news he had missed while in captivity almost before Laure had the chance to remove the remains of the dead shinsu suppression collar from around his neck. Their disbelief had largely changed to amusement when Khun failed to show any obvious signs of trauma, and they eventually seemed to accept it as the return of his usual workaholic behaviour. It was something familiar and safe, and Bam couldn’t really blame them for being relieved to close that chapter of their lives.

But Bam also couldn’t entirely believe Khun was okay, despite how hard he was working to project that image. He was functioning, doing his work with his usual level of competence and he responded appropriately when spoken to, but he was too quiet, and Bam thought there were times when he seemed oddly emotionally detached. He had lost a lot of weight too, and yet consistently skipped meals in favour of working.

Maybe… there was a limit to how much space he should be giving Khun.

Bam had the uncomfortable feeling that Kima read all of these things on his face, because she looked at him seriously. “These past months have been worse for him than he’d like to admit. But you’ll look after him, won’t you?” she asked, although it didn’t sound like it had been phrased as a question. Scratch that, he knew it hadn’t been.

“Of course,” Bam said, smiling at her. He was aiming for reassuring, but for the most part he just felt grateful to her for helping him sort out his conflicting thoughts on what he should do, whether she had meant to or not. “I’ll do my best. Thank you for being there for him, Kima. And let me know if you do ever need anything, we’ll come running.”

“If I ever get captured by a Ranker again, you’re the first person I’ll call, Jue Viole Grace,” she said, before considering. “Well, maybe the second.”

*

Khun was in his room and typing away on his new Lighthouse, trying to ignore the unfamiliarity of the controls in his hand. The new models he’d received from FUG were the top of the line for regulars of his status—only the best for their God’s teammate, even if they hated that fact—but he’d had his previous Lighthouses for years, and the newness of them combined with his lack of practice over the last six months meant he felt like a newbie all over again. His hands felt clumsy and awkward, the steps he needed to take to access information were not intuitive, and more than once he had to fight not to give into the temptation to throw them all at the wall, bury his face in a pillow and scream.

When he’d received his new Lighthouses, the first thing he had done was contact Ran to give him a status update and confirm that he was still alive, and then he’d begun the long and painful process of seeking out the rest of his past affiliates and informants to tell them the same and hopefully begin to reforge those connections. It was hard work to re-establish himself, and six months was a long time to be out of touch in the world of information exchange. He was pretty much obsolete at this point unless he could catch up again quickly.

The idea of being useless was… well, not that it would come to that. He wouldn’t let it.

Luckily, there were more than enough things he currently had to occupy himself with. Team Bam had been all but inactive for the past six months, and the general opinion seemed to be that they should attempt the Floor Test again as soon as possible, before word of a power vacuum spread too far and some other warlord swooped in to claim the 105th floor for themselves. It seemed like a good idea, but the team was also out of practice from sitting around for so long, so Khun had taken the initiative to put together a new training program for them out of the goodness of his heart.

The results had been as expected. Shibisu had gamely tried to make a show of participating and had royally sucked at every turn. Endorsi and Anaak had used it as an excuse to duke it out between the two of them until they finally came to an agreement and rallied against the common enemy—him—and spent the rest of their allotted time cursing his name and trying to knock him off his Lighthouse. Rak had also joined in on that without even being invited, while Hatz had informed Khun, the Lightbearer of the team, that he didn’t need to listen to him and had then proceeded to do exactly as Khun had requested anyways. Laure had been awake only long enough to tell them all to “have fun” and had predictably slept through the whole damned thing.

Khun would die before admitting it out loud, but he really had missed these idiots.

And Bam had, of course, listened to him respectfully and followed his directions to the letter but he seemed a bit distracted, like he had something he wanted to say but wasn’t sure how to bring up. He’d even looked like he wanted to jump in a couple of times when Endorsi or Anaak had gotten a bit too rough, but Khun was glad he hadn’t. He didn’t want Bam to feel like he had to worry about him, but he also knew he was bad at hiding things when Bam turned the full force of those earnest eyes on him.

Khun was vaguely aware that he was running away from something, and that something was very big and unpleasant and never more than a few steps behind him. He’d come through six months as Albrecht’s captive remarkably unscathed all things considered, but there were some things that he knew he had managed at the time only because he had repressed the hell out of them in favour of dealing with them later. And now in the empty moments when he wasn’t focusing his whole attention on work, they were coming back to bite him.

Khun had suffered very little, he’d be the first to recognize that. But even though he had no right to feel that way, there had been any number of fears that had crept at the edges of his mind over the past months. He’d been afraid when he lost his freedom and control of the situation, and he’d been afraid that he would mess up and lead Bam to disaster. He’d been afraid when he was forced to again confront the fact that he could make the most flawless plans in the world and they would still amount to nothing when he—foolishly, idiotically—trusted the wrong person with them. And then there had been the more insidious, unspoken fear lurking on the edges of his subconscious, that Bam wouldn’t come, because who would really….

Khun’s fingers stilled on the keypad, the cursor blinking mockingly from where he’d stopped mid-word.

Oh.

That was it, wasn’t it?

It wasn’t just that he was afraid Bam wouldn’t come back for him, but that he might be right not to.

There will come a day when you’ll call and he won’t answer, Albrecht’s words continued to mock him even as their owner rotted in the ground. Khun had faced them without flinching at the time, but truthfully, he didn’t know if he could be so calm when that day did come to pass. He couldn't ignore the fact that every single plan he’d made this time had in some way depended on Bam being willing and able to come get him. His bet had paid off this time, but it might not someday in the future when Bam was even more powerful and had bigger, more important things to think about than a single missing Lightbearer.

He needed to be better than this. He’d promised he would protect Bam, so how could he hope to protect Bam if he wasn’t even capable of protecting himself?

There came a polite knock on the door, and maybe it was because he was already stressed, but for a brief second it was like Khun was back on Albrecht’s ship and the knocking meant Kima was outside waiting to be let in so she could give her report. It was such a vivid and visceral experience that it made him recoil.

It took a few moments to reorient himself, taking note of the different layout of the room, the presence of his Lighthouses, his clothes hanging in the small cubby in the wall that served in place of a closet. He wasn’t there anymore, couldn’t be there—the Kraken had already been scrapped for parts, its captives released and crew either killed or destined for FUG’s interrogation chambers. It was all over, all in the past.

His brain didn’t seem to be willing to accept that logic, oddly enough, and he felt weak and shaky despite his attempts to calm himself down. He was pathetic.

… It was this damned ship. The sooner they left this place, the better. Khun had had enough of ships to last for the next thousand years—from now on, if he needed to get somewhere he was going to walk there with both feet on the ground like a normal person.

There was another knock, a little more insistent, and Khun realized that in his brief… confusion, he hadn’t spared a single thought for actually answering the door. He didn’t even know who it was, although there were definitely some candidates more likely than others.

He opened the door, and his heart rate surged all over again for a completely different reason.

“...Bam?”

“Hey, Khun,” Bam said with an easy smile. He looked effortlessly good as always, just a little tousled and seeming to glow from somewhere within, the light shining out visibly through the sincerity in his eyes. There was a tray in his hands with a variety of covered dishes balanced on it. “We missed you at dinner, so I just thought I’d stop by to bring you some and make sure everything’s okay.”

Although Bam’s tone was light, his gaze was canny and Khun felt a bizarre impulse to hide behind the door frame, like he’d been caught doing something wrong. “Everything’s fine, I’ve just been busy,” he said, fingers curling around the hem of his shirt as if holding onto something could ground him. His only other option was the door, after all, and he refused to clutch at it like an anxious housewife when an unfamiliar man came a-calling. “I must not have noticed the time passing and missed it. But you really didn’t have to go out of your way Bam, I’m not even that hungry.”

“You didn’t eat lunch, either,” Bam said, his smile maybe a little too guileless. “It’s not good to be skipping meals. You’re the one who used to remind me about that, so I’m sure you won’t have any objections to me returning the favour.”

Khun sighed. “Alright, I’ll concede that point,” he said, taking a step back. “Do you…” he trailed off uncertainly, glancing around to make sure his surroundings were sufficiently in order. “Do you want to come in?”

Bam’s answering beam took him completely off guard. “I’d love to, thanks. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve already eaten, but I’ve been wanting a chance to catch up with you properly.”

Khun took the tray from Bam once they were inside, sitting down on the bed with it. Khun had kind of expected Bam to come join him but he seemed strangely reluctant to considering his earlier confidence, hovering nervously nearby until Khun patted the space on the quilt next to him and invited him to sit. At that point Bam had been quick to comply but doing so seemed to somehow make him even more anxious, the tips of his ears turning a bit pink as he settled into place with what was likely several deliberate inches of space between them. Considering they used to share a room, and had sometimes even shared beds in the past, he found the reaction to be a bit strange. It worried Khun that things had gotten this uncomfortable between them.

Bam had brought him a large quantity of food, was the first thing that Khun noticed when he finally took stock of the contents of the tray he was holding. Maybe that was what Bam was embarrassed about? He set about opening the various containers, hyper-aware of the gold eyes locked on him as he did so.

Khun really wasn’t hungry to begin with, but he felt his stomach physically turn when he uncovered the largest dish and saw that Bam had brought him a steak. The shriveled piece of meat was a far cry from the bloody dish he’d been served during his dinner with Albrecht, but he was still vividly reminded of the sense of looming danger that had filled the room and the anger in the man’s eyes as he grabbed his wrist….

“Is something wrong, Khun?” Bam asked, beginning to look concerned. “It’s… it does taste a bit better than it looks, I promise. I can still get you something else if you want, though?”

Shit, he had just been staring at the plate, hadn’t he? He really didn’t want to eat it, but Bam was already worried and he didn’t want to make it worse.

Salad—there was also salad. There hadn’t been salad on the table when he’d had dinner with Albrecht. That should be safe enough, right?

He popped open the salad container and picked up his fork. “No need, this is perfect. Thank you, Bam.”

He took a mouthful, chewing it slowly and forcing himself to swallow. He could do this—those awful family dinners when he was a kid had to have been good for something.

“So, what have you been working on that has you so distracted?” Bam asked. He leaned back on his palms as he took in the room, apparently having recovered somewhat from whatever had been making him so nervous, which Khun hoped was a good sign. He was looking around like his surroundings were fascinating to him despite the fact that the room he’d been assigned to was likely identical. The team had salvaged as much as possible from Khun’s ruined Lighthouses so he did have at least a few personal possessions here and there, but those didn’t exactly make for the most interesting viewing material in Khun’s opinion.

“A lot of things. Everything, really,” Khun admitted with a small sigh. “I have a lot to catch up on, and I haven’t even started planning for our next attempt at the Floor Test yet. I’m sure it’ll settle everybody’s tensions if we get that done and can be ready to move along as soon as possible.”

A mulish expression crossed Bam’s face. “There’s no rush. You’ve only just gotten back and you need some time to recover. The Floor Test can wait.”

“FUG won’t agree with you,” Khun said with a small laugh. He knew very well the kind of pressure Bam was under to continue climbing, and had likely been under for the past six months. He speared another few pieces of lettuce. “And besides, how much more recovery time do I need? I was able to fix myself up with the Firefish barely a day after I got back. The only thing holding us up now is lack of information, so once I get that sorted out there shouldn’t be a problem.”

“FUG will wait for as long as they need to,” Bam said, a core of steel to his words. “You’re more important. No one on this team would be willing to compromise your safety just for the sake of getting to the next Floor a bit quicker.”

Khun really regretted taking that last bite. The food tasted like ashes in his mouth.

Bam shouldn’t be… shouldn’t have to make decisions based on Khun’s weakness.

“Bam,” Khun attempted to smile at him, setting the fork he’d been eating with down on the tray carefully. “I’m fine. I mean it when I say it wasn’t that bad. Thanks to you, he couldn’t even touch me, much less… anyways. Nothing happened, and to be honest I feel embarrassed that it’s gotten so blown out of proportion.”

“Blown out of… Khun, you were gone for six months.”

“I’ve been gone for longer,” Khun pointed out. “You’ve been gone for much longer.”

“You’re right,” Bam said seriously. “So I know what it’s like. When FUG held me captive the first time, they didn’t have to torture me to make it terrible. It was all threats and ultimatums and not being able to have any control over my own circumstances… and Khun, I was so scared. It almost broke me, and it took me ages to recover.”

No no no no he didn’t want to hear this.

“But that wasn’t the same,” Khun argued, feeling very uncomfortable with where the conversation was going. “It was worse for you because….”

“Because what, Khun?” Bam asked helplessly. “And even if there were differences between our situations, why does the fact that I was scared or hurt make it so that you can’t be?”

“I never said that… why are you so determined to make it sound like I should be more upset about this?”

“Khun, I’m not trying to… look, I’ve been trying to give you space, but it’s getting hard to ignore the signs that you’re not okay,” Bam said, obviously picking his words infuriatingly carefully. His tone was deliberately, forcibly patient but his hands flexed like he was itching to do something with them. “You’re my friend, and I’m worried.”

“Well, you don’t have to be,” Khun said coolly. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure, because you’re—”

“I said I’m fine, Bam!” Khun snapped.

Bam was staring at him, undoubtedly surprised by either the tone he’d used, the volume, or both. Khun for his part could do little more than blink stupidly in response, barely reining in the impulse to run away and immediately throw himself off the damned ship before he could ruin any more good things.

He couldn’t believe he’d yelled at Bam. He was appalled with himself.

“Bam,” Khun said tentatively, attempting to keep his voice steady as his mind helpfully decided to conjure images of Bam getting up and leaving, of Bam finally clueing in what a horrible person he was and not wanting to speak with him anymore. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout at you. I don’t know what I was—”

Bam lunged toward him before he could get another word out and Khun instinctively flinched away, but then Bam was holding him, clutching him to his chest like he was afraid he’d disappear if he let go. The mostly-full food tray hit the ground with a clatter, but Khun barely paid it any attention as he was surrounded by warmth and Bam’s familiar scent, strong arms curling determinedly around his back.

“Shit, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that,” he heard Bam say after a few seconds. “I know you don’t like it… but please tell me to back off if you want, and you don’t need to apologize. You’re allowed to not be okay for a while, and I swear you’ll never have to go through something like that again. I’m the one who’s sorry… I’m so, so sorry I wasn’t there.”

Bam’s voice sounded muffled from this position, but Khun could swear that his voice was shaking a bit too. He wondered what sort of expression he’d been wearing to warrant a reaction like that.

The time that passed might have only been a few minutes or it could have been an hour. Khun remained tucked under Bam’s chin and listened to his own ragged breaths and Bam’s as they slowly evened out. Bam had said to tell him off if he wanted, but there was no way Khun could do that when it felt like Bam’s proximity was the only thing holding him together.

“It’s not…”

“Yes?” Bam asked, voice soft. He shifted slightly and one of his arms unwound from its resting place around Khun’s back, and Khun became aware of Bam sliding his fingers around his own, impossibly gentle. Stupidly gentle. Who in their right mind was that gentle with a Khun?

“It’s… it’s not your fault,” he said, the words forming with a surprising amount of difficulty. “I’m glad you weren’t there.”

Khun couldn’t really see Bam’s expression from where he was, but the catch in his breath told him that it had been the wrong thing to say, regardless of how true it was.

“It wasn’t really me Albrecht wanted, it was you,” Khun said, feeling a sudden need to reassure, to explain his reasoning to Bam. “It was just me, so I had less to lose,” he huffed a small laugh. “If you’d been there it would have been… so much worse.”

Khun had always considered himself to be fairly good at reading Bam but it seemed his ability failed him at that moment, because his choice of words didn’t seem to comfort him at all. The arm that had remained wrapped around him, keeping him tucked in the crook of Bam’s neck tightened and Bam let out a hissing breath as he pressed his face into the top of Khun’s head.

“You’re always so concerned about protecting me, is it really so absurd that I’d want to be there to do the same for you?” Bam asked, voice uncharacteristically frustrated under the subdued tone.

“Not really absurd. I know you would, that’s part of what makes you, you,” Khun said fondly, before he continued on a more serious note. “But you also shouldn’t have to. You have so many people clamouring for your attention and your powers and the last thing I want to be is just… just another drain on you. Someone who clings to you and takes advantage of you because I’m not strong enough to protect myself. I want… I need to be able to help you too, otherwise I’ll just keep dragging you down.”

The like this time was left unspoken but implied.

He didn’t think he’d said anything unreasonable, but suddenly Bam’s hands were clutching his shoulders, and Khun mourned the loss of the warmth of their previous position. Bam held him far enough away that he could meet Khun’s eyes, arms stiff and expression tight.

“That’s not it at all, from the very beginning I can’t even count the number of ways that you’ve saved me,” Bam said, golden eyes harsh like fire, like the sun. His voice was shaking, and Khun wondered if this was actually the most angry Bam had ever been with him. More so than the time he had tried to kill Rachel, far more than the time he’d used human souls to revive White.

But he still wasn’t leaving. Those hands showed no sign of letting go.

“You’ve never taken advantage of me, not even once, and you’re not some… thing to be used and thrown away,” Bam continued fiercely, his tone allowing for no argument. “I just… I don’t understand why you don’t believe me when I say that without you, there’s no point in me climbing the Tower at all. That in the whole world of things that demand my attention and care you’re the one I want to give them to the most, and you’ll always be my top priority.” Bam stopped and took a breath, slowly breathing in and letting it out, seemingly trying to get himself back under control. His hold on Khun’s arms loosened slightly.

“And what I can’t understand most of all,” he said, the heat in his voice now tainted with sadness, “is why a bastard like Albrecht Glass seemed to understand that about me better than you do.”

“I’m sorry, Bam,” Khun said wretchedly. God, he was such an ass. He hated being the one to put that look on Bam’s face, but it seemed like it happened all too often.

“Shh, you don’t have to apologize,” Bam said. He let go, but before Khun could interpret the action as rejection he was reaching out again to clasp one of Khun’s hands in both of his, drawing it in to cradle in his lap. Bam stroked the back of his hand with his thumb absently as he continued in a calmer voice, “I just… really wish that someday, you’ll be able to see yourself the way I do, even a little bit.”

The mood was slightly wrong for it—a little too solemn and tense, perhaps, but Khun found himself momentarily overwhelmed by affection for the other man despite that. It was sudden but not unfamiliar, where Bam was involved.

Bam really was too good. Even as frustrated as he was, he was so gentle, so concerned for people other than himself. And so forgiving, too—a rare marvel in a place as ruthless as the Tower. Even after everything that he’d been through since their first meeting, he had miraculously never lost the heart that had drawn Khun to him in the first place. It was true that he had grown up some since then, was more powerful and a bit less innocent than he had been, but on the inside he was still the very same Bam that Khun had met on that fateful day on the Testing Floor.

Khun loved him so much, this strange man, this exception to every rule he had ever made for himself. Just being beside him again was like coming up for air after being underwater for far too long, like coming back home after being lost and finding it full of light and laughter, and people who cared about you even if you didn’t do anything to earn it. Bam probably didn’t even realize it, but he fed something in Khun that he’d always thought had starved to death before it had even gotten a chance to live.

The things Bam said made Khun think of terrifying words like unconditional, and sometimes he dared to believe they might actually be true.

But he still couldn’t help but hesitate—it wasn’t a simple thing to deny the very pillars that held up reality, after all. But if anyone could make him do it, it would be Bam.

“I am sorry though,” Khun offered tentatively, a rare honest apology for a rare existence. It seemed fitting. “At the very least, for upsetting you.”

Bam sighed, “You’re just very difficult, is all.” His display of anger earlier seemed to have burned him out and he mostly looked tired now, and just a bit reproachful. “You drive me insane with worry. You’re always there to help me sort myself out when I need you and I just… wish you felt like you could talk to me about the things that upset you too.”

“You’re always there when it counts,” Khun said. “Don’t be too hard on yourself.”

Bam shot him a resentful look. “You’re doing it again, shifting it over until you’re the one comforting me.”

“Ah… do I do that?”

“You do.”

“I see… I’ll work on that,” Khun said, mentally making a note of it for later. “Well, I’d apologize, but you’d probably just get angry again.”

Bam made a face like he was thinking about it, but it didn’t last long before his lips turned up slightly and he was looking at Khun with a somewhat helpless smile. “Hmm, maybe not this time. I think I’ve had enough of being angry with you, so for now I’d much rather just be happy you’re here. Although I’d probably do anything or be anything you want me to be, angry or otherwise, if it’d help you feel better.”

“Don’t you think that’s a dangerously open-ended offer to make to a Khun, Bam?” Khun asked teasingly, playing off of Bam like he’d done so many times before. “You don’t know what I’ll ask for… for all you know, I’ll want something bad.”

Bam just continued smiling, not the least bit intimidated. “I trust you.”

That… didn’t just sound like idle banter. Khun hummed, satisfied. Truly, reasons like these were why Bam was the very best.

“Then in that case, I think that I want you to be happy,” Khun said, after pretending to ponder an already foregone conclusion. “I want you to be very happy that I’m back. After all...” he smiled.

“... I’m glad to be back with you as well.”

*

“Do you think they finally worked things out between them?” Hatz asked, staring at the closed door with some trepidation.

“Haha, you’re always such a kidder, Hatz. If it’s those two, there’s no way,” Shibisu replied. “They probably just argued, got some of the immediate pent-up frustrations out of the way and then reaffirmed their completely ordinary and absolutely platonic friendship. Business as usual for the dream team.”

Hatz groaned, running his hand through his already ruffled hair in frustration. “I don’t believe this, what more is it going to take? I don’t know how much longer I can pretend not to notice.”

“Hey, you can’t talk while you and Endorsi still have your weird… thing going on that we all have to tiptoe around,” Shibisu countered. “You can’t complain when you’re still part of the problem and not the solution.”

“And here I thought you wanted someone to commiserate with,” Hatz glowered.

“I do, so sort yourself out and then come see me, I’ll have a bottle of soju waiting,” Shibisu said, smirking lavisciously. “Unless you’ll be too busy at that point, of course.”

“Shut up—and I’ll hold you to that second part, you asshole,” Hatz said, continuing on his way. Probably to meditate or practice his sword forms or maybe just gloom somewhere in private, Shibisu figured. “By the way, I have no idea what you mean about Endorsi,” he shot back over his shoulder.

“Uh huh...” Shibisu said, unconvinced. “Let me know how it goes, and good luck~”

“...Thanks.”

Shibisu stood outside the closed door for just a moment longer, but there were no longer any sounds from inside. He’d been thinking of checking in on Khun earlier when he’d heard raised voices and wondered if he should intervene, but in the end he was glad he hadn’t. It was a relief to know that Bam had also been keeping an eye on their wayward Lightbearer, and Shibisu knew there was no one else in the world better suited to helping him get through the lasting effects of his captivity.

It was hard sometimes, reaching the limits of what you were capable of, but sometimes that just meant you had to learn to swallow your pride and lean on others to do what you couldn’t. His friend was in good hands, and he could be satisfied with that.

“Keep working at it, you two,” he said wistfully under his breath and continued on his way, whistling as he went.

the end