I Became the Bully Extra in a Novel I Hate

Morning came without ceremony. A servant knocked once, told them the King was ready, and left before anyone had a chance to ask anything else.

The throne room wasn't what Arthur expected. No gold, no excess. Just the same pale stone as everything else in the kingdom, tall windows letting in the filtered white light from the canopy above, and at the far end, a throne carved directly out of a living root that had grown up through the floor and been shaped rather than built.

The King sat in it. Older than any elf Arthur had seen so far, silver green hair , his face lined in a way that suggested elves did age, just slower and differently than humans. His eyes carried the same slow, deliberate weight as everything else about this place.

Yveselune stood near the base of the throne, off to one side, the same black-stitched coat from yesterday.

Solenne stepped forward first, the pole with its ten crests left outside per Yveselune's instruction, only the blue relic in her hand now.

"Your Majesty." She bowed at the waist. "Thank you for granting us this audience."

The King said something. The relic hummed and translated a half-second behind him.

"You may speak, princess of the empire that raised no hand to stop this."

Solenne's jaw tightened slightly, but she didn't rise to it. "We've come to discuss the trafficking operation my people uncovered in Creslan. And to propose an alliance against the Covenant, the organization actually responsible."

"An alliance." The King's voice carried something dry underneath the translation. "Do you know how many letters my court has sent toward Creslan in the past year, princess?"

Solenne didn't answer immediately.

"Seven," the King said. "Seven formal requests for diplomatic contact. Seven attempts to raise the matter of our missing children through proper channels, before we ever considered anything else." He leaned forward slightly. "Every one of them was ignored. Two were returned unopened."

Arthur felt something cold settle in his stomach.

'Seven letters,' Vexis said quietly. 'And nobody in Creslan even bothered opening two of them.'

That's not on us specifically. But it's still—

'I know. Doesn't make it feel any better.'

"I wasn't aware of that," Solenne said. Her voice stayed level, but something in it had shifted. "I take responsibility for one of elercross kingdom's failure to respond, even if I wasn't the one who ignored those letters."

"Responsibility." The King said the word like he was testing its weight. "We concluded, after the seventh letter went unanswered, that humans considered our children, our people a joke. An ingredient. Something harvested and forgotten, with no cost attached to the harvesting."

"That's not what my people believe," Solenne said. "Not the ones who matter."

"And yet here we are." The King's eyes moved across the rest of the group, lingering briefly on Cael, then Theodore, then longer on Arthur before returning to Solenne. The relic doing the translation. "Do you know how we finally learned the full scope of it, princess? Not through your seven unanswered letters. Not through your Council."

He paused.

"A Covenant soldier was captured near our southern border two months ago. Attempting to move product through unmonitored territory. My people questioned him." A beat. "Thoroughly."

The relic hummed through the pause that followed.

"He confessed everything, eventually. The extraction method. The unfinished cores. How much purer the compound runs when the source hasn't had years to harden into something resistant. He described it the way a merchant describes inventory. No remorse in it at all. Just numbers."

Arthur's stomach turned.

I already knew the shape of it. Hearing it confirmed by someone who tortured it out of a man is different from reading a report in a courtyard.

"That soldier is dead now," the King continued. "He didn't survive the questioning past the point we needed. I won't pretend otherwise, and I won't apologize for it either." His eyes settled on Solenne again, steady. "That is how my kingdom learned what your kingdom apparently already knew, and chose not to share."

"We didn't know the scope of it either. Not until recently," Solenne said. "The operation my people dismantled — we found it through our own investigation, independent of anything you'd already learned. I understand that doesn't make up for seven ignored letters. It doesn't undo any of what your soldier confessed to. But it's not nothing, either."

"No." The King inclined his head slightly. "It's not nothing. It's simply not enough."

The silence that followed sat heavy in the room.

"Your Majesty." Solenne chose her next words carefully. "Have you made any move toward war? Troop movement, formal declaration, anything committed that can't be undone?"

The King was quiet for a moment.

"No."

Something in Arthur's chest eased, fractionally.

"But do not mistake my restraint for patience without a limit, princess." The King's voice hardened. "I will not stand by and watch my people continue to die at the hands of yours while your empire debates procedure. If nothing changes, if this ledger you've brought produces no arrests, no consequences, nothing beyond words exchanged in this room, I will not hold my army back a second time."

"Understood," Solenne said. "That's exactly why we're here. The ledger names Vak Vernon directly, along with several nobles across multiple kingdoms. The Allright Council has already moved on Vernon. Formal proceedings are underway."

"One name," the King said. "Out of how many listed."

"More than one is being pursued. I can't promise every name in that book sees justice quickly. I can promise it isn't being buried."

The King studied her for a long moment. His slits — thinner than most elves Arthur had seen, barely visible along the edge of his cheekbones — opened and closed once, slow.

"I will consider your proposal," he said finally. "An alliance is not something granted in a single morning's conversation, princess. Trust of that size is not rebuilt in an hour. But I will not dismiss you either, given what you've brought before me today."

"That's all I'm asking for," Solenne said. "Time, and the willingness to keep talking instead of preparing for the alternative."

"You have both. For now." The King settled back into the root-throne. "Yveselune will arrange further discussion. I have matters that require my attention elsewhere."

The audience ended there, no more ceremony to it than it had begun with. The King rose, and Yveselune moved to escort him, and the room emptied out around them in quiet, careful steps.

They walked in silence until the doors to the throne room closed behind them.

Only then did Theodore let out a long breath.

"…I thought he was going to declare war right there."

"So did I," Arthur admitted.

Thalon looked ahead as they continued down the corridor.

"You both underestimate him."

Arthur glanced over.

"The King?"

"He already wanted a reason not to fight." Thalon adjusted the sling on his arm. "If he'd wanted war, he wouldn't have let us finish speaking."

Solenne nodded.

"The hardest part wasn't convincing him to listen."

"What was it?" Theodore asked.

"Convincing him that we're different from the people who ignored those seven letters."

Nobody answered immediately.

Arthur couldn't.

Because the King had been right.

The empire hadn't answered.

Whether it had been incompetence, politics, or simple indifference didn't matter to the parents who'd buried empty coffins.

"…Do you think he'll agree?" Arthur asked.

"I don't know," Solenne admitted.

She looked back toward the throne room.

"But he didn't close the door."

A faint smile crossed her face.

"And right now…"

"I'll take that."

---

Outside, in the corridor leading back toward the residence, Arthur noticed it properly for the first time — small bellus, dozens of them, tucked into alcoves along the walls, curled on windowsills, resting on the shoulders of passing elves the same way Roz sat on his.

It hadn't struck him yesterday, moving through the streets with everything else demanding his attention. Now, walking slower, it was impossible to miss.

"There's a lot of them here," Arthur said quietly to Roz. "More than I've seen anywhere else combined."

"Mm." Roz didn't elaborate.

"This is your home originally, right? The Emerald Kingdom?"

Roz's ear twitched.

"Do you have a place here? Somewhere you used to stay?"

"That was a long time ago, brat." Roz's voice stayed flat, but something in it had gone tighter than usual. "Long enough that it doesn't matter now."

"I wasn't asking because it mattered. I was just curious."

"Curiosity killed several things smarter than you." Roz turned his head slightly, watching the corridor ahead instead of answering. "Focus on the King. Focus on Solenne's proposal. That's what matters right now."

Arthur let it go.

He noted the deflection anyway and filed it.

Roz had lived five hundred and ninety-nine years in a world Arthur barely understood the surface of. Somewhere in that span, something had happened here, in this kingdom, that made a five-century-old creature go quiet the second it came up.

Whatever it was, Roz clearly wasn't ready to talk about it.

Arthur didn't push.

Not yet.