Chapter 429: The Sewer Rats Are Heroes [I]
“Waaaah! Waaaaah!”
If there was ever a contest for the ugliest crying face, I think both Kang and Alexia would’ve given each other a tough petition for the crown.
Their faces were contorted into a matching, unsightly mess — eyes squeezed shut so much they practically disappeared, mouths wide open in wide rectangles, and enough snot bubbles to make me retch in disgust.
Kang’s usually stoic jaw was quivering uncontrollably, while Alexia’s tear ducts were working overtime to launch two streams of river down her cheeks. I was honestly worried she’d flood the entire space if she didn’t stop soon.
“Where were you?!” she whined between sobs and hiccups. Before I could choke out anything close to a proper answer, she pounced and wrapped herself around my thigh. “Where were you, you asshole?!”
“Where was I? Where were you?! You know how worried I was, how many calls and texts I left you?” I lied as easily as I breathe.
Yeah, I didn’t even remember to check up on her until Michael mentioned her last evening.
Hey! I’m not a bad friend. In my defense, Alexia was one of the toughest young women I knew.
She was a terrifying prodigy who could pulverize the most harrowing of monsters with her punches while not even breaking a sweat.
It wasn’t exactly my first instinct to check if she was crying somewhere in a corner.
But looking down at her now — clinging to my leg like an oversized, weeping koala — my internal justification felt a little flimsy.
Michael gave me a deserving side-eye look, judging me for lying to a crying girl. He couldn’t ment on it though, since he himself was busy trying to pry Kang off his waist.
“Dude, get off me,” he grunted and started tapping on Kang’s shoulders as the wolf-boy squeezed the remaining oxygen out of his lungs. “Kang— guuh! Seriously! I can’t breathe. And you’re getting… is this mucus? You’re getting mucus on my clothes!”
Kang didn’t care. He was reduced to a blubbering mess, burying his face deeper into Michael’s midsection.
In the end, we couldn’t get them to stop. So we had to carry them home with us.
It was the most humiliating march of my life.
I dragged my left leg forward, each step acpanied by a wet hiccuping sob from the human anchor attached to my thigh.
Beside me, poor Michael was bent in half. He was walking with a wide, awkward stance as Kang rode his waist like a giant toddler.
Once we reached our villa, and told them this was where we were living, they started crying even louder.
Beyond the foyer, sitting in the middle of the curved sunken sofa in the conversation pit, we found Juliana nursing a cup of steaming hot coffee, plates of fruits and breads and jars of jam and juice laid out on a table before her as she watched something on the large TV screen.
The moment our pathetic, blubbering circus train crossed the threshold, she lowered her mug and scowled at all of us.
Her gaze slid over me, stopped on the weeping ginger wrapped around my thigh, shifted to Michael, stopped again on the mucus-leaking boy clinging to his waist, and finally settled back on my face.
Her eyes were narrowed into a look of such profound, icy disgust that I felt an instinctive urge to apologize for merely existing.
“And what,” she began, “is the meaning of this livestock exhibition?”
•••
We somehow made Alexia and Kang let go of us.
They washed up in the mon bathroom and emerged looking significantly more human, though their eyes were still puffy and red.
We then successfully corralled them onto the sofa.
They were still sniffing pathetically, but the scent of hot food had done wonders to stabilize their fragile emotional states.
Alexia was wrapped in one of my spare hoodies that was far too big for her, the sleeves swallowing her hands whole.
Throwing her noble decorum to the wind, she immediately and aggressively began attacking a plate of jam-slathered toast, growling while eating as if she was worried we’d take it from her.
Kang sat cross-legged next to Michael in a fluffy bathrobe that was giving him the appearance of a domesticated dog.
His eyes were locked onto the kitchen, where several mechanical arms were moving, with the intense focus that a predator afforded its prey — or in this case, its medium-rare steak.
Michael and I took that chance to also slip away and change out of our clothes from the previous night.
Thankfully, wrestling and hauling and dragging Alexia and Kang home had effectively wiped out any lingering lipstick stains and perfume smells.
What now remained was only a generous helping of snot and tears smeared all over, so a fresh change of clothes and a shower were still non-negotiable.
When Michael and I returned to the living room, Juliana was bringing a tray of coffee — and what looked like hot chocolate for Alexia — over to the low table.
The three of us settled down and just watched our guests eat.
After the breakfast was over (and half our tissue supply was used up), it was finally time for some interrogation.
“So…” I began, the clinging of silverware dying out as I watched Alexia wipe a smudge of strawberry jam from her chin with the hem of my hoodie. “Now that you both have calmed down, mind explaining what was… all that?”
They began explaining.
Apparently, unlike my genius self, Alexia and Kang had chosen to discreetly dock on the Ascent Isles by directly alerting the Cadet Council.
But even then, enough reporters and paparazzi who were there to cover the Ace Tournament got wind of their arrival. So before they could swarm her, Alexia dipped with Kang.
Unfortunately, her old apartments were allotted to someone else.
Upon inspection, she realized what we all knew too well — that due to the swell in admission numbers, the Academy had reassigned every vacant plot, room, and dorm to the ining transfers.
Her things, just like Michael’s and Juliana’s, had been packed up and chucked into the deep storage of the lower wards.
To top it all off, her finances were frozen by her father. He was clearly unhappy that not only had Alexia refused to e back home for so long, but she still had no intentions of playing the dutiful daughter upon her return from the Noctveil Wilds.
I somewhat understood why he was suddenly so desperate to have her back.
Being a Duke himself, Alexia’s father must’ve known that my family was planning to drag the first years into our political dispute.
If there was even a chance that the Cadet Council would refuse to assist and cancel the quest that my father was going to assign the Academy…
If there was even a chance for her daughter to be caught up in the brewing conflict of Iron Height, he’d want her safe.
But Alexia didn’t know the intricacies of the uping wars, so she misunderstood her father’s motives as wanting to control her. Which, I admit, was not entirely wrong either, but it was missing the bigger picture.
Anyway, without much money to pay for proper acmodations and still refusing to discard her disguise, she found herself a room on Zephyros Street.
Well… calling it a room was too generous.
“Five people! We had to share that matchbox with five other people!” Alexia shrieked, slamming her hands onto the table hard enough to rattle a nearby porcelain plate. “And three of them didn’t understand the concept of personal boundaries or deodorant! One of the boys literally kept a jar of pickled swamp-eels under his bed! I don’t even know why, but the smell was war-crime adjacent!”
Kang nodded solemnly from his spot next to Michael. “The floor was cold,” he offered, then shuddered like experiencing some deep-seated PTSD. “So… so cold.”
I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing out loud. I know, I know. I shouldn’t be enjoying their misery, but the struggle of living in Zephyros Street dorms is something I can relate to — even though my tragedy wasn’t as bad as theirs.
Beside me, Juliana didn’t even bother hiding her amusement.
“Hmm. A truly tragic tale of urban survival,” she murmured while playing with a few loose strands of her hair, voice full of mock sympathy. “I am nearly moved to tears. Truly.”
Alexia glared at her and jumped to her feet. “Shut up, bitch! You have a pool here! An automated smart kitchen! Warm fucking floors! And you didn’t even think about checking if your friends were rotting in a slum somewhere?!” she turned and pointed at the rest of us, at Michael and me. “In fact, you all are bad friends! Bad!”
Goodness. That was probably the first time I heard Alexia cursing.
“Hey, the first thing I did after ing back was try to get in contact with you!” Michael chipped in his defense. “But when you weren’t answering, Sam said you might’ve blocked me!”
Before Alexia could react to that, Juliana decided to make things worse. “What’s the big deal? Don’t you already have some experience of living on the streets?”
The short young woman stilled. Then, without any warning whatsoever, she lunged across the low table.
“The fuck did you say—!” Alexia screamed, her hand cocking back into a fist.
“Whoa, wait, wait, wait!” Michael scrambled across the sofa, throwing his entire upper body weight into catching her around the waist before she could flatten our coffee table — and Juliana’s face along with it. “She’s just trying to get a rise out of you! Don’t do it! Look, she’s even smirking! Julia, stop smirking!”
Juliana was indeed smirking, clearly pleased with herself.
Alexia was seething, her screams bordering on screeching. I had seen her fight monsters with less rage. “Let go of me, Mikey! I am going to feed her that porcelain cup! I’ll feed it to her piece by piece! Let’s see if she’s smiling then!”
Kang, meanwhile, used this distraction to smoothly reach across the table. He snatched one of Alexia’s abandoned plates, and began licking the dollops of jam from it like a dog.
…Men and their priorities.
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