I had built an image in my head on the walk over, the way you do when a rumor gets handed to you secondhand and your imagination fills in the rest without asking permission. Former Royal Army Captain. The words alone did most of the work. I pictured someone built like a doorframe, scarred across one eye, a voice that could strip paint off a wall from across a parade ground.
The room did nothing to correct that expectation. If anything, it made it worse.
The Combat Fundamentals hall was not a classroom. It was a wound cut into the Academy’s foundations and left open on purpose. White walls rose high enough that the ceiling sat somewhere past comfortable viewing distance, the stone bare of any carpet, any warmth, any concession to the idea that a person might want to feel at ease in here. A stone staircase climbed one wall at an angle that made no architectural sense, cutting up toward the middle of the ceiling and simply stopping there, embedded flush into the stone, going nowhere, leading to nothing. I stared at it for a solid three seconds trying to find the logic in it and gave up.
Along the far wall stood a row of training dummies, human in shape, human in proportion, deliberately, unsettlingly so. No claws. No wrong number of joints. Just torsos and limbs built to remind you exactly what you would eventually be swinging a weapon at, in case anyone in the room had been holding onto the comfortable idea that combat class was only ever going to mean fighting monsters.
’This room was not designed to make anyone comfortable,’ I thought. ’I do not think that was an accident.’
Arthur exhaled slowly beside me. "Cheerful."
"Very."
We filed in with the rest of the class, boots echoing far too loudly off stone that swallowed nothing, and found a spot near the middle of the crowd. I kept waiting for the doorframe-shaped man from my imagination to walk in and confirm every assumption I had made about him.
Instead, the side door opened, and a wheelchair rolled through it.
I did not immediately connect the two. My brain simply refused the information for a full second, the way it refuses anything that arrives too far outside the shape it had already prepared for.
The man in the chair wore a long, dark coat that pooled around him even seated, collar high, and a wide-brimmed hat that would have looked more at home on a stage magician than a war veteran. Black hair fell loose beneath it, a little too long, a little too careless for the rest of him. A cane rested across his lap, not for walking, I realized, since he was not walking, but held the way a man holds something out of habit long after its original purpose stopped mattering.
He did not look broken. He did not look diminished. He looked like a man who had simply decided, at some point, that a wheelchair was not going to be the part of him anyone remembered.
’That is not what I pictured,’ I thought, distantly, still recalibrating. ’That is not remotely what I pictured.’
He rolled to the center of the room, stopped, and looked out over all of us with an expression that was somehow both entirely relaxed and entirely unreadable.
"Draeus," he said, by way of introduction, offering nothing else. No family name. No rank. Just the one word, dropped into the room like it was supposed to be enough.
It was. Nobody asked for more.
"I know what several of you were told before walking in here," he continued, voice dry, almost amused, "and I know what several of you are currently rearranging in your heads right now. Former Royal Army Captain. You pictured someone taller." A beat. "I get that a lot."
A ripple of nervous laughter went through the room. I did not laugh, mostly because I was too busy staring.
"We are going to talk about fighting today," Draeus said, "specifically fighting people, which I understand feels like a strange place to start when half of you signed up for this Academy dreaming about Unorthodox creatures and gates and the Realm of Evil." He tapped the cane once against the stone floor, an idle, unhurried sound. "That is coming. Be patient. There is an entire class dedicated to explaining exactly how much worse things get once you are past a gate, and it is not this one, and I would very much like to keep my job, so I am going to stop myself right there before I say something that makes that professor’s first lecture redundant."
More laughter, looser this time.
’Okay,’ I thought. ’I like him.’
That was the moment Fars Hurricane decided to ruin it.
He was tall, broad through the shoulders in the deliberate way that suggested training rather than luck, blond hair combed with more effort than the rest of us had bothered putting into our own that morning. I did not know him yet, not personally, but I recognized the type immediately, the specific breed of noble son who had never once in his life been told no by someone whose opinion he respected.
"What exactly," Fars said, loud enough to carry, loud enough to be heard by design rather than accident, "can a wheelchaired bastard teach the rest of us?"
The room went very still.
A few students near him laughed, quick and nervous, the kind of laugh that comes from wanting to be on the winning side of a joke before you know if it is actually funny. A couple of girls near the front exchanged a glance that Fars clearly noticed, clearly wanted, and clearly mistook for admiration rather than secondhand embarrassment.
Draeus did not react. Not immediately. He simply looked at Fars the way you might look at a puppy that had just knocked over something expensive, mildly curious about what it would do next.
"I could defeat him," Fars announced, to the room now, not just to us, "right now. Easily."
’Do not,’ I thought, with the specific, helpless clarity of someone watching a disaster arrive several seconds before it lands. ’Please, for the love of everything, do not.’
He did.
Fars strode forward, shoulders squared, the confident, loose-limbed walk of someone who had never once considered the possibility of losing, and Draeus watched him come with an expression that had shifted, subtly, into something closer to genuine amusement than boredom.
He did not raise the cane. He did not move at all.
Fars closed the last few feet between them, already opening his mouth for whatever line he had planned to deliver at the end of this, and then he simply stopped walking and started screaming.
It happened too fast to properly track. One moment he was upright, smug, mid-stride. The next he was on the ground, both hands clutched around his own skull, screaming in a way that had nothing performative left in it at all, the raw, involuntary sound of someone experiencing something his body had clearly decided was an emergency.
"Forgive me," he sobbed, the words barely intelligible between screams, "please, forgive me, I did not mean it, forgive me—"
Draeus sighed. It was a small sound, almost bored, the sound of a man mildly inconvenienced rather than one who had just done whatever he had done.
He waved one hand, lazy, barely a gesture at all.
Fars stopped screaming immediately, gasping instead, chest heaving, scrambling backward across the stone floor like something had physically thrown him. He was on his feet a second later and running, actually running, straight out the door he had walked in through not two minutes earlier, and even after the door swung shut behind him, I swore I could still hear him screaming somewhere down the hallway, fading, but not fast enough.
Nobody in the room said anything for a long moment.
I glanced sideways at Arthur. Arthur’s face had gone the specific pale of someone doing very fast, very quiet math about a decision he had almost made five minutes ago and was now deeply grateful he had not.
’Right,’ I thought. ’Former Royal Army Captain. Not "used to pour tea for the officers." Noted. Filed. Never forgetting that.’
"As I was saying," Draeus said, into the silence, entirely unbothered, as though nothing at all had just happened in the middle of his own classroom, "we are going to talk about fighting people today."
Nobody laughed this time. Nobody made a single sound.
"Good," he said. "Glad we are on the same page now."
He gestured toward a rack against the near wall, rows of plain wooden dueling canes lined up in neat, identical rows. "Pick one up. Not for today’s lesson, just so your hands remember what holding a weapon feels like. Most of you have never held anything heavier than a fork."
We did as instructed, filing forward one at a time, the room filled with the low clatter of wood against wood as sixty first-years figured out, mostly badly, how a cane was supposed to sit in an untrained hand. Mine felt lighter than I expected, and heavier at the same time, in the way things do when you know, abstractly, that you are going to have to actually use it eventually.
Draeus rolled slowly along the front row while we settled, cane resting across his lap again, voice returning to that same easy, unhurried register from before.
"Most of your training in this Academy will eventually point you toward the Realm of Evil," he said, "toward things that do not have a human shape and do not fight like anything human. That is what most of you came here to learn." He paused, gaze sweeping the room, and something behind his eyes sharpened, just slightly, just enough that I noticed. "But there will be times, and I promise you this, when the thing across from you is a person. Another Awakened. Someone with a Core, an affinity, and the same basic training you are receiving right now. And a person is not a distorted creature with claws in the wrong places. A person has weaknesses that do not change no matter how powerful they get."
He tapped the wooden dummy nearest to him with the tip of the cane, once, almost gently.
"The throat. The eyes. The joints, knee, elbow, wrist, anywhere the body is forced to bend and therefore forced to be weaker than the solid bone around it. The gut, if you want them doubled over and unable to breathe properly for the next several seconds, which in a fight is closer to several years." He moved the cane, tapping each point as he named it, and the room had gone completely silent again, the good kind of silent, the kind built entirely out of paying attention. "Power does not protect any of that. A Gold Core with an affinity that can level a building still has a throat that closes exactly the same way yours does."
I found myself leaning forward slightly without meaning to, cane forgotten in my hand.
’This is useful,’ I thought. ’This is actually useful.’
Draeus kept going, unhurried, methodical, walking us through stance, through the difference between where an untrained person instinctively guards and where they should actually be guarding, through the specific, practical cruelty of knowing exactly where a body wanted to break. He did not raise his voice once. He did not need to. The entire hall had gone quiet in a way that Professor Vane’s sharpest reprimand had never quite managed to produce, and I did not think that quiet had much to do with the lecture itself.
Somewhere near the back of the room, I caught a glimpse of the door Fars had fled through, still slightly ajar, and wondered, not for the first time that hour, exactly what a former Royal Army Captain had actually seen out there, on whatever front line had left him in that chair, to make him this calm about everything else.
’Whatever it was,’ I thought, watching him tap the dummy’s throat a final time, unbothered, almost gentle, ’I do not think I want to know yet.’
By the time the bell tolled somewhere deep in the Academy’s stonework, my arm ached from holding a piece of wood I had not even properly swung, and my head was fuller than it had been walking in, not with rules this time, but with something that felt, uncomfortably, like respect.
Draeus rolled back toward the side door as the class began filing out, and just before he vanished through it, he looked back once, briefly, in my direction. Not lingering. Not obvious. Just long enough that I felt it.
I told myself it meant nothing.
I did not entirely believe myself.