The Great Hall of the Magic Knight Academy was a lie dressed in candlelight.
The smell hit first—roasted meat and warm bread and something faintly floral from the enchanted tapers, a scent designed to feel like welcome. Every evening, floating candles drifted in lazy constellations above the long oak tables, their warm glow catching silver plates and crystal goblets until the whole hall gleamed like the inside of a treasure chest.
The enchanted ceiling shifted with the weather outside—tonight, a painting of winter clouds drifting across a violet sky. The food arrived in silver-domed silence, carried by first-year attendants who had learned not to make eye contact with their seniors.
It was, by any measure, a beautiful place.
For Lucas, it felt like eating inside a coffin.
He sat at the Grayson table—their table now, officially, with the House crest embroidered on the bench cushions and their names recorded in the Academy's Registry of Noble Households. It had taken Lisa's direct patronage to make it happen. It had taken months of proving themselves, of top marks and grueling trials and the kind of quiet endurance that left invisible bruises.
It had taken all of that, and the other students still left a three-seat gap on either side of them.
Not aggressively. That was the cruelest part. Nobody shoved past them, nobody sneered openly over their meal. The other noble-born students simply... drifted elsewhere.
As naturally as water finding a lower path, the benches around Lucas and Matthew filled from the opposite end, until the two brothers sat in a bubble of polished wood and empty space, surrounded by the sound of laughter that was never aimed at them.
Lucas cut his meat into precise, even squares.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Don't let the mana surface.
He had been doing this for weeks now—this quiet, relentless compression. Every time a student glanced at him and looked away a half-second too fast, every time a conversation dimmed as he walked past, he took what rose in his chest and pressed it down, down, down.
He imagined a glass jar. He imagined himself as the volcano inside it. The jar was holding. So far, the jar was holding.
"Lucas."
Matthew's voice was low enough to be private. Lucas looked up and followed his brother's line of sight.
Across the hall, Alan was trying to navigate the aisle between two long tables with Jason half a step behind him, both of them angling clearly toward the Grayson seats. Lucas almost felt something loosen in his chest—
Then Kael's friends moved.
There were three of them, lordlings from old families whose crests were older than the Academy itself. They didn't stand. They didn't shout. They simply turned in their seats and occupied the aisle with the languid ease of people who had never once needed to hurry for anything.
One of them leaned toward Alan with his elbow on the table, voice quiet, unintelligible from this distance. He smiled in a way that had nothing to do with warmth.
Alan stopped walking.
Lucas had a particular name for that smile. He had seen it in a dozen variations since arriving at the Academy—on the faces of boys who had grown up being told that some people simply did not belong in certain spaces, and that the kindest thing you could do for such people was remind them of this fact before they embarrassed themselves further.
It was a smile that said: You are welcome to exist. Just not here. Not near things that matter.
The noble stare. Effortless. Architectural. Designed not to wound but to reduce—to make the person on the receiving end feel, for just a moment, like dust caught in a shaft of light. Present, briefly. Gone soon.
Jason put a hand on Alan's arm. They turned back the way they came.
Lucas returned to his plate.
In. Out. Down. The jar was still holding.
He took a measured sip of water and thought, not for the first time, that he was becoming very skilled at this—at existing in spaces that refused to fully contain him. It was a kind of violence, what they did. Bloodless. Invisible to anyone not standing in the gap.
Matthew said nothing. He understood, the way only someone sitting in the same gap could.
They finished dinner without speaking much. On the way out, a boy Lucas didn't know brushed past him and muttered something under his breath that might have been a word or might have been nothing. Lucas didn't turn around.
The jar held.
He stayed late in the library.
This was not unusual. Lucas had developed a habit of losing himself in tactical texts after dinner—histories of military campaigns, annotated studies of magical combat forms, the kind of dense, structural reading that required enough concentration to keep other thoughts at bay.
Tonight he had been working through a comparative analysis of High Gravity techniques as adapted from the original Grayson school, cross-referencing a margin note in Lisa's handwriting that he had found in an older edition.
By the time he marked his page and gathered his things, the library was empty and the corridor outside was cathedral-dark.
The Academy at night wore a different face.
During the day, the stone walls and iron fixtures and carved gargoyles along the eaves were merely gothic decoration—impressive, academic, old. At night, the torches burned low and threw shadows that moved with architectural life of their own.
The gargoyles above the eastern corridor stretched their wings against the dark in a way that Lucas's rational mind identified as a trick of the light, and his older instincts—the part of him forged in a burning village—identified as: threat, confirm position, assess exit routes.
He adjusted his bag on his shoulder and kept walking.
He was thirty feet from the side door when he heard the footsteps.
He didn't run. He didn't slow down. He simply counted the cadence—one, two, three, four, and a fifth, heavier set, moving ahead to cut off the path in front of him—and turned to face them when they were close enough that pretending otherwise would have been insulting to both parties.
Kael Armand stood at the center, his posture the studied ease of a boy who had never once stood anywhere without assuming the room arranged itself around him. The four others flanked him in a loose half-moon, none of them with hands on their hilts.
They didn't need to draw.
What they used instead was older than steel.
Lucas felt it before he saw it—a pressure that descended like weather, like something pressing down on the air itself. It began at the crown of his head and moved through his shoulders and into his legs with a golden, grinding weight. The Armand Family Aura.
He had heard of it in passing: a signature technique refined over generations, designed to broadcast dominance through raw mana density. Against untrained commoners, it buckled knees within seconds.
The dust along the corridor floor swirled outward in a slow, circular gust as the aura expanded.
Lucas stood in it.
He didn't brace. He didn't widen his stance. He simply stood, the way stones stand—not because they resist the rain, but because the rain is not, ultimately, a meaningful event to them.
He had been broken in ways these boys could not imagine. He had stood in actual fire. He had carried people out of rubble with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. The Armand Family Aura pressed on him like a hand pressing on bedrock.
The bedrock didn't notice.
Something moved across Kael's face—not quite confusion, not quite anger. The expression of a man who has placed a bet he was certain of and heard the wrong result.
Kael rolled his shoulder back and let the silence stretch another moment before he spoke. "I heard you were something, Grayson. I thought I'd come see for myself."
Lucas said nothing.
Kael's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "Nothing to say?"
Lucas adjusted the strap of his bag. "I'm waiting for you to get to the point."
The silence in the corridor was complete. One of the four flanking nobles shifted his weight. The torches along the wall threw orange light across stone faces and long shadows behind them all.
Kael stepped closer, his shadow stretching over Lucas. "The point is that Lady Grayson made an error. She collected something from a trash heap and tried to dress it in noble colors, and now the rest of us are expected to pretend the smell isn't there."
He tilted his head slightly. "A pet. That's all you are. And pets don't sit at our table. They don't walk our halls. They wait at the door until they're wanted."
A door opened at the far end of the corridor.
Matthew.
He came around the corner at a pace that said he had been looking for Lucas—and he stopped when he took in the scene with a single, total assessment. He moved forward. Two of Kael's companions shifted to intercept him without being asked, placing themselves across his path with the confident geometry of people who had practiced this.
Matthew looked past them to Lucas.
Lucas looked back at his brother for exactly one second.
Then he looked at Kael.
"The Sparring Grounds," Lucas said.
Kael blinked. "Excuse me?"
Lucas let the motion of adjusting his bag serve as his only gesture. "If you want to settle something, settle it there. In front of everyone. Unless you'd prefer to keep hiding it in alleys."
The word hiding landed precisely where he aimed it.
Kael's eyes narrowed. Then, slowly, the confidence returned—or the performance of it, which in boys like Kael had long since become the same thing. "The Sparring Grounds." He turned and walked without waiting for a reply. "Don't keep me waiting."
His four companions followed. After a moment, the two blocking Matthew's path peeled away as well, and Matthew crossed the corridor in quick strides, his voice dropping low.
"Lucas—"
"I know." Lucas was already walking. His voice was calm in the way that very deep water is calm—still on the surface, entirely unreadable beneath. "Come watch."
The torch-lit arena waited at the end of the path. When they arrived, the low fire in the corner braziers threw the packed-earth floor into warm relief. Lucas stopped at the edge of the circle.
He set his bag down.
He unbuckled his heavy traveling cloak and let it fall from his shoulders in one slow motion, revealing the plain dark practice gear beneath—worn at the shoulder, fitted for movement, the clothes of someone who trains until exhaustion is ordinary.
He didn't look at Kael. He didn't look at the small cluster of students who had already gathered at the edges of the grounds, drawn by the invisible signal that spreads through dormitories whenever something real is about to happen.
Someone held a torch near him, and its light caught his face.
His eyes were voids. Not angry. Not cold, exactly. Just utterly, completely dark in a way that made the torchlight seem to reach them and find no purchase—like trying to illuminate the bottom of a well.
Lucas rolled his shoulder once, loosening the joint.
He picked up a practice blade and stepped into the circle.