100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids

Chapter 558: Chapter 557- Viktor Vs Random Sword Guy

She pulled back.

His grip followed.

”Please—” Her voice, controlled, the voice of a woman who had been doing this job long enough to know that the volume of a response mattered as much as the content. ”Please let go—”

”Someone—” She looked at the room. At the faces. At the people who were looking at their plates or their cards or their drinks with the focused, deliberate attention of people who had decided that what they were watching was not happening. ”—someone help me—”

”She must be wet already.” This from the man beside the grabber — his companion, also drinking, finding the whole situation entertaining. ”Look at how she’s breathing. She likes it.”

”Let’s see what’s under here—”

He reached for her skirt.

The fabric lifting.

And then a hand came through.

Not large in the theatrical sense. Not the heroic, oversized hand of a storybook rescuer. A woman’s hand, in fact — wide across the knuckles, the fingers calloused at the tips, the tendons of the forearm visible below the rolled-up sleeve in the particular, ropy way that forearms look when the hands attached to them have been doing physical work for thirty years.

The kitchen knife in that hand traveled through the air in the flat, undecorated trajectory of something that had been thrown by a person who threw things for purposes rather than for effect.

It entered the man’s shoulder at the joint.

Not the kind of entry that makes a theatrical sound. The kind that makes a very small, very honest, very final sound — the specific, brief impact of a blade finding the gap between the shoulder and the arm at the place where an arm is attached to a body and then expressing an opinion about the attachment.

The arm — from shoulder to hand — separated.

Hit the table.

Bounced once.

Hit the floor.

The man looked at the space where his arm had been.

He said nothing for approximately three seconds, which was how long it took for his nervous system to process an event it had no template for.

Then he screamed.

The woman who had thrown the knife walked out of the kitchen doorway.

Large. The kind of large that inn kitchen work produced in a woman who had been running a kitchen for decades — broad in the shoulder, solid in the hip, her forearms the forearms of the hands Viktor had already noted. Her hair pinned back with the functional pins of a woman who pinned her hair for practical rather than aesthetic reasons. Her face: the face of a woman in her sixties who had stopped finding things surprising around the time she turned forty.

She walked to the table.

Looked at the arm on the floor.

Looked at the man screaming where the arm had been.

Looked at the room.

”Come on,” she said. Her voice was the voice of a woman addressing a dining room she had been managing since before most of the people in it were born. ”Eat your food.”

Silence.

The absolute, comprehensive silence of a room full of people who had just watched something happen and were still processing where it fit.

”You’re ignoring it now,” she said. ”Same as you were ignoring it before.”

A pause.

”The difference,” she continued, ”is that now you have a reason.”

The room began to eat.

Quietly. With the focused, downward attention of people who had been given clear instructions and were following them.

The serving woman — the one with the rounded chest and the unlucky encounter — stood with her hands at her sides, her face still carrying the flush of the encounter, her eyes moving between the arm on the floor and the woman who had created the situation’s resolution.

She bowed.

Slightly. Reflexive. The bow of a woman who has been helped and does not know what else to do with the feeling.

The kitchen woman turned.

”AERRRRGHHHHHHHH!!!?!”

Looked at the man — no longer a man with a screaming problem, now a man with a screaming and a blood problem, except that the blood was not behaving as amputated blood was supposed to behave. Not spraying. Not pooling.

”KURRRHHHGHH!!!” The wound at his shoulder closed around itself in the quiet, deliberate way of a wound that had been managed by something other than physics.

Blood control.

Viktor filed this.

”For losing your hand,” the kitchen woman said, looking at him with the expression of a woman making a genuine, reasonable business decision, ”your meal is free today.”

She said it with the same tone she had used to tell the room to eat.

”Congratulations.”

The man processed this.

Then began to cry.

The guards materialized from wherever guards at inns materialize from — the door, the side room, the top of the stairs — and the process of removing the man from the premises was conducted with the efficient, practiced authority of people who had done this before, though presumably not in exactly this configuration.

The arm was retrieved separately.

”Healing temple,” the kitchen woman said, as the man was walked toward the door, clutching his arm to his chest with the wrong hand. ”If you run, they might attach it before noon. They do good work there. Better than you deserve.”

He ran.

His blood did not follow him.

The kitchen woman looked at the floor where the arm had been.

At the absence of blood there.

Looked at her own hand.

At the faint, controlled shimmer of something retreating back into her palm.

Then she went back into the kitchen.

The room ate.

Viktor had watched this.

All of it.

From the mid-point of the common room, standing where he had stopped when the glass fell, Helviana a half-step behind his right shoulder.

He looked at the kitchen door the woman had gone through.

He noted the blood control. The throw. The economy of it — no warning, no escalation, no theatrical pause. The immediate, comprehensive resolution of a problem by a woman who had seen it begin and had ended it before it became something that required more than one action.

He noted the kitchen woman.

He would look at her again later.

He turned.

And found Remus Santora’s eyes.

The guild master had watched the whole thing too. His expression had not changed during any of it — not at the grab, not at the throw, not at the arm, not at the kitchen woman’s speech. He had watched with the flat, patient attention of a man for whom things happening in rooms was simply information, and information was simply information, and emotional responses to information were a separate, optional step that he had mostly stopped taking.

His eyes were on Viktor.

Viktor’s eyes were on him.

The room ate around them.

The fire worked.

A log shifted.

Between two men who had never met in this life, across twenty feet of inn common room floor, a conversation happened that did not use words.

Viktor’s eyes said: ’I know what you are.’

Santora’s eyes said: ’I know what you are.’

Viktor’s eyes said: ’That’s interesting.’

Santora’s eyes said: ’Yes.’

Viktor’s eyes said, with the particular, private, not-for-anyone-else quality of something he was thinking rather than projecting: ’Touch my future plans and I will fuck your pregnant wife in front of your face until she forgets your name.’

Santora’s expression did not change.

But something in it noted the message.

Viktor spoke.

”Should we deal with things outside?”