The Enforcement Delegation departed within the hour, their golden-armored silhouettes vanishing back down the southern road as swiftly as they’d arrived, leaving House Draxos’s courtyard in a state of exhausted, uneasy quiet.
Caius stood rooted to the same spot long after the dust had settled, Thessaly’s final words still ringing in his skull with the force of a physical blow.
Seraphina val Lumen.
The Protagonist’s sworn future bride, assigned by the Council itself to personally observe him.
‘Of course,’ Caius thought bitterly, staring at the repaired but still visibly scarred outer wall.
‘Of course they’d assign the one person in this entire academy who has every conceivable reason to eventually report every suspicious thing I do directly back to the man destined to slaughter her alongside every other heroine on this continent.’
“You look like you’ve aged ten years in the last hour,” Kaelan said, appearing at his side with an expression that had, somewhere in the last week, settled into something considerably more thoughtful than his earlier open contempt.
“I feel like it,” Caius admitted.
Ashra’s ember-lit form had already dissolved back into faint warmth against his chest, the goddess apparently having exhausted whatever reserve of divine authority the manifestation and binding oath had required.
Caius could feel her presence now only as a distant, tired flicker, and understood with a fresh wave of guilt exactly how much she’d risked on his behalf.
“Your father wants to speak with you,” Kaelan continued.
“Given the Academy timeline just accelerated by two weeks, there are apparently arrangements that need finalizing sooner than expected.”
Caius nodded numbly and followed his brother back through the estate, past soldiers still visibly shaken from having stood in the presence of three Saint-rank Enforcers, past servants whispering behind cupped hands about goddesses manifesting in the courtyard and oaths sworn before Council officials.
His father waited in the war room once more, though this time his expression carried none of the flat, calculating distance from their previous conversation.
There was something almost like genuine respect buried beneath the granite exterior now.
“You handled that considerably better than I expected,” Voran said without preamble.
“Convincing a goddess to stake her remaining authority on a binding oath is not a small feat, even for a legitimate patron relationship.”
“I got lucky,” Caius said honestly.
“Perhaps,” Voran allowed.
“Or perhaps you possess instincts this household has badly underestimated for the past seventeen years.” He gestured toward the war table’s relief map, where a new route had been marked in fresh crimson ink, tracing a path from House Draxos’s border estate toward the distant capital.
“Regardless, circumstances no longer permit the luxury of a gradual transition. You depart for the Divine Academy in six days, traveling alongside Lady Frostmere’s caravan for mutual protection along the northern roads.”
Six days.
Caius’s mind raced through the implications.
Six days to prepare for an environment specifically designed as the Protagonist’s eventual hunting ground, now complicated immeasurably by the knowledge that his assigned Council observer was the exact woman destined to be ritually sacrificed at the story’s genre-shifting midpoint.
“There’s something else,” Voran continued, his flat voice carrying an unusual note of consideration.
“Given the political weight your recent evaluation has generated, House Draxos’s standing has shifted considerably in the eyes of several allied bloodlines. I’ve received formal correspondence from three separate Houses expressing interest in strengthening ties through your Academy enrollment.” New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
“Meaning what, exactly?” Caius asked warily.
“Meaning,” Voran said, “that the boy who spent seven days hiding in his chambers as an embarrassment to this family has, in the span of a single week, become considerably more valuable than any of his siblings currently anticipate.” A pause, weighted and deliberate.
“I would advise preparing yourself, Caius. Attention, once earned, rarely departs quietly.”
Caius left the war room with his mind spinning through an entirely new category of complications, political marriages, allied bloodlines, the machinations of noble houses suddenly circling a son they’d previously dismissed as worthless.
The following six days passed in an exhausting blur of preparation.
Var continued his brutal training regimen each morning, pushing his Ash Affinity steadily toward the crucial Level 10 threshold that would unlock Cinder Wraith, though progress remained frustratingly incremental without the desperate life-or-death stakes that had accelerated his growth during the Warden attack.
[Ash Affinity: Level 7]
He spent his afternoons buried in the estate’s modest library, cross-referencing every fragment of [God Reborn] lore he could recall about the Divine Academy’s layout, its major players, the timeline of key story events he desperately needed to either avoid or actively disrupt.
Some details came easily, burned into his memory from hundreds of hours of gameplay.
Others remained frustratingly vague, details his past self had simply never bothered memorizing because they hadn’t seemed narratively important at the time.
He learned, through careful, indirect questioning of the estate’s tutors, that Seraphina val Lumen’s reputation preceded her considerably.
First-ranked cleric candidate.
Personal ward of the Grand Inquisitor.
Known throughout Church circles for an almost unsettling devotion to procedural righteousness, the kind of unwavering faith that made her either an invaluable ally or a catastrophic liability depending entirely on which side of that righteousness he ended up standing on.
On the fifth evening, as Caius packed the last of his meager belongings into a traveling case, a soft knock sounded against his repaired door frame.
It was the maid, the same one he’d pulled from the burning dormitory a week earlier, her young daughter peering shyly from behind her skirts.
“Young Master,” she said, bowing low.
“I wished to properly thank you before your departure. I never had the chance, with everything that followed.”
“You don’t need to thank me,” Caius said, oddly uncomfortable with the gratitude.
“I should have opened that door the first time you knocked.”
“Perhaps,” she said, straightening.
“But you opened it when it mattered most. Not as the family’s shame, but as something else entirely. I thought you should know that, before you leave for the capital.”
She left before he could formulate a response, her daughter offering him a small, shy wave from the doorway, and Caius stood alone in his half-packed room, turning her words over in his mind.
Something else entirely.
He wasn’t entirely sure yet what that something was supposed to become, but for the first time since waking up seven, now nearly two weeks, ago in a body destined for madness and ruin, it felt less like a curse and more like an open, uncertain possibility.
The morning of his departure arrived with a gray, overcast sky that matched the tension knotting his stomach.
Isolde’s caravan assembled in the main courtyard alongside a modest Draxos honor guard, Kaelan among them, apparently assigned personally by their father to oversee Caius’s safe delivery to the capital.
“Try not to die in the first week,” Kaelan said as Caius mounted his assigned horse, though the earlier venom had long since drained from the words, replaced by something that almost resembled genuine concern.
“Father’s invested considerable political capital in you now. It would be inconvenient.”
“I’ll do my best,” Caius said dryly.
The caravan pulled through the estate’s repaired outer gate as the morning fog began to lift, and Caius allowed himself one final glance back at House Draxos, the militaristic fortress that had spent seventeen years treating him as a shameful footnote before a single chaotic week rewrote his entire standing within its walls.
As the estate faded behind the northern tree line, Caius pulled his stat screen up one final time, reviewing the fragile arsenal he was carrying into a world he understood far too well and not nearly well enough.
[Ash Affinity: Level 7]
[Skills: Ashveil, Ember Lash, Cinder Step]
[Locked: Cinder Wraith – Requires Ash Affinity Level 10]
[Divine Sponsor: Ashra, Minor Goddess of Ash and Embers – Binding Oath Active]
Not much, against a world that had once, in another life, watched him die screaming beneath the boot of a reincarnated god.
But it was, Caius reflected grimly as the capital road stretched out ahead of the caravan, considerably more than nothing at all, and for the first time in either of his lives, that felt like enough of a foundation to actually fight for.
Three days into the journey, as the caravan wound through a narrow forest pass flanked by steep granite cliffs on either side, Isolde’s lead scout came galloping back down the column at breakneck speed, her face pale with barely restrained panic.
“Ambush ahead,” she gasped, reining her horse to a violent stop.
“The pass is blocked. Armed riders, at least thirty strong, wearing no House colors.”
Kaelan’s greatsword was already in his hand.
“Bandits?”
“No,” the scout said, her voice shaking.
“They’re wearing masks. Ash-gray robes. And Lady Frostmere, they’re specifically asking for the Draxos heir by name.”