The energy drain from the duel with Lyon, followed by the compulsory classes, left Kael with a throbbing behind his eyes—a physical manifestation of the Compendium's accelerating countdown. He needed seclusion. Fast. He needed silence.
He and Dean walked together toward the dining hall, though Kael had no intention of eating.
"I still can't believe he made you fight him," Dean muttered, picking at the bandage on his hand. "Lyon is a Veteran Mage. Even if he held back, he still could've hurt you."
"It was a test of willpower, nothing more," Kael said flatly. Lyon's true machinations would reveal themselves soon enough.
The soul overload is the most important thing.
"That wasn't the act of a teacher," Dean scoffed softly. "He fried a layer of skin off his own hand, Kael. If you'd lost control, the Life Mana could've eaten you from the inside out."
Kael stopped just outside the sprawling, noisy entrance of the dining hall. The smell of roasting meat and stale bread hit him like a wave.
His stomach twisted violently. A flicker of old, desperate hunger—the instinct of the orphan who once stared at trash heaps praying for scraps—tightened his throat. Maybe a bite or two wouldn't hurt. I can make time for this.
A cold shudder ripped through his soul, cutting the impulse short. The feeling wasn't his; it was the Compendium—calculating, prioritizing survival, rejecting the inefficiency of feeding.
I will eat later, Kael assured the faint, aghast remnant of his old self. When I'm safe.
He turned to Dean. "I'm going to our room to meditate. I need rest before class."
Dean frowned. "Aren't you going to eat first? You just faced Lyon."
"I'm not hungry," Kael lied. "But save me some food for later?"
Dean nodded slowly, worry furrowing his brow. "Sure. Just don't overdo it. Formations and Arrays is in the Library Cellar, remember? Magus Varic gets touchy if you're late."
Kael gave a short nod and turned sharply toward the dormitories. He needed to be alone—to think, to breathe, to not shatter.
Kael lay flat on his cot in the dim dormitory, hands crossed over his chest. He wasn't resting; he was measuring himself against collapse. The Compendium's pulse flickered in the back of his mind—a heartbeat made of static and light.
Compendium, please help me evaluate the use for stored soul energy as previously discussed.
[Query Initiated: Evaluating the uses for stored soul energy. Warning: Low CP. Memories might be consumed if host proceeds further.]
"What?" His voice cracked. "All my CP are already gone…"
Then he remembered. He had spent them—wasted them—on mana conversion assimilation. Foolish.
The tremor that followed wasn't physical. It rippled through his soul like a seismic wave. If he didn't relieve the overload, his essence would splinter beyond repair.
[Compendium Alert: Time until soul overload — 4 days, 12 minutes.]
The digits flickered. 4 days, 11 minutes. 4 days, 10. The energy destabilized with every breath.
Kael calculated: The rate of destabilization was accelerating past the Compendium's ability to analyze and process data. Sacrificing memory would relieve pressure too slowly. He had to force a solution now.
Against his better judgment—no, with his complete, lethal judgment—he initiated the release manually.
He unveiled the Soul Devourer Aspect.
The dam shattered.
A surge of concentrated soul energy ripped itself free from the sealed core and burst into his mana channels. His body arched off the bed. The energy was too strong, too raw. Tiny fissures spiderwebbed through his conduits—each crack a flash of searing white pain.
His mind screamed, a soundless howl only the soul could make. But pain only fed the chaos. The more he resisted, the wilder it became. A self-devouring loop of agony and power.
He couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Couldn't be.
The Compendium seized control.
[Emergency Containment Protocol Activated. Cognitive Partition required. Processing cost: Core Identity Fragment.]
Then the price came.
His thoughts stuttered—then collapsed.
His name—his anchor—slipped away. Not forgotten. Eaten.
He gasped as something inside him went hollow. There was a space where his self used to live, and it echoed—loudly, endlessly. A silence that wasn't peace but terror.
He reached for his name and found nothing.
He reached for I and touched a void.
It felt like floating in a black sea where even thought had weight and temperature—cold, wet, suffocating. The Compendium's presence loomed in that endless dark, vast and indifferent, like a god made of equations and hunger.
He tried to think his name. Nothing answered.
He tried to remember why he existed. Nothing cared.
He was a whisper without a mouth, a thought without a thinker. He was nobody.
And that—that—was when the panic arrived. Quiet at first. Then unbearable.
His heart kept beating, but it wasn't his. Each pulse felt mechanical, distant, a rhythm belonging to someone else's body. His soul had forgotten how to belong to flesh.
He wanted to scream—but he couldn't remember what screaming was.
He wanted to stop—but he didn't know who wanted that.
His hands trembled on the cot. He didn't know his name. Didn't know his face. But he remembered hunger. He remembered fear. Base instincts. Primal. Animal. They became his new self—feral replacements for the man who no longer existed.
And deep inside, the Compendium pulsed again.
The rampaging energy in his channels stilled, bent under its control. Now that it had power again, it began reshaping him.
It took a sliver of the violent energy and forged it into a new mark.
[Compendium Alert: New energy signature detected. Soul energy classified. Conversion—impossible.]
So, this was something beyond mana—beyond laws. Soul energy in its purest, pre-universal form. Even the Compendium couldn't consume it.
It didn't care about the pain. That was inefficient. It optimized.
The energy rammed through his system like molten light, tearing open his heart's mana gate with a soundless crack. The pain was apocalyptic—blinding and ecstatic all at once. He felt his heart shatter, yet still beat.
A quarter of the energy burned away in the process, but the Compendium wasn't done.
Next came the lungs—his breath caught, seared, devoured. Then the stomach, where mana tried to flood the newly opened gates but recoiled, afraid of the soul energy's presence.
Another quarter remained.
Then it struck the head.
The surge hit like a spear through his skull. His vision exploded into white. His mana gate burst open with a crack like splitting glass. Blood leaked from his nose, his ears, his eyes.
He felt the life drain from him in waves.
And in the final, flickering moment before the darkness took him, one thought drifted through the storm:
How pitiful… that even nameless, why must I still suffer alongside him?
Dean sat alone at the long dining table, the half-finished bowl of soup in front of him long gone cold. The clatter and chatter of students washed over him, but none of it touched him. His eyes kept drifting to the entrance.
Kael should have been back by now.
He traced idle circles along the rim of his bowl, chewing the inside of his cheek.
"He said he needed rest," Dean muttered under his breath. "That was an hour ago."
He sighed, trying to ignore the restless knot forming in his gut. Kael wasn't like the others. He didn't mock him for talking too much, or for fumbling during spell formations. He didn't call him clingy, or needy, or the charity case.
Kael listened.
He saw him.
And that made Dean terrified of losing whatever fragile friendship had begun to form between them.
Don't smother him, Dean told himself. Don't be that guy again.
But the thought didn't stick. The silence in the seat beside him was unbearable.
He stood abruptly, grabbing the plate of bread he'd saved. "I'll just check on him. Make sure he's fine. We can still make it to class in time."
That was the excuse he told himself. The truth was simpler—he just needed to see Kael, to be sure he hadn't been… abandoned again.
He quickened his pace through the academy's narrow corridors, heart thudding louder with every step. When he reached the dormitory hall, he hesitated outside Kael's door.
He knocked once. No answer.
"Kael?"
Nothing.
Dean's hand tightened around the plate. He turned the handle slowly and pushed the door open.
For a moment, his mind refused to process what he saw.
The cot—Kael's cot—was stained dark red. The air smelled of iron and burnt mana. Kael lay motionless, blood crusted along his jaw and across his robes. For one horrified heartbeat, Dean thought he was dead.
The food slipped from his hand and crashed to the floor. "Kael?"
His voice cracked, high and panicked.
He rushed forward, nearly tripping over his own feet, and grabbed Kael's shoulder. The fabric was cold and damp with blood.
"Hey! Kael!" He shook him, harder this time. "Wake up! Please—wake up!"
Then, faintly—too faintly—Kael's chest lifted in a shallow breath.
Dean froze, hope slicing through the terror. "You're alive…" he whispered, then louder, desperate, "You're alive!"
That was when he saw it—the faint green glow crawling beneath Kael's skin, like veins of molten emerald pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat.
Dean's mouth went dry. "Life mana…" he breathed. "That's… impossible."
Kael, stop. If you don't know how to guide it, life mana can kill you. No one below Master rank could wield it without burning their channels apart. And Kael—Kael was just a first-year.
But then he noticed something even stranger. The glow wasn't erratic; the mana flowed in gentle pulses, layering threads of light into the conduits, closing the internal fissures first. The gashes closed, bit by bit, as if guided by a healer's touch—though the process was slow, and Kael's breathing weak.
Dean's mind spun. How does he know how to do that? He just Awakened… this shouldn't be possible.
He didn't waste time thinking. He fumbled for the small crystal vial tucked in his coat—a potion his father had given him "for emergencies only"—a powerful Hemostasis Elixir, meant to stop catastrophic bleeding.
He didn't care. Not now.
He popped the cork with shaking fingers, tilted Kael's head back, and poured the potion between his lips.
"Kael!" Dean's voice broke again. He shook him, panic clawing through his chest. "Please don't die!"
Kael didn't respond. His lips moved faintly, whispering something—half a word, maybe a name—but the sound was lost in the low hum of mana.
"Come on, Kael, wake up!" Dean's throat tightened. He wanted to yell, to cry, to drag Kael back from whatever abyss he'd fallen into. "You're scaring me, damn it!"
In concert with the Life Mana's internal repair, the elixir instantly thickened the blood and slammed shut the external gashes and mucosal tears. Kael's breathing steadied as the immediate threat of blood loss passed. His skin regained its color. Only the blood on his clothes and cot remained as proof of what had happened. The Life Mana pulse within his skin, however, did not cease; it kept working, repairing damage too profound for any ordinary potion.
Dean hovered there, afraid to move, afraid even to breathe.
Kael looked peaceful now. Too peaceful.
Dean's heart still pounded like a drum. Questions tangled in his head—what spell was that? What was he trying to fix? But beneath all the confusion, something raw and fragile stirred inside him.
Fear.
Not of Kael.
But of losing him.
He didn't want to be alone again—not with people like James, not with empty rooms and cold stares, not with the silence that made his thoughts turn cruel.
Kael had to be fine. He had to be.
Dean swallowed hard and sat beside the cot, forcing his trembling hands to still. He stayed there, watching the slow rise and fall of Kael's chest, whispering softly into the dim air:
"It's okay… I'm here. You're not alone."
But somewhere deep in the back of his mind, a smaller, crueler voice whispered something he didn't want to hear—
You said that before.
And they left anyway.
Dean was still panicking. When Kael stirred, the motion jolted him.
A faint sound escaped Kael's lips—a ragged inhale, followed by a low, disoriented groan. His eyes fluttered open, pupils unfocused, as if waking from a dream he couldn't quite remember.
"Kael?" Dean straightened immediately, his heart leaping to his throat. "Hey, easy—don't move too much. You lost a lot of blood."
For a long, silent beat, Kael only stared. Dean saw something in that blank gaze that froze him—pure processing. As if Kael didn't just forget where he was, but was cataloging his entire existence from a distance.
The thought hit like a punch. Did the injury affect his brain? Healing potions didn't work on brain damage. They could stitch skin and mend bone, but the mind was another matter entirely.
Panic rose sharp and hot in Dean's chest.
Kael blinked at him slowly. His gaze drifted across the room, uncomprehending, before landing on Dean's face. He blinked slowly, his eyes dropping to the plate of bread smashed on the floor near Dean's feet. His gaze was cold, a mechanism calculating probability and resource. There was a long, silent beat.
"…Dean? What are you doing here? Where am I?" The way he said it—tentative, uncertain—made Dean's breath hitch. The name was spoken with perfect, flat recall—a data point, not a greeting. Now Kael remembered him.
Relief flooded through Dean so fast it left him dizzy.
"You're in our dorm," Dean said quickly, his voice trembling. "You—you passed out, there was blood everywhere, and I thought—" He cut himself off before the words could crack. "You're okay now. You're safe."
Kael frowned faintly, glancing down at the sheets, then at the dried blood staining his hands. His expression stayed oddly calm, detached—the reaction of someone reviewing a crime scene that had no emotional bearing on them.
"I don't remember falling asleep," Kael murmured. "Or getting hurt."
Dean laughed shakily, trying to disguise the fear still clawing at his throat. "Yeah, well, you scared the life out of me. Next time you feel like bleeding out, give me a heads-up first."
It was meant as a joke, but Kael only looked at him, silent and distant. The expression was wrong—polite, blank, the polished surface of a stranger. But it wasn't the look of confusion; it was the look of calculation.
Dean realized the truth wasn't an injury; it was a shift. The Kael who let down his guard and muttered about hunger was gone. This new Kael was the cold, analytical mastermind Dean had once admired and feared.
And to Dean's trauma-wired mind, the cold control was safer than the vulnerable uncertainty of the old Kael.
"Hey, you—uh, you remember what happened before you came here, right?" Dean asked carefully. "The duel with Lyon?
Kael blinked once. "Lyon… the instructor?"
Dean's stomach dropped. "Yeah. He made you fight him in front of the class? You nearly passed out from the energy drain? Ringing any bells?"
Kael looked thoughtful, as if searching for the words inside someone else's mind. "Some of it," he said finally. "Fragments. I remember light. Pressure. Then nothing."
Dean's heart clenched. Fragments. Not memory. Not emotion. Just pieces.
But he forced a shaky grin anyway. "Right, fragments. That's fine. Maybe you just overused your mana. You'll remember soon."
Kael nodded absently, eyes unfocused again.
Dean sat there, hands twisting in his lap, trying to calm the tremor that had taken root in them. He wanted to reach out—to shake him, hug him, something—but fear stopped him. What if Kael pulled away? What if this distance wasn't confusion but rejection?
Because Dean had seen that look before—
The polite blankness, the fading warmth.
It was the same look his father had given him when he said, "Don't embarrass the family again, boy."
Dean swallowed hard, forcing the memory down.
"You should rest," he said, softer now. "We've got Formations and Arrays in a bit. I'll take notes for you if you're not up to it."
Kael's gaze flicked toward him briefly, the faintest crease between his brows—as if trying to recall whether "Dean" was someone worth trusting. Then he nodded once.
"Thank you," he said quietly. The words sounded mechanical, hollow.
Dean managed a smile, but his throat burned. "Yeah. Anytime."
He stood, pacing toward the door, pretending he didn't feel the distance stretching between them like a widening wound.
When he stepped out into the hall, he pressed his back to the door and closed his eyes. His pulse thundered in his ears.
Kael was alive. That should have been enough.
But all Dean could think was—
His eyes hold such distance.
And beneath that thought, darker still, another whispered through the cracks of his mind
Maybe everyone forgets you eventually.