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Sellen tilted her head slightly, dark hair spilling over one shoulder as she studied him with those sharp blue eyes that always seemed halfway between amusement and dissection.
"What, specifically, do you want my help with, little tadpole?"
John leaned back on his hands and let out a slow breath through his nose, rolling one shoulder as though trying to physically work the absurdity of the situation into place.
"All right, so…" He began. "I'm about to go face the Red Wolf of Radagon."
Sellen's expression did not change yet, but the corner of her mouth twitched with immediate interest.
John lifted a hand before she could cut in.
"But…" He said, pointing for emphasis. "I don't want to hurt it."
That earned him a few moments of silence. Sellen blinked once, then she hummed, soft and thoughtful. "Ahh… that little creature."
John stared at her.
"Little?" He repeated flatly. "Sellen, that thing's nearly ten times your size. It could bite you in half like a grape."
That only made her giggle.
"I know~!" She said it with complete ease, as though they were discussing an unruly hound that occasionally shredded a servant and not an enormous sorcerous apex predator. "I once saw him cast better sorcery than one of my former colleagues before eating the poor fool alive. His expression before the end was priceless. Rather hilarious, really."
John sweat-dropped instantly.
Behind him, Marika was quiet for a few seconds before, unexpectedly, she giggled. It was soft, almost delicate, but unmistakably delighted.
John glanced aside just enough to catch the golden-haired goddess resting her cheek against one hand with a faint, entertained smile.
"I like this one." Marika murmured.
John barked a laugh and stretched his back until it gave a satisfying series of pops.
"Yeah, all right, good to know you two are spiritually aligned." He turned back to Sellen. "So, do you know anything useful for befriending the wolf, then?"
Sellen's smile sharpened.
"No."
John's face flattened.
She laughed softly at that, shifting her weight and leaning back onto both hands with infuriating elegance.
"I am no wet nurse, nor some overbearing hearth-mother hovering over a cub's every step." Her eyes glinted. "Sink or swim, little tadpole~! If you want the beast to like you, you shall have to earn it yourself."
John sighed and dragged a hand down his face.
"'Twas worth a shot…"
For a moment, the room settled into a softer quiet.
The bustle of the Roundtable Hold stayed outside the walls, muted into a distant hum. Warm light caught on the books around them, on the scattered scrolls, on the polished glintstone instruments Sellen had already begun arranging into some living geometry only she could fully appreciate.
She looked, John thought idly, more at home here already than most people ever managed to look anywhere.
That thought tugged at him.
He looked up at her again, his expression easing. "Do you miss it?"
Sellen blinked once.
"The Academy?" She asked.
John nodded.
She hummed, gaze drifting somewhere past him, past the room, past the Hold altogether. When she answered, her voice was softer than usual.
"Some of it." She admitted. "Some of it, very much." A faint breath escaped her nose, almost a laugh and almost not. "And some of it rather less."
John stayed quiet, which, for him, was practically an act of devotion.
That seemed to please her enough to continue.
"Raya Lucaria in its height was…" She trailed off for a moment, searching not for words but for the version of them least compromised by memory. "Larger than the place you walked through today. Not in stone, perhaps. But in spirit."
She looked down at her own hand, flexing her fingers once. "There was a time when men and women would do anything in the name of sorcery. Anything in the pursuit of understanding."
Sellen scoffed softly, but there was old bitterness in it, worn smooth from too many years.
"It was once an academy where the artist need not fear the censor. Where the scientist was not bound by petty morality. Where the great were not forced to kneel before the small…!"
The room seemed to sharpen around that last sentence.
She had not raised her voice. She had not needed to.
John tilted his head, studying her more carefully now. "Talk to me."
Sellen's lips twitched at that.
"Mm. It is buried history now." She gave one light shrug. "But if you truly want the shorter telling… I sought to innovate. To push sorcery forward, as my predecessors once did. To carve a future instead of kneeling before dead masters and repeating their every theorem until the stars themselves grew bored."
Her expression hardened.
"But the Academy changed." She looked faintly disgusted saying it. "It filled itself with nobles. With cowards. With sentimental fools who wanted power without cost, innovation without consequence, and greatness wrapped in silk so no one would have to feel frightened by what it required."
Her blue eyes met his.
"They called my work cruel, mad, and unfit. They feared where it would lead more than they desired what it might uncover."
John was quiet for a few moments, before he reached his hand behind and scratched the back of his head.
"…Should I know what you did?"
Sellen sighed, rolled her eyes and let out a soft, ominous little sigh. "It wasn't enough…"
John stared at her nervously for a moment.
For the second time in only a few minutes, he found himself sweating with no external cause.
"That… is somehow more worrying than an actual explanation."
Sellen smiled without an ounce of apology.
Marika, who had been listening with half-lidded golden eyes, finally spoke.
"The pursuit of knowledge has ever required a degree of cruelty." She sounded thoughtful rather than judgmental. "Not always toward flesh, though oft enough toward comfort. Weak hearts fear the hand that reaches beyond custom. Small minds call all greatness monstrous the moment it asks more of them than obedience."
She tilted her head. "Yet unrestrained curiosity is no virtue merely because it is bold. There is a difference between breaking boundaries and breaking meaning. Still… between the censor and the heretic, I have oft found the censor more offensive."
John looked between the two of them and snorted.
"Well, that's probably terrible news for the rest of us."
He let out a breath and shrugged.
In the end, he had sought Sellen out knowing exactly what she was. Reviled witch, exile, taboo-breaker, and all. That had not changed because the shape of her sins remained tastefully vague and mildly horrifying.
If anything, it made sense.
Sellen huffed and looked away, though the lingering bitterness in her face had not fully left yet.
"If there is one thing I truly miss, it is not the pettiness, nor the politics, nor the masks people wore while pretending their ambition was some holy service. It is the books." Her eyes narrowed slightly. "The archives. The old scrolls. The texts no one outside those halls was ever meant to touch. I even left some of my own work there, once."
John blinked, before a wide smirk spread across his face slowly.
Sellen noticed immediately. "What?"
He chuckled.
"Well…" He rolled one shoulder with smug satisfaction. "As it happens, I may have… reappropriated a few things during my tour."
Sellen stared.
John opened his inventory, then began dropping scrolls and books onto the rug between them.
A few became several.
Several became a small pile.
A small pile became a miniature landslide of Raya Lucarian scholarship; scroll-cases, bound texts, lecture copies, copied notes, conspectus material, and more than a few works that had probably once lived on shelves marked do not touch under penalty of academic murder.
Sellen's expression changed by degrees.
First surprise, then disbelief, then an excitement so bright and vicious it made her look far more dangerous than any spell she had cast so far that day.
John leaned back on one hand and smiled at her.
"Consider it repayment for the lessons, my lovely teacher~!"
Sellen turned from him to the pile of stolen Sorcerery assets and back repeatedly.
The corner of her mouth twitched upward into a dark, delighted smile.
"I knew there was a reason I liked you, little tadpole~!"
With that, she moved without composed Academy poise, not with the measured elegance she usually wielded like a second language, but with an eager, immediate hunger. She turned and crawled over to the spread of texts, one hand already reaching, robes shifting around her as she settled among the books like a dragon returning to a hoard.
In the process, her robe tilted just enough at the chest to reveal a far more generous line of cleavage than modesty or survival should have permitted.
John, being himself, stared.
Openly and unashamedly.
He admired the elegant line of her back, the subtle sway of her hips beneath the fabric, the pale shape of her throat and chest as she bent over the books, and the altogether unfair way scholarship and beauty had apparently decided to cohabitate in one woman just to make his life harder.
Sellen knew.
He could tell she knew by the tiny, satisfied curve at one corner of her mouth as she unrolled the first recovered scroll.
She did not care.
Marika, on the other hand, appeared before him with her arms crossed beneath her blessed chest and one brow raised so high it nearly counted as altitude.
"Am I not enough to gaze upon that thy greedy ass eyes must wander so readily?" She asked dryly.
John bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.
He turned his head just enough to look up at her, then made the catastrophic decision to answer honestly.
"I love you, and your magnificent tits. Deeply, sincerely, and wholeheartedly." He gestured loosely with one hand toward the world at large. "But even if I have the greatest pair in existence haunting me at all hours, what's wrong with admiring others?"
Marika's disgusted stare deepened.
Though beneath it, he caught the traitorous little flicker of pride. And beneath that, the faintest glint of amusement she was trying very hard not to allow onto her beautiful face.
"Oh, thou art hopeless."
John grinned up at her with zero remorse.
Across from them, Sellen let out a quiet, breathy laugh without ever looking up from the books, already halfway lost in the texts he had dumped before her.
He dragged his gaze away from the dangerous distraction that was Marika, and turned to Sellen half-drowned in stolen books and beautiful indifference, then cleared his throat lightly.
"As much as I'd love to let you crawl through my crimes uninterrupted…" He smiled. "I actually wanted your help with something before I head back to the Academy."
That pulled her attention up again.
Sellen looked at him over the edge of an open text, blue eyes narrowing slightly as she tilted her head. The motion would have been almost adorably curious if he had not already learned, very thoroughly, that this woman was an ambitious witch with enough academic bloodlust to make lesser scholars start writing wills.
"Oh~?" She asked. "And what could possibly drag your attention away from ogling your teacher and stealing half of Raya Lucaria's library?"
John grinned and reached into his inventory.
A few moments later, he drew out the pair of scrolls he had looted from Sellia, Town of Sorcery. Their parchment was old and darkened with age, the script etched across them in elegant, precise lines that looked less like ordinary Academy notation and more like something learned under starlight and silence.
The instant Sellen saw them, her expression changed.
It was subtle at first. Just a flicker in the eyes, the sharpening of interest, the quiet lift of her posture as she set aside the text in her lap and gave the scrolls her full attention.
"Those…" She murmured.
John watched the way her gaze tracked across the seals and script.
"You recognize them?"
Sellen hummed softly and began moving closer to him.
"Not the exact copies. But the source, yes." She leaned forward slightly, all attention on him now. "Sellia."
There was a note in her voice that was not quite nostalgia and not quite professional regard. Something closer to the measured respect one predator kept for another species of hunter.
"I crossed paths with Sellian sorcerers only briefly." She lifted one shoulder. "Briefly was enough."
John gave a small chuckle and rolled the scrolls once in his hand.
"They're for Night Comet and Unseen Blade." He held them out just enough for her to see clearly. "I figured they might make for a pretty nice edge against the Academy sorcerers I'm about to deal with."
Sellen reached for them immediately.
John pulled them back at the very last moment and her hand closed on empty air.
She looked up at him with a stare that should have been offended and severe, but instead managed to look weirdly, unfairly cute. There was annoyance there, yes, but also the kind of sharp, alert interest that made her eyes shine brighter rather than colder.
John leaned down toward her with a smug smile, closing the distance until their noses nearly touched.
"Can you teach me or not?"
Sellen did not answer immediately.
She just looked at him.
Her eyes drifted downward for the briefest second, catching on his lips before lifting back to his face. Then one corner of her mouth curled, slow and knowing.
A second later she leaned forward herself, swift as a striking cat, and snatched the scrolls right out of his hand.
John laughed under his breath and sat back.
Sellen settled properly again, smoothing her robes with one hand and holding the recovered scrolls with the other as if to reassert some amount of control over the conversation.
"I do not appreciate deviations from the curriculum." She informed him.
John's smile deepened.
Sellen sighed, then relented with a faintly amused look. "But… given the circumstances, I can make an exception this once."
He grinned openly at that, victorious in exactly the insufferable way she had expected.
"No woman in thy life ever punishes thee properly." Marika lamented a few steps away as she made a tired sound of theatrical despair.
John had to bite down on a laugh.
'That includes you, doesn't it?'
Marika's face tightened into dignified defeat.
"Unfortunately…" She muttered.
She vanished from beside him and reappeared on a nearby chair, lounging back with all the offended grace of a goddess retreating from a conversation she had already lost. Her long pale legs crossed over one another atop the low table before her as she turned her face toward the false window, where Liurnia drifted in the spectral image beyond. Golden hair spilled over the arm of the chair like molten silk.
John, naturally, looked.
He took a few seconds to admire the line of her crossed legs, the calm curve of her posture, the offended beauty of her expression as she pretended very hard not to pay attention to him.
Sellen coughed softly, just loud enough to remind him that he was currently in a room with another beautiful, dangerous woman who had not missed what his eyes were doing.
He turned back to her.
Sellen was watching him with one brow raised.
"I can teach you one of them, not both."
John sat up straighter. "That works for now. Why not both?"
She chuckled and leaned back, summoning a large, plush backrest behind herself with a flicker of azure sorcery. It puffed into existence at her spine and shoulders like she had simply decided gravity was a problem for poorer scholars.
She lifted the Night Comet scroll in one hand.
"Because basic sorcery is one thing, but Sellian sorcery is another." She gave the parchment a light shake. "There is a reason the sorcerers of Sellia were feared. Their arts are peculiar, specialized, and built on disciplines the Academy never quite liked admitting were effective."
Her lips curved with faint disdain on that last point.
"You are clever, yes." She continued with a small nod. "Ambitious certainly. And powerful in far too many directions at once. But you are not yet some supreme genius of magic."
John raised a finger. "...Yet, being the operative word."
That got a small snicker out of her.
"Fufufu~... If you say so~..." Sellen flicked the Night Comet scroll behind herself. An azure glow caught it in the air and held it there at her shoulder, suspended neatly until she chose to retrieve it again. "I can teach you Unseen Blade in an hour or so. But Night Comet is beyond the sorcerer you currently are."
John sighed. "I figured that might be the answer."
Sellen's expression sharpened at once.
Her head tilted with visible annoyance, dark hair shifting behind her shoulder in a smooth spill.
"Did you? Or did you think sorcery is some simple trick of memorization and hand motions? Need I remind you how long it took you to cast Glintstone Pebble properly?"
John coughed into his fist and muttered a little too quickly under his breath. "That was a fluke."
Sellen leveled him with the kind of unimpressed stare only teachers and goddesses seemed able to weaponize so effectively.
"It was not." Marika called out from across the room without even turning around.
John sighed and raised both hands.
"All right. Fine. Fair." He leaned forward a little, smiling in open surrender. "Then, please, my lovely teacher. Would you teach me?"
Sellen held the silence for just long enough to make it sting.
Then she smirked.
"Very well." Her voice softened, just slightly, into something that sounded far too indulgent for his own good. "Just for my petulant, unruly little tadpole."
John's grin came back immediately.
Sellen uncrossed her legs and shifted to sit more squarely atop the rug, the teaching posture settling over her almost like a second skin. The teasing remained in her face, but her focus sharpened beneath it. One hand reached out, and the Unseen Blade scroll drifted free from his pile of stolen magic and floated into her grasp.
She unrolled it carefully.
Azure script shimmered across the parchment, older and subtler than Academy sorcery, the notation built on concealment, silence, and the idea that the deadliest spell in a duel was often the one your enemy could not perceive before it entered their throat.
Sellen glanced over the contents once, then twice.
A pleased hum left her.
"Yes…" She murmured. "This will do nicely."
John leaned in a little. "That good?"
"For what you need?" She looked at him over the scroll. "Yes. Against Raya Lucarian sorcerers, it is not a bad choice at all. Most of them have spent their whole lives learning to answer visible threats with visible solutions. There is a particular delight in offending that habit."
John's smile sharpened. "Now that sounds like my kind of sorcery."
Sellen smiled back, all dark amusement and scholarly hunger.
"That…" She said, rolling the scroll shut halfway and tapping it against her knee. "...is because you are a fundamentally troublesome person."
He spread his hands. "And yet, still teachable."
"That's debatable."
She shifted closer, not quite enough to erase the space between them, but enough that the lesson had officially begun rather than merely been promised.
"Listen carefully, then. Unseen Blade is not a spell of force, but of concealment. You are not creating a blade. You are not sharpening power. You are making perception fail."
John's expression focused at once.
That, more than the teasing or the flirting, always pleased her. The ease with which he could turn fully attentive when given something new to master.
Sellen laid the scroll between them.
"The spell cloaks a weapon in sorcery so subtle that the eye cannot properly hold it." She traced one elegant finger over the script. "That means two things. First, the casting must be fine, delicate. Coarse shaping will simply create a visible shimmer."
Her eyes flicked upward. "Second, you cannot bully the spell into obedience the way you must do with half your incantations."
John, to his credit, had the decency to look only slightly called out by her shockingly accurate guess.
Sellen continued.
"Sellian magic has always favored what is hidden. The strike not seen. The comet unnoticed until it is already too late. The weapon that appears only when it enters flesh." She smiled faintly. "It is less grand than Academy sorcery. Less proud, but much more useful."
Marika, from across the room, made a low approving hum.
"A rare lesson in subtlety. Attend well, mine champion. It may spare others thy usual need to crash through walls."
John ignored that expertly. "So what's the trick?"
Sellen's gaze sharpened with pleasure at the question.
"The trick is that you must first stop thinking of your weapon as an object to be hidden." She tapped his chest, lightly, with two fingers. "You must think of sight itself as the thing to be deceived."
He fell silent, considering it.
Sellen watched him do so, then slowly leaned back against her conjured cushion again with the calm confidence of a woman entirely in her element.
"Now, draw your weapon, Little Tadpole. Let us see whether you can manage subtlety without accidentally blowing a hole through my room."
John reached for his inventory with a grin.
"Wow... You really know how to set the mood."
…
John reappeared before the sealed doors of the Debate Parlour in a wash of Grace and a low, tired exhale, looking every bit like a man who had just spent an hour being academically abused by a beautiful witch for his own benefit.
His shoulders rolled once beneath his loose white shirt. His hair was a little more disordered than before, one sleeve slightly wrinkled where Sellen had repeatedly smacked his wrist into the proper angle, and there was a faint look in his eyes that belonged exclusively to students who had just survived a difficult lesson and were not yet sure whether they had learned or merely endured.
He sighed under his breath and muttered, mostly to himself. "Fuck me… Sellen really does not hold back…"
Marika, lounging invisibly at the edge of his perception with all the elegant disdain of a queen watching someone reap what he sowed, gave a soft huff.
"She does not, and thou deservest every scrap of that woman's scorn."
John snorted faintly and rolled one shoulder again, feeling the lingering ache in the channels Sellen had forced him to use properly. Unseen Weapon was now sitting in his head and nerves like a newly memorized trick he could almost do without thinking, but only almost. The lesson had been productive.
It had also involved several taps to the head, two sharp raps across the knuckles, one lecture about finesse, and Sellen calling him an impatient barbarian no fewer than four times.
Honestly, it had gone pretty well.
He took one step toward the parlour doors and heard a sharp intake of breath from nearby.
Elyse.
The Preceptor had apparently not moved far from where he had vanished. The moment she saw him reappear, relief and alarm hit her face so quickly that it nearly looked painful. She hurried toward him at once, robes swaying around her ankles as her expression shifted into something halfway between frazzled and scandalized.
"My lord!" She exclaimed, low enough not to disturb the entire corridor and loud enough to make it obvious she had been stressing herself into an early grave on his behalf. "Where have you been?"
John lifted a hand lazily and waved off the question as though disappearing out of a prestigious magical academy for an hour only to return smelling faintly of Roundtable dust, witchcraft, and bad decisions were an entirely ordinary thing.
"Don't worry about it." He glanced toward the great doors of the Debate Parlour. "I'm heading inside."
Elyse stopped dead, then she gave him a look sharp enough to strip bark.
"No."
John blinked once, mildly surprised by the force of that.
Elyse stepped closer, lowering her voice into an urgent hiss that nonetheless carried every ounce of her building frustration.
"No, my lord, you do not simply disappear after slapping a noble's son through a wall, stealing Academy property, placing your own Grace inside our schoolhouse, and then reappear only to walk into the Debate Parlour as if none of that happened!"
John's brows climbed slightly.
She was really worked up.
That, unfortunately for her, made this much funnier.
Elyse kept going before he could interrupt.
"I am already in deep enough trouble with my superiors because of you!" She said, almost breathless with exasperation. "You are expected in the upper halls soon to account for what you have done and what you have taken. Do you understand me? They are waiting."
She paused just long enough to make the next part feel heavier.
"The man you struck was the son of a higher noble." Her mouth tightened. "A man who is very much not pleased with what happened to his son. Or his son's stone mask."
John's smile returned at once. It was small at first, then sharper.
"Then I'll deal with that later." He shrugged. "And if it's such a problem for them, they can come down and say it to my face instead of hiding up in their high towers and summoning me like they're better than me or something."
Elyse stared at him in naked horror.
John, unhelpfully, looked completely sincere.
"My lord, please understand the depth of the situation–!"
"I do." He gave her a casual little nod. "And I said I'll handle it. I just need to pay my mother-in-law a visit first."
Elyse looked like the statement physically hurt her.
"Please stop joking."
"I'm not."
And with that, John walked to the great doors of the Debate Parlour and pushed them open.
Elyse made a small sound of despair and followed after him meekly, clearly too horrified to let him go in alone and too overwhelmed to truly stop him now that he had decided to be impossible again.
The Debate Parlour opened before them in grand, eerie silence.
It was larger than it ever had any right to be.
The chamber stretched wide beneath a high, vaulted ceiling ribbed with pale stone and old glintstone ornament, its architecture caught somewhere between lecture hall, dueling chamber, and sacred hall of impossible scholarship. Long banners hung from above, faded by time and dust, bearing Academy sigils and old lunar motifs half-hidden in the cold blue light that filtered down from tall stained windows.
Rows of debate seats and raised stone platforms lined the outer edges of the room, though many stood empty or half-broken from age and neglect. Tables lay overturned against the walls, some stacked with abandoned texts and notes that had likely once mattered a great deal to people who were now long dead, maddened, or promoted beyond the need to care.
At the chamber's center stretched a broad polished floor of pale stone and glintstone inlay, a dueling ground disguised as academic decorum. Great magical sigils had been worked into it long ago, now dim but still faintly humming beneath the air, as if the room remembered every spell and argument that had ever broken across its bones.
And in the far corner of that grand, scholarly emptiness lay a large, plush rug.
Upon it, curled with the imperious comfort of something that knew full well it belonged there more than any human, rested the Red Wolf of Radagon.
He was enormous, even more than twice as large as a horse.
A great beast of scarlet fur and pale undercoat, all long lean limbs, predatory grace, and tightly coiled sorcerous violence. His coat gleamed deep crimson in the magical light, richer and darker than ordinary fur, like dried blood brushed into velvet.
Around his neck and shoulders the fur thickened into a proud mane-like collar, and the body beneath it was an impossibly athletic line; slender enough to suggest speed, broad enough to promise ruin.
His muzzle rested atop one forepaw, eyes shut, breath slow and quiet.
Even asleep, he felt dangerous.
The glintstone drifting through the chamber seemed to curl around him rather than over him. A staffless sorcerer in beast form.
The moment the door opened, one ear twitched.
A second later, one eye opened slowly.
It was not the sleepy blink of an ordinary animal roused from rest. It was measured, aware, and intelligent in a way that made Elyse instinctively step half behind John without realizing she had done so.
The red wolf's gaze fixed on the doorway, then on John.
Then, more specifically, on John alone.
Elyse swallowed audibly.
"My lord…" She whispered. "Is this really a good idea?"
John only half-turned toward her, flashing a grin and throwing a thumbs-up over his shoulder as though that answered anything at all.
With his free hand, he tugged one sleeve back up his forearm and let the fabric settle there.
He turned back toward the wolf and started walking slowly and carefully to him.
The red wolf rose in one smooth, silent motion from the rug.
Gods, he was even bigger standing.
His back nearly reached John's chest. His paws looked large enough to take a man's face off in a single swipe, and when he stepped forward the muscles under that crimson fur moved with terrible elegance. They weren't lumbering or tense in the clumsy way of lesser beasts, they were precise.
His ears angled forward, then twitched again as he stared at John with clear attention.
There was no mindless aggression in it. No simple predator's hunger. It looked, instead, unsettlingly close to recognition strained through mistrust. As though some scent, some pressure of Grace, blood, or divinity around John reminded the beast of something old and important, but not enough to earn comfort from it.
John slowed even more.
He lowered his shoulders deliberately. Let the Commander's Standard remain dismissed. Kept both hands visible. Let the room breathe around him without sudden movement.
The red wolf took one step forward, then another.
John pitched his voice low and easy, the same tone people reserved for dangerous dogs, nervous horses, and maidens they were trying not to spook.
"Hey there, buddy…"
The wolf's ears twitched once.
John kept moving at a patient pace.
"Good boy…" He murmured. "That's it. Easy. No problems here."
Behind him, Elyse looked halfway between aghast and fascinated. Marika, for once, had gone quiet enough to simply watch.
The wolf took another slow step toward him, then another.
When John got within a few inches of the beast, he stopped entirely.
He did not reach forward again.
He simply held out one hand and let the wolf decide the rest.
The Red Wolf of Radagon approached with deliberate suspicion, head lowering slightly as he closed the remaining distance. His nose twitched. His ears shifted in tiny, rapid adjustments. He sniffed the air around John first, then the offered hand, then the wrist, then the sleeve, taking him apart in layers of scent and instinct.
John stood very still.
He could feel the hot breath across his knuckles. See the faint movement in the wolf's whiskers. Smell fur, glintstone, old blood, moonlight, and something else beneath it all. Something familiar to the Academy and old Caria alike.
For a moment, the tension seemed to ease.
The wolf's posture did not soften exactly, but it ceased tightening. No bared fangs. No bristled challenge. No immediate sorcerous swords forming over its back.
John's mouth curled into the beginning of a smug little smile.
'Huh… that wasn't so bad. It was actually kinda easy–'
The wolf's ears pinned back sharply, then he bit him.
Hard.
There was no warning growl, bark, or theatrical buildup. Just a sudden brutal clamp of jaws around John's forearm with enough force to crack stone if applied elsewhere.
Pain detonated up his arm.
"FUCK—!"
John's shout rang through the Debate Parlour as he instinctively jerked backward in shock, the wolf's fangs briefly buried in flesh before the beast released and sprang away in the same motion, landing several feet back with his head low and eyes blazing now with open challenge.
Behind him, Elyse gasped in horror.
"My lord!"
And in the back of his mind, Marika broke.
She burst into laughter so sudden and viciously delighted that John almost felt more offended by that than by the bite itself.
It rang through him in bright, helpless peals, rich with vindication and amusement both.
"Oh, magnificent!" She managed between laughs. "Thou deservedst that entirely!"
John clutched his arm, glaring at the wolf with deeply wounded indignation while blood welled between his fingers and the beast stared right back at him with all the cold suspicion of a creature who had just concluded that, no, actually, this man was in fact full of nonsense.
Elyse looked caught between rushing to help and deciding whether that might get her eaten too.
John, for his part, stared at the Red Wolf of Radagon in shocked betrayal.
"Dude…" He hissed. "I called you a good boy."
The wolf's lip twitched very slightly, showing one long white fang as if to say that had changed absolutely nothing.
John hissed through his teeth, then flicked the bitten hand once in pure annoyance. Blood sprayed in a brief arc across the polished debate floor before his forearm rippled and thickened, scales pushing back over skin in a wave of black-red plates as he dragged the limb fully into its draconic shape again.
"All right then…" He growled, flexing the clawed hand once as the torn flesh already began knitting shut around the puncture marks. "Guess we're playing rough."
The Red Wolf answered with a low, rumbling growl of his own before springing at him.
He moved like a spell cast by something with fur and teeth instead of hands. One heartbeat he was crouched low with his mane bristling and his eye fixed on John. The next he was airborne, crimson body carving through the blue-lit air of the parlour with unnatural grace while glintstone light gathered in his maw.
It was not a pebble, or a shard, as was John's current limit in sorcery.
A proper, snarling Comet of condensed Glintstone.
John's eye twitched.
"Oh, come on…" He muttered, shoulders tightening as the spell swelled brighter and brighter behind the wolf's fangs. "This damn overgrown puppy is better at sorcery than me…"
Marika laughed immediately, a full, helpless laugh that rang through his head as she watched her champion get humbled by a dog.
"I warned thee not to grow arrogant too swiftly!"
Elyse, to her great credit and greater intelligence, made one short, horrified sound and promptly threw herself behind the nearest stretch of broken interior wall.
The wolf fired.
The glintstone comet tore across the Debate Parlour in a brilliant streak of azure-white, screaming hard enough to make the old room's sigils hum in answer. John did not bother blocking.
He threw himself sideways instead, boots skidding across polished stone as the comet sheared past him and slammed into the floor where he had been standing a fraction of a second before.
The blast blew out tiles, cracked a length of raised stone, and sent a geyser of glittering magical debris up toward the vaulted ceiling.
John landed in a low slide, one hand braced against the floor, and barked out a laugh despite himself.
"Oh, that is bullshit!" He said, grinning as he sprang back up. "You do not get to be cooler than me in my own scene."
The Red Wolf landed opposite him, paws soundless against the stone, shoulders rolling with predatory tension. Three glintblades spun into existence above and behind the beast's back in perfect Academy formation, hovering like a halo of azure glintstone.
John stared between them and the wolf.
"You're not helping the 'I should maybe take you seriously' problem."
The wolf's ears flicked once, then the blades launched.
John moved.
The first cut through the air where his ribs had been. The second shattered against a pillar when he twisted aside. The third he actually swatted away with the shaft of an armory stand he ripped up from the floor at the last second, sending the magical blade careening sideways into a row of old debate benches.
The Red Wolf came after the spells instantly.
He hit the ground at full speed and rushed John low and fast, not trying to tear his throat out this time so much as bowl him over with all the righteous fury of a very magical beast who had decided this man needed to be physically corrected.
John met him halfway and immediately understood two things.
First, the wolf was fast enough to be deeply offensive.
Second, this had already stopped being a fight in the normal sense.
Because the moment he reached for the beast's shoulder instead of his jaw, the moment he shifted from kill-range to grab-range, something about the whole exchange changed.
The Red Wolf hit him like a launched boulder.
John laughed as claws scrabbled against his shirt and the two of them crashed through the open center of the Debate Parlour, skidding across old stone in a mess of fur, scales, and glintstone sparks. The wolf twisted under his grip with liquid, impossible flexibility, snapping for his draconic arm more out of refusal than murderous intent now.
John caught the side of his neck instead, firmly enough to be forceful.
The wolf kicked off his chest and flung himself free, landing on all fours atop one of the broken debate platforms with his fur standing slightly on end and his lips peeled back in a soundless, affronted snarl.
John pushed himself upright and spread his hands.
"There we go…" He said, breathing a little harder now. "That feels way more honest."
The wolf's eye stayed fixed on him.
Then, slowly, his front half lowered while his hindquarters stayed high.
John blinked. Marika went very quiet for one dangerous second. And Elyse peeked out from behind the broken wall and froze in utter disbelief.
The Red Wolf of Radagon had just given a play-bow.
It still looked like it could become homicide if misread. But John knew a challenging stance when he saw one.
His grin widened into something boyish and delighted.
"No shot…" He breathed. "You actually wanna do this? You wanna go, puppy?"
The wolf barked once, a sharp, cracking sound edged with magic and old arrogance, before launching himself again.
John met him laughing.
From that point onward, whatever dignity the Debate Parlour had once possessed ceased to matter.
They tore through the chamber like overpowered idiots.
The wolf lunged, swiped, pounced, and fired short bursts of glintstone sorcery every time distance opened between them. John ducked under comet-shots, vaulted over snapping jaws, grabbed at scruffs and shoulders, and let himself get chased around pillars and broken desks with the giddy delight of a man who had somehow stumbled into the most dangerous game of tag in Liurnia.
The wolf rushed him across the central floor.
John sprang up onto an overturned lecture table, kicked off it, and cleared the beast's snapping muzzle by inches. He landed on a high stone rail, skidded along it, then nearly got his face taken off when a glintblade came screaming for his throat and the wolf followed it like an especially smug executioner.
"You little shit!" John laughed, ducking as the blade shaved a lock of hair free. "No magic spam during melee, that's cheap!"
The wolf barked again and pounced from the left.
John caught him around the middle and let the momentum carry them both through a stack of old wooden chairs. The whole mess exploded around them, splinters and dust flying everywhere as wolf and demigod tumbled together across the floor. For half a second John had one arm looped around the beast's chest and the other braced at his side.
The fur was unbelievably soft.
He had exactly enough time to register that before the Red Wolf planted all four paws against him and kicked off, tearing free with offended majesty and leaving long claw marks across John's shirt in the process.
John rolled to his feet, looked down at the damage, and pointed accusingly.
"Rude!"
The wolf's tail lashed once.
Then two more glintblades formed above his back and curved around opposite angles, not at John's body, but at where he would need to move if he dodged the beast's next rush.
John noticed that and immediately laughed louder.
"Oh, okay, you're smart-smart."
Marika folded her arms and watched the carnage with a mixture of exasperation and unwilling fascination.
"This was not, I believe, the intended approach to befriending a royal sorcerous beast."
'Counterpoint…' John thought as he ducked a swiping paw and slapped the wolf's shoulder on the way past. 'He's having fun.'
"That is not a counterpoint. That is an indictment."
Elyse, still behind partial cover, looked absolutely aghast.
"My lord..!" She called weakly as John narrowly avoided being flattened against a pillar by a snapping lunge. "Are… are you sure this is under control?"
John grabbed a hanging banner rope, swung out of the wolf's path, and shouted back. "Not even a little!"
That did not help her.
It did, however, make the wolf pause in a way John finally caught properly.
The beast was no longer looking at him as a trespasser alone.
There was still caution, still challenge, still the proud, suspicious edge of something ancient and dangerous deciding how much faith to grant an idiot.
But there was something else under it now. Something close to engagement and interest.
The Red Wolf rushed again, but it was different. Less of a killing strike. More of a deliberate line driven to test whether John could keep up.
John met that energy instantly.
He did not try to hit harder. He did not go for the throat.
He feinted left, vaulted right, slapped the floor with his draconic claws for purchase, and ran three steps up one of the debate pillars before pushing off into open air. The wolf spun beneath him, twisting mid-bound to track him, and John grinned down as they passed each other in crossing arcs.
When he landed, the wolf was already there.
John raised both arms and braced.
Instead of biting, the beast slammed chest-first into him in a full-bodied, powerful collision that nearly sent him sliding halfway across the room. John caught the wolf around the shoulders and dug his heels in, laughing through the strain as the beast shoved and shoved and shoved, trying to bulldoze him backward through sheer offended determination.
"All right, you fat little shit…" John hissed, muscles bunching.
The Red Wolf snarled right into his face.
John snarled back automatically.
For a moment, they stayed like that, locked chest to chest, hand to fur, claw to floor, staring into each other's eyes while glintstone sparks drifted around them and the whole Debate Parlour held its breath.
The wolf jerked free and bounded backward in three quick steps.
He did not attack, he circled.
John straightened slowly as the two of them watched each other.
The wolf's ears were up now, not flat. His tail was not tucked or stiff, either. It was moving softly, though not quite wagging.
But enough that John saw it and immediately felt the grin tugging at his face again.
"Oh, you are so busted~!" He called out softly. "You're enjoying this~!"
The Red Wolf huffed, almost insulted by the implication, then he came in again faster than before.
This time John was ready.
He sidestepped the first rush, caught the mane at the base of the wolf's neck with his draconic hand, and used the beast's own momentum to pivot them both around one of the central columns. The wolf twisted, pawed at the stone, launched off it, and rebounded straight back into him.
John barely had time to laugh before a heavy furry body hit his chest and took him clean off his feet.
They hit the floor hard and the wolf landed on top of him.
Elyse made a noise of horror. Marika pinched the bridge of her nose.
And John, flat on his back with a massive magical wolf standing over him, stared up into crimson fur, glinting fangs, and two bright intelligent eyes.
The Red Wolf stared down at him. He didn't immediately bite him, or start casting anything.
He was just standing there, chest rising and falling, as if waiting.
John blinked once. Then, very carefully, he reached up and scratched behind one ear.
The wolf froze.
John scratched again, slow and deliberate, fingers sinking into the thick fur just behind the ear and down into the mane where dogs, wolves, and apparently magical moonlit monstrosities alike tended to keep a weakness for proper attention.
The Red Wolf made a sound, one like a low, rough exhale that might have once thought about becoming one and then changed its mind halfway through.
John's grin turned impossibly smug.
"There it is~..." He murmured. "Who's a homicidal little genius, huh~?"
The wolf did not answer in any language John fully understood.
But he also did not move away.
Instead he gave one short, annoyed huff and stepped off John's chest with all the put-upon dignity of a creature allowing a thing, not enjoying it, and certainly not admitting anything to the contrary.
John sat up slowly.
The Red Wolf circled once around him.
Then, to Elyse's visible spiritual collapse and Marika's deepening disbelief, the beast came to stand at John's side rather than across from him.
John looked up at Elyse with a broad, victorious grin while one clawed hand stayed buried in crimson fur.
"What? He and I are practicing diplomacy."
Elyse stared at him, then at the wolf, then back at him, and sighed tiredly.
"My lord…" She said faintly. "I do not think that word means what you think it means."
Marika let out a long, weary sigh.
"I concur."
John chuckled under his breath and kept rubbing the wolf's neck, fingers sinking deeper into the thick crimson fur before drifting under the beast's chin.
The Red Wolf held himself stiffly at first, every inch of his posture screaming that this was not happening, that he was not yielding, that he remained a proud and terrible guardian-beast of Raya Lucaria and not some overgrown hound getting won over by scratches and audacity.
Then, little by little, he gave in.
His head tilted up by a fraction. His shoulders loosened. That great, regal neck stretched forward ever so slightly into John's hand, and the soft rumble in his chest deepened into something less like a growl and more like a rough, grudgingly pleased vibration. Behind him, his tail started moving.
Slowly at first, then with a little more confidence.
Then with the unmistakable rhythm of a creature who was absolutely, definitely enjoying himself and would sooner die than admit it aloud.
John's grin turned downright victorious.
"Oh, you poor bastard…" He murmured, scratching just right beneath the jaw. "You weren't trying to kill people at all, were you?"
The Red Wolf opened one eye and looked at him with an annoyed expression that somehow managed to be both offended and vaguely superior.
John laughed quietly.
"No, no, I get it now." He kept scratching, and the wolf's tail gave another stronger wag before the rest of his body remembered it was supposed to be dignified. "You're just really, really, really fucking bored."
That earned him a huff through the nose.
The kind of huff that confirmed everything.
John leaned back slightly where he sat amid the wreckage of the Debate Parlour and looked around at the shattered benches, cracked flooring, half-toppled lecterns, clawmarks along pillars, and the various signs of magical canine roughhousing spread all through the chamber.
It all made sense now.
The Red Wolf of Radagon was not some frothing executioner lying in wait to slaughter all trespassers on sight. He was a monstrously strong, monstrously intelligent, monstrously unsupervised magical wolf who had been left in a giant Academy full of nervous scholars, arrogant sorcerers, and soft-bodied prey-looking-things that folded in half the moment he got excited.
Anyone unlucky enough to step into his domain became his unwilling playmate.
And John, by sheer dumb luck and overwhelming physical durability, had become the first one in a very long time who did not immediately explode when the wolf got a little too enthusiastic.
That realization only made John like him more.
He kept scratching the wolf's throat and asked, in a tone one might reserve for a child or a particularly smug cat. "So… you got a name?"
The Red Wolf lifted his head just enough to shoot him the sort of glare only a magical beast of great age and wounded pride could manage. It was a remarkably expressive look.
John stared back.
He could not tell if the wolf was asking whether he was stupid for not already knowing the name, or whether he was stupid for expecting a wolf to answer him in words.
Possibly both.
John clicked his tongue and glanced aside. "Marika, do you know it?"
She did not answer immediately.
When she appeared a moment later, it was with one hand planted on her hip and the other lifted in mild disbelief, gold light draped around her like impatient royalty made visible.
"How should I know?" She asked. "It hath been an age. Dost thou expect me to remember the proper name of every oversized beast ever allowed in my daughter-in-law's halls?"
John looked up at her hopefully.
"Try?"
Marika stared down at him, then at the wolf, then back at him again.
There was a long, suffering pause before she sighed through her nose and relented.
"I shall attempt to remember." She said at last.
"Hell yeah."
While she thought, John dipped into his inventory with his free hand and started rifling through the increasingly absurd stockpile of things he had shoved in there over the past several days. Weapons, spare clothes, ingredients, random monster bits, recovered trinkets, healing supplies, suspicious alchemical odds and ends, and, eventually, something useful.
He pulled out a thick hunk of preserved meat from some earlier excursion and held it up.
The Red Wolf's entire body changed.
It was immediate.
His ears perked. His eye sharpened. His nostrils flared with near-offensive intensity, and his tail, which had only just slowed in a desperate bid to reclaim some dignity, abruptly started wagging so fast it stirred the air in visible little gusts.
John barked out a laugh.
"Oh, that's a yes."
He held the meat out farther. "You hungry, big guy? Want a treat?"
The Red Wolf rose at once with all the terrible poise of a moonlit predator and all the emotional transparency of an excited dog trying to pretend he was not excited. He took one step forward, then another, then decided patience was for lesser creatures and snatched the meat from John's hand with a quick, efficient bite.
Elyse, standing off to the side amid broken stone and academic devastation, still looked thoroughly disheveled from everything that had happened in the last ten minutes. Her robes were askew, her hair slightly out of place, and the expression on her face suggested that she had run out of acceptable categories for what she was witnessing some time ago.
And yet, despite the fear still plainly written in her, she could not help staring.
The Red Wolf of Radagon, ancient terror of the Debate Parlour, stood there chewing eagerly on a strip of meat while a dragon-blooded demigod scratched his neck and spoke to him like a beloved menace.
It was, unfortunately, a little cute.
Elyse seemed to realize that at the exact same moment and looked almost offended with herself for finding it so.
John patted the wolf's head when he finished swallowing.
"So…" He tilted his head. "You wanna go visit mommy?"
The Red Wolf stilled, one ear twitched, then both.
He lifted his head and looked at John with sudden, bright attention, as if asking whether he truly meant who the wolf thought he meant.
John's smile softened into something easy and conspiratorial.
"Yeah~, Rennala. Wanna go visit Mommy Rennala?"
The reaction was immediate and catastrophic.
The Red Wolf's tail went from wagging to full-on ecstatic violence, whipping hard enough through the air to kick up gusts across the Debate Parlour floor. Loose parchment, dust, and splinters of broken furniture swirled in the wind of it.
Elyse actually had to brace herself and catch one hand against the wall to keep from being pushed off-balance by sheer magical canine enthusiasm.
John burst out laughing, deep and bright and delighted.
"I'll take that as a yes!"
The wolf barked once, sharp and eager, then pressed his head insistently against John's shoulder like a creature who had suddenly remembered a far more important person existed somewhere deeper in the Academy and would now like this new, durable playmate to stop wasting time and take him there immediately.
John got to his feet with a grin, one hand still buried in crimson fur.
"Well then, come boy! Mommy's waiting for us!" He called out with clear excitement, glancing toward Elyse and then toward the inner paths of Raya Lucaria beyond the Debate Parlour.
The Red Wolf stood proudly at his side, tail still moving in treacherous, delighted sweeps behind him.
----------------------
Author's Note:
[Puppy Tamed]
lol
GIMME YOUR STONES!
At any rate, hello everyone! How have yall been doing? This is a genuine question, talk to me. How has your day been? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
I feel like we don't talk often enough (probably on account of my dogshit uploading schedule COUGH COUGH).
I dunno, its hard for me to upload as much as i want to. I guess thats how adult life goes, huh?
I got a job, two fics, and many other personal responsibilities. All the time I used to have seemed to evaporate. It's a bit sad, but also not? I dunno. Im not some kind of philosopher, I just write slop on my off time. And somehow, so many people like it.
It honestly makes my head spin sometimes. You guys are amazing. Honestly.
Thank you. All of you, from the lurkers who never comment, to those who comment on every chapter dutifully. I love all of you. I will be forever grateful to you for joining me on this journey.
See y'all soon~
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Next Chapter Title: Johnathan Pendragon Loses Completely To MILFs
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