The ground trembled before the tail even moved.

’Duck!’

Arthur dropped. The tail swept through the space where his head had been, close enough that the wind off it pulled at his hair. Cael had already gone low on the other side. Theodore rolled sideways through frost-stiff undergrowth, the ground here nothing like the soft dirt back home, packed hard from cold that never fully let go even with the sun directly overhead.

The thing standing over them shouldn’t have existed.

Shell plating wrapped its whole body, ridged and split into overlapping segments, horns jutting at irregular intervals like something had grown them wrong on purpose. Four thick legs. A jaw that snapped shut with a sound like two boulders meeting.

A turtle. An absolute abomination of a turtle, the size of the building they were staying in.

Cael moved first. Both hands came up and vines tore out of the half-frozen ground, wrapping around two of the creature’s legs before it could reposition. His other hand followed with fire, controlled and tight, sweeping across the shell in a band that left scorch marks but didn’t slow it down.

Arthur built the marble fast, tight at his fingertip, and fired. It hit a seam between two shell plates and the crack that opened was small but real, a hairline fracture spreading from the impact point.

Theodore’s wind came in low, a flat blade of compressed air that caught the foreleg and opened a shallow gash. Not deep enough.

"Shell’s too tough!" Arthur called.

"We need the soft point." Cael’s voice carried over the creature’s bellow, perfectly level even with vines straining against four hundred pounds of furious turtle. "Find it, then commit."

’Use your legs.’ Vexis’s voice cut through clean. ’What we trained for. Perfuse your legs slow, keep some in your forearms too. Light Stima, don’t go all in.’

Arthur split the flow. Half his attention on holding the shape of the spell building at his hand, half on pushing aetheric blood down through his thighs and calves, the muscle memory Vexis had spent years building waking up under him like a second set of instructions running parallel to his own. A month ago this would have collapsed both halves immediately. Now it held, thin but holding, and his legs felt lighter the way they had in the courtyard.

He moved faster than he had any right to.

The turtle’s head whipped sideways, jaws snapping for Theodore. Arthur’s shadow network, spread thin across the frozen ground beneath all of them, caught the shift in weight a half second before the head actually turned.

Shadow sense, he’d started calling it in his own head. Not seeing exactly. Feeling the ground tell him what was coming through the soles of his feet.

"THEODORE, LEFT!"

Theodore broke left without questioning it, the jaws closing on empty air where he’d been standing, and came up already building another gust, this one narrower, more deliberate than the wide cuts he’d been throwing. He’d learned something from Calver’s wall, Arthur realized. Compression instead of spread. The narrow blade hit the same gash from before and went deeper, the shell groaning under the precision rather than the volume.

Cael’s vines snapped under the strain and he replaced them instantly with a second set, faster this time, no visible effort in the recast. He stepped in close while the creature thrashed against the new bindings, fire wreathing both hands now, and drove it directly into the crack Arthur had opened.

The shell split wider.

Underneath: pale, soft tissue, exposed and vulnerable in a way the armor plating had spent its whole life protecting.

"There." Cael didn’t shout it. He never shouted anything.

Arthur fired into the gap with everything he’d built up, the marble punching clean through soft tissue this time instead of bouncing off plate, and the turtle’s bellow turned into something higher and more desperate. Theodore’s wind followed immediately, slicing through the same opening, and the creature’s legs buckled.

It went down heavy, the ground actually shaking from the impact.

For a second, just breathing.

Then the ground trembled again, and this time it wasn’t the dying turtle.

Through his shadow sense Arthur felt it before he heard the trees splitting apart at the treeline, something massive forcing its way through, branches and frozen leaves scattering across the clearing.

A two-headed lizard burst through, bigger than the turtle they’d just killed, bleeding from a dozen open lacerations across both necks and its long body, clearly running from something rather than hunting.

Arthur’s stomach dropped. Whatever could put that many wounds on something this size wasn’t anything they were equipped to deal with.

A beam of pure dark energy cut across the clearing.

It wasn’t fire. Wasn’t lightning. It moved like a shadow given direction and weight, slicing clean through both the lizard’s necks and continuing into the fallen turtle’s body, killing whatever residual life remained in a single stroke that left no mess, no spray, just two bodies suddenly, completely still.

Arthur, Cael, and Theodore turned toward where the beam had originated.

A figure stood on a high branch at the treeline.

A woman with hair tied in a bun, deep copper bronze, darker at the roots like burnished metal rather than dye. A thick black fur coat. Leather pants fitted close to her thighs. Her eyes, even from this distance, were molten gold, a different gold than Vexis’s, warmer somehow and infinitely more dangerous.

Arthur’s eyes met hers.

I recognize her.

She dropped from the branch and landed cleanly on the turtle’s shell, a long rapier in one hand, the blade coated in blood that glowed faint purple along its edge. She looked at the three of them without any particular hurry.

Arthur breathed in slow.

Solenne Castellane. Second Princess of the Elercross Empire. The novel had called her the most beautiful woman in the empire, and for once the description wasn’t lying. A swordbearer. Also, in the Chapters he half remembered, the most ruthless of the imperial line.

What is she doing here.

She drew a cloth from her coat and wiped the blade clean in three unhurried strokes.

"Who are you three."

Cael dropped to one knee instantly. Theodore followed half a second later. Arthur’s body bent before his brain finished processing the order, some instinct in Vexis’s frame already knowing the correct response to royalty.

’Arthur. That’s the princess. You understand that, right?’

Yes. Quiet for a second.

Roz, on Arthur’s shoulder, watched her with something sharp behind his usual flat stare.

She stepped down off the lizard’s body, retrieved its severed head, and stuffed it without ceremony into a large brown sack slung at her hip.

"We humbly greet the Princess of Elercross," Cael said, eyes still on the ground.

"You know who I am." Not quite a question.

"Yes, your highness."

"Then I’d suggest you keep your mouths shut regarding the fact that you encountered me out here." Her voice carried the easy, unbothered authority of someone who had never once needed to raise it to be obeyed.

"Yes, your highness."

Arthur studied her posture without lifting his head far. In what he remembered of the novel, this woman went on to lose an eye, lose her place in succession to her elder sister’s betrayal, and end up leading a rebellion against the Doren and against the empire that raised her. Eventually becoming the reformer who rebuilt the Allright Council into something with teeth.

Though that memory felt thinner every time he reached for it. Her face wasn’t matching anything specific in his head anymore. He couldn’t lean on what he thought he knew. Not safely.

Then his eyes landed on the lizard’s headless body.

Wait.

That creature’s listing matched the same Vorik trading quest board. She’d taken the same contract.

Could it be.

Arthur made the call before he’d fully thought it through. He lifted his head and met her eyes directly.

’What are you doing, you absolute lunatic—’

"We’re currently operating undercover, your highness." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "Regarding the production of a drug known as Elven Tears. The Archmagus of House Lestilaut gave us direct orders to begin investigating here."

Cael’s eyes went wide beside him.

’WHY ARE YOU TELLING HER THIS—’

She tilted her head slightly, gold eyes narrowing in interest rather than offense.

Arthur kept going, ignoring both Cael’s stare and the shouting in his own skull. "We’re looking into a new trading operation in Moncruir District. No merchant sigil, no trade registry beyond a single plate. We took this quest as cover to get inside and document anything suspicious, with the intent of reporting it to the Allright Council."

She slid the rapier back into its sheath with a soft hiss.

"You. Blonde hair. Stand up."

Arthur rose slowly.

Her presence is unreal, he thought. The novel isn’t lying about this one. Ever since he’d landed in this body he’d run into beautiful people one after another, Welya, Alfia, half the noble families at that banquet. He’d stopped being surprised by it weeks ago.

This was different. Her beauty didn’t invite looking. It felt closer to standing too close to something he wasn’t supposed to be looking at directly, the specific discomfort of staring at something forbidden and knowing it.

"The Archmagus sent three of you. For a drug investigation." Her eyes moved over each of them in turn. "State your identities."

"Vexis Lestilaut. Second son of Vaelis and Avara Lestilaut. Second-year magus at Magilea Academy." He gestured to his right. "Cael Aftell, fellow second-year, Class A." Then left. "Theodore Vaust. Also second-year, Class F."

"How fitting, then. You already know who I am, and I happen to be investigating the same matter." A pause. "Under Allright Council Directive Seventy, you’ll regard me as your superior in this matter. Not merely as a princess."

Arthur exhaled slowly.

So the gamble had paid off.

Her gaze settled fully on him.

"Tell me everything you’ve found so far."