The next morning, after explaining last night's incident to Lilliana as carefully as he could without causing unnecessary panic, Soren found himself sitting alone in a small café just off the academy grounds.
It was quiet at this hour, not empty, but soft around the edges, with only the low murmur of conversation, the occasional clink of porcelain, and the steady hum of magic-powered heaters pushing back the morning chill.
A faint sweetness hung in the air from fresh pastries and steamed milk, warm enough to be comforting without quite managing to pull him fully back into himself.
Soren sat near the window with both hands wrapped around a mug of caramel latte, staring at it as if the answer to something might be waiting under the foam.
He had ordered it without thinking.
To be fair, thinking had not exactly been going well.
His body was here, in a warm café with an untouched pastry on a plate and sunlight starting to gather weakly across the glass, but the rest of him kept slipping backwards, pulled again and again to a dark alley, to the aftermath of panic and pain and the sound of measured footsteps approaching through the night.
'That was definitely Yvette.'
The thought had been circling him since he woke up, stubborn and bright and impossible to set down.
Every time he tried to move on, it resurfaced.
Sometimes as a clear image, pale-blonde hair catching the moonlight, rose-pink eyes fixed on him, other times as something less coherent and far more inconvenient, the memory of her hand in his hair, the calm in her voice when she told him he was safe, the way his heart had reacted to all of it like it had forgotten how to behave.
Even now, just thinking her name made his pulse kick a little too hard.
Soren took a slow sip of his drink and stared harder at the latte as if that might somehow help.
It did not.
The problem was not simply that she had saved him, though that alone would have been enough to leave an impression.
It was that she was someone he knew.
No, not knew.
That word felt too small, too distant, too casual for what Yvette had once been to him.
Yvette was his favourite character.
Back on Earth, the username he had used on the TKS forums had been "YvetteMyBeloved".
He had written embarrassingly long posts about her questline, defended her in comment sections with the energy of a man fighting for his life, and spent money commissioning custom merchandise that he would absolutely have denied owning if anyone had asked.
Acrylic stands, keychains, art prints, stupidly expensive little things that had seemed completely reasonable at the time because they were hers.
She had not just been familiar.
She had mattered.
"And yet…" he murmured under his breath, looking into the drink as the foam slowly settled. "That isn't right either."
Or rather, it had been right and wrong at the same time.
In the game, Yvette's first proper introduction had not looked anything like last night.
She was supposed to enter the story during the second year, after an incident in the mock duels that turned the academy against her.
In his memory, she had overwhelmed her opponent so thoroughly, so mercilessly, that the faculty had been forced to intervene.
There had been a suspension, whispers, condemnation dressed up as concern, and then, when she returned, Alex had gone to speak with her because that was the sort of thing Alex did.
That first meeting in the game had been unforgettable for entirely different reasons.
Yvette had looked at him with open disgust, her eyes sharp and cold, her whole body rigid with revulsion.
Her words had been clipped, vicious, meant to drive him away.
She had seemed less like a person and more like something cornered and trying not to bite through the bars of its cage.
If anyone touched her, even by accident, there were only ever two outcomes.
She either ran and vomited, shaking so badly it looked painful to watch…
…or she attacked.
No hesitation, no restraint, just raw, instinctive horror written across her face.
That changed eventually.
Her questline was one of the slowest in the game, and one of the best for exactly that reason.
Trust had to be built carefully, painfully, over time, until each tiny step forward actually meant something. But that was later.
What mattered now was the simple fact that none of that had matched what happened last night.
Why had she been so kind to him?
Soren leaned back in his chair and exhaled quietly through his nose.
Sure, if someone insisted on comparing appearances, he could admit with a straight face that he had a certain advantage over Alex, but Yvette had never struck him as the sort of person who would be swayed by something that shallow.
It did not fit her, not even remotely.
And what she had done had not felt shallow anyway.
It had felt instinctive.
Careful.
Gentle, in a way that still made his chest feel strange if he let himself think about it for too long.
She had approached him slowly, spoken softly, supported him without making it feel humiliating, and then, at the gates, she had smoothed a hand over his hair so naturally that his brain had apparently decided to stop functioning for a while.
The memory surfaced again, vivid enough that Soren had to look away from the window.
His heart thudded once, hard and abrupt.
'This is stupid,' he told himself, though not very convincingly.
That did not stop the small smile trying to tug at his mouth.
Whatever else last night had been, however much it had hurt and however close it had come to ending badly, meeting her like that had still felt unreal in the best and worst possible way.
For a moment, though, the dazed warmth gave way to something quieter.
He remembered the faint shadows under her eyes, the slight heaviness in the way she breathed when she thought nobody was looking, the sense that the night had already taken too much from her before she ever reached him.
'…She looked tired.'
That part sat much heavier than the rest.
Before he could follow the thought any further, the bell above the café door rang.
"Ah, sorry, sorry, I'm late!"
Soren looked up as Olivia hurried towards his table, clutching the strap of her bag with one hand and trying to smooth down her hair with the other.
She looked flustered in the way she always seemed to when caught even slightly off balance, cheeks pink with embarrassment as she slid into the seat opposite him.
"I overslept a little," she admitted with a weak laugh. "I didn't mean to keep you waiting."
"It's fine," Soren said, setting his mug down. "You're here, which is more than I was expecting after last night."
Olivia blinked, then let out a tiny startled laugh.
"That's such a terrible way to say that."
"It worked, though."
"It did…" she mumbled, settling slightly.
Then, after a moment of hesitation, she parted her lips.
"Are you alright?"
Soren almost asked the same question back out of habit, but the earnest concern in her face made him pause.
He gave a small shrug.
"Mostly. A bit sore, a bit tired. Nothing dramatic."
"That still sounds bad."
"I'm choosing to call it manageable."
Olivia smiled at that faintly, and some of the tension in her shoulders loosened.
"Alex was worried," she said after a second. "That's why I ended up late. I had to explain everything first."
Soren nodded once, outwardly calm.
Internally, his opinion of Alex managed to sink a little lower.
'Bit late for that.'
Still, he kept it off his face.
Olivia liked talking about him too much for Soren to start stabbing at that with his own irritation, and besides, this was not the time.
"The boy you mentioned before?" he asked.
Olivia's cheeks warmed almost instantly.
"Y-Yes. Alex. I, um… I did say I'd tell you properly next time."
"You did."
"And now I have."
"Very responsible of you."
She huffed a tiny laugh into her sleeve.
"You're making fun of me."
"Only a little."
That earned him another small smile, and Soren felt something in himself ease.
Talking to Olivia was… easy.
Not because there was nothing beneath it, but because there was.
She was timid, earnest, a little awkward, and so transparently sincere that being around her felt warm in a way he could not quite explain.
There was very little posturing in her.
Very little calculation.
Around her, he didn't have to brace himself as much.
"What happened after you ran?" he asked, steering things back before she could circle too far into embarrassment. "You didn't exactly vanish into the night very efficiently."
Olivia cringed.
"Please don't say it like that."
"So I'm right."
"…A little," she admitted.
She folded her hands around each other on the table, fingers twisting lightly in her sleeves as she gathered herself.
"After I left, I tried to find help like you told me to. I thought if I just kept running, I'd run into a professor or a peacemaker or someone from the city watch, but everything looked different in the dark, and I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere because suddenly I didn't know where I was."
Soren rested his chin lightly against his hand and listened.
Olivia spoke in starts and stops at first, but the more he stayed quiet, the more steadily the story came out.
She described the streets twisting into unfamiliar little lanes, the way the lantern-light had seemed too dim and too far apart, how urgency had gradually curdled into panic when she realised she was lost and alone and Soren was still back there.
At that part, her voice dropped.
"I kept thinking…" She swallowed. "I kept thinking that if something happened because I couldn't find help quickly enough, then it would be my fault."
Soren's expression softened.
"It wouldn't have been."
Olivia looked up at him.
"I told you to run. You listened."
Her lips parted slightly, like she wanted to argue, but she only nodded instead.
"Eventually," she continued more quietly, "I did find someone, but at first I thought I'd made things worse."
She went on to describe the figure she had seen sitting alone in a dark alleyway, bow in hand, idly tugging the string while faint, shimmering spirits hovered nearby like little fragments of moonlight.
The image alone was enough to make Soren's attention sharpen.
"When she noticed me, she stood up right away and pointed the bow at me," Olivia said, her hands tightening together. "I really thought she was going to shoot."
Given who it was, Soren actually believed that.
"I was already panicking," Olivia admitted. "So I just… cried."
"That's one strategy."
Olivia gave him a wounded look.
"It wasn't on purpose."
"I know."
"She put the bow down after that," Olivia went on, quieter now. "And then she came closer, but slowly, like she was trying not to scare me any more than I already was."
Soren could picture it too easily.
"And then?"
Olivia's fingers relaxed a little.
"She pulled her hood back, and I saw her properly for the first time."
Her voice grew softer, almost thoughtful.
"I recognised her name more than her face at first, but once she said it… I couldn't believe it."
Yvette Astrin Yggdrasil.
Even hearing the name aloud made something in Soren's chest pull tight again.
Olivia explained how famous Yvette was among the students, how everybody knew she was the strongest in the second year, how stories about her moved through the academy with a life of their own.
She admitted that once she understood who she was speaking to, she had grabbed Yvette's arm without thinking, only to flinch when Yvette reacted sharply to the contact.
"I thought I'd ruined everything," Olivia confessed. "But I just… I didn't know what else to do. So I told her you were still back there, and that I was sorry, and that I couldn't find anyone else…"
Her gaze dropped to the tabletop.
"And then she went."
Soren was quiet for a moment.
"She didn't do anything when you grabbed her?" he asked, before he could stop himself.
Olivia looked up, surprised.
"Huh?"
"…Nothing."
"No, you definitely asked something."
He ignored that with as much dignity as he could manage, which was not much.
Olivia tilted her head slightly in confusion, then softened again.
"She was scary at first. Not in a cruel way, I think, just… distant. Like she was expecting something bad to happen. But after that…" She took a small breath. "I don't know. She felt lonely."
Soren's gaze drifted briefly to the window.
"That's probably true."
Olivia watched him for a second.
"You think so too?"
"She looked tired," he said, more quietly than he intended. "Really tired."
That much, at least, aligned with the Yvette he remembered.
Even later in the story, even after trust and affection and healing had started to make dents in the walls around her, there had always been something worn in her, as if exhaustion had become part of the shape she carried.
Soren looked down at the dregs of his latte.
'I shouldn't get involved.'
The thought landed with more force because some other part of him immediately resisted it.
He knew pieces of Yvette's future.
He knew why she was the way she was, knew enough to understand that her pain was rooted in things far beyond a chance encounter in an alley.
Nothing about that was simple.
Nothing about that was something he could fix by being kind in the right direction.
And if he tried to force himself into her story just because he knew how badly it hurt to watch from the outside, there was every chance he would only make it worse.
Still, the memory of her voice lingered.
"What a pain," he muttered under his breath.
"Hm?"
Soren blinked and looked up.
"Sorry. I meant, do you want another drink? Mine's disappeared."
Olivia peered at his mug.
"That's a very dramatic way to describe an empty latte."
"It's accurate."
"Then… hot chocolate, please."
"Alright."
He took the mugs to the counter, and for a few seconds that was enough to make the morning feel almost normal.
Then he noticed who was standing there.
Louise Cruentus leaned one elbow against the counter as if she had all the time in the world, her expression easy, almost lazy, but her eyes were sharp in the way they always were.
Eyes too much like his own.
Or rather, too much like Soren's.
His steps faltered for the smallest fraction of a second.
"Well, this is a surprise."
————「❤︎」————