Chapter 74: Well What Now?
We move away from the churning mass of Luxor students, the air behind us buzzing with all the posturing and chest-thumping you'd expect from cliché bullies. They're already sorting themselves loud voices, pointed fingers, and the gleam of entitlement in their eyes. I can practically hear them staking out a pecking order, each one desperate to be the first rooster on the dung heap.
Elijah falls into step beside me, his hands jammed deep in his pant pockets, shoulders hunched against the chill that's already creeping in from the open fields. All around us, the other houses are starting to merge into loose clusters: Vespera's lot some of the giants over there looking like they were on a camping trip; Melruth kids all looking pissed and annoyed; Umbra students nervously moving towards the very edge of the crowd. There's a nervous energy thrumming through everyone, a sense of disbelief that the proctors just left us.
A Vespera kid stumbles into me, jostling my arm hard enough to make me take a step back. I shove him off without thinking. "Watch where you're going idiot." My glare is enough to make him blanch and scurry away, muttering something under his breath. I sneer as he goes.
Elijah snickers, his lips twitching at my expression. "You know, any threat out here in the wild is going to take one look at that permanent scowl of yours and run the other way. You'll scare off wolves and other weird ass animals. And if monsters do exist out here they may think you are one of them."
I look at him deadpan "I don't have a scowling face," I grumble outraged but he just laughs harder.
"Whatever you say, man," he replies, utterly unbothered.
He's got this easy way of laughing at things that ought to make him nervous, and I have to admit it's infectious. I find myself smirking despite the situation we find ourselves in.
We keep walking, putting a little more distance between ourselves and the chaos behind us. The field is rough, grass up to our knees and scattered with low, thorny bushes. What shit area.
Ahead, I spot a group of students gathering near where the proctors' platform used to be House Apophis, by the look of the patches glinting gold on their uniforms. Elijah points with his chin.