Chapter 247

Sofia was having an ... interesting evening. Mostly thanks to, of course, the usual suspect. Natalie.

As the team wound down their day over dinner, she had been seated close to Sofia, their thighs touching within the confines of the booth. In all honesty, even that simple skin contact would have been enough to fluster her. Despite their recent dungeon expeditions and Natalie’s enthusiastic involvement in their hastily made bet, Sofia could hardly be considered experienced in such matters. Yet, experience alone didn’t cure nervousness—it merely provided familiarity, which might dampen the feeling but not wholly erase it.

More importantly, it wasn’t that Natalie was acting friendlier than usual, purposefully brushing against her and generally hanging close, but rather, that their bet was coming to a close. Tomorrow would be mostly filled with taking out the goblin nest, followed by a long trip back to Tenet and handling all of the various errands that would come with returning to the academy.

So that meant tonight was the night.

The last opportunity before their bet ended.

And Natalie had made her intentions clear. How she intended to ‘finish off her training.’ Hence, she was feeling unusually hot, even if all Natalie was doing was hanging a bit closer than usual. Because the subtext of why she was doing so was rather blatant.

The teasing was far subtler than usual, and yet Sofia couldn’t help but squirm her way through the evening, unable to fight away a blush that persisted through half their conversations—or would at least reappear whenever Natalie did so much as touch shoulders or turn a grin toward her. Sofia would almost have preferred if Natalie had been more blatant in her teasing.

Which maybe she was. By not doing so. If that made any sense.

It was, Sofia decided, extremely unfair that both teasing her and not teasing her had exactly the same effect.

There was a single lull in the mortification, during which, after dinner, they had a postmortem discussion on how they’d handled the goblin encounters of the day before and the more intense one several hours ago. Such talks were common, of course, for any delving party, no matter how experienced. They frequently had them during lunch chatters, when it came to the weekly dungeon runs, though they were informal things.

Some teams were more structured about post-combat analysis, going through postmortems with a seriousness not befitting lunchroom casual talk, but one of the benefits of having a team of five who were both friendly with each other and passionate about their profession meant that such discussions just happened. For Tenet students, post-dungeon analysis was almost a mode of small talk.

Once those practical discussions had wrapped up, they had returned to more casual topics, and so the brief distraction was lost, and Natalie’s ‘accidental’ touches returned. Thus so had Sofia’s growing nervousness. It was a very intense squirming in her stomach, the anticipation of what was coming, to the extent she was almost relieved when the time came that they were heading upstairs.