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Ember sat on the edge of the examination table, staring at the floor. The doctor had checked her over, muttered something about her results, and disappeared through the curtained doorway to deal with someone else.
That moment of silence was what she needed.
She pressed both hands over her face and let it flow.
The tears came, soaking into her palms. She'd held it together through the hallway, through the walk over here, through all of it. There was a threshold, and she'd crossed it.
Everything had been piling up—her past, Magnus, Landen, and now the ambush and the wristband. Ember had spent so long pretending to be strong that people expected her never to break. But behind the confident mask was a frightened seventeen-year-old girl, quietly wondering if she was making the right decisions and wishing, just once, she didn't have to carry everything alone.
She let herself have it for exactly as long as she needed. Then wiped her face, and took a slow, steady breath.
No one needed to know.
Then she saw movement from the corner of her eyes. She glanced, then looked again.
A boy was sitting against the far wall, watching her. He hadn't made a sound.
"Landen," she squeaked, quickly wiping her face again. "What are you doing here? Creep."
He just sat there, watching, his expression unreadable in that particular way that made it impossible to tell whether he was thinking deeply or thinking absolutely nothing.
"I was here first."
She opened her mouth, then closed it. He wasn't wrong. She hadn't even checked when she walked in.
"Why are you just sitting there all silent?"
"You were crying." He said it plainly. "Didn't seem like the right time to say anything."
She had nothing to come back with for that. So she didn't try.
The room settled back into quiet. Ember stared at the opposite wall. Landen stared at whatever he stared at. It was a strange kind of silence — not uncomfortable exactly, but she didn't know what to do with it either.
Then she noticed something.
He wasn't grabbing his head. No strained expression, no wince pulling at the corners of his eyes. Every other time he'd gotten too close to her, there had been something — some reaction he couldn't hide. Right now, he was just looking at her the same way he might look at a wall.
She filed that away without saying anything about it.
Then Landen broke the silence. "What happened to you?" he asked.
She didn't answer right away.
"Training match," she said. "I – I got hit."
He glanced at the way she was rubbing her neck. "Must've been serious."
She didn't answer.
"For it to make you cry like that."
"I wasn't —" She stopped herself. He already knew. Denying it was just going to make her look worse. She pressed her lips together and left it alone.
A beat passed.
"You've got me on your team now," Landen said. He spoke so casually, as if he were stating an obvious fact. "I won't let you get hurt like that again."
Ember blinked.
She didn't know how to respond to that, so she said nothing.
— — —
The curtain shifted.
A girl stepped in wearing the pale blue sash of the nursing track — calm eyes, dark hair pulled back, moving with quiet efficiency. Her gaze found Landen first.
"You're always causing trouble," she said.
Landen straightened slightly. "Liora."
The girl paused. Something in her expression shifted — small, but there. "You remember my name."
Liora Fenwick, the girl Landen sat next to in Support 101. She glanced over to Ember, offering a brief, polite smile and a small nod. "The doctor will be back in a moment."
Ember nodded once.
Liora turned back to Landen and reached for his hand. "Your results came in." She lifted it carefully, examining the bandaging. "Seven fractures. All in the hand. How are you just sitting here so calmly?"
"At a certain point, the pain kind of stopped." Landen watched his own hand like it belonged to someone else. "I don't really feel much anymore."
"You probably overloaded your nerve sensitivity." She unwound a section of bandaging and gently rubbed along his knuckles. "Can you feel that?"
"A slight tingling sensation. Yes."
"That's better than nothing." She continued rubbing his hand.
Ember glared at her. She knew what she was doing.
Then the curtain moved again.
Three more girls filtered in wearing the pale blue sash of the nursing track. Then a fourth. They were girls from Landen's class. Supporters naturally gravitated toward the healing track; it was woven into the curriculum. Potion theory, wound treatment, recovery logistics. Half of them ended up rotating through the nurse's office before they even graduated.
The girls converged on Landen like a search and rescue operation, where the rescue was mostly just touching him.
"We heard you broke your hand —"
"Seven fractures, are you serious —"
"Does it hurt? It has to hurt —"
One looped an arm around his shoulder. Another cupped his face in both hands and tilted it toward the light as though conducting an examination, though Ember was fairly sure that wasn't in any textbook. A third pulled his head against her chest and made a sound that could only be described as cooing.
"You need to be more careful," one of them said, in the tone of someone who had decided that was now her personal responsibility.
"Seriously, what were you thinking —"
"You're going to give us all a scare one day —"
Landen sat in the center of it with the expression of a man caught in sudden weather.
Ember watched from her side of the room. Arms crossed. Still.
She told herself she was just observing. It was interesting, objectively. A spectacle. She uncrossed her arms. Recrossed them.
Liora was still holding his other hand.
The girl who'd been cooing at him said something into his hair, and two of the others laughed. Landen's head was still pressed against her. He didn't look exactly comfortable — something was off about his expression, actually. A slight glaze to his eyes, like his focus was slipping. His breathing had gone shallow.
The curse was active. Even without the head-grabbing, his body was running the math on all of this at once. Pain, exhaustion, and now half a dozen girls pressed up against him. Whatever was going on inside him wasn't subtle.
Ember stood up.
"Ladies." The voice came from the doorway. "Please do not smother the patient."
The curtain had been pulled aside. A man in his mid-forties stood in the frame — white coat, stethoscope draped around his neck, two small vials of deep blue liquid held loosely in one hand. He had the expression of someone for whom this was not a new situation.
The girls dispersed quickly, murmuring apologies. Liora released Landen's hand and took a small step back.
Landen exhaled quietly.
"Miss Cindercrest," the doctor said, looking at Ember.
"Strife," she corrected.
He didn't blink. "My apologies. Miss Strife, please sit down." He gestured to the chair beside Landen. It wasn't the one she'd been sitting in before, but she sat anyway.
He looked between the two of them. "You two are teammates, right? Were you training together?"
"Yes. That's right," Ember said, glaring at the other girls.
Landen glanced at her sideways — not entirely sure if she meant they were teammates or that they'd been training together. He couldn't tell from her tone. He went along with it.
"Bone fractures for both of you." Doctor Pell extended the vials. "Drink these. They'll support the healing process."
Landen took one and considered it. The liquid inside was a flat, medicinal blue. He drank a small sip and immediately made a face.
"Can't someone just heal it directly?" he asked. "Like an ability?"
The room went very still.
Pell looked at him. Liora looked at him. The girls near the curtain looked at him.
"An ability," the doctor repeated.
"Yeah. Someone who specializes in healing. Who just — fixes it."
"That isn't something that exists," Pell said, with the careful patience of someone confirming a basic reality to someone who should already know it.
Landen frowned. In every game he'd ever played — in Legends of Heroes alone, he could name six different support archetypes built entirely around direct healing. It was practically foundational to the genre. He'd just assumed this world would have something equivalent.
It didn't.
He turned that over for a second. A world that could reshape the rules of matter and energy — that had soul classifications, dantian pools, and literal military academies — and no one had solved direct healing. That was a strange gap.
He caught the looks everyone was giving him.
"Right," he said. Then he finished the potion in one go.
It worked fast. He watched the swelling in his knuckles pull back, felt something deep in the bones realign. He flexed his fingers slowly. Still stiff. Still tender. But functional.
Ember drank hers without comment.
The bell rang overhead, distant and steady, marking the end of the period.
"Well," Dr. Pell said, "Now that you two are better, everyone is to report to your homerooms for instructions regarding the first freshman outing. You are dismissed."
— — —
The homeroom had relocated to a smaller room — fifteen desks, one whiteboard, no windows. It felt deliberate. Like a briefing room.
Halvek stood at the front with his arms crossed, waiting for the last student to find a seat before he spoke.
"I'll keep this short," he said. "The Freshmen Tournament isn't until the end of the school year, but you'll be participating in practice battles throughout the year. To enter the battle arena, every participant must be at least Elementary Grade 4. That means if you want any real combat experience, you'll need to level up as quickly as possible."
As he said that, his gaze settled on Landen.
A hand went up near the middle of the room.
Halvek's eyes moved to it. "Yes."
"What if we're already behind?"
"Then work harder." He snapped, but followed it with a smile.
The students exchanged uneasy glances, the kind people shared when they knew they were already in trouble.
"Now." He uncrossed his arms. "The good news is that you won't be doing this alone. The academy has a program for exactly this kind of problem." A pause. "The First Freshman Outing."
Nobody spoke. A few students exchanged glances.
Halvek didn't elaborate. He just looked out at the room, expression flat, like he was giving them a moment to appreciate what they'd just heard.
"Details tomorrow," he said. "Get some sleep."
He picked up his folder and walked out.
The First Freshman Outing was a popular event. Everyone knew what was going to happen. All except one.
Landen looked at Maledic for some answers.
But he simply stood up, threw his great sword over his shoulder, and walked towards the door. "It's time to level up."
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