For the next few minutes, Michael kept firing prying questions at me.

I kept most of my answers intentionally vague, carefully establishing a pattern of giving just enough truth to keep him engaged, and just enough ambiguity to keep him guessing.

To be clear, I didn't tell him a single lie. Not outright, at least. I simply relied on… selective honesty.

Whenever his questions edged too close to something I didn't want to answer, I redirected.

Whenever he pressed for specifics, I brushed it off as fragmented visions or incomplete glimpses. As dreams that felt real, but unreliable.

I established that my knowledge of the future wasn't perfect.

He caught on fairly quickly.

Michael wasn't as stupid as I liked to give him credit for.

"So you're saying you don't know when it happens," he said at one point, arms crossed as he paced a slow circle in front of me, "but you're sure that it does happen."

"Exactly," I replied.

He frowned, chewing on that. "Convenient."

I smiled innocently. "You say that like I'm still hiding something."

He snorted. "Aren't you?"

Touché.

Eventually, Lily dragged him away to help with dinner preparations, much to his visible reluctance.

Besides, judging by the beads of sweat rolling down his forehead by the end of our talk, it looked like he was having trouble suppressing Xaldreth for much longer.

So about half an hour was his limit as of now.

I tucked that detail away in a corner of my mind.

As he walked off, he shot me one last look over his shoulder, seeming thoughtful and cautious… but not suspicious.

Good.

That was a good balance.

•••

The day went on with Ray still riding the high of his ascension while the rest of the group continued to fight starvation.

Yeah, we still hadn't found anything to hunt. Which meant we still had nothing to eat.

But during his routine scouting, Kang found a stream of clean river water nearby.

The boys couldn't have cared less, but the girls lost their minds over it.

They practically declared it a miracle!

Alexia was the first to reach the stream. She knelt beside it and dipped her fingers into the water.

She stilled for a moment, sensing it, then beamed. "It's clean! It's clean! But it's very cold…"

Which was a problem, considering how low the jungle temperature had been getting lately.

But Lily decided she didn't care.

She let out a sound that could only be described as feral relief and immediately rolled up her sleeves.

"I don't care if it's cold! I don't care about hypothermia!" she announced. "If I die, I die clean."

Juliana studied the stream for a long moment. Then she glanced at me. "Can you do something?"

I frowned. "Do what? Create a jacuzzi?"

Instead of answering, she quite literally started batting her eyelashes.

I grabbed my head. "Have you gone crazy, woman?"

Juliana gave a pleading whimper and stepped a little closer, her glacial blue eyes half-lidded, lips slightly parted, and expression expectant.

She knew exactly what she was doing.

This cute little act would've worked on most men.

Unfortunately for her, I wasn't most men. She could try every trick in the book and I wouldn't budge—

"Please," she then whispered.

I froze.

Wh–What the actual fuck?

Did she just—

Did she just say please?!

She knew that word?!

I held her gaze for three seconds. Then three more.

Before I could respond, Alexia, still knelt by the stream, jumped to her feet.

"Sam, she's right! Please! Please!" she chimed in. "Do something!"

Lily nodded so hard her ponytail nearly snapped her neck. "Same, Sam! I will literally owe you my life!"

"You already do," I rolled my eyes at her, then sighed. "Fine. Step back. I don't know if it'll work."

They did.

I walked over and plunged my hand into the water. It was cold. Not painfully so, but enough to sting the skin and seep into your bones if you stayed in it for long.

I closed my eyes, called upon my innate power, and raised a circular dirt basin in the stream to contain the water.

Then I began pouring a flood of Essence into my Origin Card.

What I was trying wasn't particularly difficult.

All I needed to do was increase entropy and nudge molecular agitation upward until the water stopped being cold.

It was the exact opposite of what I did when freezing liquids.

But taking energy out of something required far less effort than forcing it to gain energy.

So I focused, pouring Essence steadily, feeling it drain from my core as I nudged the agitation higher and higher. Soon, the water started rippling.

Moments later, it wasn't cold anymore, just pleasantly warm.

I stepped back and deactivated my Origin Card.

For the second time that day, the girls lost their minds and began acting like I'd turned water into wine instead of merely warming it up.

"Alright then, ladies," Ray raised a hand. "I volunteer to stand guard."

Everyone turned to stare at him.

"…What?" he said defensively. "I'm B-rank now. I can protect things!"

He was promptly dragged away by Kang, kicking and screaming like a child denied candy at a grocery store.

Lily and Juliana wasted no time and immediately started stripping. Alexia didn't bother and just tore her shirt off.

"Okay! Let's go, guys!" Vince covered his eyes in a way that covered absolutely nothing and turned around very slowly, no doubt sneaking a few quick peeks.

So he was the next one dragged away, this time by Michael, who, incidentally, was also bright red.

I scoffed. These inexperienced children, blushing at the sight of a little skin.

Anyway, Alexia and Lily had moved into the makeshift jacuzzi to skinny-dip.

So I also turned to join the boys and give the ladies their privacy.

…Or at least, that was the intention.

"Young Master."

I'd only taken a couple of steps when Juliana's voice reached me. It wasn't loud.

But it didn't need to be to make me stop in my tracks.

I shouldn't have looked. I knew that. I knew it was going to be some kind of trap.

I did anyway.

I turned to see that Juliana had her back to me.

Facing the opposite direction, she was slightly bent forward, unhurriedly working her way out of her clothes.

First, she slid her tank top off. Moonlight spilled over the smooth line of her naked back, tracing every newly uncovered inch of her body with crimson reverence.

Then her hands tugged at the waistband of her pants and pulled them down. The fabric slid down her hips, leaving her entirely exposed. Entirely… exposed.

Her pale skin was a stark contrast to the green and brown jungle around us. But my focus was obviously elsewhere.

When she straightened, it was slow, almost languid, and when she glanced back at me over her slender shoulder, there was no surprise in those piercing blue eyes of hers. Only playful amusement. Only unashamed confidence.

Only a quiet challenge that once again said she knew exactly what she was doing, and exactly who she was doing it to.

"It's a shame you can't join after all that work," she said lightly, as if commenting on the weather. "But this should be reward enough, right?"

The corner of her lips quirked into a knowing little curve that wasn't quite a smile.

All my thoughts derailed instantly.

I felt intense heat rush to my cheeks before snapping my gaze forward like I'd been caught committing a crime.

…But then it hit me.

That look… that tone…

That bitch!

She was provoking me!

Fine, I thought. If that's the game she wants to play, then I can play too.

Without a second's delay, I twisted sharply and dragged my foot back against the ground.

As if on cue, the very earth under her feet immediately retreated toward me like a moving treadmill.

"Wha—!" Juliana let out a sharp yelp as her footing vanished, sounding startled and embarrassingly cute.

She pitched forward, arms splaying.

But before she could hit the ground… she collided straight into me, since I had already moved to catch her in time.

My arms came around her and pulled her in as her weight pressed flush against my chest.

Her momentum carried her fully into my space, her face burying against my sternum and fingers clutching the fabric of my shirt.

"Oh no, Juli," I grinned, my voice slipping into a cocky drawl. "Did you slip? Tsk. You should be more careful, you clumsy—"

The joke, however, died on my lips when I felt her body shuddering against mine.

At first, I thought she was angry, or abashed. But when she lifted her face from my chest, I saw that her composure was gone.

Her cheeks were now flushed, her ears beet red, her lips parted, pupils unfocused and trembling just as much as the rest of her.

My cocky grin withered as soon as I looked at her dazed state, and was instead replaced by a quick, painful realization of just how close we were.

All of a sudden, she felt so vulnerable and fragile in my hands. Which was stupid, because I knew she wasn't weak. Far from it.

But at that time, I wasn't thinking with my brain. I wasn't thinking at all, actually.

My heart was pounding so violently, each beat echoing in my chest so loudly, that I was irrationally afraid she might hear it.

I became acutely aware of everything all at once: the way her hands adorably gripped my shirt, the way her breath brushed against my collarbone, the way my fingers dug into her plump flesh, the way her bare breast pressed so softly against my sides, the way she felt so ridiculously hot.

And not hot like that. I mean, yeah, she was hot like that too, but—

Argh! I meant physically hot!

She was physically hot! So much so that her warmth seeped into me through my clothes, setting my nerves on fire.

The whole moment stretched for so long, so heavy and fragile, daring either of us to move. Daring us to do something we weren't ready to admit we wanted.

I swallowed.

…Then jerked back abruptly, pulling my hands away like I'd touched flame.

"S-Sorry," I blurted, turning far too fast to be graceful.

The silence that followed wasn't as awkward as it was thick. For half a minute, neither of us had the courage to utter a sound.

Then her voice finally came again.

This time, she sounded breathless and small and shy, nothing like the cold and domineering Juliana I knew. "Y-Yeah…"

After that, I heard her footsteps move toward the makeshift jacuzzi. And only then did my shoulders loosen.

Lily and Alexia were laughing by the stream, blissfully unaware. The boys were long gone, far out of sight.

The only witness left… was Kevin.

Fucking Kevin!

I shot a glare to my right, and there he was standing, silently watching me.

The fluffy bird had grown fast over the past few days and now towered nearly at my height, feathers fluffed to an almost ridiculous size.

And while I knew it wasn't possible, I swear to god that fucker looked cheeky.

"Shut up, Kevin!" I groaned, burying my face in my hands. "It's all because of you!"

Kevin chirped in confusion, tilting his head as if to say, 'The fuck did I do?'

"Don't give me that look!"

In the end, he was the last guy to be dragged away… by me.

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