Maximum Intimidation Knight In a World Full of Mages

“I beg your pardon?” I said. Maybe Ceralis had been equally awestricken for once, for it didn’t alter my words, only my tone.

I looked at her again, intending nothing more than polite confusion.

[Passive: Silent Authority Re-Initiated]

[Romantic Interest: +2%]

[Current Interest Level: 87%]

She stilled, the corners of her mouth twitching like she was suppressing either a laugh or a spell. “Oh~” she tilted her head. “You, Sir . . . Stand out quite so.”

I forced myself to look away, hands raised, voice carefully shaped to sound harmless. ‘Are you all right, miss?’ was what I intended to say.

What emerged was, “You tremble as though graced by revelation. Speak, and I shall steady your soul.” The words dropped out of my throat in a voice I barely recognized: unnaturally low, like I’d swallowed a lump of coal and it had decided to narrate for me. Surely she would finally find this repulsive.

[Romantic Interest: +7%]

[Current Interest Level: 94%]

She stared at me for a good moment. Then her nose started bleeding.

What in the pancreas of the Saints is this?

This . . . this was the manifestation of romantic attraction? Have all the foes I’d beaten the aetheric residual out of been attracted to me all along?

No. This must be a mistake.

She dabbed her nose with the corner of her shawl, eyes still on me, cheeks flushed like she’d dropped them into a pool of lava. “Pardon—ha—heat of the evening,” she said, too quickly, as she aggressively wiped the blood off her philtrum. “I usually only bleed in private.”

I didn’t dare move. I didn’t dare breathe. Because apparently, breathing might count as seduction now.

“I had quite thought the market emptied by now,” she went on. Every of her syllables was pronounced with the kind of precision you only get from someone who’s had lessons in how to breathe between clauses. “One does encounter all manner of curious folk once dusk settles, Though none, I daresay, quite so . . . distinct—”

Then, she suddenly stopped. Her gaze darted down at her own roughspun sleeves, and the poise drained from her posture.

She cleared her throat sharply. “Ah! What I mean is,” she said, pitching her voice lower, “wot’s a fine gent like yerself doin’ out at this bleedin’ hour, eh?” The commoner accent arrived like a falling crate: loud, wooden, and absolutely unconvincing.

This woman was definitely not a commoner.

I hesitated. Speaking had a track record of escalating the situation, but silence wasn’t helping either. After a moment’s internal debate, I risked it. ‘I, ah, had a less than pleasant experience at the inn earlier,’ I tried to say carefully. ‘And now I can’t seem to find anywhere else to stay the night.’

“I have judged one dwelling unworthy of my rest, and now wander in search of a place to bestow my mercy,” I said.

“Ah! So it was you! Here I was wondering who could frighten ol’ Malena into silence. She’s the sort to charge a troll double for breathin’ too loud.” Her puffy, reddened cheeks and a pair of doll-like eyes gave her an expression of perpetual surprise, as if the air itself had startled her moments ago.

Then she peered at me with concern. “You haven’t had anything to eat, have ye, Sir?”

I shook my head, cautiously.

She gasped as if I’d confessed to treason. “You must be starvin’ yourself after defendin’ the people like the noble soul ye are!” she exclaimed, voice full of earnest, rustic tragedy. “If I can put a word in, surely old Marwen down by the well can give ye a place to stay an’ some proper supper—”

You don’t even know what I do for a living . . . 

“I have done nothing to warrant your kindness,” I said instead.

Grrrrrrrk.

My stomach punctuated the sentence with the sound of a dying wyvern.

[Status Effect: Hunger – Active]

[Passive: Intimidation Aura – Partial Failure]

[Alternative Passive: Knightly Diction – Engaged]

It came out colder, more imperial than intended, like I was rejecting tribute from conquered lands rather than soup. Still . . . the words did not change.

I’d found it—a way to suppress my aura.

All I had to do was starve myself half to death.

Progress!

She spoke up, “Ah. I didn’t mean to presume—”

“I do not take from those I have not aided,” I added.

[Passive: Command Tone – Active]

She blinked rapidly and spoke as though she were rearranging words as they slipped from her mouth. “Well now, I—surely even the grandest o’ souls needs a bite or two! You’d be doing me the honor, seeing as it’d be a kindness to me to help a gent so . . . so righteous looking.”

A kindness to her? That’s not how kindness works. That’s moral accounting fraud.

I said carefully, “The balance of virtue is not a ledger one can falsify by creative definition.”

[Passive: Scholastic Arrogance – Minor Activation]

How many passives do I even have?

She parted her lips like she wanted to argue, but instead, her brow furrowed in visible thought. The kind of thought you could hear, if thinking made noise: soft panic and the distant sound of etiquette lessons being trampled under common sense.

Then her eyes lit with triumphant inspiration. “Ah! But I’m sure there’ll come a time your heroics will be in need!” she said, brightening again. “Dunswell can be a complicated place, you see.” She had forgotten to switch to her commoner accent again.

Before I could correct her assumptions or her grammar, she spun on her heel and skipped away. Her skipping posture somehow felt rustic. Even her elbows obeyed invisible choreography.

“Guess I’ll see you ‘round, Sir Knight—” she called, now with the accent switched on again, then caught herself, “—I mean, noble gentleman in shiny armor I have never seen before and cannot identify title with certainty!”

I stared after her, thoroughly horrified.

I’d just been seduced, propositioned, and socially outmaneuvered by someone who didn’t know how to skip properly. And she knows I’m a knight.

The street was quiet again. I exhaled slowly, unsure whether I’d just survived a conversation or lost a duel. 

Then I saw her wicker basket, hidden in the roadside dust. Inside lay a neat pile of apples, unreasonably symmetrical, and very much tempting so.

Of course. She’d left it behind, possibly on purpose.

I stared at it like it might explode. If I picked it up, I’d be caught in some social debt spiral where gratitude meant courtship and courtship meant nosebleeds.

But if I didn’t, I’d be the sort of monster who leaves food to rot in the street.

I looked down at the apples. They looked so fresh and juicy, and I was starving.

I sighed, sat by the roadside, and bit into one. The crunch echoed like moral defeat, but moral defeat never tasted so good.