Twenty minutes earlier.
The heavy mahogany door of Room 402 had barely clicked shut before Harry McGuire stormed out into the carpeted corridor, his boots striking the floor with a rhythmic, furious force.
His silver eyes were wild behind his spectacles, his chest heaving under his rumpled blazer as the humiliation and rage of the last ten minutes boiled over inside his skull.
“That fucking bastard!”
Harry hissed under his breath, his knuckles turning white around the strap of his backpack as he marched toward the elevator bank.
“Who the hell does he think he is? A midline lackey trying to lecture me on survival? He’s nothing but a glorified dog on a leash held by the Mayfair bastard.”
Harry didn’t wait for the elevator.
He shoved through the heavy fire door and descended the concrete stairwell three steps at a time, his breath coming in sharp, ragged gasps.
The air in the midline tower felt suffocating, thick with the scent of wealth and unearned security.
Harry hurried out of the glass-fronted residential building, his pace rapid as he crossed the manicured lawn that separated the mid-tier sector from the gravel paths of the lower academy.
He proceeded directly toward his own quarters—back to the commoners’ dormitories that sat two long, poorly lit blocks away from the safety of the brick towers.
But as the smooth asphalt turned to cracked cobblestone, Harry’s walking pace slowed.
The modern streetlamps of the midline sector faded behind him, replaced by the flickering, amber hum of a single overhead bulb near the old building.
From the shadow of the brickwork, a dense, familiar silhouette detached itself from the wall.
Then another.
And another.
It was the same group of older students from earlier.
Harry found himself sighing in annoyance.
“Well… Didn’t we say we’d meet again, Harry McGuire?”
The voice was low, laced with the rough, gravelly edge of the lower-tier barracks.
They moved with a synchronized, practiced malice, splitting apart to effectively block Harry’s path forward while the remaining two slid behind him, surrounding him completely within the narrow lane.
Harry stopped dead in his tracks.
He didn’t drop his bag; he simply straightened his spine, his silver eyes cold and lethal as he looked at the four figures crowding his space.
“I actually don’t have time for these silly little games right now,”
Harry hissed, his voice dropping into a dangerous, flat register that carried the residual venom from his fight with Lucas.
He was truly infuriated.
“So please get the hell out of my way immediately.”
“And what if we don’t want to?”
The leading senior snickered, his thick boots scraping against the loose gravel as he slowly drew his steps closer to Harry.
He wore his commoner’s uniform with a deliberate sloppiness, the collar unbuttoned to reveal a thick throat.
“Why don’t we just finish off what we started before that midline fag disturbed us earlier?” the leader suggested, leaning his head forward until his features were caught in the pale amber light.
He reeked of cheap cigarettes.
“After all… we took our own sweet time waiting out here in the cold for you. We figured a pretty boy like you might miss his room at some point tonight.”
Harry didn’t flinch from the smell.
He merely tilted his chin, his gaze cutting through them like glass.
“You commoner scum… what the hell do you actually want from me? Who sent you to harass me? Was it the elite circle?”
“No one,” the leader laughed, a short, wet sound that made the boys behind him chuckle in unison.
“Mhm… but if we absolutely had to put a reason behind it, let’s just call it glazing. An initiation for the glorious Harry McGuire into being one of us. A sudden commoner who fell from glory.”
The boy took another step, his fingers twitching.
“We all heard the rumors, McGuire. We heard your family completely disowned you and threw you to the wolves. We heard even Andrew Mayfair can’t stand the sight of you anymore, so he sent you down here to the dirt to rot with the rest of us. So from now on, let’s become real good friends, hmm?”
Harry let out a long, slow sigh.
Right now, he was in the worst mood humanly possible to entertain their pathetic playground games.
“Get the hell out of my way right now,”
Harry repeated, his voice dropping an octave, his glare fixing on each of them in a promise of violence.
“Oh, come on, Harry, don’t be like that to your new friends,” the leader mocked, his hand rising to lazily wave through the air between them.
“It’s just a little bit of glazing and a little bit of fun. We just want to perform a little experiment with you tonight… and I’m sure you’ll end up having plenty of fun too.”
Harry’s brow furrowed, his patience snapping completely.
“Experiment?… What the fuck are you talking about, bastard?”
The leader smirked, his eyes dropping down Harry’s frame with a disgusting, slow deliberation.
“If each of us sleeps with you at once… will you also get pregnant for each of us?”
Harry’s eyes involuntarily popped out of their sockets, a sudden, cold shock freezing the blood in his veins.
The surrounding boys let out a dark, guttural chuckle, circling him much closer now, their shoulders overlapping to block out the rest of the campus from his view.
“Or better yet,” one of the boys behind him whispered, “let’s just make a bet among ourselves about who will actually succeed in knocking you up first.”
Harry didn’t waste another second on words.
With a sudden, explosive movement, he threw his right fist straight into the leader’s jaw.
The impact was loud—the distinct *crack* of knuckles meeting bone.
The leader’s head snapped back violently, his boots leaving the gravel as he stumbled into the dirt.
The other seniors gasped, completely shocked and frozen for a single, critical moment.
They hadn’t expected a high-born main line child to strike first with such raw, unrefined force.
“You’ve been babbling complete nonsense for a while now,”
Harry breathed, his voice trembling with an volatile mixture of rage and disgust as he pulled his fist back.
“And I’m afraid I am quite an impatient man to entertain your shitty nonsense any longer, so let me beat some morals into you quickly.”
The leader touched his fingers to his mouth, bringing them away to see a smear of dark crimson running from his split lip.
He looked up at Harry, surprise evident in his eyes—but it lasted for only a brief, terrifying moment before his face contorted into pure malice.
“You little—”
The boy lunged, throwing a heavy, sweeping punch that caught Harry squarely across the left cheek.
Before Harry could reset his balance, a second blow struck him right over the ear.
The double impact sent Harry stumbling backward into the brick wall, his reading glasses slipping from his nose and clattering loudly onto the concrete flags below.
“Ah, Harry… you’re quite full of yourself, I admit,” the leader spat, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as he closed the distance.
“But I like that confidence. It just makes me even more eager to see exactly how long you’ll hold on to it tonight.”
“What made you believe you could get past all of us anyway?” another senior mocked from the left.
They laughed at him, a cruel, rhythmic sound as they began to physically push him side to side among each other, catching his shoulders only to shove him back into the center like a ragdoll, swaying him around in their closed circle.
“There is absolutely no one coming to help you this time, McGuire,” the leader whispered, his face inches from Harry’s.
“Even the campus guards won’t see us when we fuck the daylights out of you in this alley. You’re invisible down here.”
That statement actually pissed Harry off.
It didn’t just rattle him because he was deeply repulsed by the horrific idea of these boys laying their hands on him—it infuriated him because even commoners like them, the absolute lowest tier of the academy’s social ladder, actually believed they could do whatever they pleased to him simply because he had lost his seat at the high table.
‘Was choosing to lay low in the commoners’ side a bad idea after all?’
Harry thought, his teeth grinding together so hard his jaw ached.
‘To think that I actually believed they’d stay away from me if I wore their uniform…
But it seems like I don’t belong anywhere in this place.
High towers or low dirt, they are all exactly the same.’
With a low growl, he lunged forward toward the nearest boy on his left, driving a hard, technical punch straight into the senior’s solar plexus.
As the boy doubled over, Harry swiftly turned to the next, launching a sharp, lateral kick that caught the second attacker in the knee, the joint buckling with a sickening pop.
Without breaking his momentum, Harry drove his forehead directly into the face of the third boy who attempted to grab his jacket.
*Crack.*
While they were still entirely surprised that a main line heir could actually make use of his fists in a street brawl, two of the seniors were already groaning on the gravel, holding their broken faces.
Harry stood in the center of the lane, his hair disheveled, a fierce, manic grin breaking across his bruised lips.
“What? You bastards actually thought I was some kind of helpless damsel in distress just because of my looks? Oh, well… you’ve got another thing coming, you assholes. Come at me! Come—”
A heavy, crushing blow to the back of his skull cut the words right out of his mouth.
Harry groaned in absolute agony, his knees instantly turning to water as the world spun in a violent, dizzying circle.
He forced his body to turn around, his silver eyes trying to focus on the figure standing behind him.
It was the leader.
He was holding a heavy brick in his right hand, his fingers stained with grey mortar dust as he snickered, a satisfied, demonic grin stretching across his split face.
“We’ll admit it… you’re a bit of a monster, McGuire,” the leader whispered, weighing the brick in his palm.
“But even that isn’t going to get in our way tonight.”
Harry reached up, his fingers touching the back of his buzzing head.
When he brought his hand back into the pale amber light, his palm was soaked with a thick, warm stain of fresh blood.
A pounding, rhythmic headache instantly shattered his vision, making it nearly impossible to keep his feet under him.
But before he could even shake his focus back to the punks standing across from him, the remaining three seniors jumped on him all at once, their collective weight bearing him down into the dirt.
They beat him up all at once, their heavy boots and fists raining down without structure or mercy.
Harry covered his head with both his arms, curling into a tight, defensive ball on the cobblestones as he groaned against the ground, receiving dozens of heavy blows to his ribs, his shoulders, and his spine.
“You–… you fucking cowardly dogs!”
Harry choked out, his mouth filling with the metallic taste of his own blood.
Before he could finish his curses, two pair of rough hands seized him by the collar of his shredded blazer, pulling him up into a standing position while they locked his arms brutally behind his back.
Harry’s head hung low, his chest heaving as he tried to blink the blood out of his eyes.
The leader chuckled, walking up to him with a slow, measured stride.
He formed a thick fist, drawing it back as if aiming for Harry’s face—but the blow was actually directed with full force straight into Harry’s exposed gut.
*Thud.*
Harry’s eyes nearly fell out of his head from the sheer impact of the breath leaving his lungs.
The leader didn’t stop; he continuously punched Harry’s gut, three, four, five times, until the fabric of the white shirt beneath the blazer began to tear.
Harry let out a broken groan, coughing out loud as the seniors finally released his arms.
He fell heavily down onto his knees in the dirt, his hands pressed against his stomach as he tried desperately to catch a single breath of air.
But before his lungs could expand, another heavy blow—a solid boot to the side of his temple—shattered what was left of his consciousness.
He fell completely flat on the ground, bloody, broken, and beaten up bad.
“Time to go have some real fun, boys,” the leader’s voice sounded distant, muffled by the ringing in Harry’s ears.
“Drag him along to the quiet alley behind the barracks. No one goes down there after dark.”
The boys let out a low chuckle, reaching down to grab Harry by his ankles, lifting his legs as they began to haul his heavy, unresisting body down the path, his uniform dragging through the grit and the dry leaves.
“No…”
Harry’s voice came out as nothing more than a broken, breathless whisper against the stone.
With a final, desperate surge of survival instinct, he dug his fingernails into the cracks of the cobblestones, trying to anchor himself to the earth, trying to resist the pull.
But his fingers slipped, leaving ten dark streaks in the dust as his grip failed completely, and the darkness swallowed him whole.