Reine was moving before the bell had finished its first cycle.She crossed the dining hall at a dead sprint, her boots cracking against the marble, and threw herself toward a terminal embedded in the far wall, a flat, rectangular slab of stone inlaid with thin lines of dormant flame conduit, the kind every royal residence kept for exactly this purpose and prayed never to use.Her palm slammed against it.The conduit lines flared to life, gold light tracing through the stone in jagged, branching patterns, and a moment later a massive projection screen flickered into existence above the terminal,wide, rectangular, hovering in the air like a sheet of burning glass.A Mage Knight's face filled it.He was sweating, his eyes wild, soot streaked across one cheek, and behind him the world had gone to hell, fire, collapsing masonry, the distant orange glow of something enormous moving through smoke too thick to see clearly."The castle is being attacked by Flame Armor Beasts!" He screamed int

The Prince had stopped pretending.Whatever composure he'd managed to hold onto through the dinner, through Flora's fist rearranging his face, through the humiliation of sobbing on the marble floor in front of a roomful of witnesses, all of it was gone now. Completely, spectacularly gone.He paced the length of the dining hall with the frantic, uneven energy of a man whose legs had decided that moving was the only thing keeping the panic from eating him alive, his rings flashing every time he threw his hands up, which was often."What are we going to do?" He muttered, spinning on his heel and pacing back the other direction. "What are we going to do? What are we going to ‘do?’"He grabbed his private guard by the lapels.Both hands, fistfuls of armor, yanking the man forward with a strength born entirely of desperation rather than any actual power."Tell me we're not going to die tonight." The Prince demanded, his voice cracking somewhere in the middle of it, his eyes wild and too

"We've got this handled."The Knight Lady stood there for exactly half a second.Then she was shouting at her remaining knights, dragging the stumbling one by the arm, sprinting hard toward the castle entrance without looking back.Mira didn't watch them go.Her eyes were already running the numbers on the five beasts pressing through the breach, cataloguing the armor plating, looking for the joints, the seams, the places where dead flesh had to flex to allow movement and where the metal therefore couldn't be quite as continuous, quite as solid.She exhaled slowly.The flame climbed higher.Boots hit the ground to her left.She didn't look."Took you long enough." She said."I was giving you your entrance." Asta said, his sword coming free of its sheath with the clean rasp of steel on leather. "You're welcome.""Nobody asked.""You don't always need to ask, Mira."She finally glanced sideways at him.He was already watching the beasts, jaw set, the origin flame flickering at the bl

The walk back through the breach felt different than the walk out had.Going out, the air had been thick with the specific tension of people moving toward something they weren't entirely sure they could handle. Coming back, the same air carried the particular quiet of a battlefield that had been decided, the settling dust, the cooling metal, the gradual return of night sounds to a space that had been too loud for them moments before.Asta sheathed his sword.Mira let the flame axes dissolve from her hands, the heat bleeding off her knuckles in faint wisps of orange-red vapor.Neither of them said anything for a few steps.Then:"Three and a half." Asta said."We are not still doing this.""I'm just saying the count…""The count is two and three, Asta. Two for me, three for you. The split beast counts as one full kill divided equally between us, which gives us each an additional half, making it two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half, which means you're ahead by exactly one…""Which means I

"You weren't angry. You were just right, and you knew you were right, and you were going to stand there being right until he caught up. You didn't need me to defend you. You didn't need anyone. You just needed him to finish the argument he was going to lose."Flora had looked up now.Her eyes were on his face, and the flush hadn't faded, but the self-consciousness behind it had, replaced by something quieter, more direct."The way you knelt down in that courtyard with that injured guard." Asta said."And held his hand. Not because it would help anything clinically. Just because he was scared and you understood that scared people need someone to hold onto."He was quiet for a moment."That." He said. "That's what's beautiful."The tower room was very still.Flora looked at him for a long moment, something shifting behind her eyes, some final piece of whatever she'd been holding at careful distance over the weeks since they'd been separated finally releasing its grip.She stepped for