I Became the Bully Extra in a Novel I Hate

The Covenant soldiers stopped moving.

All of them, at once, turned to look at what was left of Soltice. A boot standing upright with nothing above the ankle. The black tattoo that used to sit on his forehead was gone with the rest of his face.

Harren was down the corridor. Same condition.

Two commanders. Dead in under a minute.

A soldier near the back, young, hadn’t drawn his blade yet, looked at the golden-haired shape climbing out of the rubble and felt his legs stop listening to him.

That’s not a second-year.

Another one grabbed his arm. "Move. MOVE."

"That’s not possible. Nobody does that to Soltice—"

"I don’t care what he is, we need to LEAVE—"

Vines came up out of the floor before either of them decided anything. Two soldiers went down wrapped to the throat, screaming, and a third turned to run and made it four steps before Cael’s bellus dropped onto his back and put him face-first into the stone.

Theodore came out of the side corridor at a run. He looked at the broken ventilation shaft first.

"Did it work?"

Then he saw Soltice. In pieces. Then his classmate, standing wrong, steaming, one shoulder hitched higher than the other.

He didn’t ask anything else. He fired into the nearest cluster and kept firing.

Three soldiers broke for the west exit together, shields up, moving in formation like they’d trained for exactly this. One of them looked back once.

"He’s not slowing down!"

He wasn’t wrong. Golden hair, cracked knuckles, that same purple crawling up his arms, and he was already moving toward the next body that hadn’t gone down yet. The soldier in front tripped over rubble and the two behind him didn’t stop to help. Nobody wanted to be the one standing closest when he arrived.

"What IS he," one of them said, backing into the wall. "Sword one second, then that black — that black thing just eats the wall—"

"He killed Soltice with his BARE HAND—"

"Shut up and RUN—"

They ran.

Some of them made it past the treeline. Most didn’t. Sable’s telekinesis picked soldiers off the retreat one at a time, dropped equipment turning into shrapnel mid-flight, and Cael’s vines closed the gap on anyone who tried the wall instead of the door.

By the time the corridor went quiet, golden hair had collapsed where he stood.

Solenne came out last.

Walking, not fast, one hand pressed against her right shoulder where the joint had slipped in its socket, blood running from a cut above her eyebrow. She stopped at the mouth of the corridor and looked at what was left of it.

Bodies. Both sides. Craters where walls used to be.

Veris, where she’d fallen. Not moving.

Solenne crossed the corridor and knelt beside her.

She didn’t say anything for a moment. She reached out and closed Veris’s eyes with two fingers, careful, like it still mattered whether she was gentle about it.

"I told you to hold the flank." Her voice came out low. "You held it."

Nothing answered her. Nothing was going to.

"I’m sorry." She said it plainly, no performance in it. "I should have pulled you back the second Soltice showed himself. I saw what his hand was doing and I didn’t call it in time." Her jaw worked once. "That’s on me. Not you."

She stayed there a second longer than she needed to. Then she stood, wiped her palm down the side of her coat, and put her face back where it needed to be to keep giving orders.

Cael was watching her when she turned around. He didn’t say anything about what he’d just seen.

"Have you scouted the whole fortress?" she asked.

"Working on it now." Cael’s hand was still at his own throat, where the wound had closed but the memory of it hadn’t. "Sable and I are splitting the lower levels."

"Go faster. I want this place clean before dawn."

He nodded and moved off with his bellus trailing low behind him.

They found the second storeroom an hour later, behind a door that had been bricked over and repainted to look load-bearing. Cael’s bellus caught the draft coming through a gap in the mortar that shouldn’t have existed.

Inside: crates. Dozens of them. Vials packed in straw, the same red liquid Arthur had watched Elias drink back at the academy, enough of it to supply half a kingdom for a year.

Cael crouched beside one of the open crates and turned a vial slowly between his fingers. The crimson liquid caught the torchlight, almost beautiful if he ignored what it actually was.

"...This doesn’t make sense."

Solenne looked over.

"What doesn’t?"

Cael gestured toward the rows of crates stretching deeper into the storeroom.

"Sable told us this fortress is a holding site." He frowned. "A transit point. Elves come here before they’re moved to the production facility." He looked around the room again. "If that’s true... why keep this much product here?"

He picked up another vial.

"It looks like they’re preparing for transport."

Silence settled over the room.

Sable, still leaning against the doorway to steady himself, lifted his head.

"...They’re not usually stored here," he said quietly. "At least... they weren’t when I was here."

Cael nodded.

"Exactly."

He swept a hand across the room.

"This isn’t a reserve stock."

"It’s a shipment."

Solenne’s eyes narrowed.

Her gaze traveled across the crates before settling on the ledger resting alone atop the worktable.

"They were getting ready to move it."

"Or they were waiting for someone to collect it," Cael added.

Another moment of silence.

Then Solenne walked to the table and opened the ledger.

Her eyes moved across columns of names, quantities, dates, destinations.

She closed it again.

"We don’t know enough yet."

She tucked the ledger beneath her arm.

"But if there’s this much finished product sitting in what is supposed to be nothing more than a holding fortress..." She looked around the room once. "...then the actual production site is far larger than we imagined."

Cael’s expression darkened.

"If we find that place..."

"...we’ll find the source."

Solenne nodded.

"And enough evidence to expose every noble, merchant, and official funding this operation."

She looked toward the doorway.

"But not tonight."

Her voice became firm again.

"First, we inform the Allright Council."

"We’ve won a battle."

She glanced back at the endless rows of crimson vials.

"The war is just starting"

Cael went through three crates in silence before he spoke.

"This is more than Ishkral was ever getting." He held one vial up to the torchlight. "This whole operation was staging out of here and feeding it downstream in smaller batches. Making it look smaller than it was."

Solenne came in behind him, favoring the shoulder. She looked at the crates. Then at the ledger sitting open on a table nearby, columns of numbers in the same neat businesslike hand from the note Arthur had crumpled back at the academy.

"Take all of it," she said. "Burn what we can’t carry."

"And the ledger?"

"That comes with us specifically." She picked it up herself. "The Allright Council is going to want names, and I want to be the one who hands it to them."

Further down the same corridor, Sable found a second holding room, smaller than the first, empty of prisoners but full of restraints sized for children. Nobody said anything about that room out loud. Sable just stood in the doorway for a moment, then turned and kept searching.

They cleared four more storage rooms, a barracks, and a shrine room nobody could explain, before Cael called it complete.

"That’s everything," he told her, back at the courtyard. "No drugs left inside. No prisoners left inside. All forty elves are accounted for and moving."

"The cohort. Status."

Cael’s jaw tightened. "Thalon’s unconscious. Severe. He’ll live if we get him to a healer within the hour." A beat. "Sable’s in an Aetherthin state. He’ll be useless for days, maybe longer if he keeps pushing like that."

"And Veris."

"You already know."

"Say it anyway."

Cael looked at her. "She’s dead."

Solenne held his eyes and didn’t flinch from it. "Say her name when you write the report. Not ’casualty.’ Not ’lost.’ Her name."

"Understood."

She looked past him, toward where Theodore was hauling an unconscious Vexis Lestilaut across the courtyard, one of the boy’s arms slung over his shoulders.

"And him?"

"Overstrained. Theodore thinks he’ll wake in a few hours." Cael hesitated. "Princess. What you saw him do back there—"

"I saw it."

"I’ve fought beside him for weeks. I’ve never seen that."

"Neither have I." Solenne watched Theodore ease the boy into the back of the third carriage, the pink bellus curling up against his side without being told to. "Whatever it was, he killed Soltice and ended this hellhole.

Cael didn’t answer that.

"Get the wounded loaded," she said. "Veris rides in her own carriage. Not stacked with cargo. She rides like a soldier, not a crate."

"Yes, princess."

Solenne looked at her shoulder once more, then reset it herself with one sharp motion and didn’t make a sound doing it.

Snow had started coming down harder, covering the blood on the frozen ground one flake at a time, like it was trying to erase the whole night before morning found it.

It wouldn’t manage that.

But it would be enough to get them home.