CHAPTER 252: MANLY WILES

Why she had used her words and not her actions to get Caius away from her, Cynthia didn’t know.

Well, actually she knew and it was the reason her subconscious had driven her to stipulate this impossible challenge in the first place.

"Hm," Caius intoned with a smile and took his hand off her thigh causing Cynthia to release his wrist but she didn’t do anything about his arm around her waist.

Caius raised his free hand that had only recently been on Cynthia’s thigh and placed it on her back instead pulling her even closer which should have been impossible because Cynthia felt there shouldn’t have been any more space left between them.

Caius stared into her eyes. That look that had gotten Cynthia’s heart to beat in trepidation was there again and just like before, her heart thudded in powerful beats that Caius could feel with their chest pressed up against each other as they were.

And then, he moved forward, pushing against Cynthia’s body not to close in on some nonexistent space between them but to get Cynthia herself to move.

Cynthia felt trapped by his gaze. By his attention on her but her body reacted on instinct and she moved backward as he had urged her to.

Caius took another step and then another and then another. Cynthia followed him through it all with complementary poses. She had performed those poses so many times that it came so naturally to her and she did it without any real thought behind her action.

That said, it was surprising how her upper body reacted though because her actions with that part of her were not a part of her pose-routine until last week. Now she was grabbing Caius with her hands, which she had never done when she didn’t have a partner to perform the poses with.

The way her legs moved was natural because of how much she had practiced the poses over the years but her hands grabbing onto Caius didn’t have those years of practice to explain why that felt so... right.

A part of Cynthia’s mind took note of this but she didn’t think too much about it. Not really because of negligence but because she had been sucked quickly into the routine of having a partner. Or more accurately, the routine of having Caius as a partner. His eyes were like swirling vortexes sucking her in. Only she was letting herself be sucked in. Hell, she was excited to be sucked in.

’No, no, no,’ Cynthia said to herself then, shaking her head mentally to correct what was happening to her. Alas, she didn’t—couldn’t—break free.

This was what she had been afraid of. And it felt like some cruel irony that the duel she stipulated to put a stop to the possibility of it happening had ended up leading to it.

Caius could basically see the turmoil going on in her head by just studying her visual cues and it intrigued him but he didn’t stop the dance. He was actually starting to have fun and it was his one way of winning this duel.

Yes, that was still on. And this was all just part of his plan.

Caius had accepted that he couldn’t defeat Cynthia. He just didn’t have the required contingencies just yet for that and his Trait Acquisition potion would do him no good.

And so, after a period of wracking his brain, he arrived at this somewhat elegant solution. He baited Cynthia to use her higher circle movement spell to get very close to him by getting ten meters away from her.

He had studied her actions enough to know how she was operating in this duel. She never chased him down whenever she was closer than ten meters to him and just cast spells from a ’reasonable’ distance because her goal was to knock him out and not to hunt him down to kill him. Despite her viciousness in ’cheating’ to use higher circle spells, that remained relatively the same.

That said, although Cynthia didn’t seem interested in chasing him down, she always spent her first period getting within range of him getting very, very close. She probably thought that doing that meant Caius had to dash an even longer distance to reestablish the Ten-Meter limit. And she wasn’t wrong.

So Caius made sure to stay only just a bit farther than Ten Meters so he could reduce how far he’d need to run to get within arm-grabbing distance of her. I.e., give Cynthia as little time as possible to figure out what he had planned.

They danced for about two minutes.

Cynthia thrust the part of her that was nagging her and trying to get her to be sensible to the very recesses of her mind which left her vulnerable to being completely enraptured by being so close to Caius and performing the poses together. She didn’t even use the action to gather focus as was its original goal.

And then, they performed the last of that particular set of poses which led to Caius dipping Cynthia. She raised one of her legs, its smooth, long bronze wonder stretched so straight and so alluringly.

Both of Cynthia’s hands were off her body and stretched in ways to complement that pose. The one leg of hers she still had on the ground wasn’t all that balanced and would not have been able to keep her as she was had it not been for Caius’s support.

But, as she had found last week, that was the beauty of having a partner. No longer having to go it alone and being able to relax and let yourself go in their arms...

And then Caius let her go.

"Huh?" Cynthia let out. The absence of his touch on her body snapped her out of her trance but then she was already falling. She had gotten out of the trance too late to move her hand to do something.

Her entire body seemed to have been shut down by shock. Something she didn’t think should have been possible being at the circle she was at. And yet, it happened.

*Thud!*

She hit the ground flat. Her back lay right down.

Caius went low then and tilted his head to the side as his eyes observed the contact to ensure what he already knew; Cynthia’s back was on the ground. The duel was over.

"I win," he said with a smile.

Cynthia’s mouth fell open and her eyes were wide.

Caius looked up to her face then and his smile became even better. Only a bit wider but much more enrapturing. Annoyed as Cynthia was feeling, her heart still skipped a beat or two.

"What’s with that look?" Caius asked, "Don’t tell me you forgot we were still dueling."

"You asshole," Cynthia said and she sounded like she couldn’t get the words out as easily as she wanted. She wasn’t sure she had ever been as angry with someone as she was with Caius right now.

As much as her sister Delia had annoyed her over the years, especially with her adamance to choose the wrong path, it had never gotten Cynthia as upset as she currently was.

She sat up and glared at Caius.

"You cheated," She said through gritted teeth.

"You mean like how you cast higher circle spells in a duel that should have been with Third Circle spells only?" Caius asked with a smirk.

"That was different," Cynthia said through gritted teeth.

"Was it?" Caius asked lightly, "I can still feel electric current coursing through me, by the way."

Cynthia still frowned but she didn’t say anything. Just kept glaring.

Caius wondered if this was the first time he had ever rendered her speechless.

He grabbed her chin delicately then and stroked his thumb against the smoothness of it before then stroking twice—light as a feather—across Cynthia’s lower lip. She kept glaring at him but she didn’t knock his hand aside.

"So I suppose the extra lessons continue then," Caius said gently, "Unless of course, you’d like to just do away with the rules and agreement you set and want it all to end anyway."

Cynthia’s glare softened a bit.

"What are you talking about?" she said.

Caius took his hand off her chin then and shook his head,

"You didn’t have to use higher circle spells against me. You also didn’t have to put up an ultimatum to a challenge I couldn’t possibly win.

Well, not without using my manly wiles, at least..."

"Manly wiles?" Cynthia repeated and laughed. A genuine sound.

Caius smiled at that.

"Laugh all you want. It worked so I can afford to be silly with naming it," he said.

"Fair enough," Cynthia said with a nod and a little chuckle.

Caius’s expression became somber then as he said,

"Whatever it is that made you do all this, I doubt my winning this duel has changed that."

He and Cynthia locked stares for a few seconds before she let out a sigh and admitted.

"No," she said, "No, it has not.

If anything, with the manner you won, I’m all the more convinced this should end."