“It’s too early~” Pria moaned as Beth attempted to haul her out of bed.

  They’d been summoned by Sil. He claimed it was important—which meant they needed to get there quickly—but not an emergency—which meant Beth didn’t have to spark them over to his apartment, regardless of whether Pria was dressed or not.

  Beside her friend, the girl from the day before continued to sleep, snoring quietly. Considering that Beth had been forced to climb onto the bed and haphazardly straddle Pria in an attempt to shake her awake, the girl’s continued sleep was impressive. Or concerning. It might be concerning.

  “I know,” she said, pulling back and dragging Pria with her, a physical augmentation skill racketing through her body. As much as Beth was taller and stronger than Pria, the girl was big, and she didn’t want either of them hurt by her manhandling. “Sil said it was important.”

  “Why important? What important at”—Pria was quiet for a long moment, her sleepy mind struggling to check the time. Then, she groaned, long and loud.

  The girl still didn’t move.

  “Too early.”

  “I know.”

  “What’s so fucking important he wants us up and about this early?”

  Beth hesitated. Technically, Sil hadn’t said what was so important. Chances were that meant it was either related to the news she’d received upon being rattled awake by his urgent message—that Emilia had been involved in a very public, very ugly breakup with Elijah—or that it was something equally insane, but completely unrelated. Most likely, it was the latter. If it had been about the breakup… well, Beth knew Emilia well enough to know she’d never been that attached to Elijah.

  Theirs had been a relationship of good—or at least acceptable—sex and mutual enjoyment of each other. Then, it hadn’t been. Elijah had changed, become too serious for Emilia, who needed someone who would simultaneously ground her and lighten her life. That was never going to be Elijah, but even the bit he did cover—notably, that he used to be fun—was now in the past. Therefore, he needed to be past as well. The fact that he hadn’t seen it that way was a him problem, and regardless of how badly the breakup had gone…

  No, Beth couldn’t see Emilia needing them for emotional support or anything like that.

  Still, not knowing what else Sil could possibly want, it wasn’t like she could leverage Pria out of bed with anything else.

  “I don’t know for sure, but have you seen what happened in Elijah’s suite this morning?”

  “What? No?”

  Pria was silent for several, long moments, her sleepy mind digging into the campus messages, looking for the gossip. With the pink tide and all the drugs circling, there was a lot of news floating about. Luckily, no one had died—although the clinics both on campus and in Piketown were currently overrun with patients who had done an impressive array of stupid things. Videos of their stupidity were now swamping the campus messages, burying even the relatively fresh news of Emilia causing the evacuation of an entire dorm building—not to mention whatever had happened with her and Elijah and some mystery man shortly after.

  Eventually, however, Pria found it.

  “SHE WHAT!?” Pria screamed, bolting upright and sending both the blanket and Beth toppling backwards.

  “Is your hookup okay?” Beth asked, politely turning away as Beth flung her naked body out of bed and began tugging on clothing. Luckily, she didn’t just grab the closest fabric—which would have resulted in either ruining her hookup’s clothing or a long process of getting into the tight black dress she appeared to have worn out the night before.

  “What? Oh, fuck. I was supposed to tell her to go get her knots checked about that,” Pria said as she struggled with a sock.

  “What knots? And why are you putting on socks? It’s still a million degrees out?”

  “What? Oh, fuck.” The sock went flying, Pria racing out of the room.

  Beth gave the girl in Pria’s bed another look, wondering if her friend had actually learned the girl’s name this time, before calmly following. “What knots?” she asked again, noting the way Pria was serving herself up one of the disgusting, if highly effective, concoctions Emilia made them drink when she knew they were hungover. Usually, Pria put up a fight about drinking the things—this was fair, they truly were some of the most horrific things Beth had ever consumed, even worse than pranpran. The fact that Pria was willingly drinking one, while not even appearing that hungover…

  This may have been why Beth had been hesitant to frame their excursion to Sil’s as being about Emilia’s breakup. Pria was now taking getting there seriously, sure, but she was perhaps taking it too seriously.

  “Oh…” Pria sighed as she forced her feet into a pair of shoes, not bothering to lean down and put them on like a normal human being. “It’s a whole thing. I don't really want to talk about it.” The other girl shuddered as she ushered them out of the suite she and Emilia shared and continued struggling to drink her hangover remedy. “Emilia can tell you about it. Or Payton, I guess.”

  “Payton?”

  “He was the one who handled me at the clinic yesterday,” Pria said, her voice growing more strained.

  Time to drop the subject, then.

  “Did you and Emilia go out last night?” Beth asked instead, bracing herself as they exited the building.

  It was still early morning, and the heat of the pink tide had yet to hit its apex. It was still unpleasantly balmy, however, and around them, the students moving about were already layered over in a thin film of sweat. The worst of them—people who had been out partying all night or had the misfortune to fall asleep out in the wild of the mountain, as the most intoxicated of students occasionally did—had dark circles of sweat under their arms, across their chests. One poor guy even had a line of sweat up his ass. At least, Beth assumed it was sweat. She’d never seen him at any of the school’s semiregular sex parties, so it probably wasn’t related to too much sex, but who knew.

  “We went out to dinner at that fancy ass place that just opened by The Grint, then headed over there.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Expensive. Who paid for that?”

  “Emilia.”

  “Seriously? Where’d she get the pay?” While their friend had definitely done well in the raid the day before, she hadn’t done that well, nor had she implied she’d gotten some extra paydrop from it or anything, as occasionally happened for great plays. Emilia definitely would have preferred extra pay over the strange invite she’d gotten. Plus, she’d been in debt from the night before—that’d been the whole point of dragging her to the raid, after all. “Wait, you guys went back to The Grint?” Usually, they didn’t hit the same club twice in a week.

  “Yeah, related to the whole… knot and clinic thing…” Pria sighed.

  Okay, dropping that subject as well.

  “And she just fucked some rich dude,” Pria added before taking another shuddering sip of her drink. Nothing in her tone implied she thought there was anything strange about Emilia apparently having sex for money. “Em said it wasn’t like that,” the other girl assured her, waving a hand. “She said it wasn’t sex for money, but also wasn’t not sex for money… or something like that. I don’t know how much her hookup gave her, but I got the impression it was a fucking lot~”

  Pria laughed as she began to complain that Emilia hadn’t been willing to even show her a picture of the guy, even after telling her he was the most beautiful man on the planet. She was midway through speaking, however, when a voice cut her off.

  “Em had sex for money!?”

  Of course. Of fucking course.

  Beth and Pria turned in unison to meet the shocked gaze of Elijah. Behind him stood his group of shitty friends and roommates, including the asshole who had locked Emilia into their suite. Beth supposed it made sense they were out and about, their dorm building still being inspected for structural damage, while their suite currently lacked a door… and the wall for the door.

  Beth had watched the video Emilia had spread of the incident. To say she was shocked was an understatement. While she’d known Emilia probably had more skill than she usually let anyone see—and she definitely remembered her friend’s stellar performance in the physical competitions they’d taken part in, early in their university life—Beth hadn’t realized Emilia was that skilled, capable of taking out an entire wall with pinpoint precision and seemingly no effort.

  Really, though, the fact that these assholes weren’t still being questioned by security or someone else about their conduct that morning was pretty shitty. Sure, Emilia hadn’t been hurt, but what Victor had done—what none of the men in front of her had even bothered to speak out against—was fucking creepy.

  Predators. Men who enjoyed making women feel small. Men who wouldn’t stand up to their friends, even when they were clearly in the wrong.

  Sometimes, Beth was glad a lot of men didn’t view her as a real woman. It sucked, and there was definitely a different sort of predator out there who would do horrible things to her, if given the chance. They wouldn’t get such a chance, but if they did, those things would be terrible enough that no one would pretend it didn’t happen—that it wasn’t that bad, as she’d already seen people saying throughout campus chats and message boards about what these men had done to her friend.

  Luckily, those comments were being shut down pretty fast, but the fact that anyone could view a bunch of men locking a woman into their room and talking about her like she was only good for sex as nothing was pretty fucking terrible. So yeah, as much as there were other threats out there that trans people faced, at least it wasn’t normalized the way these guys’ actions were.

  “I just said that she didn’t,” Pria said, glaring daggers at the men, one hand on her thick hips while the other gripped her drink like it was a weapon, which… while it was objectively disgusting, Beth doubted it could be used as an actual weapon.

  “I dunno,” Victor laughed, not even bothering to look at Pria as he spoke to her, his eyes instead glued to Beth because he was an equal opportunity asshole who loved making everyone feel like they were shit, “definitely sounded like she opened her holes for a bit of cash.”

  Seriously, Emilia had terrible taste in men. Granted, they’d avoided spending more than the barest amount of time with any of Elijah’s trash friends, but anyone who kept company with these sorts of people should have been an absolute no. Realistically, they were to blame as well. Could they keep Emilia from dating or fucking whoever she liked? Probably not, but they were her friends, and since she’d proved herself to be so undiscerning in who she let stick their cock inside her, they should step up to be her common sense.

  [Beth: New Rule: Emilia isn’t allowed to date or fuck anyone without our approval.]

  A chorus of agreeds came through the group chat, followed by Emilia complaining about how she had great taste in friends and how that taste should translate to having good taste in boyfriends and fuck buddies.

  [Em: i swear]

  [Em: i have fucked at least four people who were good people!]

  [Em: plus the people i sometimes have kinky group sex with are awesome]

  [Beth: and how many people have you fucked total?]

  Emilia did not respond, which Beth was taking to mean it was such a high number that her at least four people, plus random group sex people were barely significant. Still, she at least didn’t complain about Beth’s mostly joking suggestion that they vet all her hookups from now on. Perhaps, if she wasn’t putting up a fight, it should be changed from a joke to a real suggestion, at least when it came to her dating anyone in the future.

  “Fuck off. All of you,” Beth didn’t quite snarl. If she had to fight the entire group of men, she would. It wouldn’t be pretty, and they’d all get in some pretty big shit for fighting at all, let alone on campus, but for Emilia—against these assholes—Beth would gladly get expelled.

  “Don’t speak to us that way,” Victor snapped back, stepping forward.

  Elijah’s least pleasant roommate was tall and muscular. Beth had seen him in raids, and unfortunately, he was good. If they fought—even just the two of them—it would be messy. He might only be a sub-100—probably high 70s, although Beth wasn’t certain, as she generally made a point to avoid the man—but he made a point to brag about his service during the war often. Beth’s lower D-Level might give her the potential to be more powerful, but she didn’t have the experience to back it up.

  “If you don’t want to be spoken to like that, none of you should talk to any of us again,” Beth replied, Censor already whirring as it loaded up a combination of defensive and offensive skills, just in case the unpredictable man decided to throw something at them.

  Victor’s eyes racked over her, a smirk Beth didn’t like tugging at his lips. “Someone like you can’t tell us who we can and can’t talk to—not how we talk to them, either.”

  He stepped closer, pulled himself taller. Beth was tall, but Victor made even her feel too small and in the corner of her vision, Pria shrank back slightly, whatever emphatic connection she had to the aether probably burning for how much threat this man was radiating.

  “Something as disgusting as you should be glad we’re even talking to you at all,” Victor laughed, and for once, one of his roommates reacted, their eyes growing wide. They still didn’t say anything. Coward. “If you'd like, I can take care of that for you? Make you a normal girl?”

  It took Beth a second too long to realize what he was implying, a skill already sliding towards her, intend to slice away flesh she’d long ago decided she was fine keeping.

  The man was insane.

  Just fighting would have been bad enough—enough to be suspended or even expelled. For him to attack her, intent to mutilate her…

  That was the sort of shit that got you arrested.

  Or worse.

  Pria’s gasp rattled through her as she tried to activate a skill to block whatever Victor had sent her way. It wasn’t going to be fast enough, some part of her saying she should have risked sparking, as nauseating as that would have been, to get out of the way. Even then, it was unlikely she would have been fast enough. Sparking was only fast when you were practised, precise. Beth was neither, and now, she was going to—

  A thick arm wrapped around her waist, tugging her away from the skill as it snapped shut where her hips had just been.

  No, not snapped shut. Something had stopped the skill, leaving code visibly vibrating through the aether, frozen.

  “What—” Victor began to ask, but he cut off, a blur of black appearing in front of him and then, nothing.

  Nothing, because Victor was just… gone, and Beth was being set down by the tallest man she had ever seen, his golden eyes not even bothering to look towards Elijah and his friends, as though they weren’t worthy of his attention.

  Perhaps they weren’t. Not with braids like those woven through his hair.

  “Fucking stars, you’re tall,” Pria breathed out behind them.

  The man’s eyes tilted in mild amusement. “So I’ve heard, several times in the last few minutes.”