#web novel

[polygoncake]

i hate my mc and i'm NOT KIDDING!!!

That Poor Girl

[sanctuaryoftheodd]

Chapter 161: Ball and Chain

I stepped out of the guest room only to immediately run into a guard. Of course they posted a guard on our room.

"Panchi, a beauty should be getting her beauty sleep right now." He tried to block my path as he tilted his fedora. "Unless such a beauty has come out to flirt with me." He glanced down at me expectantly.

...I jabbed my finger behind him. "Is that a scantily clad woman over there?"

"What?" He swung around to look. "Where?"

As soon as he turned away, I roundhouse kicked him in the face. He slumped down, knocked out cold. I placed my hand on his head and channeled energy into his mind. This was #75 Shattered Memories, a technique that could blank out the last 30 minutes of someone's memories. Assuming I don't get caught, he'll be none-the-wiser that either of us left the room. He'd just assume he fell asleep.

I looked him up and down and shivered at the idea of flirting with the guy to let me pass. The idea almost made me as sick to my stomach as dinner had. I wouldn't even do that as a joke.

I used #76 Life Sense in the mansion. Most of the population of the house was underneath the manor, which gave more credence to my theories. There were a number of people in the kitchen and a few in the game room. Sigma did punch a hole in the wall there, maybe they were patching it up? Covering my movements with #78 Shadow Walk, I made my way through the mansion. There weren't any guards roaming around, so it was kind of easy.

I peeked around the corner into the game room, and as I suspected, three minutians, none of them part of the main group I saw before, each 2 feet tall. They wore many different varieties of maid and homemaker outfits. One was a french maid, another wore a pink apron over a hoop dress, another wore something akin to a soccer mom. They had plaster out.

"Why do they have to punch a hole in the wall every time things don't go their way?" Moaned the french maid.

"I heard a woman beat Sigma at a video game." Commented the hoop dress girl.

The girl in the soccer mom outfit rolled her eyes. "That would do it."

"Couldn't they like, squeeze a stress ball or something?"

"They broke all the stress balls a long time ago."

"Goddamn it!"

"I heard the guest is a Princess."

"Really? They can't be stupid enough to marry a political figure."

"Well, that's what I heard."

"Ugh. It's a matter of time before their egos get them killed."

"Does that matter though? We'll be freed if that happens."

"And we'll be at the mercy of the people doing the killing. I wouldn't bet on it."

One of their voices sounded familiar to me, I tried to remember as I continued to listen.

"Plus anyways, even if I was saved, I have nowhere to go anyways."

"What about your clan?"

"Nah, my Matriarch was a bitch. I kissed her ass for almost a century and it got me fucking nothing but ire from the rest of them. I doubt there is a single Tanglefoot alive who doesn't hate my guts."

"Is that why you're called Kessess?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah. Even my mom knew what I was. Branded me with this stupid name."

Hearing her name broke the floodgates. Kessess hung around Leahdah all the time and basically backed up every terrible thing she did. She was there when the Matriarch rejected my name, she was there the day I left the clan, mocking me all the way through. She wasn't there when the Tanglefoots joined Sanctuary. Has she been here the whole time?

"But yeah, I could never go back. They'll never forgive me, and I don't deserve it. I'm exactly right where I belong." She had a dead look in her eyes. This was a woman who surrendered to her fate.

With the sting of the past, a part of me wanted to just leave her to her fate. I doubt anyone would blame me for that. But that's the ronin part of me thinking. It was different now. I stepped out from hiding. "I wouldn't be so certain."

The two other minutians panicked upon seeing me. Meanwhile, Kessess just stared at me, mouth agape in shock of my sudden appearance. "P-Pipsqueak?"

I cringed a little hearing that name again after so long.

Noticing the pained look on my face, she suddenly corrected herself. "I-I mean, Panchi?"

The two others were looking between me and Kessess. They noticed we both had the same eye color and suddenly it dawned on them what was happening.

"It's Lord Panchi now, actually."

"Lord?" Her expression shifted to concern. "Does that mean..."

"Leahdah is still alive," I reassured her, "she abandoned the clan and considering I was the only blackbelt..."

"Oh," and suddenly all the concern dropped from her face and was replaced with annoyance, "of course she would do that. Always living up to her reputation."

"Haha, very much true."

She got back to plastering. She spoke while actively avoiding eye contact with me. "What are you doing here? Don't tell me they somehow caught you."

"I'm the bodyguard of Princess Anne. Wait, is that how you wound up here? You were caught?"

The other two came to their senses and chimed in. "Yes! They told us they'd train us and then ganged up on us!"

"We were immediately married off and set to clean the place."

"Married off?!"

Kessess shot me a forlorn look and said. "We're the wives."

The prospect horrified me. Being forced to marry was awful in its own right, but being married to those fools? "Do they... have they done anything to you?"

"Outside making us work, nothing." One of them stated.

"Too cowardly to do anything." Said another.

That's a relief. At least they don't have to live with that.

"Ball and chain, that's what they call us. They act like we enslaved them." Kessess sighed. "I don't even remember which one I'm married to. I guess it doesn't matter anymore." 

"Are all the people down below wives?"

"Nah, only 13 of the basement dwellers are wives. The rest are the duds."

"People who Sigma consider not manly enough to be part of the main group, but too blood related to be wives."

"They take orders from us."

So the punishment for not living by Sigma's code is to live under the thumbs of women. "Can you take me down below?"

The three girls glanced at each other. Kessess stepped forward. "I'll bring you down there."

"But Kess..."

"You could be dooming her to become another wife!"

She glanced between the two and grunted. "I know her well. She's a pain in the ass, she's not going to be tamed easily." She turned towards me. "Let's go."

She led me out of the gaming room. We walked wordlessly through the manor for a while, until Kess was the one to break the silence. "How's Domatt doing?"

She's talking about her friend, the one that joined in backing up Leahdah most of the time. "She followed the former Matriarch into self-imposed exile."

She rolled her eyes. "Figures. Domatt will always live up to her namesake as a doormat." She sighed and shook her head. "We both were only friends of convenience. I doubt she shed a single tear the day I left. However, I still kind of hoped maybe she turned her life around."

"Don't you think you're projecting on her a little bit?"

She scoffed. "When did you get so observant?"

"Somewhere in between becoming a lord and becoming a dad."

"Becoming a-" Her eyes shot open in shock. She looked me up and down, thinking there was supposed to be 2 feet in extra height that wasn't there.

"Not in that way. I adopted."

"Oh, heh. I guess that is very you."

Our conversation fell into silence once more. Her footsteps echoed down the halls, as if they bore a heavier weight than her entire body combined. After a few minutes she broke the silence again. "I'm-" She struggled, the words caught in her throat. "I'm so- sorr" she slapped a hand against her forehead and grunted.

"Is it really that hard to say?"

"Of course not!" She let out another heavy sigh. "You should hate my guts! Stop acting so goddamn forgiving!" She buried her face in her hands. "Why is the damn hallway so long!"

True, we've been walking for quite a while, but I thought the first point was more worth addressing. "Listen Kess, we were all surviving our own way. You didn't choose Leahdah, you were doing what you could in an oppressive environment. No one can blame you for that."

"I made the wrong choice though..." She said meekly behind finger prison bars.

"Even so, you still deserve a chance to be family, to prove who you can be without her getting between us. Especially now that you can recognize what you've done wrong."

Mind you, this shouldn't apply to everyone. Forgiveness is a form of love, and like all of its kind, it is toxic to expect it. Maybe there will be members of the Tanglefoot Clan who will never forgive her, and it wouldn't be wrong for them to do so. But this is the choice I'm making, and I'm choosing to side with family, at least for her. I wouldn’t give such leniency to Leahdah.

She was silent. I couldn't tell what was going through her head just from her face alone. Before she could give an answer, we reached our destination.

"Oh, uh, right, the kitchen."

Three more minutians were hard at work. They turned to me with shocked looks on their faces.

"Those are more wives." Kess casually said before sauntering over to the broom closet. She opened the door revealing just a standard room with cleaning supplies, but then she moved to the other side of the small space and pushed one of her hands into the wall. It was some sort of button that had been smoothed out to blend into the surface. The wall opened up to reveal a dark stairway.

"This will lead you down."

I immediately headed through the portal and turned around to face her once more. "Thank you, Kess."

"It's the least I could do." She glanced at her feet, started rubbing her shoulder. "Umm... I'm sorry." Then she immediately left before I could respond. 

I watched her walk away before swiveling on the spot and made my way down the stairs. Into the unknown.

[feolnir]

Eventually, I’ll figure out how to reach fantasy readers who want stories about herbs and healers 🌿 and then I’ll show them the free web novels on my website, feolnir.com:

[keikaru]

Bride of the Crow Tengu was chosen as a Weekly Editor’s Choice?! 😳 Thank you staff!! That was on my bucket list ahaha I feel so honored aw 🥹🤧 tysm for everyone reading it so far! That makes my heart so happy~!

(You can also read BOTCT here!!)

[missfinefeather]

Sanctuary of the Odd, Part 2 - Chapter 161: Ball and Chain

Read Chapter 161: Ball and Chain from the story Sanctuary of the Odd, Part 2 by MissFinefeather with 0 reads. politics...

Chapter 161: Ball and Chain

Ass kisser redemption.

(Wattpad) (tumblr)

[keikaru]

Bride of the Crow Tengu - Chapter 5 is out!

Chapter 5 is uploaded! You can read my web novel for free on NamiComi! 🫶

ALSO! You can read my story on Royal Road too! I want to space out the chapters a bit on RR for interest & readership, but it'll follow the same posting schedule on NamiComi very soon.

Synopsis of my story below the cut~

[ctinocipni]

All These Broken Things Chapter 28

Gifts

Alessia was going to set the tent on fire if Askarion didn’t let her up soon.

She had been in bed for days, her ankle a throbbing mess of stitches and poultices.

She was losing what was left of her godsdamned mind.

Stella had taken to her role as “warden” with terrifying enthusiasm, threatening to tattle to Patrian whenever Alessia so much as thought about standing.

So when the tent flap rustled open, she nearly threw her empty kotyle at whoever dared disturb her imprisonment—

—only to freeze when Dionys ducked inside, his expression as unreadable as ever.

His shoulders briefly blocked the morning light, and he froze when he saw the kotyle raised in her hand. His gaze flicked from the cup to her face, and he exhaled through his nose, a sharp, controlled sound.

“Put it down,” he grunted, stepping fully inside and letting the canvas fall shut behind him. “You hit Patrian with that, and he’ll strap your other ankle to the cot just to prove a point.”

He didn’t wait for permission. He crossed the small space in two strides and dropped to a crouch at the foot of her bed, his knees hitting the dirt with a soft thud. His hands found her ankle immediately with the efficient, clinical assessment of a soldier checking a blade for nicks. His fingers probed the bandages, testing for heat, swelling, any give in the fresh stitches.

“No heat,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “Color’s better.”

He looked up, slate-grey eyes meeting hers. His hands remained wrapped around her ankle, solid and grounding, the calluses on his thumbs brushing once against the pale skin just above the wound.

“Still attached,” he said, deadpan. “Despite your best efforts to irritate it into falling off.”

Alessia lowered the kotyle, slowly, dramatically, and let it clatter onto the crate beside the cot with a resentful thunk.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have terrible bedside manner?” she rasped, dropping her head back against the pillows with a huff. “You come in here looking like a thundercloud, manhandle my foot without so much as a ‘how are you doing,’ and then mock my survival instincts. If I wanted someone to poke at me without asking, I’d have asked Askarion.”

She shifted her leg slightly and hissed through her teeth when the ankle protested, hot and sharp. Three days and it still felt like the bronze was there, a phantom-weight, even though she’d watched them melt the damn thing down.

“Irritate it into falling off?” She cracked one eye open to glare at him, though the effect was ruined by the fact that she looked like she’d been dragged through a hedge backward. “I’m trying to convince it to work again. There’s a difference. One involves pacing. The other involves me losing my mind staring at the same canvas seams until I start seeing patterns in the dust.”

She gestured vaguely at the tent around them, at the piles of rocks Stella had strategically placed to prevent Alessia’s escape, at the bandages wrapped tight around her newly freed ankle.

“Your ‘observation post’ is driving me insane, Dio. I’ve counted every water stain. I’ve named them. I’ve considered staging a coup against Admiral Stonebelly just for something to do. If I have to lie here while my daughter threatens me with tattling to Patrian one more time, I’m going to start gnawing through the tent poles.”

She propped herself up on her elbows, ignoring the pull in her side, and fixed him with a look that was half venom, half plea.

“Tell me you didn’t come here just to poke my stitches and make bad jokes. Tell me there’s actually news. A battle. A council meeting. A suspicious seagull that needs interrogating. Anything that isn’t staring at my own feet.”

He snorted, the sound sharp and dismissive, but his hands lingered on her ankle a moment longer than strictly necessary, his thumb pressing once, gently, against the arch of her foot before releasing her.

“No.”

He regarded her for a long moment.

“The council’s still arguing.”

He glanced toward the flap where Stella’s laughter drifted in.

“The gulls remain suspicious.”

He stood, dusting sand from his knees with rough, efficient strokes, and reached behind him to the small of his back. His hand returned holding a cloth-wrapped bundle, which he dropped onto the cot beside her hip with a soft, heavy thunk.

“Since you’re so determined to be useful instead of healing,” he grunted, “you’ll need something better than that boot knife you’ve been palming.”

He nodded at the bundle. “Unwrap it. Carefully. Unless you want to add ‘cut off my own finger’ to Askarion’s list of reasons to strap you down.”

Alessia rolled her eyes but obliged, only to freeze when the linen fell away to reveal a dagger.

Her breath caught.

It was perfect. Balanced for her grip, the fuller etched with curling waves that shimmered in the lamplight. Waves that matched those carved into the old comb in her satchel.

It was a weapon meant for her.

Her fingers hovered over the blade before she dared touch it. The waves glinted in the firelight, almost alive as she traced them with a reverent fingertip.

“… You made this,” she said. It wasn’t a question. The work was unmistakably his, brutal in its efficiency, elegant in its purpose. “For me.”

Her voice cracked on the word.

She had never owned anything so fine. No one had ever looked at her hands long enough to imagine what belonged in them.

Dionys huffed and crossed his arms, not meeting her gaze.

“While you were sleeping off Askarion’s butchery,” he said. “Weighted for throwing if you need to. Balanced for close work.” He nodded at the blade. “Bronze is from the ingots. Cleaner metal.”

He turned toward her, his gaze steady and assessing.

“Took three tries,” he grunted, as if admitting he’d botched it twice was a confession.

He crouched down next to her and took the dagger from her hands. 

“Wave pattern’s Otharan. Handle’s Karethi.”

With a flick of his wrist, he turned the hilt toward her, revealing a hidden detail beneath the leather.

“Look.”

Two tiny engravings, a boar and an owl, nestled side by side near the guard.

“They fit.”

He shifted his weight, looking away toward the tent wall, suddenly fascinated by a water stain.

“Stella gets hers when she’s bigger. This one’s yours. Stop groping for the one in your boot every time someone enters. Makes you predictable.”

Alessia stared at the dagger until her vision blurred.

She’d had knives before, ones she had stolen or scavenged, hidden in boots and under pillows. Never one that fit her palm like it was carved from the negative space where her hand ended.

She was about to say something sharp, something about compensating for his terrible bedside manner with expensive gifts, when her fingers brushed against something soft in the linen. 

She pulled it free. A skein of yarn, dark as Stella’s wild curls, threaded through with gold like her own sun-bleached strands.

“For the doll,” Dionys grunted, shifting his weight on the balls of his feet like he was preparing to retreat. He didn’t look at the yarn, his gaze fixed on the tent wall. “That patchwork disaster she drags everywhere.”

Alessia had been braiding scraps of old linen into the doll’s hair because yarn had always cost more than food.

He reached out to adjust the angle of the dagger where it lay across her lap, ensuring the blade faced away from her belly.

“Stella mentioned Queen Whatsit was going bald. Can’t have the General’s second-in-command looking shabby.”

He kept his eyes on the tent wall. 

“Don’t,” he muttered. “It’s yarn. It’s a knife.” He shrugged. “You needed both.”

He stood abruptly, sand gritting beneath his boots, and turned toward the flap. Paused. Didn’t look back.

“Try not to stab yourself with it before Askarion clears you to walk. I’m not sewing you up again.”

The tent flap snapped back with theatrical flourish, and Odrian strode in, juggling a flat parcel wrapped in dark blue linen, his elbows barely missing Dionys’s retreating shoulders.

“Oh, do excuse me,” he sang out, sidestepping with exaggerated grace as Dionys froze mid-exit. “I seem to have interrupted a moment of intense… yarn exchange?” He peered past Dionys’s broad shoulder at the skein in Alessia’s lap, then at the dagger gleaming on her blankets, and clucked his tongue. “Dionys, you absolute soft touch. You put waves on it. Next you’ll be embroidering handkerchiefs.”

He dodged the elbow Dionys aimed at his ribs with practiced ease and swept past him into the tent, dropping the parcel onto Alessia’s lap with a solid thunk beside the dagger.

“Since our beloved vanguard has seen fit to arm you for violence,” Odrian announced as he perched on the edge of her cot with deliberate casualness, “I have provided for your other weapon of choice.”

He gestured grandly at the dark blue linen. “Unwrap it. Go on.”

Alessia arched a brow at his intrusion, her fingers still trembling slightly around the dagger’s hilt as she adjusted her grip on the blue-wrapped parcel. The weight of it was solid, and she shot Odrian a look that tried to be cutting but landed somewhere closer to wary curiosity.

“Let me guess… It’s a map of all the exits in camp, so I can finally flee your terrible hospitality? Or perhaps a manual on how to properly identify dockweed, since Askarion seems determined to let me poison myself through botanical ignorance?”

She unwrapped the linen slowly, the dark blue fabric rough against her calloused fingers, and stilled when she saw the papyrus sheets between the wooden boards.

Not weapons.

Not intelligence.

Blank pages.

“Don’t look so suspicious, Thief,” Odrian chided, though his voice had lost its usual theatrical edge, settling into something quieter. “It’s not a trap. If I were going to bait you, I’d use something more tempting than blank papyrus and splintered wood.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and tapped the edge of the board with one finger. The gesture was light, but his gaze was steady, pinning her with the sharp, spymaster’s intensity he rarely turned on friends.

“It’s for the stories. The ones you tell Stella.” He paused, letting the words settle. “Little Star. The mountain. The constellation waiting with outstretched arms. You’ve been spinning them from memory every night, patching them together from whatever scraps of breath you can steal between escaping death and inventorying herbs.”

He glanced toward the tent flap, where Stella’s shadow moved against the canvas, arranging her rock battalion with the seriousness of a general deploying cavalry.

“Write them down,” he said, voice dropping to a murmur meant only for her. “Before they fray at the edges like old rope. You’re already changing them without realizing it. She deserves to have them forever.”

Alessia’s thumb traced the edge of the papyrus, feeling the texture of the blank surface.

Five years of hoarding stories in her head, whispering them in the dark so Stella would sleep, and now she had pages waiting for them. Not borrowed. Not scavenged. Given.

She looked up at Odrian, then at Dionys still hovering by the flap, and felt something hot and uncomfortable tighten in her chest.

“You’re both terrible at this,” she muttered, clutching the scroll packet to her ribs alongside the dagger and the yarn, forming an impossible, heavy collection of things that were hers. “Bringing me weapons and yarn and… and permanence. I don’t know what to do with that. I know how to survive. I don’t know how to stay.”

She looked down at the bundle gathered against her chest.

The dagger wasn’t only for her. It meant she would live long enough to use it.

The yarn wasn’t only for Stella’s doll. It meant someone had noticed the little things that made her daughter smile.

And the blank pages… they weren’t simply hers, either. They were for the little girl outside, marching rocks across the dirt, so that one day Little Star would still have a mother telling stories, even if memory failed.

None of the gifts had really been for her alone. She gestured vaguely with the hand that wasn’t holding the dagger as she held their gazes, Odrian’s sharp and calculating, Dionys’s gruff and distant, and forced a smile that wobbled only slightly. 

“I suppose I’ll have to learn. Though if you expect me to fill this with heroic ballads about your tactical brilliance, King Odrian, you’ll be disappointed. Little Star’s adventures are far more interesting than yours. She at least has the decency to include talking crabs.”

“I’ve met several talking crabs,” Odrian protested. “Most were politicians.”

Alessia snorted as she looked down at their gifts.

She didn’t put any of them down.

----------

Fiction Page

Previous

Next