The soldiers reached the breach seconds after the Heretic vanished, and Caius found himself yanked bodily out of the shadowed alcove by two armored guards before he could even process what had just happened.
“Young Master Draxos was hiding near the breach during the attack,” one of them barked toward Kaelan, voice clipped with military precision even as his eyes darted nervously toward the scorched wardstones.
“Orders?”
Kaelan stared at his younger brother for a long, heavy moment, his crimson eyes unreadable in the flickering firelight.
Whatever fury had been building in him during dinner, whatever contempt had fueled his earlier attack in Caius’s bedroom, seemed to have curdled into something far more complicated.
“Bring him to the war room,” Kaelan said finally.
“Father will want to hear this directly.”
The walk through the estate felt like a funeral procession.
Soldiers parted around them in eerie silence, their eyes flicking toward Caius with expressions he’d never seen directed at him before, not contempt, not pity, but something closer to fear.
Word apparently traveled fast in a household built entirely around martial hierarchy.
The cripple who couldn’t summon a proper flame had just been personally addressed by a Heretic, by name, in front of the eldest son.
The war room occupied the base of the estate’s central tower, a circular chamber dominated by a massive stone table carved with a relief map of the northern border.
Lord Voran Draxos stood at its head when they entered, still in his battle armor, a jagged greataxe resting against the wall behind him, its blade still smoking faintly from whatever violence he’d personally dealt with during the chaos.
He was, if anything, even more imposing up close than Caius remembered from a distance.
Seven feet of solid muscle wrapped in crimson-threaded plate, a face carved from the same unforgiving granite as the mountains this bloodline had been bred to guard, and eyes that held the particular flatness of a man who had stopped being surprised by violence decades ago.
Those eyes settled on Caius now, and for the first time in seven days, Voran Draxos actually looked at his youngest son instead of through him.
“Explain,” Voran said.
Just the one word, low and heavy, carrying the full weight of a man who did not waste breath on people he considered beneath his attention.
Caius’s mouth went dry.
Every instinct told him lying to this man would be a death sentence, but the truth, the actual truth, that he was a reincarnated soul from another world who knew this entire continent was a video game, that he was destined to become the Great Heretic, that the man who’d just addressed him in the ruins outside was apparently trying to recruit him decades ahead of schedule, was equally likely to get him executed on the spot for insanity or blasphemy.
“I don’t know why he singled me out,” Caius said instead, which was at least technically true.
“I went to help the servants trapped in the burning dormitory. Kaelan intervened and killed the Warden. Afterward, the man in black appeared and spoke directly to me. He called me by name. He said he’d felt my ash contract the moment it formed.”
Voran’s expression didn’t change, but something in the air of the room shifted, a subtle pressure that made Caius’s newly upgraded Vitality feel suddenly very inadequate. You are reading on novelping(.)com, the official source.
“A Heretic sensed your contract with a Minor Goddess of Ash from beyond the wardline,” Voran said slowly, “and traveled here specifically to speak with you. Not with your brother, who commands a Saint-rank blessing of Valerion. Not with me, who has personally slain three Heretical agents in my lifetime. You.”
“I don’t understand it either,” Caius said, and this part, at least, was genuine confusion layered thick over genuine terror.
He understood the game’s lore, but the timeline was wrong.
Decades wrong.
Something had already changed, and he didn’t know if it was because of his arrival or despite it.
“Repeat exactly what he said,” Voran ordered.
“Every word.”
Caius swallowed hard and recounted the encounter as precisely as he could manage, the Heretic’s offer, the mention of the Protagonist’s second Bloodline Trial in forty-nine days, the warning that ash and mist would not be enough.
He carefully omitted any reference to Helion, to the game, to anything that would require explaining knowledge he had no legitimate way of possessing.
When he finished, the war room fell into a silence so complete Caius could hear the distant crackle of the still-smoldering dormitory outside.
“A Heretic does not offer contracts to cripples on a whim,” Voran said finally, his voice carrying a dangerous, calculating edge that made Caius’s skin crawl.
“If a creature powerful enough to slip a Thornwood Warden through a four-hundred-year warded wall believes you are worth personally recruiting, then you are worth more to this family alive and useful than dead and forgotten.”
Kaelan’s head turned sharply toward his father, an unreadable expression crossing his face.
“Father, he ran directly toward an active combat zone during a Warden incursion,” Kaelan said carefully.
“Whatever his ash affinity is capable of, he demonstrated genuine combat instinct tonight. He burned me, during our earlier altercation, hard enough to leave a mark that hasn’t fully healed.”
Voran’s flat eyes shifted toward his eldest son, then back toward Caius, and for the first time in Caius’s admittedly brief seven days of memory in this body, something that might have been calculation, rather than dismissal, settled across the Patriarch’s granite features.
“Sixteen years I let you rot in your chambers,” Voran said, addressing Caius directly now, his voice dropping lower, quieter, somehow more dangerous for its lack of volume.
“I assumed Ashra’s rejection meant you were worthless. Tonight, a Heretic crossed a border that has held for four centuries specifically to whisper in your ear, and you ran into a burning building rather than cower in your room like every other night since your possession.”
The word possession made Caius’s blood freeze solid in his veins, but Voran’s expression gave no indication he meant it literally.
“I am reassigning your status within this household, effective immediately,” Voran continued.
“You will begin training under House Draxos’s combat instructors starting tomorrow at dawn. You will also be enrolled in this year’s cohort at the Divine Academy in the capital, a full season ahead of your original scheduled admission.”
The Divine Academy.
In the game’s lore, that was exactly where the Protagonist began his slow, methodical grooming of the continent’s most powerful heroines.
That was ground zero for the entire genre-shifting nightmare Caius had been trying to avoid entirely.
“Father, that’s—” Caius started, then caught himself, forcing his voice back into something resembling steady composure.
“I appreciate the opportunity, but I’m not remotely prepared for—”
“You will be,” Voran cut him off flatly, “or you will die trying, which was already your expected outcome before tonight. Nothing has changed in that regard except my willingness to invest resources in delaying it.”
It wasn’t reassurance.
It wasn’t even close to warmth.
But it was, Caius realized with a chill, the single longest conversation his father had directed at him since he’d woken up in this body, and buried somewhere underneath the brutal pragmatism, there was something that almost resembled interest.
“There is one more matter,” Voran said, turning toward the room’s heavy iron door as a soft knock echoed against it.
“The Academy’s admission requires a formal evaluation of incoming students’ Blessed status. Given your unusual circumstances tonight, I’ve already sent word ahead requesting an expedited evaluation.”
The door swung open, and a woman in the pale ceremonial robes of the Ashborn Temple stepped inside, flanked by two temple guards.
Her eyes swept the war room once, professional and unbothered by the tension still hanging thick in the air, before settling directly on Caius.
“Caius Draxos,” she said, her voice carrying the formal cadence of temple ritual.
“I am High Oracle Seren, dispatched by order of the Ashborn Temple to conduct an emergency divine resonance reading, following reports of contact with an unregistered Heretical entity.”
Caius’s mind raced.
A divine resonance reading.
If this Oracle was capable of actually reading the nature of his soul, his contract, anything beneath the surface level of his pathetic Ash affinity, there was a very real chance she would sense something far stranger underneath it all.
Something that didn’t belong to this world at all.
The Oracle raised both hands, violet-white light already beginning to gather between her palms, and fixed Caius with an expression of clinical, unblinking focus.
“Hold still,” she said.
“This will only take a moment.”