The World of Otome Game
is a Second Chance for Broken Swords
Story Starts
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Chapter 11.3 -
The Offrey
Gambit
The Partner's bridge hummed with the low, steady pulse of systems Olivia still didn't fully understand. Dozens of holographic panels floated in concentric arcs around the central command dais, each one streaming data in the old humans' script that Luxion translated into readable Holfortian in real time. Navigation telemetry. Sensor sweeps. Fleet disposition charts showing the patrol craft's projected course as a thin blue thread unwinding towards the forward anchorage.
Olivia stood near the tactical plotting table with her arms folded, half-listening to Leon's final instructions to the bridge whilst her gaze tracked the departing blip on the long-range display. Erica's vessel—a sleek courier that Luxion had modified for speed over everything else—was already a fading dot at the edge of sensor range, pulling away towards the capital at a pace that made the patrol craft look stationary. Pollux's signature pulsed beside it, a warm golden dot keeping pace.
The princess hadn't argued. Olivia had expected resistance—royals tended to stiffen at the suggestion they leave before the fighting started—but Erica had simply nodded, accepted the sealed intelligence packet, and asked Leon whether she should present the evidence to her father or her mother first.
'Both,' Leon had said. 'Together, if you can manage it. Separately invites them to form conclusions before comparing notes.'
Erica had left within the hour. Pollux had volunteered to accompany her before anyone thought to ask, which solved the escort problem neatly and meant the princess wouldn't be alone for the transit. They'd already discussed fitting another dungeon expedition into the calendar once Erica returned—the princess needed a guardian spirit of her own, and they hadn't done a proper raid in weeks. The logistics were straightforward enough.
What was not straightforward was the hollow feeling sitting beneath Olivia's ribs.
She glanced sideways at Leon, who stood at the command dais reviewing Luxion's latest sensor pass. Setanta—who'd accompanied the group even though Greg wasn't here—perched on the railing looking bored out of his mind, feet swinging, fingers drumming on the metal bar, radiating the specific energy of a combat-oriented spirit who'd been told to sit still for more than ten minutes. Brad occupied one of the auxiliary stations, scrolling through fleet composition data with the focus of a man who'd spent months relearning humility at the Principality border. Chris stood beside him, quiet as always, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword out of habit rather than need.
Sella and Leysritt flanked the doorway. Durga sat cross-legged atop a deactivated console, polishing the blade of one of her talwars with slow, meditative strokes. Art leaned against the viewport, arms folded, her golden eyes tracking the conversation with the steady attention she gave to anything involving deployment orders. Ria had claimed the armrest of the navigator's chair, legs drawn up, chin on her knees.
Everyone was here. Everyone who should be.
Angelica was back at the academy with Meltryllis and Britomart, handling the remaining festival cleanup alongside the student council. Mégane held the Rachelle border. Erica was halfway to the capital with evidence that would end a marquise house. And Illya was doing whatever Illya did when left unsupervised at the holdings—which, knowing Illya, was absolutely nothing productive.
Olivia pressed her lips together. Shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
'Stop stalling.'
Leon finished his briefing, dismissed the holographic overlay, and turned to address the room.
"We've confirmed the Blackfleet's position relative to our position. Luxion will run final intercept calculations during the transit. I want everyone fed and rested before we arrive—three hours gives us enough time for a proper meal and kit check."
Nods around the bridge. Setanta pushed off the railing.
"Brad, Chris—you're comfortable with the formation we discussed?"
Brad glanced at Chris. Chris gave a small nod.
"We'll hold the flanking position," Brad said. "Guardian spirits forward, power armour hot and ready. Standard screen doctrine."
"Good."
Setanta cracked his knuckles. The sound echoed off the bridge's curved walls.
"Right," Leon said. "Dining hall. All of you."
Olivia caught Sella's eye.
Her gaze darted towards the bridge door—a fractional movement, barely a twitch—and then back. Sella's expression didn't change. They'd already discussed this. Twice, in fact: once in Olivia's quarters the previous evening, and once more at dawn whilst Olivia paced the length of her cabin rehearsing sentences that kept dissolving into gibberish.
Sella understood.
The guardian spirit straightened from her position at the doorway. When she spoke, her voice cut through the ambient noise of the bridge cleanly enough to draw every head.
"Everyone to the dining area, please. Leysritt and I have prepared the meal—it will not keep if left to cool."
It was a transparent excuse. Nobody commented on it, which meant either they were being tactful or they genuinely wanted food. With this group, the odds favoured food.
Art pushed off the viewport. Ria unfolded from her chair. Brad and Chris filed out together, already murmuring about lance formations. Durga rose from her console, sheathed the talwar, and followed them in her soundless way.
Setanta did not move.
He remained perched on the railing, legs dangling, watching the procession with the cheerful disregard of a man who had never once in his existence taken a social cue.
Durga paused at the doorway. She turned. Crossed the bridge in three soundless strides, reached up, and seized Setanta's ear between her thumb and forefinger.
"Ow—ow ow ow—"
"Come."
"I was sitting—"
"You were being dense." Durga's grip tightened. Setanta's protests dissolved into a hiss as she hauled him off the railing and marched him bodily towards the exit. His feet scrambled for purchase on the deck plating. One of his hands flailed towards the doorframe. Durga adjusted her grip and pulled him through without breaking stride.
Though, to be fair, anyone outside of their immediate group doesn't know about what happened.
The door slid shut behind them.
Silence.
Olivia stood at the plotting table. Leon stood at the command dais, his back to her, one hand resting on the console's edge. The bridge's ambient systems hummed around them—ventilation, power conduits, the faint rhythmic pulse of Luxion's processing cores somewhere deep in the hull.
Luxion's drone hovered at the periphery of her vision. Small. Silver. Watching.
Olivia turned to look at it. The drone's single red optical lens regarded her with mechanical patience.
She gave it a look. Not a glare—Olivia reserved glares for people who'd earned them—but something softer. A plea. The kind of expression she'd perfected at the orphanage when she needed Sister Agatha to leave the room so she could sneak biscuits from the pantry.
The drone's lens contracted. A faint shimmer ran across its casing.
Then it cloaked. The silver shell rippled and vanished, leaving only the barest distortion in the air—a heat-haze shimmer that faded within seconds.
Still here. Still listening. Olivia knew that.
Good enough.
She turned back towards Leon.
His shoulders were a straight line against the glow of the viewport. The sky beyond the armoured glass had settled into deep twilight, the last amber bleeding out along the horizon. It caught the white of his hair and turned it pale gold at the edges.
He hadn't moved. Hadn't spoken. Hadn't turned around.
Olivia's stomach did something unhelpful.
'Just walk over there. Open your mouth. Form words. You've done this a thousand times.'
She had. She'd needled him, teased him, provoked him, dragged him into schemes and out of melancholy and across the length and breadth of his own patience. She'd done it with confidence and shamelessness and a grin wide enough to make Sella reach for the back of her head.
But this was different.
This was the gap. The one that had opened between them after the host club—not a fight, because Leon didn't fight with her. Not properly. Not with raised voices and accusations and the satisfying collision of two people who cared enough to shout. He simply… receded. Grew quieter. His responses shortened by a syllable. His gaze slid past her rather than settling. The warmth was still there, but muffled. Like hearing someone speak through a closed door.
She'd first noticed it the morning after the festival, when he'd made breakfast for everyone and spoken to her in the same tone he used for Britomart. Polite. Measured. Correct.
Correct.
Olivia hated that word. She hated it because it was the opposite of everything Leon was supposed to be with her. Leon was supposed to be exasperated. Resigned. Baffled by whatever she'd done now. He was supposed to sigh and rub the bridge of his nose and mutter something about how he should have stayed dead. That was their rhythm. That was how they worked.
Correct meant the rhythm had broken.
It had continued through the days that followed. Through the planning sessions for the Wayne deployment. Through the patrol rotations and the intelligence briefings and the careful, methodical preparation for the engagement they were now sailing towards. Leon spoke to her. Included her. Deferred to her judgement on tactical matters and logistical arrangements and all the practical business of running a household on a war footing.
And none of it felt right.
He'd defended her when Carla Fou Wayne had called her a dog. Materialised a sword the size of a mast and held it a hand's breadth from the woman's face. His voice had been flat enough to freeze the air in the room.
But afterwards—after Carla had been dismissed and the broken porcelain swept up and the diplomatic niceties observed—Leon had excused himself, and Olivia had sat alone in the common room staring at the fragments of his mother's blue-glazed tea set and the crack that ran through one of the surviving cups, and neither of them had spoken about it.
He'd defended her honour and then gone back to being correct, and the contradiction made her want to scream.
'He knows what I did.'
Of course he knew. Leon was many things—exasperated, tired, burdened by a guilt he carried from another life—but he was not stupid. The suggestive magecraft she'd layered into the host club setup had been subtle by any reasonable standard. A thread of compulsion woven into the ambient atmosphere of the eastern wing, designed to lower inhibitions and encourage physical contact. Nothing coercive. Nothing that overrode will. Just a gentle nudge—the magical equivalent of a strong drink on an empty stomach.
She'd told herself it was to reduce friction. Make the customers more comfortable. Smooth the social mechanics of physical proximity between nobles and attendants.
That was a lie, and Olivia had known it was a lie when she cast it.
She'd set it up so that she could enjoy the evening on her own terms. Leon in the outfit she'd designed—the short shorts, the boots, the collar with the bowtie, nothing else—serving her. Touching her. His hands on her shoulders and his voice in her ear and all of it happening because she'd arranged for it to happen, because she was clever and he was obliging and the magecraft ensured that every interaction tipped just slightly in the direction she wanted.
She'd brought Angelica in later. That had been part of the plan too.
And then Leon had ended up pressed between Erica and the Queen on that ridiculous chaise, and Olivia had watched from across the room, and—
Here was the part she wasn't thinking about.
She'd expected jealousy. That was the normal response, wasn't it? Your person, pinned between a princess and a queen, both of them making eyes and running fingers and treating him like a dessert course. Jealousy. Possessiveness. The hot spike of mine that was supposed to drive you across the room to stake your claim.
What she'd actually felt was heat. Low in her stomach. Spreading.
Not jealousy. Not even close.
She'd liked it.
'No.'
She had. She'd watched Leon fumble and flush and try to maintain his composure whilst two of the most powerful women in the kingdom used him as a pillow, and the emotion that had risen in Olivia's chest had been—
'No. Absolutely not. We are not examining this.'
—excitement.
'That drawer is closed. That drawer is locked. That drawer has been welded shut and dropped into the ocean and the ocean has been set on fire.'
She'd think about it later. Maybe. With Illya, who wouldn't judge and would probably welcome it.
'Later. Much later. Possibly never—but the Illya idea is too… NO STOP!'
Olivia shoved the entire thing into the farthest corner of her mind, bricked up the entrance, and turned her attention back to the problem she could actually face.
The magecraft. The consent. The distance.
She'd used magecraft on Leon without his knowledge. She'd manipulated the environment around him to serve her own desires, and she'd done it knowing—knowing absolutely, without a shred of ambiguity—that if she'd asked him beforehand, he would have said no. Not to the host club. Not to the outfit. Not even to the physical contact. He'd have sighed and grumbled and gone along with all of it, because that was who he was.
But he'd have said no to the magecraft. To the compulsion. To the invisible hand tilting the scale.
And she hadn't asked. Because asking meant risking the answer.
That was the line she'd crossed. Not the scheming—Leon expected the scheming, and somewhere beneath the exasperation, she suspected he even enjoyed it. Not the host club itself, which had been outrageous but ultimately harmless. The line was the moment she'd decided that her wants mattered more than his ability to choose.
'I sound like Sella.'
She did. Sella had warned her. All of them had, actually—her guardian spirits, who had seen into her memories during the bonding and knew exactly what kind of person Olivia was and loved her anyway and still told her the truth when she needed to hear it.
'He'll let you get away with anything because he cares about you. That's exactly why you shouldn't.'
Sella's words. Delivered months ago, in the quiet of Olivia's quarters, after the first time Olivia had pushed Leon into something he hadn't wanted to do.
She'd filed it away. Kept pushing. Because pushing worked, and because Leon's exasperated sighs were better than his silence, and because somewhere in the wreckage of two lifetimes Olivia had learned that the surest way to keep someone close was to never give them a moment's peace.
Worked out brilliantly, that.
Here she was. On the bridge. In the silence. Staring at his back.
Olivia's feet carried her forward. One step. Two.
Three steps. Four.
Leon's back remained turned. His hand still rested on the console. She could see the tension in his fingers—not white-knuckled, not clenched, but there. Present.
Five steps.
"Uh-ah, Leon."
'Brilliant. Stellar opening. Truly the wordcraft of a master orator.'
She heard him exhale. Not the frustrated huff she'd grown accustomed to—the one that preceded a dry remark about her latest scheme. This was slower. Quieter. The sound of someone letting go of something they'd been holding onto for days because there wasn't any point in holding it any longer.
She could see it in his shoulders. The way they dropped half an inch. The slight forward tilt of his head.
'I earned that.'
She had. She knew it. She'd known it for three days, and knowing hadn't made it sit any lighter.
"Sorry!" The word erupted before she was ready. Louder than she'd intended. Graceless. She winced at the sound of her own voice.
Another exhale.
His shoulders dropped properly this time. The tension in his hand dissolved. He lifted his fingers from the console and let his arm fall to his side.
"Come here."
He still didn't turn around.
Olivia moved. Each step careful, deliberate, her gaze on the deck plating. The bridge felt absurdly large—all that empty space where a dozen voices had been a moment ago, and now just her boots on metal and the hum of Luxion's systems and the sound of her own pulse in her ears.
She stopped one pace behind him. Close enough to see the weave of his coat. Close enough to catch his scent.
"Again, so—"
His hand closed around her wrist.
Olivia's feet left the deck for half a heartbeat as Leon pulled her forward, and then his arms were around her and her face was pressed against his chest and his heartbeat was right there, steady and solid and real.
Her arms hung at her sides. Her brain—which had spent three days composing apologies, rehearsing openings, preparing deflections and escape routes—went completely, catastrophically blank.
Leon was hugging her.
Not the one-armed thing he did when she was upset. Not the restraining hold from the Carla confrontation. Both arms, fully around her shoulders, his chin resting against the top of her head. Holding her. Properly.
"You're a pain, you know that?"
The words came through his chest. She felt them in her skull.
"Sorry," she mumbled into his coat.
"I know you didn't exactly have a normal childhood. Either time around." A pause. "I'm guessing the orphanage had stories about you too."
She winced. Sister Agatha's grey hairs had quadrupled between Olivia's fifth and tenth birthdays. There'd been the incident with the chapel roof. The incident with the magistrate's prize goat. The incident with the visiting bishop's toupée, which Olivia maintained to this day was an accident of wind currents and absolutely nothing else.
"I know you think it's all good fun. And most of the time I go along with it. But sometimes—" He stopped. Started again, quieter. "Sometimes it's not fun being on the receiving end, Livia."
Her eyes burned.
She pressed her face harder against his coat because if she looked up now he'd see and she wasn't ready for that. She nodded. The fabric absorbed the motion.
He was right. She'd known he was right before he said it. The host club. The schemes. The constant prodding and provocation. All of it driven by affection—genuine affection, the kind that had survived death and reincarnation and the long slow process of finding each other again. But affection didn't excuse everything. She'd taken his patience and his willingness to bend and she'd pushed until something cracked, and the crack wasn't loud. It was just silence. Polite, measured, correct silence.
Worse than any argument. Worse than shouting. Because you could fight back against anger, but you couldn't fight back against someone who'd simply decided to stop letting you in.
'Sella told me. They all told me. And I didn't listen.'
"In return," Leon said, "I'll try harder. To reciprocate. Properly. All right?"
Something behind her eyes gave way. One tear. Then another. She nodded—harder this time—and felt his arms tighten fractionally around her shoulders.
He stepped back. His hands stayed on her upper arms for a moment, then released.
Olivia blinked up at him through blurred vision.
Leon reached out and brushed the tear from her cheek with his thumb. His expression was—
Tired. Fond. The same look he always wore when she'd done something ridiculous and he'd forgiven her for it anyway, which was to say the same look he'd worn for most of their shared existence across two lives.
Then he flicked her forehead.
"OW!"
The sting bloomed across her skin—sharp, precise, exactly calibrated to hurt without injuring. She clapped both hands to the spot, eyes watering for an entirely different reason.
"That's for feeding me to the wolves."
He turned and walked towards the bridge door. His stride was easy. Loose. The tension that had lived in his shoulders for three days was gone, and watching it leave was like watching someone set down a pack after a long march.
Olivia stared after him, both hands pressed to her forehead, mouth open.
"Come on," he called over his shoulder. "Let's eat. We've got pirates to deal with."
The bridge door slid open. Corridor light spilled across the deck.
Olivia dropped her hands.
The sting was already fading. Everything else—the warmth in her chest, the lightness where the guilt had been sitting, the stupid, helpless, giddy feeling that had no business existing in a grown woman who was about to sail into a battle—was not.
She grinned. Wide. Reckless. The kind of grin that would have earned a smack from Sella.
Then she bounded after him in three strides, and if her shoulder bumped against his arm as she fell into step beside him in the corridor, and if she stayed a little closer than strictly necessary, and if Leon sighed but didn't move away—
Well. That was their rhythm. Cracked, mended, and still beating.
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End
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