Chapter 10: Shinobu: I Have to Sit Up for This!
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Watching the divine wine she had spent years dreaming about get spat onto the floor like something unpleasant, Liliruca let out a sound of pure anguish and began struggling to slide off Kihara's back — to crawl to the spill, to salvage whatever remained.
One quiet sentence stopped her cold.
"If you want to rot in this Familia forever, go ahead and lick it off the floor. If you don't — stay where you are."
Even in the grip of the craving, Liliruca had always known she wanted out. She bit down on her tongue, hard, until the copper taste of blood flooded her mouth and dragged her consciousness back from the howling thing in her body that wanted nothing but wine.
She had grown up inside the Soma Familia. Her parents had both died in the dungeon, claimed by the addiction. She herself had been tricked into drinking divine wine as a small child — Zanis had seen to that personally — and from that moment, the path had been set: steal, deceive, trade everything for the next drink. There had never been another road.
In her lucid moments, she hated all of it with equal intensity — the Familia that had swallowed her whole, and the version of herself that couldn't find a way out.
The clarity came back slowly, like a lamp being turned up. Her voice shook, but it held.
"Lili — Lili won't drink it. Take me — take me away from here, please—"
By the last word she was nearly snarling it through clenched teeth.
Soma hadn't moved. He stood motionless, his gaze travelling between Kihara and the wine soaking into the floor — back and forth, as though the arithmetic of what he was seeing refused to resolve. In all his years, he had never once seen a human resist it.
"How did you do that?"
The question came out with something almost desperate beneath it.
"Simple. What I feel for my girlfriends is stronger than whatever's in that cup. Purer, too."
"...Love?"
"Do the transfer. I have things to do."
Soma looked at Liliruca — still trembling, still fighting her own body — and drew a line across his fingertip without ceremony. He moved behind them and flicked divine blood across her back. The Soma Familia's divine script rose to the surface and dimmed, like embers going cold.
The rest was straightforward: bring her back to the Hestia Familia, have Hestia perform the Falna ceremony, and the transfer would be complete. After that, she'd need to remain with the new Familia for a full year before any further transfer was possible.
"If she ever reaches a point where she's confident she can face the wine," Soma said, already turning back to his barrels, "bring her here then. For now, it's better she stays away."
He crouched beside his work and stopped speaking entirely.
Kihara was nearly out of the brewing room when he noticed that Liliruca had gone limp on his back. She'd rendered herself unconscious — by what method he wasn't certain, but the intent was clear enough. Rather than trust herself around the wine, she'd simply removed herself from the equation.
[Master. Zanis's presence is in the Daedalus Street area.]
[He took a million falis off me and he's still wandering the slums? What is he doing, digging a hole to hide it in?]
The coin pouch had been prepared before the handoff — Shinobu had introduced a single drop of her blood into it, enough to track its location precisely. Kihara had no particular habit of letting people walk away with his money.
"That million isn't staying with him."
He followed Shinobu's directions through the tangled geography of the slum district, Liliruca still unconscious on his back. The neighbourhood had its own ecosystem — street brawls, open robbery, scenes of human desperation that had long since stopped bothering to hide themselves. It was like a wound in the city that had never been treated, the mud between the low shacks carrying a dark, organic sheen that stuck to the sole of every step.
The smell was layered: mould, ammonia, the acrid smoke of cheap oil lamps burning in enclosed spaces. Kihara breathed through it and kept moving.
He found Zanis quickly, tucked into a side alley conducting some kind of transaction, wearing the self-satisfied expression of a man who believed the afternoon had gone well for him. His counterpart was a broad-jawed adventurer with a heavy beard — unremarkable individually, but the iron cage behind him was not. Inside it, something that was partly human and partly bird hung in a state that was somewhere between alive and not.
Monster trafficking. In Daedalus Street, apparently.
He didn't deliberate. He used his time acceleration to close the distance, retrieved his coin pouch from Zanis's hands, borrowed the bearded man's belt knife, and put it through Zanis's heart. The creature in the cage, he ended with the Crimson Blade. Then he left, taking Liliruca with him, before the acceleration window closed.
When time resumed its normal pace, the bearded adventurer found himself standing over a man killed by his own knife, next to a dead creature that had just been worth a considerable sum, with no explanation available for either development. He went home, collected everything of value he owned, and left Orario before dawn.
"You're saying... she wants to transfer into our Familia?"
Hestia's brow furrowed. She studied the kneeling Liliruca with an expression that was doing its best to be neutral and not entirely succeeding.
Liliruca pressed her forehead to the floor with complete sincerity. "Yes, Lady Hestia! Lili was pulled out of the darkest moment of her life by Lord Kihara, and Lili has decided to start over from the beginning — please allow me to join!"
Gaining a new member was genuinely good news for the Familia. Hestia knew this. She also noted, with a precision that surprised her, the very specific way Liliruca said Lord Kihara — with a warmth and weight to it that set off something small and territorial in her chest.
She stamped it down firmly. Jealousy without cause was listed clearly in Chapter Four of the reference materials she'd been studying as a significant strategic error.
"Of course I agree. I was just thinking about how impressive Kihara-kun is — barely started adventuring and he's already bringing in new members through sheer ability and..." She searched for the right word. "...personal magnetism."
"Lady Hestia, please follow me to the guest room for the Falna ceremony."
"Of course! And you can just call me Lili — Lord Kihara too!"
"Noted."
To mark Lili's official addition to the Familia, Kihara cooked dinner himself — a full spread, generous enough that both Hestia and Lili ended the meal tilted back in their chairs with their hands on their stomachs and matching expressions of surrender.
Getting the unusually clingy Hestia settled and asleep took some doing, but eventually Kihara made his way back to his room in the silver-edged moonlight coming through the windows.
Deep in the night, Lili crept into the room on legs that still ached, moving carefully in the dark. She had barely climbed onto the edge of the bed when she found herself looking directly into Kihara's open, unhurried eyes.
She hadn't expected him to be awake.
She clutched the hem of her sleeve and looked away. "Lili kept thinking about the wine. Lili couldn't sleep."
Kihara said nothing. He simply shifted to make room and pulled the blanket back slightly in an uncomplicated invitation.
Lili hesitated. Then she lay down at the very edge, as far as the width of the bed allowed, and stared at the ceiling.
"...Is it always going to be like this?"
"Probably for a while," he said. "Then less. Then one day you won't notice."
She didn't respond. After a long moment, her breathing evened out.
[Hm,]
Shinobu observed from the shadow-space, with the air of someone filing away something unexpected.
[So that's how you handle it.]
She said nothing further. She lay back down in the dark and let them sleep.
...
Thank you for reading.