So. What do you think he's hiding? And why?
The willow sways overhead. The fountain murmurs. For this moment, the world narrows to two mages and a shared question.
Eric's eyes briefly wander on Lena's legs, the back at her curious eyes. Telling her just enough should be acceptable. He reasons, conscious of his constrains.
It is intentional, Lena. The author isn't correcting the anomaly; he is suppressing it to keep the spatial-type mages weak and predictable, as he was instructed.
His words land like stones dropped into still water. Lena's eyes widen—not with shock, but with the recognition of a puzzle piece clicking into place. She opens her mouth to respond—
Eric's voice stops unnaturally: mid-thought, his jaw tightens, his knuckles whiten against the book's spine.
Damn it, even that was too much?! He curses in his head.
A breath catches in his throat—sharp, involuntary—and for a fleeting instant, something flickers across his expression. Pain. Not physical. Deeper. Like a chain pulled taut from the inside.
Then it passes. He exhales. Open the book. Resume reading as though nothing happened.
Lena doesn't resume.
*...*
She watches Eric in silence. Those purple eyes trace the tension still lingering in his shoulders, the controlled steadiness of his breathing, the deliberate casualness of his page-turning. She's seen something she wasn't meant to see.
A restriction. Something preventing him from speaking further.
Her lips press together. She doesn't ask. Doesn't push. Instead, she pulls her knees back up and rests her chin on them, gaze drifting to the willow branches above.
...Suppression. She says it softly—not to him. To herself. Rolling the concept around in her mind. Intentional suppression of spatial-deviation theory. Eighty years of buried research.
A long pause. The fountain trickles.
...Your House. Two words. Barely a whisper. She connects it—his earlier slip, the cold flash, the restriction just now. She doesn't say more. Doesn't need to.
She reaches over without looking and gently tugs the book from his hands. Closes it. Sets it between them on the bench.
...You look like you need a nap more than I do. Quiet. Almost kind. The ceremony's in two hours.
Eric eyes snap open and look her directly in the face, his voice colder than before. Don't overthink it, Lena. Some secrets are meant to remain buried.
Then his head drops onto her thighs without warning. The softness beneath his cheek warm through the fabric of her skirt. But I suppose I can rest a bit, after all.
Under his head he feels her entire body going rigid—every muscle locking at once like a startled animal.
Wh—
Her hands fly up, hovering uselessly in the air on either side of his head as if she's been handed something fragile and dangerous simultaneously. Her thighs tense beneath him.
You— that's— I didn't mean—
Her voice cracks upward an octave. He can feel her heartbeat through her legs—rapid, hammering. The vast ocean of her mana actually ripples—a tiny disturbance in that perfect equilibrium, like a stone tossed into a still lake.
E-Eric. This is. This is a public bench. Each word comes out strangled. People could— someone might—
She doesn't push him off.
Her hands lower slowly—trembling—until they hover just above his hair. They stay there, frozen in indecision. Five seconds. Ten.
...You said don't overthink it. A shaky exhale. You're the one making things... complicated.
Slowly—agonizingly slowly—one hand settles. Not on Eric's head. On the bench beside his shoulder. Close enough to feel the warmth of her fingers. A compromise her pride can survive.
Her heartbeat gradually slows. Her thighs relax, just slightly, beneath his cheek.
..Five minutes. Barely audible. Then you move. Or I'll drop a mana bolt on your face.
She won't.
The willow sways. The gardens are quiet. Eric closes his eyes.
A faint shimmer pulses outward from his fingertips—subtle, almost invisible. The air around the bench warps ever so slightly, bending light and attention away like water parting around a stone. Passersby will glance this direction and see nothing worth noting. A minor spatial distortion—child's play for a Void bloodline, but elegant in its precision.
Lena feels it immediately. Her mana sense catches the spell's architecture, and Eric feels her thighs tense again—not from embarrassment this time, but from analytical reflex.
...A perception-redirect ward. Spatial-class. She murmurs it above him, voice still unsteady but unable to suppress the academic instinct. You wove that without a circle or incantation. Just raw circuit manipulation.
Eric smiles, pleased. I told you... you are interesting.
A pause. You feel her swallow.
...You did that so no one would see us like this.
The realization makes her ears burn fresh crimson. Her hand—the one resting beside his shoulder—twitches. Then, after a long hesitation, her fingers brush against his hair. Barely. A ghost of a touch. She pulls back instantly.
..Interesting. She echoes his word back at him. Quiet. Defeated. You're... really troublesome, Eric.
But her body has relaxed. The tension in her legs softens. Her breathing evens out. The mana around her settles back into its calm, deep rhythm—and now his mingles at the edges. Two different densities meeting, like freshwater touching the sea.
...I'm not explaining chapter seven if you fall asleep.
She says it, but her fingers find their way back. This time they stay—resting lightly, tentatively, in the troublesome lad's hair.
The gardens murmur on around his invisible pocket of stillness. He leans back further into her touch, his voice a drowsy murmur. Then I suppose I will just have to make sure I stay awake for that chapter, won't I?
Her fingers still in his hair for a moment—then resume their tentative path, tracing slow, absent lines across Eric's scalp. It's the kind of touch someone gives when they're pretending they aren't doing it.
Mm. A non-committal sound. But her voice has gone soft—cottony at the edges, like she's the one drifting off now. ...You'd better.
Silence settles between them. Comfortable. The kind that doesn't demand filling.
Minutes pass. The warmth of her lap, the rhythm of her fingers, the gentle pulse of her mana field washing over him like a warm tide—it's dangerously easy to sink into. His own mana circulates slowly, the aftereffect of the restriction fading with each steady breath.
At some point, her hand stops moving. Not because she pulled away—but because her breathing has deepened. Evened out. The great genius of the first-year class has fallen asleep sitting up, fingers still tangled loosely in his hair.
The perception ward holds. The world flows past their willow tree like a river around a stone. Twenty minutes. Thirty. Forty.
Then—
BONG. BONG. BONG.
The academy bell tower rings eleven times. One hour until the opening ceremony.
Lena jolts awake above him, her hand accidentally tightening in his hair.
Mn—ow— what— She blinks rapidly, disoriented. ...What time...
She looks down. Eric is still there. On her lap. Her face cycles through three emotions in one second—confusion, memory, mortification.
...We both fell asleep. Flat. Accusatory.
This is your fault.
He rises from her lap, and she immediately smooths her skirt with frantic hands—as if erasing the evidence. Her silver hair is slightly mussed on one side where she'd leaned against the armrest, and there's a faint crease on her cheek from her sleeve.
She looks, for all her seven circles of power, like a disheveled cat caught in an undignified position.
Eric stretches, then accepts the accusation. Perhaps, but I think the nap was worth the blame, wouldn't you agree?
Worth the— She starts to argue, then stops. Her mouth presses into a thin line. She won't admit it. ...The bench was comfortable. That's all.
A lie. They both know it. She slept better in those forty minutes than she probably has in days—he could feel it in how deeply her mana had settled.
Want to talk about chapter seven before the ceremony? He gives her a way out and, promptly, her expression shifts.
The embarrassment doesn't vanish, but it gets pushed aside—shoved into a box by the part of her brain that lives for theory and puzzles. She pulls her legs up onto the bench, cross-legged, and holds out her hand.
Book.
He hands it over. She flips to chapter seven with practiced speed, landing on a dense diagram—the Veren model of mana circuit symmetry. Her finger taps the central node.
Here. The author assumes bilateral equilibrium as the natural state. But your bloodline's circuits aren't bilateral—they're radial. The mana doesn't flow in loops; it spirals outward from a central axis. Her voice is steady now—in her element. If you force symmetry onto a radial system, you get—
Suppression. She glances at him. Reduced output. Slower casting. Spatial magic that functions at maybe... sixty percent of its theoretical maximum.
She lets that hang in the air. *She's sharp.* Eric observes, his head moving in an imperceptible nod.
So. The question isn't just why the author buried this. Purple eyes meet yours. It's who benefits from keeping Void mages at sixty percent.
She closes the book gently and sets it between them.
...That's as far as I can take it with published theory. The rest is— Her gaze flickers to him. ...yours to tell. Or not.
The bell tower looms in the distance. Fifty minutes until the ceremony.