"...you...?" Claire's breathing came in ragged pulls, her face draining further of color, her vision starting to blur at the edges.
"Leave the rest to me."
Hearing that did something to Claire she had not expected. The tension and fear she had been holding onto, all of it, eased slightly at words that amounted to little more than "do not worry." It was enough that she let herself stop fighting for a moment.
"Who are you?!" the man demanded, eyes briefly dropping to the hem of Lutra's skirt, which had lifted with the motion of her kick.
"I do not answer questions from perverts." Lutra shifted her stance, pressing her leg further to widen the gap between them.
"I will get you stabilized. Hold on while I deal with this disgusting man."
A soft green light wrapped around Claire's body. Bit by bit, her wounds began to close, and the pain that had been screaming through her began to fade into something duller.
"Regeneration. It is close to a healing spell but weaker. I am only suppressing your pain while your body works on repairing itself."
Claire said nothing back, not because she chose not to, but because her injuries had taken away even that much.
If she had not been ambushed earlier, there was a real chance she could have held out longer on her own.
"Do not get in my way!" The man unleashed a barrage of fireballs.
"A man who calls himself one of the leaders of the Bloodpath, attacking an academy student through ambush like a coward," Lutra said as the fireballs streaked toward her. Before they reached her, every single one split cleanly in two.
The man froze mid-motion, dagger still raised, while Claire watched the fireballs splitting apart with her own eyes wide and disbelieving.
"You should resign from your post."
"What just happened?! What kind of trick is that?!"
"I already told you. I do not answer questions from perverts."
"You bitch! I will offer you up as well!"
He lunged at Lutra, both daggers wrapped in blackish-red aura.
Lutra did not move. She did not need to.
Watching from where she lay, Claire felt a fresh wave of concern. The attack looked stronger than anything she had faced.
It made sense. When she had fought him herself, he had never actually landed a dagger strike on her, not once, even with the aura on it. Every wound she carried had come from magic and raw physical force, nothing more refined than that.
The fact that she had ended up like this from physical attacks and basic spellwork alone told her something she had been avoiding.
'I am still so weak.'
She was supposedly one of the strongest students at Aetherion. She carried the title Frost Lady. And underneath all of that, if she was honest with herself, there had always been a quiet kind of arrogance she had never fully looked at.
She had believed she was strong enough, simply because hardly anyone in academy duels could beat her. She had counted herself among the strongest in Class A1 through A2 without much thought and had taken comfort in that ranking.
Then she had met a girl from Class B1, a full tier below her own.
That had been the moment her perspective started to shift. The moment she finally believed there was always someone stronger somewhere above her.
They had crossed paths by accident. The girl had asked for a duel, bright and eager, saying something like, "This is just so I can learn something from my senior!"
Claire had thought it would be a waste of time. The outcome seemed obvious. But there had been something about the girl's enthusiasm that made Claire want to see it crack, just slightly, under pressure. So she had agreed.
It had not gone the way she expected. The fight she assumed she would win easily, with room to toy with her opponent, had instead gone almost entirely the other way. She had lost outright.
"Good match, Senior Claire."
Watching the girl smile through it, bright and unbothered despite having just beaten her, had cracked something open in Claire. The realization that there was an invisible wall she had been walking straight toward without ever noticing it.
From that point, Claire had pushed harder than she ever had before. Not chasing a higher class rank specifically. Just chasing strength. Trying to break through whatever that wall actually was.
When Ard introduced himself as her new professor, there had been a flicker of something like relief, even pleasure. But learning afterward that he was a demon had soured it almost immediately.
After insulting him, dragging his parents into it, she had come back to the same conclusion all over again. She was still weak. And now she had lost to a man using nothing but his fists and a few basic spells.
'What exactly am I doing.'
The frustration kept rising, layer over layer, and underneath it sat a deeper question she could not answer: what was she actually working toward. The not-knowing pulled tears out of her before she could stop them.
'What... what am I actually doing? Why does everything keep drifting away from what I meant to do?'
"Open your eyes, Young Lady."
Claire blinked through the tears already running down her face and looked up.
"I do not know what you are carrying, or what exactly is weighing on you, but I will say something. It will not sound like encouragement. Think of it as advice instead."
"...What?"
"Having many dreams is good. Having too many is not. You might want to do this, want to do that, but that is not always a good thing either."
Wiping at her eyes, Claire asked, "What do you mean?"
"In my view, gathering experience is valuable. But learning and chasing the one thing that is actually your true purpose matters more. There is nothing wrong with picking up other skills along the way, but do not lose sight of what you were actually built for."
"I understand even less now."
"...Well."
"Where do you think you are looking!" The man was directly in front of Lutra now, dagger inches from her nose. Then his motion simply stopped, as though he had frozen mid-air, suspended.
"Whatever it is you have been forging from the beginning, finish it. Then you can move on to forging something else."
Claire's eyes trembled. She told herself she did not want to cry again. That resolve lasted exactly as long as it took to watch the man's body come apart into small, even pieces.
Lutra turned back to face her. One hand was raised, and at the tips of her fingers, an impossibly thin thread caught the light.
"Do you understand now, Young Lady Claire?"
The tears came back, harder this time, and Claire finally let herself cry properly, releasing everything that had been sitting compressed somewhere behind her ribs and inside her skull.
Lutra moved closer and sat beside her, pulling her into an embrace, one hand smoothing slowly over her hair.
Bit by bit, in the crying, the frustration started to loosen its grip. Not knowing her own strength. Not being able to compensate for what she lacked. The weight of being mixed blood. The discrimination at home. The need to prove something to people who would never actually see it. All of it seemed to find some kind of answer in Lutra's last few words.
Right now, Claire only wanted to cry harder, for as long as it took.
---
Several hours later, Claire finally stopped.
The good news was that she felt lighter, and her injuries had mostly closed, since Lutra had been quietly running healing magic the entire time she held her.
The bad news was that her eyes felt like they had been scrubbed raw.
"My eyes really hurt."
"That is to be expected, Young Lady. You cried for more than three hours."
Lutra's own eyes were red and swollen. She had clearly given just as much of herself to that as Claire had.
"Thank you, all of you, for saving me. And Professor Celi, I am sorry for not listening to you."
"What matters is that you are safe."
Celi and Tristan had arrived after hearing the crying from a distance, loud enough to carry. Following the sound, they had found Lutra and Claire, along with what remained of the Shadow Monarch, still technically alive, his body scattered in pieces that no longer had the capacity to regenerate.
"And Sai and Anna...?"
"Do not worry!" A bright, cheerful voice cut through, coming from a girl in an academy uniform.
'A student?'
Behind her, Sai and Anna appeared.
"Sai! Anna! Are you both alright?" Celi rushed to check them over.
"We are fine. We knew someone was guarding the corridor outside, so we hid in one of the rooms. We almost got hit when something tore a hole straight through the wall, looked like a sword strike," Anna said, glancing pointedly at Claire.
Claire's expression did not change. Without a hint of guilt, she said, "That was probably this pervert," and stepped, casually, on part of the dismembered body at her feet.
"I am just glad everyone made it out." Tristan smiled, arms crossed over his chest.
"Big sister!" The new girl ran straight at Lutra and jumped into her arms.
"Yidra. Have I not told you to mind your manners?"
"Hehe, but what can I do, it has been so long since I saw you. I missed you." Yidra wrapped herself around Lutra, rubbing her face affectionately against her.
"We saw each other two months ago. That is not long at all." Lutra pushed her back gently.
"Felt long to me~"
"Um... you..."
"Ah, hello, Senior Claire." The girl turned and smiled brightly at her.
Claire felt a flicker of surprise somewhere in her chest, though nothing showed on her face.
"You remember me, Senior?"
* * *