The feast was a funeral masquerading as a celebration.
Leon sat at the far end of the high table, a place once reserved for honored guests, now clearly marking him as an outsider. The seat to the Duke's right, his old seat, was occupied by Elara. She glittered under the chandelier light, a natural focal point. Stories of her "miraculous" survival and "divinely guided" journey home were already circulating, each telling boosting her radiance.
Leon picked at the roast pheasant. The sauce, usually his favorite, tasted like ashes. He watched the social physics of the room recalibrate in real-time.
Lord and Lady Perth, who had once eagerly sought his opinion on trade routes, now directed their charming anecdotes solely toward Elara. Sir Gareth, the weapons master who had spent extra hours drilling him, didn't even glance his way. It was as if a great, silent command had gone out: The Astor favor has a new locus. Adjust accordingly.
He wasn't hated. He was irrelevant. A piece of furniture that had been mildly appreciated, now recognized as not matching the new décor.
The system, he realized with chilling clarity, hadn't just zeroed out the numbers. It had edited memories. The emotional weight of shared experiences was gone, leaving only dry facts. To the Duke, Leon was now just "the boy I took in after the border skirmish, son of a minor knight who died honorably." A duty, not a son.
The hollow feeling in his chest grew colder. But within it, that new, quiet thing stretched, testing its boundaries.
Elara rose to speak, her voice carrying effortlessly. "… and I am so grateful to be home, to find such warmth and strength in my true family." Her eyes swept the room, touching Leon's for a fleeting second. She offered a small, sympathetic smile. A charity smile. It was worse than the Duke's blankness.
That was when the first crack appeared.
Not in the world. In him.
A sharp, almost metallic taste flooded his mouth. A pressure built behind his eyes. The world didn't shimmer with system text, but the substance of things seemed to sharpen. The latent heat rising from the food, the subtle currents of air stirred by a servant's passage, the faint, dormant magical energy sleeping in the castle stones—he could sense them. Not with magic. He had no affinity. With something else. Something that had been smothered under the system's constant, gaudy interface.
He excused himself quietly, his departure unnoticed by all but the most vigilant servants, who marked it only to ensure the "ward" wasn't causing a scene.
He didn't go to his rooms—the spacious suite in the family wing. Instinct, cold and sharp, guided him. He went to the old, disused north tower, to the tiny chamber he'd been given on his first night in the castle, before the system's influence had "improved" his standing. It was bare, dusty, and smelled of damp stone and forgotten things.
Here, alone, he let the mask fall.
His breath came out in a shuddering cloud. He looked at his hands. They were the same. And yet, everything was different. For three years, his worth had been an external metric, a number on a screen. His strength borrowed affection. Now it was gone, and he was…
He was light.
The crushing weight of perpetual performance was gone. The anxiety of monitoring a thousand social variables had vanished. The hollow space inside wasn't just empty. It was clean.
And from that clean, dark space, knowledge unfolded. Not system-granted knowledge. His own. The memories of a life before, a man who had solved problems with logic and stubbornness, not flattery. The sharp, analytical mind he'd used to game the system's favorability algorithms… it was still there. Unshackled.
A plan, cold and hard and utterly devoid of the need for anyone's approval, began to form in the stillness.
The door creaked open. In the frame stood Kieran, a cousin several times removed, perpetually jealous of Leon's former place in the Duke's eye. A bully whose favorability Leon had artificially boosted to a pacifying seventy just to avoid trouble.
"Look what's slunk back to its kennel," Kieran sneered, his confidence buoyed by the evening's shift in power. "The pretend heir. Did you finally figure out where you don't belong?"
Before, Leon would have deployed a calibrated response. A disarming joke (Favorability +2), a deferential acknowledgment of Kieran's status (-1 to self-respect, but +5 to Kieran's fragile ego), or a quick exit.
Now, Leon just looked at him. He saw the weak chin, the eyes darting for approval from his two friends lurking in the corridor, the cheap enchantment on his ring meant to make his punch hit harder. Leon saw the variables, not the person.
"Your ring," Leon said, his voice flat, devoid of its usual careful modulation. "The kinetic-burst enchantment. The alchemist in the lower town uses a cheap grade of Phoenix Ash. Unstable. If you channel more than a trickle of mana through it, the feedback will shatter your metacarpals. Try it."
Kieran blinked, his sneer faltering. He looked down at his ring, then back at Leon. The script was broken. This wasn't supplication or fear. It was… a statement of fact. A dangerous one.
"What did you say to me, you little—"
"I also know," Leon continued, taking a step forward. The movement was not aggressive, but precise. "That you borrowed three hundred gold from the merchant Venton to cover your dueling losses. The debt comes due in a week. Venton is not as forgiving as the Duke, and his enforcers don't care about your bloodline."
Kieran paled. The knowledge was not secret, but for Leon to state it so baldly, here, now—it was an act of war.
"The Duke won't protect you from your own stupidity anymore," Leon said, his final blow quiet and absolute. "I certainly won't. Get out."
For a long moment, Kieran stood frozen, his face a battlefield of rage and sudden, dawning fear. The old Leon was gone. In his place stood something unfamiliar and sharp. With a final, inarticulate grunt, he turned and shoved past his friends, his bluster undone.
Leon closed the door. The silence rushed back in.
He leaned against the cold stone wall, his heart pounding, but not with fear. With a raw, unfamiliar exhilaration.
He hadn't used a single point of favorability. He hadn't needed to. He'd used knowledge. His own. Gathered not to please, but to understand. And it had been more effective than three years of fake camaraderie.
He looked out the narrow window at the moonlit grounds. The world hadn't changed. It was still a brutal, hierarchical, magic-saturated place. But his toolset had just been violently swapped.
The system had been a crutch. A loud, gaudy, demanding crutch.
And he had just taken his first step without it.
The cold thing inside him settled, not sated, but… focused. It had a taste now. A direction.
Fine, the thought came again, clearer this time. You wanted a world run on favors and feelings? I'll learn a new language. The language of leverage. Of secrets. Of cold, hard truth.
Let's see which one breaks first.