Chapter 188: The Exchange
Aaron stayed silent, his eyes moving around the white room as his brain worked overtime trying to find some angle, some deflection, some way to sidestep the question entirely.
He found nothing useful. Karen’s fingers were still tracing idle patterns, and her scent continued its quiet assault on his ability to think in straight lines.
Between the two of them, his poor brain was operating at a fraction of its usual capacity.
So he gave in.
"Uhm, I was dropped into the world without any information and my mission was to reach the capital city Drax." He began carefully, pausing at intervals whenever Karen’s fingers grazed somewhere that sent his concentration scattering.
She noticed his willingness to talk and pulled back slightly, putting a small margin of distance between them, and with a casual ease that involved no gesture, no snap, no theatrical flourish of any kind — two metallic chairs simply existed where nothing had been a moment before.
Aaron noted that. He also noted, privately, that it wasn’t evidence of Bella being weaker or inferior by comparison.
Bella used gestures and snaps, but that felt deliberate — performative in the way that someone chooses to make an entrance rather than simply arrive.
Karen’s method was different. Quieter. In some ways more unsettling for it.
He took the seat wordlessly once Karen had settled into hers, letting his gaze pass briefly over Plontis, who was still standing exactly where he’d been standing before, unmoved and apparently unbothered by the absence of a third chair.
Whether the man lacked the ability to conjure one for himself or simply wouldn’t do it without Karen’s explicit permission, Aaron couldn’t say with certainty.
But he was strongly inclined toward the second explanation, which delivered a very clear message that he filed away carefully.
Do not mess with Karen.
She was being pleasant. Warm, even, in her own particular way. He had no interest in discovering what she looked like when she wasn’t.
The Plontis situation suggested the answer was something he’d rather observe from a significant distance, if at all.
His brain delivered this assessment clearly and sensibly. His subconscious, his body, his heart, and his little brother delivered a completely different verdict, unanimous and loud — get closer, not further.
Find out how that glowing skin would feel under his hands. Imagine what expression this cold, seductive woman might make on the bed were different, if the chairs were replaced with something horizontal, if Plontis were anywhere else in the universe —
Aaron shut those thoughts down with the efficiency of a man who had learned, at least intellectually, where that road led. He refocused on his story.
"There was also the optional mission that lady Karen had given, to seduce lady Bellanoir." He said it smoothly, slipping the name in without ceremony.
Karen’s ocular abilities were, as it turned out, not significantly behind Bella’s spiritual perception.
She could read the surface of him easily — the bodily reactions, the direction of his thoughts a moment ago, the effort he was currently making to think about something else.
She registered all of it and felt something close to genuine amusement settle warmly in her chest. It had been a very long time since she’d made any real attempt to bewitch anyone, and yet here was this young mortal, doing everything in his power to hold himself together at the seams and barely managing it.
That was satisfying in a way she hadn’t expected.
She gestured for him to continue, mild amusement coloring her expression, and so he did.
He retold the trial from the beginning, keeping the broad shape of events intact while making small, careful adjustments in the retelling. His account of Alyssa was compressed and deliberately flattened — he presented her as a guide he’d made use of, useful for navigation and local knowledge, without colour or warmth.
Not a companion. Certainly not someone whose death was currently sitting in his inventory alongside a considerable weight of guilt. He kept that particular detail entirely to himself.
He moved through the events methodically — the journey, the landscape, the challenges — until he arrived at the nightcrawler, and that was where Karen’s expression changed.
It wasn’t the mild curiosity she’d been wearing up to that point, nor the warm amusement that had settled over her features during the earlier parts of his account. Something shifted in her face — something with edges to it.
Her lips curled in a way that suggested she found something privately funny and privately dangerous in equal measure, and the colours in her multicoloured eyes moved through their slow rotation with a quality that Aaron could only describe as mischievous in the most unsettling possible sense.
He didn’t know what that look meant specifically, but his instincts were unanimous that it wasn’t anything straightforwardly good.
"Nightcrawler, you say?" Her voice was carefully casual, but the mockery underneath it was audible if you were paying attention, and Aaron was paying very close attention to everything about her. "You told me you collected their venom, correct? Mind if I have it?"
Aaron’s mouth opened. Nothing came out immediately. He’d collected that venom as a precaution, a bonus — the kind of thing you pick up when opportunity presents itself and worry about the application later.
The plan had been to bring it back to Solaris, hand it to Eva or another capable alchemist, and have it properly studied. The description alone had been striking enough to make him think it had value.
And now Karen was asking for it, which told him two things simultaneously — that it had more value than he’d estimated, and that whatever she wanted it for was probably not something she was going to explain.
"Ah, sure." He pulled up his inventory, located the bulb, and handed it across with the care of someone who remembered very clearly that the contents were rumoured to be capable of causing problems even for primordials. Best not to be casual about it.
Karen accepted it without any particular ceremony. "Cute," she murmured, turning the bulb in her fingers and looking at it with an expression he couldn’t decode — whether the assessment was directed at the bulb, at him, or at Plontis standing silently in the background, he genuinely couldn’t determine, and decided it probably didn’t matter.
What happened next was quietly extraordinary. She shattered the bulb in her palm and held her hand open, and the venom — rather than falling or spreading — trembled in the air between her fingers like something from a film, suspended and contained, shifting slightly as though it had its own uncertain opinion about being examined.
She kept her skin clear of it, spreading the liquid apart with an invisible precision, studying it with those shifting, multicoloured eyes that saw down to a level of detail no ordinary perception could reach.
Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, the venom gave up its secrets to her gaze.
Whatever she found there made her laugh — a short, delighted sound that carried something between satisfaction and pity.
"Hah! So it’s to that level already... Oh you poor Bella~" The giggle faded into a smile as she swiped her finger through the air, and the venom gathered itself obediently into a new glass vial that appeared in her hand — considerably more refined and beautiful than Aaron’s improvised bulb had been, the kind of container that looked like it had been made specifically for something important.
She pocketed it and turned her attention back to him, one finger tapping thoughtfully against her chin. "I’m keeping it but how about a nice reward in exchange?"
A brief pause while she considered, and then something settled in her expression — the particular quality of someone who has landed on an idea they find genuinely pleasing. "Aha, you will probably enjoy this quite a lot."
She snapped her fingers and a small box materialised near Aaron’s lap, floating at a comfortable height, unhurried and patient.
"What is it?"
He understood on a basic level that gifts from primordials occupied a different category entirely from ordinary rewards.
The exchange had been casual on her end — she’d simply decided to take the venom and replace it with something — but casual decisions made by beings of her calibre still tended to carry significant weight. His curiosity was immediate and genuine.
"Hmm, a fun little surprise. Eat it." Karen’s smile carried that flicker of mischief that he was beginning to recognise as a signal worth paying attention to.
It did nothing to slow him down.
Aaron pried the lid open and looked inside. A uniquely shaped vial sat in the box, and the shape of it gave him a moment’s pause — it was designed, unmistakably, to resemble a certain piece of male anatomy, which raised several questions he chose not to voice aloud.
Still, his expectations remained high. They climbed higher when he caught Plontis in his peripheral vision and noticed that the man’s eyes had gone noticeably wide at the sight of the vial. Plontis — who had maintained the emotional range of a wall through everything — was looking at that small container with something that read unmistakably as want.
That settled it. Aaron stopped overthinking, uncorked the vial, and was immediately punished for his decisiveness by a smell that hit his nostrils like something that had been rotting in a warm place for an unreasonable length of time.
It was mildly survivable only because Karen’s scent still lingered in the air around him, providing a counterweight.
A low giggle slipped from Karen’s lips as she crossed one leg over the other, leaned back, and watched him with the comfortable posture of someone who knew exactly what was about to happen.
"Drink it in a single gulp. Do not worry, it will not kill you." she said lightly.
The logic was simple enough. If she’d wanted him dead, the white room offered no shortage of options and she hadn’t needed to hand him anything.
Aaron raised the vial and threw it back in one go, and his gag reflexes staged an immediate and vigorous protest. The taste was catastrophic. The texture worse.
It slid down like something that had given up on being palatable and was simply committed to the journey regardless.
Then it hit his stomach, and the world went sideways.
A burst of energy detonated somewhere in his core, violent enough to arch his back and drag a groan out of him that he had absolutely no control over.
Heat flooded through his body in a rushing wave — and then, with the focused intention of something that knew exactly where it was going, that heat made a sharp and very specific turn.
Aaron’s pupils dilated.
"Nooo!"
Yes. It was heading directly to his little brother.