For Ruby, the world was never truly quiet.
It was a constant, overwhelming tapestry of pressure, movement, and currents that ordinary human eyes could never hope to see. Most people in Aetherion believed strength was everything. They judged value strictly by size, raw magic output, destructive speed, and innate talent. By those harsh clinical standards, Ruby was entirely unremarkable. She was not the strongest familiar in the academy, nor was she the fastest or the most destructive. She could not tear through enemies with a crushing display of raw force.
But Ruby possessed something far rarer.
She had a sixth sense—a strange, fluid instinct that allowed her to feel hidden danger long before it actually appeared. Sometimes it was nothing more than a faint, prickling unease at the base of her neck. Other times, it was a sharp, electrifying warning that made the fur along her spine rise instantly. It was a silent whisper that often meant the exact difference between safety and a violent death.
That instinct was the sole reason she had been so useful during the catastrophic tower incident. The Original Will did not possess a detection or search spell like the high-born mages; he couldn't easily map out what lay waiting in the pitch-black, hidden spaces of the tower. But Ruby could feel it. She could sense the malice creeping through the dark before it ever reached him, and that silent guidance had saved his life more than once.
Because of this gift, Ruby had always looked at the world through a completely different lens. And because of it, she understood people far better than most—better than the high-ranking beast familiars, better than the ancient guardians, and certainly better than the scholars who spent their entire lives studying human behavior only to miss what was staring them right in the face.
Ruby could physically feel emotion. Not in structured words or phrases, but in shifts of atmospheric pressure, the rhythm of a heartbeat, a sudden hesitation in a step, or the violent fluctuation of a soul's intent.
To her, fear had a physical, jagged shape. Lies carried a distinct, bitter smell. Grief felt like a heavy, suffocating blanket draped over a person's shoulders. Joy was light and blindingly bright, though it was tragically easy to mistake for mere carelessness.
Humans said many things. They wore elaborate smiles. They laughed loudly to fill empty rooms. But Ruby never trusted a human face. She trusted the feeling. She always had.
In truth, she had never understood why humans trusted spoken words so easily. People could smile while harboring pure hatred. People could praise your achievements while secretly plotting to take everything you owned. People could weep bitterly while spinning a web of absolute deceit.
But feelings? A soul's frequency? Those were impossible to fake.
And the Original Will... the Original Will had always been strange.
The old Will—the exact Will she had known before the tower incident—felt unyieldingly warm. His soul was bright, sometimes incredibly noisy, and occasionally frustratingly stupid—but it was always warm. That distinct warmth had stayed with him through every failure. It remained even when the noble students laughed at his lack of progress, and even when he returned to his room covered in bruises from impossible training standards. That core warmth had never changed.
Then, the tower incident happened.
And afterward, something vital simply vanished.
Ruby had noticed it the exact moment he woke up. The other students and professors didn't see it, but she did. The fundamental connection between them was gone. The boy still looked like Will, talked like Previous Will, and moved like Previous Will, but underneath the skin, he was entirely wrong.
He wasn't dangerous. He wasn't evil. He was just fundamentally out of place—like walking into a familiar, lifelong room and realizing an invisible hand had moved every single piece of furniture by just a few inches.
She didn't understand it. So, she began to watch.
The investigation started that very day, right after Elena and Will had separated. Will turned and walked toward the training hall, his steps heavy with a strange new purpose. Ruby watched him from the deep shadow of a stone corner.
Will noticed her. She felt the brief flick of his awareness lock onto her position. But he did absolutely nothing. He didn't call out her name, he didn't question why she was stalking him, and he didn't chase her away with a scowl. He simply ignored her, continuing on his path.
That quiet dismissal confused her far more than if he had shouted at her.
So, she followed him. She trailed his shadow for one day, then two, then three. Soon, a week bled into more.
Will's routine became agonizingly, brutally simple: Class. Library. Training. Work. Room. Repeat.
At first, Ruby kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. She expected to uncover a dark secret, a clandestine meeting with a handler, suspicious behavior, or a hidden agenda. But there was absolutely nothing. It was just a ceaseless loop of the library and the training grounds.
Again. Again. And again.
She watched him use sword techniques that the old Will had never practiced. She watched him use strange, unfamiliar magic. She watched him fail, fall hard against the stone floor, and ruthlessly drag himself back up to repeat the sequence. She watched him sit in the deepest corners of the archives, reading ancient texts until his eyes bled from exhaustion. She watched him leave the academy grounds on cryptic errands, only to return entirely spent.
There were no secret meetings. There were no hidden, forbidden rituals. There was no malevolent second personality waiting behind his eyes to seize control. Yet, the baseline wrongness persisted. The old warmth wasn't there anymore. It wasn't completely gone, but rather... different. It felt like the exact same melody being played on a completely different instrument. She couldn't explain it; she only knew the truth of what her instincts screamed.
One afternoon, she followed him down a deserted, echoing academy hallway. Without warning, he stopped dead in his tracks. Ruby's instincts flared, and she immediately vanished behind the corner.
A tense silence filled the corridor.
Then, without even turning around to face her, he spoke, his voice echoing flatly against the stone walls. "…If you're going to follow me, at least hide better."
Ruby froze, her heart hammering against her ribs. Silence stretched between them. Then, without waiting for a response, he simply walked away. He didn't try to stop her from following, he didn't ask what she wanted, and he didn't even look back to see if she was still there.
That indifference deeply bothered her. If the old Original Will had noticed her tracking him, he would have broken into a wide smile, talked to her, asked what she was doing, and probably teased her until she walked away. This current Will just accepted her presence like a ghost accepting the wind.
Days bled into a full month. Still, she found nothing.
Then came that day. Will entered Kael's private office. Emma was already inside, waiting. Ruby crept up along the exterior ledge, peering through a cracked window pane and waiting patiently. A long, agonizing time passed before Will finally emerged, his expression unreadable as he walked down the corridor.
Ruby expected him to leave and prepared to follow, but a sudden ripple in the ambient pressure made her hesitate. Something felt strange inside the room. So, she stayed pressed against the outer wall.
A moment later, Kael and Emma stepped out into the hallway, deep in conversation. Ruby could only catch fractured pieces of their dialogue through the heavy wood.
Kael let out a heavy, exhausted sigh. "…Don't act clumsy. Where we're going, show proper respect."
Emma frowned, her shoulders tensing. "…I won't."
Before she could catch anything else, the sound of approaching footsteps forced Ruby to slip away from the place, her tail flicking in deep thought. She tilted her head. Where were they going? What was happening behind the scenes of the academy?
She looked down the long corridor toward the direction Original Will had gone, paused for a beat, and then followed.
The next day brought the same relentless routine. She followed him through the courtyard, keeping a calculated distance. Will walked with his usual measured stride, and Ruby darted between the hedges, hiding in plain sight.
Then, the danger hit.
She didn't notice the anomaly at first. Nearby, a heavy, iron-bound training construct suddenly suffered a catastrophic mana malfunction. It wasn't a lethal war-machine, but the internal gears ground violently, and its heavy iron arms swung out with blinding speed. It was too fast.
By the time Ruby's sixth sense screamed a warning, the massive iron arm was already hurtling directly toward her small frame.
She froze, her paws glued to the stone. It was too late to dodge.
Then, a blur of movement shattered the air.
A hand grabbed her firmly by the scruff of her neck, pulling her back with immense, reckless force. Ruby stumbled blindly through the air, hitting the ground a few feet away as the iron arm smashed into the stone wall right where she had been standing, shattering into pieces.
Silence descended on the courtyard.
Ruby looked up, her breathing shallow. Will stood directly over her. He didn't look terrified, nor did he look like a heroic savior. He just looked thoroughly annoyed.
He glanced briefly at the smoking, destroyed construct, then lowered his gaze to meet hers. "…You okay?"
Ruby froze completely.
And then, it happened. A sudden, radiant wave of feeling washed over her. It was small, faint, and buried deep beneath his icy exterior—but it was undeniably, beautifully familiar.
Her eyes widened. She remembered this exact feeling. A long time ago, on the day they had first met, she had been entirely alone, terrified, and too small for a harsh world. Someone had reached out a gentle hand to pull her out of the dark.
It was that exact same warmth. It wasn't identical—it was sharper now, tempered by something hardened and old—but it was close. Close enough to make her heart ache.
Will looked down at her, his brow furrowing in confusion. "…Why are you staring?"
Ruby couldn't answer. But the mental connection between them—the invisible thread that had been severed after the tower incident—suddenly hummed. For the very first time since his awakening, she felt it. It hadn't been destroyed. It had changed, evolved into something different, but it was there.
Will let out a short sigh, turning on his heel and restarting his walk. "…Be careful."
Ruby watched his retreating back for a long moment, then quietly followed him. She trailed him now not because she doubted his identity, and not because she was investigating him for treason. She followed him because she desperately wanted to know who he had become.
Days later, evaluation day arrived.
Ruby sat quietly on Elena's lap, watching the arena fill with tension. Down below, Will was stretching his limbs, his expressions calm despite the weight of expectations pressing down on him. A crowd began to gather along the stone tiers. Emma stood nearby, watching him with a soft expression.
When Will walked over to her, Emma offered a bright, relieved smile. "…Where have you been?"
Will smiled back—a perfectly normal, easygoing expression.
Ruby tracked every twitch of his facial muscles, then quietly slipped off Elena's lap, padding across the stone floor until she was standing right at his boots. Emma noticed the movement, blinking down at the cat-like familiar in surprise.
Ruby looked straight up into Will's eyes.
"…Meow."
Emma blinked. Will looked down, his gaze locking onto Ruby.
Ruby stayed perfectly still, keeping her mouth shut. But internally, she channeled every ounce of her mana into the newly reawakened connection, pushing her intent through the faint, unstable mental bridge.
Good luck.
Will stared at her. For a fraction of a second, a look of genuine surprise flashed across his face. Then, so subtly that no one else in the entire arena could have noticed, the corners of his mouth twitched upward. He smiled.
Her message delivered, Ruby turned and walked back, quietly sitting down on the stone bench.
This time, she wasn't watching him to find a lie. She wasn't investigating a stranger. She was simply waiting.