What It Means To Be King

Chapter 74: The Fingers That Danced Over The Theatre

I knew it was a bad idea to write more than one story at once. Now y'all have to suffer from my inconsistency again. As what happened to What Was Worth A Heart. 

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The buzzing sound from the crowd muffled everything else around him. From all corners of the cafeteria, students filled in moments after the lunch bell rang. The line was long and the tables were full. One of them was occupied by a group of princes, discussing something with hard expressions on their faces. One of them, Charles in particular, would glance at him once in a while, with a raised brow that might have screamed unimpressed. Regardless, Anubis wasn't going to bother about sending an equally offensive response to the childish gesture. 

He was busy as is. 

In a normal occasion, Charles wouldn't have been able to see him. No one else would have, except for Leo. But this wasn't exactly a normal occasion. Now everyone from the Student Council are aware of the attack from last night, and despite the words unspoken, it occurred to everyone then that the case had taken a detour than previously imagined. Now not just Shao Long was threatened. Now it was anyone the Jester wanted involved. 

While Anubis could care less about anyone else that wasn't Shao Long and Leo, and perhaps their respective families, the princes would of course believe that the range of victims had extended to the rest of the Academy's occupants and therefore proved to be a much more serious matter. Anubis didn't care what sort of strategy they came up with, he wasn't going to wait for them to bring it up and work together. 

He was trying to find a person. 

Chris Eriksen wasn't someone you'd pay attention on normal circumstances. With his family background being from the entertainment and fiction industry, he wasn't part of the top 50 ranking of the wealthiest or most influenced students of the Academy. But perhaps if one ought to look closer, which Anubis didn't do previously, the boy had to be some sort of literary genius. 

As Leo had - surprisingly - informed him, this - another - blond kid, had published his own works before. Won a few competitions before. Gained a name for himself before. Alas, not many among the kids here actually liked to real novels, especially not the ones Chris wrote. Something about it being too emotional for male readers, or too deep in terms of several aspects. Like medicine. 

Anubis guessed that was how the two of them got to know each other. 

Sigh. 

Medicine. 

But that aside, there was something more about the boy's background that attracted Anubis' attention. It was a common nasty habit of his to look up anyone who had interested both Leo and Shao Long. Scratch that, just Leo maybe. For Shao Long, the boy didn't need much of a reason to like or hate someone. Some of them may be because of petty reasons. The others are for good ones. But Leo didn't care for people. Would rather remember his lab rats' code names by heart than his previous acquaintances who worked with him. 

Now to have a guy swooping in and steal Leo's attention like that, Anubis knew that unless the kid had some kind of severe brain disease, the only reason that it could be this way was the person didn't abide by Leo's Manual of People-Reading.