Book 2. The Grand Gathering. Chapter 7. Little Accidents. (Part II)

“I’m Alexandra, Alex for short,” the silver-haired girl stated calmly, looking at Laien with a hint of obvious interest lingering in her eyes.

“And my name is Nan!” a seven, eight years old girl with bright pink hair peeked from behind one of the young women, taking Laien and Anatis off-guard with her sudden appearance. “Big sis, are you and everyone not going to introduce yourselves?” she asked In innocent bewilderment, recalling how everyone always told her to mind her manners. Yet, weren’t all her seniors being impolite to those two boys right now?

The nearly twenty women, with but one exception, were speechless and in a bind regarding the way they should explain it to their young apprentice sister. They couldn’t just tell her straightforwardly that they weren’t interested in hitting on or talking with some younger boys and additionally, didn’t want to disturb the fun of their four juniors, could they?

“You will understand when you grow up a bit,” Nan’s older sister dodged the question in a roundabout way and Nan herself certainly wasn’t happy with such an answer, but she knew well enough when not to press the matter as to not make everyone angry with her.

“Probably because they don’t feel like associating with us,” Laien said wryly, giving the pink-haired girl an amused glance. “But hopefully, it’s more about them not wanting to snatch us from their juniors,” he elaborated with a laugh, not shutting up despite the reprimanding and furious glances directed at him.

“So that’s what it is about!” the pink-haired girl raised her voice in excitement, the behavior of her seniors suddenly beginning to make sense to her.

“Nan!” the girl’s older sister snapped, angry to see her little sister behave so inappropriately.

“I won’t be disturbing you then, have fun!” Nan said happily while grinning cheekily at Laien, completely ignoring her older sister’s outburst. She then quickly returned to her seat, disappearing from Laien’s field of view.

“Amusing, but those women seem so stiff,” Laien chuckled quietly, but before he had a good chance to take a look at the black-haired leader of theirs, who appeared to be smiling just a little, one of the girls around him started a conversation.

“So, are you guys from Neil City or did you come from somewhere else?” Lara asked curiously, playing around with her short, brown hair and glancing at Anatis with an ill-hidden predatory look in her eyes.

“I’m from the City of Buare and I live there,” Anatis answered simplistically.

“I’m originally from the northern parts of our Kingdom, but now I live here in Neil City,” Laien also answered briefly, without getting into the details of his background.

“Hmm, you’ve got it nice,” Lara said with a sigh, then smiled at the two of them. “We spent our entire lives in the Royal Capital. The Black Rose School is really strict too, so we rarely got to leave its grounds. Can you believe we aren’t even allowed to bring any boys in? Talk about tight-ass rules,” she spoke quickly, in a rather all over the place manner. It didn't bother either her friends or Laien and Anatis, though.

“Your school is a girls-only place, huh. Must suck pretty badly,” Laien said with a grin. Comparatively speaking, he was enjoying a full, unrestrained freedom in the Red Dragon School, so it was hard for him to imagine how boring a life in a single-sex school would be.

“It does suck, but at least it teaches us pretty well,” Lara admitted grudgingly. “Too bad only the few top students get to learn the Heavenly Flame Art and others need to be satisfied with a high-level art devised from it. from among us four, only Alex got to be one of the three lucky ones,” she brought up quite bitterly, glancing sourly in Alex’s direction.

“You are still bitter about it?” Alex asked resignedly. She thought they had already talked it over and Lara no longer held it against her… but apparently, she was wrong.

“How can I help it? You lost a duel you never should have lost because you got distracted by the made-up story that bitch sold you before the fight, then you beat me up when we fought for the third place,” Lara brought the matter up again, still bearing a grudge against Alex for screwing her over.

“Had you done anything to prevent it?” Laien interrupted the two with his question, looking at Lara as he asked it.

“What do you mean?” Lara frowned, unsure what Laien was trying to imply.

“I’m asking if you had done anything that could have prevented your friend from being tricked into losing,” Laien clarified in a neutral tone. “For example, if you told Alex before the competition to look out for things like getting tricked by opponent’s words. If you failed to foresee that event, then you have no right to complain,” he added after a moment of consideration, confirming with his own conscience that in Lara’s place, he indeed would have acted as he was telling her.

“Aren’t you being a bit too unreasonable here?” Lara replied angrily, getting easily riled up due to her emotional personality. “I was preoccupied with my own fights and my own future, do you think I had time to speculate and worry about others?” she refuted, staring at Laien with irritation.

“Well, since you had no time to worry about others, you did nothing to influence the result of Alex’s fight,” Laien stated and shrugged his shoulders. “Sure it’s stupid to be tricked into losing and she should reflect on it, but I don’t think it’s right for you to be angry at her,” he restated his point calmly, seeing no reason to be getting emotional over a girl he just met and didn’t particularly care about.

“You…!” Lara hissed, beginning to regret agreeing to Laien’s request to join them. At the same time, two women turned towards their group and appeared like they were about to say something, one of them being Nan’s older sister and the other… judging by her appearance and the silver hair of hers, she must have been Alex’s older sister. However…

“Don’t,” the black-haired woman spoke up calmly, without raising her voice or even looking away from the cup of tea on the table before her. “I didn’t know you girls were conflicted over something so trivial… and I told you to always tell us when something is wrong or when you have a problem,” she said with a sigh. Then, after a few seconds of thought, she stated without beating around the bush.

“If you came to me with this problem, I would have said the same this boy told you. Lara, you always act before thinking… being emotional isn’t a bad thing, but not when it clouds your judgment,” she reprimanded lightly, without raising her voice at all. The words, however, seemed to have a powerful effect both on Lara and Alex, as on the other girls and women in the group.

“Wow, she sure has some face here,” Laien mused, impressed by the ease with which the black-haired woman handled every matter that came up.

When the black-haired woman smiled slightly and briefly, but just long enough for him to notice, Laien smirked and looked her in the eye; his expression saying that he recognized her ability, but at the same time challenging her and implying that he would overcome her as a person.

Unexpectedly for everyone, the black-haired woman hid her mouth behind her hand and laughed in a big-sister-like manner. “You are an interesting one, Laien was it? I’m Anna, so if you ever need help and happen to be around the Royal Capital, come to our Black Rose School and ask for me,” she said lightheartedly, but with the full intent on keeping this little promise.

“Why would you go so far for a random kid?” one of the women asked in a low voice, but still louder than she intended to.

“I have a feeling those two aren’t just any random boys, ” Anna said with a smile and glanced at Laien, then at Anatis. For a moment, she considered using her aura to probe the two… but even if the boys would be incapable of noticing, it would be bad manners regardless. Thus, she refrained from the idea, her woman’s intuition telling her that sooner or later, she would learn of their prowess anyway.

“Hey…” Lara murmured, but almost instantly got angry with herself for being so idiotically timid and repeated, this time in a much louder voice.

“Hey!”

Even the nearby people shuddered due to this sudden yell of Lara’s, not to speak of those close to her or Laien, to whom the shout was directed at.

“I was wrong, you were right. My bad for acting stupid,” Lara said in a tone which seemed to be more suited to picking a fight than apologizing. She did lower her head, however, for as short of a period of time as it was, before turning her gaze towards Alex.

“I won’t be unreasonable anymore. If anything, it was my own fault for being weaker than you and losing. Sorry,” she apologized, this time truly having had dealt with the resentment she was feeling towards Alex.

“You don’t need to be apologizing to me,” Alex said consensually. She wanted to say something else, something along the lines of ‘you were right, it was my fault for losing’, but after imagining where this line of conversation would have brought them, she refrained.

“Thanks, I guess. Sorry for being a bitch the last few months,” Lara said awkwardly. She took a deep breath, then reached out with her hand over the table and clenched it into a fist. “Best friends forever?” she asked with a smile, looking Alex directly in the eye for the first time in quite a while.

“Best friends forever,” Alex said with a quiet chuckle and bumped fists with Lara, finally making up with her to the relief of their two closest friends.

“Okay!” Ciane clasped her hands. “Enough of serious subjects, let’s have some fun! How about ordering a few drinks?” she suggested, feeling a bit dissatisfied with the current set of drinks and juices on their table.

“Good idea,” Laien supported Ciane without hesitation. At his or Anatis’s level, one could easily detoxicate even very high levels of alcohol in their bodies in the span of a few hours. Since the banquet would only take place in two days and the Grand Tournament in three, he saw no reason to abstain from some light drinks.

“Alex, what are your favorites?” he asked cheerfully, making use of the opportunity to take a good, close-up look at Alex’s silvery eyes and her smooth, somewhat pale and princess-like face.

“Orange drinks if I needed to choose, I guess. I don’t really like those kinds of alcohol though, I prefer sweet red wine,” Alex answered, at the same time smiling and returning the favor by eyeing Laien’s qualities on her own. Surely enough, it wasn’t only Laien’s personality that was exactly in her type.

“For real? Screw the drinks then! I have something much better,” Laien said with a grin and waved his hand over the low table, producing a bottle of exquisite wine along with two glasses. He picked the bottle up and poured the red wine into Alex’s glass, then into his own.

“Aa~h, and there they go into their own little world,” Ciane murmured, a bit jealous of how compatible Alex’s and Laien’s characters seemed to be.

“Cheers,” Laien said merrily and raised his glass, clanging it lightly against Alex’s.

“Cheers,” Alex said with a laugh and at the same time as Laien, took a sip of the wine… and her eyes went wide as the rich, cherry taste spread throughout her mouth. She couldn’t help but drink more of it in one go, emptying half of the glass before finally forcing herself to put it away from her lips.

“It’s delicious! The best one I’ve ever had,” Alex exclaimed, her face flushed due to the pleasure her taste buds just experienced. “Where did you get this wine from? How is it called?” she asked excitedly, noticing the lack of a label on the bottle.

“My elder brother had it brewed for himself,” Laien said lightheartedly, happy to see Alex enjoying his and Rudford’s favorite wine.

“So you have an elder brother,” Alex mentioned with curiosity.

“Mm, and a younger sister,” Laien said with a chuckle. “And you, how many siblings do you have apart from your older sister?” he asked, going with the natural flow of the conversation.

“So you noticed her,” Alex smirked just a little bit. Her older sister was pretty much a tomboy, so even the beautiful color of her hair could easily go unnoticed if one didn’t pay enough attention. Such a pity that she kept cutting them so short...

“I have only one big sister, no other siblings,” she added after a few seconds, somewhat embarrassed to have fallen into her own train of thoughts in the middle of talking with Laien.

“Mm,” Laien nodded, but before he could ask another question, something fairly distracting happened.

“I told you I’m not interested, stop forcing yourself on me!” Anatis said angrily as he grabbed Lara by the wrist and forced her to stop snuggling to him.

“Playing hard to get?” Lara chuckled, her mood already having taken a one hundred and eighty degrees shift. “No one ever told you not to bully girls and to be nice to them? You think you can overpower this big sister?” she asked tauntingly, pretty confident in her own strength.

She was already in the middle stages of the sixth mortal realm and she had always trained really hard, so her body strength was comparable to most martial practitioners of the seventh rank… yet despite that, to her utter shock, she seemed to be incapable of making Anatis’s hand budge even a little.

“How can this be?! I’m already using almost all my strength, yet he is holding me in place so easily?!” she thought alarmingly, a mixture of nervousness and amazement appearing on her face and in her eyes.

“I already have a girlfriend, I’m here only to keep Laien a company,” Anatis said with a sigh and let Lara’s wrist go, a reddened mark beginning to show at the area he had been gripping.

“Yeah… sorry…” Lara mumbled, still in a daze after being overpowered by Anatis. She was used to breaking rules of the school and going out to fool around with boys, but she would always be the one in the dominating role. Truthfully, it was a huge shock for her to be subdued by a boy her own age in such an unyielding, steadfast fashion.

“You are stronger than Lara?” Ciane said in amazement. “Who are you? What school are you from?” she asked the question all the women wanted to know the answer to.

Anatis was about to reply to Ciane, but he caught the amused glance of Laien’s before that. He chuckled silently, pretty sure that he knew what kind of development Laien would have liked to see the most.

“I’m no one important,” he said with a smirk, making it rather apparent that he wouldn’t answer any personal questions.

Laien laughed quietly, aware of what Anatis was doing and feeling quite grateful for it. As Laien saw it, simply revealing that they were from Red Dragon and Twin Phoenix Schools would be boring, so he preferred to avoid it; at least until an amusing enough opportunity came or until he got bored enough to mention it on his own.

“Are you no one important too?” Alex asked with an intrigued smile, looking at Laien with curiosity.

“Exactly,” Laien replied with a laugh and poured himself and Alex more wine. “I’m not nearly as important as the certain girl who tried to impress me with the mentions of the Heavenly Flame Art, but got into an argument with you afterward,” he said with some sarcasm lingering in his voice, which however showed more apparently in his expression and smile.

“You guys don’t need to tell us if you don’t want to,” Alex said lightheartedly. “But, can’t you at least reveal how strong you are? I’m curious,” she bargained, the sweet smile of hers surely not helping Laien restrain himself from agreeing.

In the end, Laien chortled and tilted his head, giving Anatis a meaningful look. If they bragged just a little, then it wouldn’t be too bad, right?