"Repeat what you just said."
"I said I was going."
Arthur was already moving toward his seat with the energy of someone who had decided that forward momentum was the best available option right now.
He didn't look back.
The weight in the air stayed on his shoulders for three more steps and then lifted, slow, like something deciding to let it go for now rather than forgetting about it entirely.
He sat down.
His pen was extremely interesting.
Halfway through finding his pen interesting he caught movement two rows over.
Havier.
Back in his seat. Head down. Pen moving across his notes like yesterday had been a normal day and the day before that had also been a normal day and everything was fine.
Then Havier looked up.
Their eyes met for exactly one second.
Havier looked back at his notes.
That was it. No confrontation. No acknowledgment. Just two people deciding simultaneously to let something stay where it was.
'He's going to keep quiet,' Vexis said. 'Smart.'
Arthur looked at his own desk.
Cael had used Havier's mother to make that happen. A woman who ran a meat shop in the Shard district and had nothing to do with any of this. Arthur hadn't asked him to go that far and Cael had gone that far anyway because that was how things worked in this world and in this body's circle and Arthur had said nothing about it after.
He filed that under things sitting badly and left it there.
"Five different formats depending on class rankings." Vivienne was at the front, moving. She didn't pace so much as occupy different parts of the room with the same energy. "If this class trio reaches top five, the class advances to the expanded format. Five mages. Higher stakes. Wider field."
She stopped.
"Which means Vaust, Lestilaut, and Kreasial are responsible for getting this class there."
Kreasial looked at Arthur from across the room.
Arthur looked back.
She smirked. Not unfriendly. The smirk of someone who had just been handed a problem they thought they could probably solve.
A hand went up near the second row.
"Yes. Vaust."
The white‑haired boy stood. Freckles across both cheeks. He held himself like he was trying to take up the minimum possible amount of space while still technically being vertical.
"Is it one on one? Like previous years?"
"Team match," Vivienne said. "All three members. Synchronization matters as much as individual output. This isn't about who hits hardest."
'For someone who allegedly killed a forgotten titan alone,' Vexis muttered, 'she really does enjoy emphasizing teamwork.'
Arthur kept his face still.
Vivienne pressed the relic stone and disappeared without ceremony.
The room started moving. Bags, chairs, students filtering out.
Havier stood. Looked at Arthur once more, brief, unreadable. Then walked out.
Arthur watched him go.
Then he looked at the two people left in the room.
Kreasial was already heading for the door. Theodore Vaust was gathering his things with the careful speed of someone who was also planning to leave shortly.
Arthur clapped his hands once.
Both of them looked at him.
"Okay." He came down the stairs toward the center of the room. "You two already know each other. You've been in the same class since first year."
Kreasial pointed at Theodore. "I haven't noticed him."
Arthur stopped. "How."
"I always go home after class," Theodore said. His voice was soft. Not shy exactly. Just calibrated low, like someone who had decided a long time ago that the world didn't need more noise from him. He offered a small shrug. "I prefer to be alone."
Arthur stood in the middle of the empty classroom with these two people and thought about the word alone.
Great. An antisocial and a woman who headbutted me into the ground. Crazy luck. Actually.
Incredible team composition.
He pushed his hair back.
"Right. Then we introduce ourselves now."
Kreasial laughed. Not a polite laugh. An actual one, short and real, aimed at the situation rather than at him. "Tell me something blondie." She tilted her head. "Why are you trying this hard? Trying to impress daddy?"
"Yes," Arthur said.
She blinked.
He kept going before she could recover.
"I know I'm not from this class." He looked at both of them. "And I know what I used to be. I'm not that anymore." He let that sit for a second. "So let's just work together."
A pause.
"God." Kreasial was already moving toward the door. "Your smile is unsettling. It's too bright. It's like looking at the sun." She waved a hand behind her. "Fine. Whatever. Bye, blondie."
The door swung shut.
Arthur stood there.
What the hell was that speech. I sounded like the protagonist you see in corny webnovels. I'm never doing that again.
Theodore let out a small laugh. Quiet, like the rest of him. He had a way of standing that made him seem like he'd been placed in the room by someone who wasn't sure where he belonged and had decided the corner was safest.
"Okay," Theodore said. "Um. Vex, right?"
"Yeah." Arthur picked up his bag. "Just Vex."
Theodore nodded once and smiled and it was the smile of someone who didn't do it often enough to have made it habitual yet.
"Okay. Just Vex."
The sun was coming down when Arthur left the academy.
Long shadows across the road. Carriages moving through the main stretch. The city doing what it always did, which was exist loudly and without concern for anyone's problems.
'You are dismantling everything,' Vexis said. He appeared at Arthur's left and kept pace. 'My reputation. My image. I spent two years establishing exactly how people look at me and you are undoing all of it by smiling at people and asking them nicely to cooperate.'
How is being decent dismantling anything.
'Because I'm not decent! I was feared. Respected. People moved out of my way. Now they're laughing at you. At me. At—'
Be kind for once in your life. Try talking to people without making them feel like furniture.
He stopped walking.
Because he'd heard it come out of his own head and he'd heard it land and he knew exactly where it had landed.
Not that you have a chance to try now anyway.
Oh.
He hadn't meant to finish that sentence.
I'm sorry, Vexis.
Vexis said nothing.
The silence had a specific quality to it. Not angry. Not hurt in the loud way. Just present, the way something sits when it's been waiting for acknowledgment and finally got it and doesn't know what to do with that yet.
Arthur kept walking.
He'd stopped using alleys three days ago. Standing rule. Any path that required passing between two walls with limited sight lines got replaced with a longer route no matter how much time it added.
Which added time every single day and his feet had opinions about it.
He was halfway across the main citadel road when his sternum tightened.
Not the training kind. Not the output kind.
The other kind.
He went still in the middle of foot traffic. People moved around him without caring.
"Kid." Roz's voice was quiet against his ear. Low in a way it didn't usually go. "You feel that."
Arthur closed his eyes.
He dropped his aetheric field outward, slow and low, and let it find the anchor points. Not all of them. Just the ones nearby. The shadows in the road, under the merchant carts, against the building walls.
He pressed his perception into the nearest one and listened.
A breath.
Slow. Patient. The specific rhythm of someone who had been waiting in one position for a long time and had no problem continuing to wait.
He knew that rhythm.
He'd felt it once before through an anchor at an alley mouth while his heart was doing something unpleasant in his chest.
Same weight distribution. Same stillness. Same quality of someone who had done this before and found the waiting to be the easiest part.
Arthur opened his eyes.
The citadel road moved around him, loud and indifferent, and somewhere in the shadow of a building two streets over something was standing very still.
Watching him.