Chapter 373: On The Way…

Sophie was already moving toward the corridor, the faint trace of a smile on her lips that she was not working particularly hard to conceal.

“You planned this,” Bruce said, falling into step beside her.

“I planned the restaurant,” Sophie said pleasantly. “Everything else just followed naturally.”

The Fenrari left Reignland the way it had entered, cleanly, without ceremony, the formations parting in recognition and sealing again behind them as though the visit had been noted, filed, and approved in the same breath. The outer gate guards were different from the ones who had greeted their arrival, the shift having turned over in the hours they’d been inside, but the posture was the same, straight, attentive, a bow as the vehicle passed that carried the same unhurried respect.

Then they were through, and the Fenrari’s engine note shifted as the open road unfolded ahead of them, and Bruce pressed the accelerator with the particular intent of a man who had a destination and a reason to reach it.

The speedometer climbed.

Sophie watched it with mild interest.

“You’re going to frighten someone with that speed,” she said, as the number crossed four hundred kilometers per hour and kept moving.

“There’s no one to frighten,” Bruce said. “The lane’s clear for the next eight kilometers.”

“That’s not actually the reassuring statement you think it is.”

Five hundred. Six. The Reignland estates had given way to the broader infrastructure of the surrounding region, wide arterial roads designed for exactly this kind of travel, the mana reinforced surface humming faintly beneath them as the Fenrari found its stride. The landscape on either side had become a suggestion of itself, shapes and colours blurring into a continuous streak of motion that existed mostly as peripheral information. The air resistance that should have made the vehicle shudder at these speeds simply didn’t, the Fenrari’s construction was too refined for that, but the sense of velocity was visceral and present, pressing against the awareness like something physical.

Eight hundred. Nine.

“Bruce.”

“Still clear.”

“I can see that. I’m sitting right here.” Sophie’s hand had found the edge of the seat without her entirely noticing. Not gripping it. Just resting there with a certain deliberateness. “This is almost Mach 1.”

“Just below,” Bruce agreed.

“You say that very calmly.”

“Because I’m calm.”

Sophie turned to look at his hands on the interface, steady, minimal in their adjustments, the corrections happening with a precision that was less about reaction and more about anticipation. He wasn’t responding to the road. He was reading it, several seconds ahead of where they currently were, his inputs so clean they were almost invisible. The Fenrari moved under his control the way water moves through a channel it’s always belonged in, without friction, without waste, without any particular drama about the fact that it was going nearly a thousand kilometers an hour.

She watched his hands for a moment longer. Then she settled back into her seat, released the edge of the cushion she’d been holding, and looked at the road ahead.

“Fine,” she said.

“Fine?”

“You’re clearly not going to crash. I’ve decided to accept this.”

“Generous of you.”

“I thought so.” She crossed her arms, though the posture had no real tension in it. “Lily is going to be furious that she missed a ride at this speed.”

“She’ll find out eventually,” Bruce said. “And then she’ll ask for her own one and I’ll have to explain why that’s not happening yet.”

Sophie’s mouth curved. “What will you tell her?”

“That she can have one when she stops trying to sneak additional dessert by claiming Lucy already said yes.”

Sophie turned her head toward him. “Lucy told me about that. Lily was very convincing, apparently.”

“Lily is always very convincing. That’s what makes it a problem.” A brief pause, the Fenrari adjusting imperceptibly through a long curve at a speed that made the adjustment feel like breathing. “She told Lucy that I had pre-approved an extra serving of the mango tart because I quote, ’said it was fine when he was busy and not really listening.’”

Sophie pressed her fingers to her mouth. “That’s,”

“Accurate,” Bruce said, with the tone of a man making a confession. “I did say fine. I was reading a report. I assumed she was asking about something else.”

The laugh that Sophie had been suppressing came out properly now, genuine and unguarded, bright in the enclosed space of the Fenrari. It lasted several seconds longer than she would have allowed it to in most other company.

“She’s going to be a nightmare,” she managed finally.

“She already is,” Bruce said, with complete affection. “She’s just very pleasant about it.”

The speedometer held steady just below Mach 1, the number sitting there with the casual certainty of something that had found its natural resting point. The road ahead ran clean and open, lit by the even glow of the Fenrari’s forward systems, the world beyond the glass moving at a speed that made the concept of distance feel briefly theoretical.

“How long?” Sophie asked.

Bruce glanced at the projection on the control panel. “Eleven minutes.”

Sophie raised her eyebrows. “At this speed, from Reignland?”

“The academy isn’t close,” Bruce said. “It just isn’t as far as it used to be.”

Sophie considered the mathematics of this for a moment, then decided it was accurate and let it rest. She turned slightly in her seat, angling toward him without quite facing him fully, her elbow finding the edge of the door as the particular comfortable looseness of someone who had stopped performing relaxation and was simply experiencing it.

“My father liked you more than I thought he did,” she said. “Even though I know he has changed by a lot, it’s still hard to reconcile him with that jovial self that casually shook your hand two times…”

“Haha, what can I say” Bruce repeated. “Hand shakes brings men closer.”

Sophie tilted her head as she tried to hide a smile.

Bruce nudged her with one hand playfully while still driving, “I can see that smile of joy you’re hiding you know?”

After that he focused on the road once more, with his insane speed things were blurring past them so fast they they were like streaks of their respective colours, brown houses they drove past will streak past them in a blur lightning like brown streak.

At that moment, Bruce began, “The thing about hand shake is that the first time you shake someone’s hand, you learn something about how they’ve decided to treat you. The second time, he adjusted slightly through a long straight, the Fenrari responding before the correction was even visible, you find out if the first time was real.”

Sophie was quiet for a moment. “And?”

“Same grip,” Bruce said simply.

She held that for a beat. Then she turned back toward the road ahead, something warm and unhurried settling in her expression, and didn’t say anything else. She didn’t particularly need to.

Outside, the landscape continued blurring past them at just under the speed of sound, indifferent to their pace, indifferent to the evening they’d had, indifferent to all of it. The Fenrari held its line, steady and precise, carrying them forward through the open dark toward an academy where a small girl with cute eyes and considerably more audacity than anyone had adequately prepared for was almost certainly already watching the entrance and counting the minutes.

Eleven of which, as it happened, were almost up.

The academy’s outer district appeared on the projection first, the familiar cluster of institutional architecture rising against the evening skyline, its mana lit spires catching the last of the ambient light in pale golds and blues. Bruce’s foot eased off the accelerator a full thousand meters out, a deliberate and calculated decision rather than a cautious one. At the speed they’d been carrying, a hard deceleration in close proximity to civilians, to children, wasn’t a question of comfort. It was a question of physics. The shockwave alone from braking at near Mach from a shorter distance would have hit like a wall, and Lily would probably not be able to withstand that.

So he gave the Fenrari a thousand meters to remember what it was like to move at a civilised pace.

The deceleration was smooth and authoritative, the vehicle shedding velocity in even, controlled increments, eight hundred, six, four, the kind of braking that felt effortless from the inside and looked, from the outside, like a vehicle simply choosing to slow down. No drama. No announcement. The Fenrari rolled the final stretch at something approaching normal traffic speed and came to a stop at the academy’s designated pickup point with the quiet, settled finality of a ship finding its dock.

Lily had been standing at the curb for four minutes and thirty seven seconds. She knew this because she had checked her smart bracelet four times in the last five minutes, and the fifth check was already forming as an impulse she was actively suppressing out of dignity

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