[Wolf Lord+ | Draft] Volume 2 - Chapter 111 - Tells (Patreon)

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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

Welcome to the draft release of Volume 2 - Chapter 111 - Tells for y'all.

As always, a quick reminder that this chapter is still in the process of being workshopped by me and that this is simply the first-draft.

And also: Please do not read the chapters here on Patreon, but go for the googledoc, .pdf or .epub instead. Patreon butchers all forms of formatting and you're missing out on easier and more enjoyable reading experiences.

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Can you call everyone else's bluffs? Hmm... I wonder.

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I'm looking forward to hearing your first impressions and opinions on this chapter. \o/

I hope you will enjoy it!

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-------------------- End of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) ------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the link to the chapter:

GoogleDoc Chapter

Click me to get to the Doc!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E9SWctrR4sbZB_ZMQC7B_-WEmgitMN5rb92txykrKbQ/edit?usp=sharing

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Volume 2 - Chapter 111 - Tells

“Card games die as a pastime above Perception 10. You just play dice. Dice don’t have tells.”

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[Excerpt from “Mess-hall proverb,” common across all UHF fleets, origin year disputed, PFC 654]

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Thea was already picking apart the run before the gray of the scenario’s failure had fully washed out all of the colour around her.

‘That was a stupid, sloppy rotation on the final wave… What were you even thinking?! Simply submitting to the Commander’s pressure like it was ever going to be the main threat, when it was obviously just a distraction… Fuck! The Stalkers flanking wide around the right side should have immediately told me something was off—they never go that wide unless something’s coming in behind them. I had all the damn information right there… Just didn’t weigh any of it right!’

Her gaze drifted over the frozen battlefield, taking in the very last frame of the scenario.

‘The mines were spent two waves too early, as well… If I’d kept three of Lucas’ charges in reserve for the junction lanes—maybe even just two, if I’d picked the right ones, actually—the Commander and Grunt screen collapses right away, or at least a lot faster, and I get to keep my eyes free for the air. Instead, I was working fucking manual cleanup detail when Desmond surprised me…’

She had to give him real props for that one.

He’d decided to spawn his drones in early, specifically to coordinate with the scenario’s own massed assault—not waiting for the full respawn of his triplet, and risking them getting picked off without achieving anything.

Which was something he hadn’t done a single time across the entirety of today’s session.

Not once in almost sixty runs against Lucas, and not once against her during the first minutes of the scenario either.

She’d straight up figured he’d forgotten the pre-spawn option even existed, and had subsequently filed it away as a highly unlikely non-factor… Right up until the moment two drones—which had no business being there at that exact time, and which she had no business missing like that—slipped the gap and turned her Marks into paste.

She’d literally been the one to explain to him how that whole system worked, while setting up the scenario at the start of today’s Wildmaws session, so she’d been fully aware of it as an option… But he’d sat on that unused option for so long, biding his time for just the right moment, that she’d simply stopped weighing it as a real risk.

‘That’s entirely on you, Thea. You should have kept it in mind as a real possibility throughout and planned around it instead of getting lazy. You should know better than to assume an enemy forgot parts of their kit… You do know better! The Old Man even—’

“By Xagis, that was so damn awesome to watch, Thea! The way you just absolutely crushed my time on the first try is utterly insane!”

Lucas’ booming voice cut her reprimand clean in half as the squad’s Defensive Heavy came jogging across the sand toward her, armour clanging with every large stride.

Thea turned toward him and gave him a sad little smile, shaking her head.

“I could’ve done a lot better, actually. I messed up a lot, especially right at the end there. I misjudged Desmond’s actions completely, wasted the mines too early, let the Commander bait my—”

He suddenly wrapped his arms around her.

Thea froze up completely, the analysis inside her brain and pouring out of her mouth stopping dead in their tracks as their two identical armours clanked together, plate grinding against plate.

It was very strange. 

He’d never done this before. 

“You did fantastic, Thea,” he said, somewhere above her head. “Thank you for showing me all of this—seriously. You’ve done more than good enough. I know you could do better on a second attempt, and better again on a third, and so on—but that’s not what we’re here for, is it? It’s for me to get my shit together. And you’ve helped so much with that… Genuinely, thank you, Thea.”

She wasn’t sure how to react to that whatsoever.

She wasn’t even remotely sure where this strange pep-talk-slash-thank-you speech had even suddenly come from, either. But she also couldn’t deny the unfamiliar warmth crawling up through her chest at his words—strange, definitely, but not entirely unwelcome if she was being honest with herself…

She let the hug go on for exactly one more full second.

That was when the whole situation tipped over into far too uncomfortable for her, and she started wriggling her way out of it—which Lucas put up no fight for, stepping back with his hands briefly raised as if to show he meant no harm.

His face carried that ever gentle, inviting smile of his when they finally returned to a distance where their bulky armours weren’t a massive sightline-blocking hazard anymore, and she could actually see the big man towering above her properly.

“Well… I—I guess I’m happy to hear that you think watching me deal with the scenario is going to help,” she managed, recovering graciously. “Honestly wasn’t sure how to help you without just giving you all the answers directly… Evelyne… She helped me make a decision on that, actually. But I still wasn’t sure whether it would actually work and—”

“—You’ve done great, Thea. Truly,” he interrupted her, then gestured at the AR-303 analogue still in her hands. “What was up with it, anyway? Did the pause help you find what was wrong?”

Thea’s brain stalled for a half-second—because she knew she wasn’t great at lying.

She never had been, really. Her entire toolkit in regards to social situations consisted of roughly three moves, and that was with her being extremely generous to herself with the counting criteria.

Deception, of all things, was decidedly not among them.

But she also couldn’t exactly reveal Æht to Lucas—not just because the setting and context for that kind of conversation were entirely wrong, even Thea could figure that much, but especially because the Sovereign was listening to every single word spoken. 

Nor could she really reveal that her precognition wasn’t working right—not with Evelyne sitting up in the stands, well within the likely bounds of her Perception, which Thea had slowly been cataloguing and mapping out over their sessions together so far. 

That second part being particularly important had been hammered home in yesterday’s meeting, with Corvus and Kara in complete lockstep: “Under no circumstances,” was the fact that Thea’s Psychic Powers were precognition-based to be mentioned in Evelyne’s presence by anybody. 

Both of them had been certain that the Sen Heir would figure it out on her own eventually—a Sen figured everything out eventually when they put their minds to it—but, as Corvus had put it, there was exactly zero reason to make it unnecessarily easy for her. And as Kara had so pointedly added then—with a particularly uncharacteristic viciousness in her voice, as Thea recalled: “The information might end up being a valuable bargaining chip instead. Something Thea can trade away, piece by piece, to tease more out of her in return—about Masters, about the Challenges, or about whatever else we might end up needing…“

So Thea went for the best available middle-ground she could come up with on the quick: Telling the truth—somewhat.

“Ahh—no, your weapon’s fine… Well, mostly fine. I’ll want a look at your actual AR-303 after we’re done here—I’ve got some potential recommendations for attachments and parts that’d make it fit your use cases way better, assuming that it is indeed a fairly close analogue to the real thing and—Ehh—but that’s not what you asked, I know. Sorry.” She hefted the Wildmaw’s analogue weapon slightly as if showing it off. “Just had to reconfigure my brain a bit, is all, really… Felt different, firing the AR-303, compared to my usual Gram, y’know?”

Lucas’ eyes met hers for a brief instant. The minuscule flinch that crossed him at the contact was tanked almost without a hitch—suppressed so quickly and cleanly, that Thea was fairly certain she’d never have caught it at all without her absurd Perception backing her up.

He held her gaze… Just a moment too long to be entirely natural—even to Thea. 

So long, in fact, that she was fairly certain he was trying to tell her something through the extended eye-contact—something that shouldn’t be spoken aloud in this particular arcade session any more than her own truths could... But alas, they were, once again, thwarted by the inconvenient fact that neither of them possessed any telepathic Powers whatsoever.

‘Maybe I should pick up that Ability of Corvus’…’ Thea thought, for exactly one brief moment—before throwing the idea straight out the airlock. 

There was no room in her planned Build for something like that—not even close. 

The slots were spoken for three times over as it was.

“I’ll go and try my hand at this thing again, then,” Lucas finally said with a sigh, breaking the contact and rolling his shoulders in visible anticipation. “I’ve got a lot of stolen ideas to try and implement.” 

He took a step back toward the arena’s center, then glanced over his shoulder at her, and added: “Make sure you watch me closely, Thea. I might have some ways to improve on your efforts, too.”

The last part came out almost… 

‘Smug…?’, she thought. 

It sounded dangerously close to a challenge, to her ears. 

Entirely unbidden, a toothy smile spread across her face in response. 

Because this—this exact kind of thing—was what she’d always lived for: Someone looking at her run, her numbers, her performance, and having the sheer audacity to say ‘I think I can do it better.’

“You better not die in the first three minutes again, with those words as big as your damn body,” she shot back practically instantly, the banter fully formed and firing before she’d had even a single moment to process what was happening. “Time to put up or shut up, big guy.”

Lucas’ eyebrows immediately rose high at her words.

Thea, meanwhile, felt heat rush straight up her neck and into her ears as her brain finally caught up to her own rapid-fire mouth. So she opted for her social-encounters standard plan A—also included as her social toolkit move #1: Rapid Escape.

Ducking her head low, she quickly turned and half-sprinted away from him, off across the sand toward the stands where Evelyne was still waiting—leaving the big man standing stunned in the middle of the arena behind her, before he could say anything in response.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Thea?! They’re not gamers! You can’t talk to them like that!’ she internally screamed at herself—quietly thankful for Lucas’ copied Attributes including a whole lot of Strength to allow her escape to be appropriately expedient for the situation. ‘Maybe—maybe—Ela could take it, based on her rather strange understanding of what friendship entails… But not Lucas! He’s the nice one! What the fuck, Thea?!’

Behind her, she heard something that sounded suspiciously like a snort. 

And somehow, that only made her ears burn hotter.

‘Just reach the stands, sit down and act natural. Surely nobody has to talk about this ever again…’ she counselled herself, eyes fixed firmly on the ground ahead of her, until she made it to the arena’s far-side wall—at which point she accessed the teleporter embedded in it to get up to the stands. 

Walking the few extra meters to the seat next to Evelyne, Thea sat down and took a deep breath to calm her racing mind.

‘That was stupid… But thankfully it’s Lucas, at least. He won’t hold it against me. If it had been Desmond… Or Corvus…’ A shudder ran down her spine at the mere thought of accidentally disrespecting her Squad Leader like that. ‘You really gotta get yourself under control one of these days, Thea. You can’t keep impulsively messing up like this. First with your emotions and the whole Psychic side of things, now this? Get it together.’

A few deep breaths later, she managed to somewhat settle her mind—

—and promptly realized, out of the corner of her eye, that Evelyne was intently staring at her.

“I messed up quite badly toward the end there… But I hope it was still entertaining enough to watch?” Thea offered as the first tidbit of conversation, hoping to steer Evelyne away from any potentially awkward questions about what, exactly, had just happened down there.

The other girl regarded her for a few more moments, before graciously nodding. “It was indeed eye-opening. I thank you for it.”

That particular answer caught Thea off-guard, and she turned fully toward her. “Eye-opening…? What do you mean?”

She suddenly heard Evelyne’s heartbeat quicken for just the briefest of moments, watched her squirm uncomfortably at the question, and almost reflexively pulled it back—figuring, based on that reaction, that it had somehow been rude—but the answer came before she had a chance to do so.

“I—I’ve been wondering, every time we talk about Builds, just how you have such seemingly in-depth knowledge of how all kinds of them function. And not just academically, but down to a feels-based perspective too, which is something most Build-creators tend to neglect or miss entirely… B—But it makes a lot more sense to me now, if this is something you’re used to doing—and it very much looked like it was, if I’m allowed to say as much. Your displayed performance out there was astonishing, even with whatever mistakes you might have made throughout.”

Glad to have apparently not messed up too badly—judging by the fact that Evelyne had still decided to answer—Thea did her best to keep the conversation going.

“Ahh… I’m not sure I can claim any kind of honors on that one, to be honest. It’s really just how I was taught to approach these things by my mentor, back when I first started getting interested in Build-creation. He was the one that—”

“Y–Your mentor?!” Evelyne interrupted her, for the first time ever, downright startling Thea.

The instant the other girl saw Thea simply staring at her in response—with Thea trying to figure out what, exactly had just happened to cause that reaction—she turned pale and shrank in on herself. “O—Oh, no. I—I’m so sorry! I—I didn’t mean to interrupt… I—I wasn’t—”

“It’s fine, really,” Thea recovered quickly and interrupted her right back, providing a genuine smile alongside it. She knew all too well how terrible it felt to mess up in social situations—especially unintentionally and reflexively, like this.

At the same time, however, her own mind was immediately flooded with two separate strands of thought. The first one focused on Evelyne herself.

‘This is supposed to be the super scary Heir to an almost-Prime-level Legacy? Really…? Either she’s an actor so good that even Corvus’ scary descriptions undersell her capabilities massively, or he doesn’t actually understand her at all... She’s only, like, slightly better than I am at this stuff—‘

The second strand, running almost simultaneously, cut the first one short—because it was far more important in her mind.

‘A social faux-pas like that does not fit with Corvus’ and Kara’s descriptions of how a Sen Heir would and should act… Based on that, and the very obvious interest in the topic, I’m going to venture a guess here: This is one of those “bargaining chips” they were talking about…’

She had been coached quite thoroughly by Corvus and Karania the previous night on what exactly to pay close attention to when interacting with Evelyne—and not just for the Lucas training sessions, either, but for any and all contact with her in general. Because, as the two of them had laid out, Thea was the only member of Alpha Squad who could actually match, or potentially even exceed, Evelyne’s own Perception scores. 

Perception was, after all, the social Attribute—it betrayed all the countless little accidental actions people had no idea they were even producing: Micro-expressions, breathing shifts, the heartbeat of a person. And while the Sen Heiress was undoubtedly trained to the very bone in suppressing exactly those tells, it was not impossible for her to mess up.

Thea had been able to confirm that one herself, remarking on it during the briefing—recalling the whole training session that Kara had been a part of, and all the downright questionable things Evelyne’s heartbeat had done throughout it.

Even Kara had admitted—with an uncharacteristic reluctance—that she, unfortunately, had no way of truly meeting Evelyne in this arena herself. For all her genius and uncountable other talents, she simply didn’t have the Perception required to catch the minuscule details that might give Evelyne’s actions away.

So the job had naturally fallen to Thea—exclusively.

Which was exactly why they’d drilled her on the warning signs and watch-points so thoroughly—including the ones filed under their “unlikely, but extremely helpful scenarios” category. There hadn’t been a whole lot of entries in that one, so it was rather fortuitous that this exact kind of situation had happened to be among them. 

Or rather, “A social blunder that sits entirely outside her usual behavior—and that immediately betrays a topic of stark interest,” as Corvus had described it yesterday. 

A rather adequate description, Thea had to admit, since it was precisely what had just happened by accident.

Not having quite figured out how to use said bargaining chip yet—but also not wanting to leave the awkward silence hanging between them any longer than necessary, considering that social faux-pas were a particularly sore topic for her as well—she decided to bridge the gap with something easy.

“So… Did you and Lucas have any interesting talks while I was down there? Or were you two just watching in silence?”

A whole series of rapid-fire emotions crossed over Evelyne’s face and body at the question—flickering micro-shifts in expression, posture and breathing that Thea couldn’t even begin to accurately describe, much less put a name to—before the other girl seemingly finished recalibrating and finally answered, wearing a smile that did a strange, almost impossible-to-notice-even-for-Thea twitch toward one side.

“I—it was very… Interesting, I’d say, yes. There is more to Callahan than first meets the eye, is there not?”

Thea nodded reflexively, because what Evelyne said was simply true. Most people saw nothing but a big meat wall when they looked at him, but Lucas was far more than that.

“Indeed.”

Her brain only caught up half a second later, finally asking the real question that had arrived bundled with Evelyne’s answer.

‘Wait… What, exactly, does all of that mean…? The almost-hidden smirk… Talking about how interesting he is, how there’s more to him than meets the eye… Wait—Is… Is Evelyne into Lucas?! Is that it?!’

Thea simply stared at Evelyne—who, for some reason, seemed utterly incapable of sitting still underneath her gaze—as the thought effectively short-circuited her brain for a few long moments.

‘I—I’ll have to ask Corvus or Kara about this one before I act on it… I don’t think I’m particularly great at catching when people are into other people… Except for Desmond, I guess. But that’s like sniping a motorblock from a few hundred meters out—not actually a challenge whatsoever.’

Thankfully, somewhere underneath all of that, her brain had also finally finished processing what she might actually be able to use her newfound bargaining chip for—which allowed her to drag the conversation back toward a topic far more comfortably within her wheelhouse.

“Anyway—as I was saying earlier,” she began, watching Evelyne’s full attention snap back onto her, “about my mentor… He had this whole philosophy when it came to Builds, y’know? About how you can’t actually understand, much less make one until—”

“—mmh. Actually, hold on… That reminds me.” She tilted her head, letting the sentence die right there, as though her train of thought had simply jumped tracks mid-motion once again—which, to be perfectly fair, was something that happened to her often enough that it required practically no acting on her part whatsoever. 

“Could I see one of your Allbright System Abilities? Any one would work, really. I’ve been compiling a bit of a database for myself, for Build-making purposes, you seem, and I’d imagine I’m still missing quite a few of your Abilities in it. It would help me out a lot.”

Evelyne visibly froze at the sudden request, clearly taken aback by it—

—but then, for once, she actually met Thea’s eyes on purpose and held them. 

For a long few moments, something worked behind her gaze that Thea couldn’t quite read, but she assumed was likely calculation.

After a few more moments, the Sen Heir let out a slow sigh, and nodded, dropping her gaze.

“F—fair is fair, I guess…”

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