A soft, biting breeze swept through the towering stone corridors of the academy. Autumn had officially arrived, bringing with it a sudden, cold shiver that rustled the golden-brown leaves clinging to the courtyard trees. It was the morning immediately following Vale’s exile.
Moving through the bustling crowd of gossiping students was a familiar, timid figure. He walked with hunched shoulders, his gaze cast downward, carefully avoiding eye contact. It was the perfected mask he always wore, a flawless shield of insignificance.
Once he cleared the main courtyard, his bare feet led him toward one of the most secluded, overgrown corners of the academy grounds—a ruined stone terrace swallowed by wild ivy.
As soon as he stepped into the shadows of the ruins, the boy’s timid posture shattered. He stretched his back fluidly, letting out a long, lazy yawn.
"Hey, Histrio."
The voice was flat, originating from a crouched figure sitting near a crumbling stone wall.
Kail looked over. The cadet was idly tracing his finger through the damp mud. He was moving his hand in forceful, sweeping circles as if playing a childish game.
But when boy finally lifted his finger, a lone ant was left behind in the dirt, its limbs trembling violently as it struggled to survive the crushing weight of his play.
Kail stared down at the hopeless ant. His eyebrows furrowed slightly. "Don’t call me by that name in here."
Reaching into his spatial bracelet, Kail retrieved a small, wrapped parcel of high-grade dried meat and tossed it carelessly aside.
Cadet bored expression vanished instantly. With a delighted gleam in his eyes, he snatched the food out of the air and immediately began stuffing it into his mouth at an alarming speed.
"B—b... t-h... w-wh..."
Irritated by the muffled, animalistic chewing noises, Kail’s eyebrow twitched violently.
"JUST EAT IT."
Dreig devoured the food in seconds, swallowing hard before placing a hand over his stomach, looking as though he were still harboring a mild, lingering hunger.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and looked up. "By the way... was it really necessary to push that punk?"
Kail stopped, genuinely bewildered. His mouth hung slightly open. "Are you really the one saying that to me?
"Hey, don’t give me that look," the cadet mumbled, shifting his weight.
"Man, look at that ant," Kail muttered, leaning back to sit on the narrow stone wall, his voice dripping with dry exhaustion from playing the weakling all day.
"You aren’t even planning to spare its life, yet you’re lecturing me?"
Cadet let out a light, airy chuckle. Without warning, he brought his finger down with sudden, brutal force directly onto the struggling ant. The insect’s remaining life was snuffed out in an instant, crushed into the dirt.
When cadet stood up, his entire facade changed. The childish hunger and boredom vanished, replaced by a deathly serious, icy demeanor. He looked down at Kail with a piercing, frozen stare.
"Kail. You were supposed to stay completely quiet until the mission officially begins. And now, because of your little game, you’ve shown your true face."
Kail didn’t flinch. Instead, he forced a bright, entirely innocent expression onto his face, holding his hands up in mock surrender. "Sorry, sorry, Dreig. It won’t happen again. Besides, the guy is already expelled. Even if he tries to crawl back and tell someone the truth, do you honestly think a single soul would believe a magicless defect over me?"
Dreig slowly withdrew his cold glare, turning his head to look up at the gray, autumn sky. "Our Lord only asked us to watch him. We are merely devotees, Kail. We must never cross the line. Not ever."
Hearing the mention of their deity, the playful sarcasm instantly drained from Kail’s face. He nodded seriously, his posture stiffening with absolute, unquestioning reverence. Whenever it concerned the Lord, there was no room for games.
"Hmm... that Erwin, though," Dreig muttered, lazily scratching his head as he stared toward the main spires of the academy. "Let’s see how much longer he gets to live."
Meanwhile, far from the polished stone of the academy, the city streets roared with the aggressive, suffocating vitality of the mid-day rush.
Merchants barked out prices like threats, their gravelly voices clashing over tables piled high with bruised fruit, coarse vegetables, and cheap tin trinkets.
The crowd was a shifting, claustrophobic wall of damp wool, heavy breath, and the pungent stench of sweat. The sea of bodies parted only slightly to let people through before closing right back up.
Vale walked through the chaos like a ghost navigating the realm of the living.
His fingers were turned bone-white where they tightly gripped the rough strap of the canvas bag slung over his shoulder. The bag was heavy, stuffed to its limits with the meager belongings he had left to his name, but his muscles felt completely numb to the strain.
In truth, he felt remarkably little of anything.
His face was a frozen mask of cold disbelief—a protective numbness that set in when a shock was simply too massive for the human mind to process. There was no grief, no raging anger, and no tears. There was only a vast, echoing hollow.
His eyes scanned the upper stories of the cramped, leaning buildings lining the narrow alley. He tracked the faded, salt-stained wooden shingles and the rusty, iron-wrought signs creaking ominously in the autumn wind.
"Is there really not a single decent apartment here?" Vale muttered, his head starting to spin.
The sun was rapidly dipping below the horizon, casting long, bloody shadows across the cobblestones, yet nothing had caught his eye. His vision began to blur at the edges, a sudden, burning heat blooming behind his eyes.
"Kid."
Vale stopped. A middle-aged woman stood in front of him, her brow furrowed with concern. Behind her apron, a small, dirty-faced child clutched her skirts, staring intensely up at him with wide, curious eyes.
"Your nose is bleeding," the woman said, her voice rising with sudden urgency.
Vale blinked, raising a trembling hand to his upper lip. His fingers came away slick with warm, dark crimson. Before the woman could even reach out to steady him, his knees buckled, and the world spun violently into darkness.
In the void of his unconsciousness, a nightmare bloomed.
A figure stood in the center of a desolate wasteland, wielding a dark, heavily corroded spear. The sheer, suffocating pressure radiating from the figure’s hand cracked the earth, surrounded by shattered rubble and piles of dead, decaying bodies. It was a landscape of pure slaughter.
Terror ripped through Vale’s chest, paralyzing him. He couldn’t draw a single breath into his lungs. In an instant, the figure leveled the corroded spear and charged with blinding, impossible speed.
The weapon pierced directly through his chest.
As the darkness began to swallow his vision in the dream, a cold, mocking whisper echoed in his ears:
"I never knew you would become the Herald of her."
Vale’s body jolted. His eyes snapped open, and he sat bolt upright in bed, gasping desperately for air as if he had just broken the surface of deep water.
His hand flew to his chest, his fingers frantically clawing at his shirt, searching for the gaping wound left by the spear. To his immense relief, his skin was entirely intact.
"Easy there," a calloused but steady voice drifted over from the far side of the room. "You’re breathing like a horse that’s run its last mile."
Vale’s head snapped toward the sound, his heart still hammering against his ribs.
A woman was standing near a small stone hearth in the corner. A heavy iron pot bubbled quietly over the embers, sending up thick, fragrant plumes of savory steam.
She wore a stained canvas apron over a dark, sturdy woolen dress, her sleeves rolled tightly up to her elbows to reveal forearms dusted with flour and glistening with light sweat from the heat.
She looked him over with a sharp, assessing squint, though her gaze wasn’t entirely unkind.
"Thought for a moment there I’d carried a corpse into my back room," she said, wiping her hands on a dry rag. "You went down incredibly hard in the alley out front."
She walked over, the floorboards groaning softly under her heavy leather boots, and set a steaming bowl of thick stew on the wooden table next to his cot, alongside a substantial, crusty chunk of day-old bread.
"Eat," she commanded gently, gesturing to the bowl with a tilt of her chin "You look like a stiff breeze could blow you apart, and I don’t need patrons dying in my private quarters. It’s bad for business."