I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!-Chapter 25: In Great Trouble.

POV: Amari Stormborne.

Amari was still surprised at how fast the cute guy had been in responding to the dungeon. It was on par with her own reflexes, if not faster.

Which was weird, impressive even, considering that she was a full fledged S rank.

True, she was suppressing her presence, and she was fairly unknown to the public even despite her rank. And completely ignoring the fact that she was unrecognizable as the Amari Stormborne that the public knew, thanks to the lounge wear;

It still didn’t make sense for some random person on the streets to be as fast as her!

She was still processing the situation as she dropped off the haggle of terrified kids at a safe distance. Then taking a moment to make sure they were all uninjured, and reassuring them that everything was under control, took off back towards where the dungeon had opened up.

A moment later, she was already upon the turbulent gate, and the first thing she noticed was that the cute guy, Aris was gone.

Inside, presumably.

She looked at the gate. It was unstable in the specific way that gates were unstable when something on the other side was paying attention to the outside, the edges fluctuating with an irregular pulse that didn’t match any of the standard deterioration patterns she’d documented. She pulled out her notebook—a reflex, at this point, as automatic as breathing—and made a note.

Gate instability: non-standard. Pulse interval inconsistent. Suggests internal awareness. Possible Aberrant classification.

She looked at where Aris had gone in.

Then at the gate.

Then at her notebook.

Then at the gate again.

Quietly sighing, she added: Civilian entered. Unlikely civilian.

The gate pulsed again, harder this time, the edges contracting and expanding with the urgent quality of something that had received new information and was updating accordingly. Whatever was happening inside had just changed. She could feel it in the ambient mana, the specific pressure-shift of a significant release—not explosive, not a detonation, something quieter and considerably more total, the kind of release that didn’t make noise because it didn’t need to.

She wrote: Significant quantity of mana discharge. Hard to classify, fluctuations are unnatural for an emerging gate.

She shoved the notebook back into her pockets, and was getting ready to summon her armour and weapons when he walked out.

It was... quite the sight.

Maybe ’sight’ was underselling it a little bit.

Amari’s jaw slackened when she registered what she was seeing, mind scrambling to make sense of the situation.

Aris looked mostly untouched apart from the subtle exhaustion in his eyes and the residual blood on his clothes. He was carrying someone, on his back, lifting them with the quite confidence of someone that knew they were back in safety. The person itself was really injured, missing a hand, which was most likely the one laying on the floor a little away from them, and was completely unconscious.

Aris had a really irritated look on his face as he slowly lowered the man to the floor, which looked a little ridiculous, because the person was twice his size.

In her defense. If that was the end of the situation, she had no reason to be so shocked.

It was the identity of the man laying unconscious in front of them, that was...

She still remembered that face clearly, the one she had seen in the classified documents the association kept away from public eyes.

"Regulus Au Nyx" The name left her mouth on its own.

Aris turned to her, confused.

"What?"

"That’s Regulus Au Nyx."

His eyes widened in surprise subtle, but enough for her to notice. His expression saying, please do not joke with me at a time like this.

She didn’t even react when the dungeon gate closed behind Aris, she genuinely couldn’t, her shock meter was full and a little more, overflowing even.

"That’s an Aureate." She said, jaw still slack, turning her head to stare at Aris with genuine horror in her eyes.

Aris looked at her.

Then at the unconscious man on the floor.

Then at her again.

He turned to the man again, eyebrows lightly raised, the most emotion she had seen out of him since the thirty minutes she first met him.

The poor guy didn’t look this surprised when he ran headfirst into a dungeon.

He turned to Amari, blinking.

"No way."

There wasn’t any panic in his voice, obviously there wasn’t. But she still didn’t fail to notice the quiet disbelief, the denial of someone who was experiencing something that wasn’t supposed to happen.

Even though she really didn’t want to, Amari reluctantly nodded her head, confirming that the man in fact, was Regulus Au Nyx.

The founding father of... S ranks.

And one of the royals that used to rule the world, from sixty years ago.

Then she looked at his missing hand, the wounds littering his body, the terrible exhaustion on his face, and the emaciation that was painfully apparent. This man looked like he had just crawled out of hell itself.

"What the hell was in that dungeon?"

Aris didn’t answer for a long moment, still staring at the man.

"I don’t know."

"What." She turned to Aris, tearing her stare off of the Aureate, her voice coming out sharper than she had expected.

"I didn’t check, i was too focused on saving this guy. The thing died before i could even see it."

"What." She snapped. "The hell do you mean you killed it before you could see it!?" She tried her best to keep her voice quiet, the hushed shout still managing to carry the panic of someone who had just been told the most ridiculous thing ever.

Aris was visibly uncomfortable now, fidgeting with his hands.

"Am in trouble?"

Amari blinked.

"You just carried one of the most important people in history out of an unclassified dungeon." She paused for a moment when she heard the sirens coming in from the distance. "This guy has been missing for more than sixty years."

She paused for a moment, basking in the absurdity of it all.

"So yes." She said, letting out a sigh. "We, are in trouble."