The single overhead bulb didn’t shine; it leaked. It dropped a weak, small residue of light into the center of the pitch-black basement, just thick enough to illuminate a massive, unpolished stone slab of a table.
Five pairs of hands rested on the stone. Because the darkness swallowed everything above the wrist, it looked less like five people sitting together and more like a bizarre anatomical collection pinned to the table.
They didn’t speak. One man had knuckles that were scarred and thick. All of them wore hooded robes of dark scale, enough to blend their presence entirely into the darkness.
To an outsider, the room would have felt completely empty. There were no faces, no shifts in posture, no glint of eyes in the dark. Just the rhythmic, wet wipe of a cloth and five distinct rhythms of breathing, all tethered to a single slab of dark stone floating in a void.
"How is the unison of waves going?" a man’s cold voice echoed through the room, vibrating the stillness. That voice alone was enough to understand how much authority he possessed.
"It is all going according to plan," another figure calmly responded.
"Good," he nodded.
"What about the holy sword and the saintess?" another hooded figure stood up, eager for the answer. But the leader didn’t look at him. It wasn’t that he didn’t; "he couldn’t" was the more precise phrase. A heavy amount of pressure was being released, forcing the speaker to look only down at the floor.
"Not yet," his cold voice responded
Each piece of information was a dangerous currency traded in the quiet dark, fitting together a puzzle that could either buy their freedom or seal their ruin.
A sudden, sharp scrape of iron against stone cut through the whispers. The hooded figure rose, the movement so fluid it seemed to pull the surrounding shadows up with them. Without a word of farewell or a dramatic promise, they vanished into thin air. Thus, only one remained.
"Oh, Goddess Liana, we will eradicate all the corruption and kill all the betrayers."
***
In the infirmary, he had been sleeping in the same bed for hours, thinking hard about plans to reclaim his good reputation in the academy. While he was deeply lost in thought, someone kicked the door to the room and barged in.
All sorts of tiny thoughts had been swirling inside my mind, but this intrusion pulled me away from them, disrupting the moment of ease in my head.
’Who is this person? Does nobody in this academy want me to have a peaceful day?’ he thought. Looking toward the door, there she was. A cool, aloof girl with a furious face. She had the same eyes as me, looking at me with a disdainful glare.
"Is there anything you want... my little sister?" his voice lacked any touch of gentleness.
Avaria Roderick... Vale’s little sister. She was two years younger than him, but here, age didn’t matter; the only thing that mattered was strength. The little sister who used to support and comfort him was long gone. He couldn’t even remember the last time she had spoken to him gently.
They shared the same blood and the same lineage, but the mana had chosen her with an unblinking, terrifying favoritism. At barely sixteen, his little sister had already crossed the threshold into the Third Class—a rank most acolytes spent half a lifetime praying to glimpse. But she hadn’t just reached it; she had conquered it, cementing her status with the Advanced crest.
She walked forward, each step deliberate and intense. "little sister?" she snorted. "Don’t ever call me that with your mouth!"
She walked until she reached his bed. "This is all you can do," she said in a mocking tone.
"Yup, this is all I can do," he casually agreed, meeting her remark with a wry smile.
It wasn’t his words that broke her patience; it was the look on his face. That infuriatingly calm, maddeningly detached expression irritated her the most. It was as if he were looking at a child throwing a tantrum rather than a Third Class mage who could level the room if she chose to.
Before he could even register the flash of anger in her eyes, she lunged forward and grabbed his hand.
The sudden, aggressive contact sent a jolt of pure confusion through his mind. His thoughts scattered, stumbling over themselves as he stared down at her fingers locked around his wrist.
"What are yo—?" The question died in his throat. Before the words could fully form, a violent, suffocating heat erupted from her palm. It didn’t just burn his skin; it scalded right through to the bone—a sudden torrent of raw, unbridled mana rushing into his veins like liquid fire
"AAAAAAA... AHH!" he screamed until Lady Eriana reached them and pulled her away from him. The scream echoed through the hallway, drawing the attention of some students. A few students passing by the infirmary caught the scene and found it genuinely amusing.
Avaria turned her head, fixing him with a gaze so thick with contempt it felt like a physical blow. There was no warmth left in her eyes, no trace of the sisterly bond they had once shared—only the cold, hard disdain of a superior looking down at a lesser being.
She paused at the threshold, her hand gripping the heavy iron frame of the door. Before she stepped through, she tossed a final sentence over her shoulder, her voice cutting through the quiet room like a shard of ice.
"Ah... Some unpleasant news awaits you, Vale Roderick."
The words hung in the air, heavy and ominous. She didn’t grant him the courtesy of his title. She didn’t buffer the blow with the traditional honorifics due to the head of the house or an elder sibling. To her, in that moment, he was just a name.
Without waiting for a reaction, she spun on her heel and left into the corridor, her cloak billowing behind her as the door clicked shut, leaving Vale alone with the sudden, suffocating weight of her warning.