Chapter 168: Getting Along
Riven nearly followed her items to the ground, catching herself just in time before sending a furious glare at Rae. Rae merely laughed, patting Riven’s lush black hair. "You’re being overly rude to our new awesome buddies," she chided playfully.
At that, Riven seemed to snap out of her focused trance. A blush crept up her neck and onto her cheeks as she realized the truth of Rae’s words. She quickly stammered out an apology.
"I’m so sorry..." she mumbled, bending down to retrieve her fallen glasses and tablet. "I... I was just trying to figure out what sort of inner mechanism the Association was hiding in that outer turret of theirs."
Nyx and Aria spoke up at once, voices overlapping with bright curiosity.
"Wait, wait! Did you find something?"
"We’ve been wondering about the bunker’s weird defenses, too!"
Despite Riven’s eccentric aura, or rather because of it, all three Valkyries found themselves oddly drawn to her. Maybe it was the dead-serious expression she wore beneath the comically oversized lab coat that barely concealed her extremely generous feminine figure, or maybe it was the vibe of a genius too consumed by curiosity to remember she was dressed like a girl who’d lost a bet. Either way... despite the very weird first impressions, they kinda liked her.
Riven pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and scoffed.
"Those bastards knew exactly what they were doing. There are too many safeguards wrapped around the sensitive hardware. I couldn’t break through more than surface-level diagnostics." She grumbled, then tapped a finger against her temple. "But I did learn one thing about those outer wall-mounted sentry arrays... they’re self-activating proximity-based mana-reactive laser turrets."
There was a beat of silence.