CHAPTER ~16 THE IRON WALL CRACKED
The next morning, I opened my eyes.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE] Good morning, Sunshine. Passive Repair: 22% complete. Arm functionality restored to 40%. Recommendation: Refrain from punching things.
I groaned and rolled onto my side, searching for the source of the voice.
Lucen Gray was in the corner of the room.
He wasn’t just doing push-ups. He was doing them one-handed, upside down, his entire body held straight as a spear, balanced against the wall like gravity was merely a suggestion.
“You’re late,” Lucen grunted. His voice didn’t waver despite the blood clearly rushing to his head.
He dropped cleanly to his feet.
“Get up,” he said. “We’re jogging.”
As you might have guessed, Lucen Gray was a war machine.
He didn’t run so much as advance. A terrifying, steady momentum carried him forward,
the kind that suggested he could jog across a continent and arrive on time.
Halfway through the jog, my left foot landed on something… squishy.
I yelped and stumbled, barely catching myself. My shoe now had an unpleasant new decoration ofdog poop.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE]
Hurry
found your doppelgänger.
“You okay, buddy?” Lucen asked, voice flat, though I swear there was the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth.
I muttered under my breath, “Luck -11.3,” and forced a strained “Yeah
I struggled behind him, lungs burning as we circled the Academy’s outer perimeter, stone blurring beneath our feet.
“The math,” Lucen said evenly.
We were still running.
“You told the entire class,” he continued. “Why?”
I dragged in a breath. “Strategy,” I rasped. “If I kept it… unknown… they’d fear it. Fear makes people cautious.”
Another step. Another breath stolen by the ground.
“Now,” I continued, forcing the words out, “they think I’m an idiot who compares mana to pipes and valves. They’ll try to copy the calculations… but they don’t have the intuition.”
Lucen said nothing at first.
His boots struck the stone in a steady rhythm—heavy, grounded, unyielding.
He came from House Gray. A noble name stripped of everything except expectation.
No wealth.
No political backing.
Just discipline,
hammered into bone. He understood how nobles thought,
how elites assumed the world would bend for them. But he lived like a soldier who knew the dirt never would.
Finally, he spoke.
“They will still try,” he said. “And some of them will injure themselves.”
I smiled despite the ache in my chest. “Exactly.”
We ran on. Boots, breath, and stone blurring together.
My legs were screaming. My vision began to tunnel as I locked onto the rhythm of Lucen’s heels,
using him as a pacer just to stay upright.
Then I noticed something impossible.
His rhythm broke.
It was barely a fraction of a second. Lucen Gray’s stride usually flawless as a metronome stuttered. His left boot dragged, grinding stone.
That alone was enough to scare me.
I followed his gaze toward the West Training Grounds.
The morning mist was being violently torn apart by raw, pulsating heat. At the center of the grounds stood Aria Asteron.
She wasn’t practicing.
She was an inferno in motion.
Her movements were jagged and predatory, twin daggers carving arcs of red-hot embers through the air.
With a sharp twist of her hips, she unleashed a localized firestorm. The flames didn’t spread
they obeyed.
The metal target didn’t just dent. Thin veins of dull cherry-red spread across its surface,
the heat precise and contained no waste, no overflow.
She looked like a goddess of the forge. Sweat glistened on her skin. Her eyes were narrowed with a focus sharp enough to melt glass.
“Lucen?” I prodded, squinting at him. “You’re staring. That’s a great way to get a fireball to the face.”
He snapped his gaze forward instantly.
For the first time since morning, his neck flushed faintly red. Whether from exertion or embarrassment, I couldn’t tell.
“She… has a very efficient stance,” he muttered, his voice dropping an octave.
I nearly tripped.
A wheezing laugh tore out of my chest.
Efficient stance? You’re a terrible liar, Lucen. You like her, don’t you?
“She is strong,” he said defensively, increasing his pace just enough to avoid eye contact. “Strength is respectable. And her mana control is… symmetrical.”
“Symmetrical,” I repeated. “Right. Definitely the first thing people notice about Aria Asteron.”
I fought for breath as I kept talking. “Though fair warning—if you ever ask her out, she’ll probably demand your family tree, analyze its weak branches, and then set the whole thing on fire.”
“I am not asking her out,” Lucen grunted, now borderline sprinting. “I am observing a potential threat.”
“Yeah,” I said between breaths, grinning despite myself. “A threat to your heart, big guy.”
He accelerated.
Lucen’s stride lengthened. The distance between us stretched.
“Slow down, Romeo!” I wheezed, my legs feeling like overcooked noodles. “Running away won’t change the fact that you have a crush on a human flamethrower.”
Eventually, after what felt like a eternity of l exercise, we slowed,
the Academy’s spires looming above us. I was but at least the jogging was over.
We approached the next obstacle in the day’s gauntlet: breakfast.
The entrance to the Academy’s Great Dining Hall was guarded by iron-bound oak doors that looked more appropriate for a fortress than a place meant for eating.
As we approached,
the scent of expensive tea, roasted meat, and spiced bread seeped through the seams warm, heavy, and indulgent.
I paused at the threshold, adjusting my uniform with my good hand.
“You ready?” I asked, flexing my bandaged fingers.
Lucen straightened his collar, his expression settling back into that familiar, stony calm
“Ready for what?” he said. “Breakfast?”
“No,” I replied, catching our reflections in the polished brass of the door handle.
“Ready to walk into a room full of people who think I shouldn’t exist.”
I pushed the doors open.
Erynthia didn’t officially segregate students
by bloodline.
No assigned seating.
No written rules.
But humans never needed rules to build hierarchies.
The Great Hall stretched before us in long rows of wooden tables layered around a massive central hearth.
The closer one sat to the fire, the higher their standing tended to be. Distance meant obscurity. Proximity meant influence.
As we moved forward, whispers followed us like ripples trailing a ship.
“Is that him?”
a student from a mid-tier House murmured, stirring her tea.
“The Casper who bought his way to Rank Six?”
“I heard he humiliated servants during training,” another replied softly.
“Like one of them.”
“Crude,” someone scoffed.
“Winning with calculations instead of proper technique.”
I ignored them.
My gaze drifted instinctively toward the center of the hall.
Elena von Hestia sat alone at a table meant for six.
No one dared approach. Conversations nearby were quieter, careful,
as if the air itself might carry words back to her. She ate with calm precision, posture flawless.
Presence absolute
An apex predator at rest.
A few tables away sat Aria Asteron.
She ate without hurry,
movements efficient and unshowy. Her twin daggers rested beside her plate, close enough to reach without thought, angled just slightly outward.
Ready even at breakfast.
Lucen slowed.
Not much. Barely noticeable.
But I noticed.
The war machine had just dropped to ten percent output.
“Don’t rush,” I muttered, nudging him lightly with my elbow.
“Eyes forward. Focus on the food. Remember—symmetry.”
Lucen didn’t respond.
He reached for a piece of meat.
Missed...
His fingers closed on air.
There was a pause half a breath before he corrected the motion and continued as if nothing had happened
I bit my lip.
Oh. That’s bad.
We took seats near the outer tables far enough from the hearth to avoid attention, close enough to avoid insult.
Lucen sat stiffly, back straight, eyes forward.
Too forward.
“Relax,” I whispered. “She’s not going to incinerate you for eating breakfast.”
“You don’t know that,” he replied
quietly.
I nearly choked.
As if summoned by fate’s cruel sense of timing,
Aria stood to retrieve bread from a nearby table.
She stopped when she noticed Lucen.
Just for a moment.
Lucen rose as well too quickly nearly knocking his bench backward.
I closed my eyes.
Steady, soldier. Steady.
“Your heat control earlier,” Lucen said, voice low but steady,
“was… efficient.”
That was it.
No flourish.
No hesitation.
No retreat.
He gave a brief nod and sat back down.
Aria blinked.
Then just barely one corner of her mouth lifted.
“Your footwork is stable,” she replied. “For someone who doesn’t rely on mana.”
She returned to her seat.
Lucen stared at his bowl.
His ears were red.
I leaned closer.
“You’re going to remember that sentence for the rest of your life.”
He didn’t deny it.
For a moment, I felt eyes on my back.
I didn’t turn.
Elena von Hestia hadn’t looked our way.
But somehow, I knew she’d noticed everything.
Breakfast continued.
The whispers softened.
The hierarchy held.
And somewhere between porridge and silence, I realized something important.
This wasn’t a battlefield.
Not yet.
But everyone here was already choosing sides.
