“You’re right,” said Scorio, looking at his tray of food with a new eye. “I’ve been so happy to just be here that I forgot the endless lines outside the gruel fountains.”
“Gruel fountains?” asked Leonis, eyebrows rising. “You’re joking.”
Both Scorio and Naomi stared at him.
“You’re obviously not joking. That sounds hideous.” Leonis rubbed at his jaw. “Perhaps we can start an initiative of some sort? See if we can’t convince the administration to donate some of the Academy’s food to those in need?”
Scorio nodded soberly. “That’s an excellent idea. I’ll go with you. It’s not right that we dine like kings while others starve.”
“Well, I intend to continue dining like a king,” said Leonis, “but there’s no reason we can’t help others at the same time.”
Naomi sighed and shook her head.
A group of students who had been passing by their alcove came to a stop as one of their members turned suddenly to approach their table.
Scorio looked up, a noodle halfway slurped into his mouth, and saw a towering man staring down at him, expression as friendly as a knife tip aimed at your eye.
“Kuragin,” said Leonis, tone amicable, but Scorio knew him well enough to hear the tone of mild warning. “Can we help you?”
Kuragin was a massive youth. He looked like some wasteland refugee who’d grown strong on the flesh of his fallen companions. Features hard and flattened as if by cruel elements, eyes glittering, hair a dusty black that looked hacked at with a sharp knife. Skin dusky and bronzed as if tanned by a foreign sun, his whole body radiating menace and the potential for violence. His eyes were stormy with intensity, his manner unyielding, and he didn’t answer Leonis at once, instead choosing to just stand there and study Scorio.
The other students clustered behind him uneasily, and with a start, Scorio noticed Asha amongst them, her expression dour, closed.
“Word is you helped an Imperator defeat Imogen the Woe,” said Kuragin, his words a mocking drawl. “That without your help Sol the Just would have lost, and the city been destroyed.”
Scorio considered, then sat up and slurped the last of the noodle into his mouth. “Something like that, sure.”
“Something like that.” Kuragin smiled mercilessly. “But I’ve also heard that you sided with Imogen at first. That you only decided to help Sol when you realized you’d made the wrong bet.”
The silence spread out from where Kuragin stood like ripples extending out from a pond.
Scorio sensed his friends tense by his side, but before any of them could reply, he wiped at his lips once more with his cloth napkin and stood, edging out from around his table, forcing Kuragin back so that they stood inches apart.
The movement bought him time. A hot wave of alarm rushed through him, his appetite disappearing and his gut clenching. How could Kuragin know that? The only ones who’d have heard him speak to Imogen would have been those controlled by her fog, who, outside of his friends, would have been Pyre Lords or higher.
“Kuragin, right?” Scorio kept his words soft.
The other Great Soul narrowed his eyes, expression hard. “Simple question, Scorio. You going to answer it?”
“Interesting that you should ask it,” replied Scorio. “Seeing as it was Sol the Just who declared I’d helped him. Something the White Queen agreed with. Are you questioning their judgment, Kuragin?”
The mess hall had gone completely silent. Over a hundred students were staring at them, drinking in the moment. Scorio ignored the frozen tableaux, and instead focused on the huge man before him.
The youth’s lips quirked into the smallest of smirks. “I’m not arguing that you helped. Just asking if you had a change of heart at the last moment. If you said those words. If you’re a coward who regretted picking the wrong Imperator to suck up to when Sol the Just showed you the error of your ways.”
Something within Scorio stilled. His smile remained on his lips, but the rest of the world seemed to fade away. In a rush, he felt his past wash over him, his every sacrifice, his every loss, each moment of pain and privation. How could he ever hope to explain that to someone like Kuragin? In whose dark eyes gleamed a surety of the truth? Should he explain, plead his case, tell them he said those words, yes, but had been trying to trick the Imperator, not expressing cowardice or opportunism?
No.
His pulse began to pound in his ears like waves upon a distant shore. His hands tingled, and his muscles suddenly felt twitchy, restless. Fire flowed through his veins, and he forced his smile to widen just a fraction more.
Kuragin narrowed his eyes in suspicion, sensing a dangerous change, but it was too late.
“Well you see,” he began, and then he jerked his head forward with as much force as he could muster, a violent explosion that brought his brow crashing down upon the bridge of Kuragin’s nose.
He felt cartilage crunch as cries of horror and alarm broke out everywhere.
Kuragin’s head rocked back, but he didn’t lose his balance; his eyes narrowed in pain, momentary confusion, and then turned into something vicious, something Scorio recognized: anticipation.
“You see,” said Scorio again, raising his voice, stepping in after the other Great Soul. “I’m not used to having my decisions and actions questioned by a Cinder who wasn’t there and had no effect on the outcome of the battle.”
“Scorio,” hissed Lianshi, grabbing at his arm. “He isn’t—”
“A Cinder,” said Kuragin, dropping his hands and glaring at Scorio, blood running down his upper lip. “Bad move, Red Lister.”
Kuragin began to shift. His body grew, his shoulders broadening, his neck shortening, his face transforming into something monstrous. His mouth split open wide, becoming a fanged maw the width of his head, while his nose sank away and disappeared. His eyes became burning yellow pits, his skin rough, his musculature exaggerated to the point of deformity.
But those were the least of his changes. His hands morphed into huge digging claws, massive and serrated, his fingers growing inflexible, while a thick carapace covered his back, the shell a mottled crimson and black, sweeping over his head to form a horned helm, down his back, across the fronts of his thighs and shins and along his shoulders, the sides of his biceps, and forearms.
Finally, a huge tail dropped into view, thick as Scorio’s wrist and terminating in a ridged club.
Leonis emerged from behind the table, palms extended. “Come on now, this isn’t the time or place—”
“Apologize,” growled Kuragin, his voice changed into a rasp, his tail lashing behind him. “On your knees. Apologize or I’ll punch your nose down the back of your throat.”
Scorio slipped his hand into his robe, palming his nubbin of chalk. He kept his sneer on his lips, his anger still pounding in his ears, but even in his rage, he wasn’t immune to the danger before him. Kuragin had grown some four inches in height and width, his limbs and body become massive, and his claws looked like they could tear through living rock.
How did you hurt someone like that?
Leonis stepped between them, placing a palm on Kuragin’s chest. “Come on, both of you. Let’s talk this over—”
“Don’t touch me!” roared Kuragin, and swung his claws at Leonis’s jaw.
Or tried. His fist shuddered to a stop inches away from Leonis’s face, having impaled itself upon a foot-long blade that had slid between his knuckles and deep into his wrist.
“Oh no,” whispered Asha, stepping back.
The Nightmare Lady crawled onto the table, somehow moving with sufficient grace to avoid knocking over any of the cups or displacing the trays. Her tail arced over them all, segmented and glistening, and her sulfurous green eyes were locked on Kuragin, who was staring at his fist.
“If you’re going to throw your weight around,” she hissed, voice low and lethal, “then I’ll play, too.”
With a wrench Kuragin yanked his fist back and off her bladed tail, causing dollops of thick, burning blood to fall upon the floor where they sizzled and sent up slender streams of smoke.