Arcane Mercenary Chapter 16-20

Chapter 16

Rade

There’s a special kind of silence that follows you when the whole Academy is pretending nothing happened.

Officially, the courtyard meltdown was a “training exercise accident.” The Wardhall said as much on a neat little placard by the door. Seniors limped around with bandages and perfect posture, as if stiffness were a uniform requirement. The gossip was feral for twenty-four hours and then—nothing. Shut tight. No names, no blame, no lists.

In that vacuum, every glance got heavier.

Girls still drifted toward Cale between classes like he was a gravity well with hair. Nobles still pretended not to look. Scholarship kids still muttered, but quieter, like the soundtrack had been turned down out of respect for some invisible funeral. Cale didn’t play to any of it. He was the eye of his own rumor storm—still, quiet, uninterested.

Which is to say: he sat down next to me again.

He didn’t make a big deal out of it. He never does. Just came into Halden’s lecture, scanned rows like a hawk, and sat in the empty seat behind a boy who sumptuously decided they were going to be friends.

“Hey,” I said, swallowing a wrench. I swear I sound some dumb everytime I talk.

“Hey,” he said, which I had decided was basically a life dissteration for him.

Halden talked about core stability under environmental stress. I pretended to take notes and instead made went into to Expression specialization. I have a core, like most people my age. But didn't going to into the Aura field like most of my classmates.

The whole time I could feel it: the way the row in front of us leaned back one half-inch to hear if he breathed; the way two girls in the aisle kept flicking their hair like spells; the way Mikel Thorne, three rows down, cut his eyes sideways just enough to be petty.

When the bell rang, I decided to put my whole life on one die roll.

“Cale. Have you ever played mana games??” I said, words elbowing each other on the way out. “There’s a shop just off campus. The good rigs. You can, um, try Dominion Clash. Or not. We can just sit there and breathe, that’s also a thing.”

Cale blinked, neutral as always. "I've played Mana games before. But I am not every good at it.

I smiled. "Everyone cannot be good at everything. You seem to be good Aura and Arcanum which means you have two cores that are well developed."

I let the implied question sit out there.

Cale shrugged. "I developed interest in Expressions earlier and had a good teacher."

T

I felt something in my ribcage throw confetti.

We made it out the archway before Darren Vale spotted us.

“Rade!” he bellowed, somewhere between a shout and a bark of laughter. “You kidnapping celebrities now?”

Darren is the kind of person who greets you like he’s been late to a party and you’re the party. Middle height with dirty-blond hair perpetually at war with gravity and grin you can see from the next courtyard over. His parents are Dominion Skynavy logistics—officers who count crates, assign caravans, keep the empire’s tax-blood from clotting. Darren acts like this makes him an admiral.

Beside him, Mikel Thorne managed to look like he’d just smelled the wrong kind of incense. He was everything Darren wasn’t: neat black hair, tie perfectly knotted, sarcasm polished to a reflective sheen. His family had a crest somewhere, low-branch noble with more history than money. His parents both rode desks at the Bureau of Supply and would absolutely correct your grammar while denying you a shovel.

They stopped dead when they realized who was walking with me.

“Transfer,” Darren said, recovering first. He slapped a palm against his chest as if to steady his own heart. “You slumming it?”

Mikel’s smile was a cut. “Rade bribed him. With what? Those terrible spice nuts? Your friendship? Spare me.”

“Shut up,” I said, in the way you only can when you love someone like a brother and wish they would fall down a flight of stairs just a little. “We’re going to the shop.”

Cale watched them both without moving, which made both of them fidget.

“Shop?” Darren perked. “You mean the shop?”

“The good one,” I said.

“Skewers,” Darren said, already changing direction.

“Gloves that don’t smell like dojo mat,” Mikel added, which was his way of saying yes.

Cale look a bit confused by the gesture but put up a hand. “Give me a moment.”

He pulled out a sleek commuication device and tapped the screen as he gained a bit of distance. Not enough we could still hear him though obviously I could only hear one side of the conversation.

“Yes. I got invited to a shop. I will meet you then run you home before I go--no, its ok I don't mind."

We cut off campus through the east gate. The streets immediately shed Arclight’s marble neatness for the real city’s noise: street vendors chanting their wares, Technica drones humming overhead, steam from the lower baths curling around lamp-posts etched with wards. The shop sat mid-block under a faded sign that used to be elegant and now looked like it had seen a duel or two: Mana & Mirth.

It smelled like a bad idea and home—ozone, oil, sugar. Rows of carved desks held crystal rigs like altars, each with a headband and gauntlet set resting on a rack. The crystals hummed at a pitch you felt in your teeth. Lanterns hung close and warm. A counter at the back sold skewers that dripped spice and juice and sin. A stack of fizzy mana-cola bottles popped little blue sparks at the caps to keep attention.

“Two skewers, one fizz,” Darren told the clerk as we came in, slapping down coin with ceremony. “No basil. Basil is for cowards.”

“Three skewers,” Mikel corrected, already sliding a pair of gloves onto his fingers with the reverence of a priest. “One for whoever wins. One for whoever loses. One for me.”

I made for our usual bank of rigs along the left wall—low glare, decent airflow, best line of sight to the snack counter because priorities—and fired up a station. The runework bloomed across the crystal in a lattice of pale light, then resolved into the polished interface of Dominion Clash.

“Okay,” I said, trying to sound casual when my insides had started drumming. “It’s five versus five. Capture points, destroy core, try not to feed. Everyone picks an avatar that maps to an Expression. You channel mana through the headset and gloves. It—uh—it feels real. But it’s not. Mostly.”

Cale touched the headband, curious. The rig hummed and then did something I hadn’t seen before: its glow sharpened. Like it was… greeting him.

“Pick a lane, pick a role,” Mikel said, dropping into the chair to my right like he belonged to it. “And try to remember you have a team, Darren.”

“I am the team,” Darren said through a mouthful of skewer.

I threw the party queue up. Our tags flickered in: RADETACTICIAN. THORNE_ILLUSIA. DARRENBRUISER. I left the fourth slot open and gestured to Cale. He reached for the selection wheel, paused for a half-second, and then let his hand settle over a lightning avatar. The crystal’s glow ticked up another notch.

I tried not to squeak.

“Good choice,” Darren said. “We needed a carry.”

“We needed a brain,” Mikel said. “Narrow like yours, we take what we get.”

Five chimes. Queue pop. We synced in.

The rig did the thing it always does—the world telescoping down to a breath and then unfurling again into a battlefield. Our avatars stood on a platform carved with too-slick Dominion eagles. Three lanes stretched out across a ruin-themed map: left through crumbling arches, mid across cracked flagstones, right through shattered market stalls. The enemy’s core pulsed red on the far platform like a heartbeat you hated.

“Assignments,” I said. “Darren top, Mikel mid, I’ll support bot with—uh—”

“Cale,” Cale said. Simple.

“Cale,” I echoed, like a prayer. “Perfect.”

We took lanes. Darren got to work being a hero. His Aura avatar was a slab of muscle and bravado with a knock-up that felt like getting hit by a low-flying cart. He engaged early and often, which is polite-speak for “he dove under a core tower at level three and nearly died.”

“Left flank! LEFT—” he started to scream.

“I see it,” Mikel said, and the air near Darren bent. Mikel’s Illusia layered the lane in mirror images and false terrain; enemy avatars faltered, struck the wrong projection, and got punished for it. Mikel cackled, which meant he was happy. Probably.

I warded the river with glyph-traps and dropped a Scriptura slow at the turn. “Bot incoming. Two. Their Arcanum tactician and a bruiser.”

“On it,” Cale said.

The thing about mana-games is they’re supposed to teach you coordination. You learn line-of-sight, you learn cooldown timing, you learn when to talk and when to shut up. You don’t usually learn what it feels like to be in the lane with somebody who makes the rig pay attention.

Cale’s lightning avatar moved like the world owed it space. He didn’t spam abilities. He didn’t jitter-step. He waited, watching the enemy bruiser telegraph his strike, watching the tactician begin to lay down a suppression field, and then he stepped.

Not far. Not dramatic. Just—exact. One dash to the side, a slice of white-blue across the tactician’s roots, another snap into the bruiser’s shoulder. The rig threw haptics into my gloves and I felt the impact like a bell.

Both enemy avatars slammed backward as if pulled by a hook. Cale didn’t chase. He took the capture point instead, standard as breathing.

“…Okay,” Darren said, which in Darren meant holy gods.

“Legal or not?” Mikel asked, mild. He meant it as provocation, but it came out a little breathless.

“Legal,” I said. My voice sounded like it had relocated two inches to the left of my body. “Just… clean.”

For the next ten minutes, it was that—clean. We rotated. We traded towers. I dropped slows and shields; Mikel wrapped fights in shadows and made their mid cry in chat; Darren made questionable decisions loudly and got rewarded for them because sometimes the gods love idiots.

Cale didn’t talk. He didn’t have to. He’d ping once and appear where the ping had predicted, lightning paring a three-man push down to one with surgical cruelty. Every now and then I caught a glance of his avatar’s eyes—stormglass violet in the game just like outside it—and felt the same pressure I’d felt in the quad. It wasn’t the rig. It wasn’t the code. It was just him: presence translated, simplified, still a weight.

“Group mid,” I called, breathless, because we were about to make a run at the core and I had two wards and a dream.

We converged in a four-man stack. The enemy had set up a nasty little trap: Illusia doubles layered with Arcana Nova’s stun field, a bruiser waiting just out of sight. Good play.

“On my mark,” I said. “Three… two—”

Lightning lanced across the screen, cutting the field in two before I hit one.

Our avatars slid through the gap as if the world had been designed that way. Darren charged with a bellow that drew aggro from their whole team. Mikel layered illusions so thick the enemy bruiser punched a pillar and apologized to it. I dropped shields and watched bars tilt in our favor, the core’s health peeling away, an orange-red scream.

“Finish,” Cale said, the first instruction he’d given all game.

We did.

The core exploded into a firework blossom. The rig’s haptics softened, the world telescoped again, the lanterns came back, and sound punched the room—kids shouting, a clerk laughing, mana-cola caps popping, somebody from the back calling that the skewers were out.

Darren ripped off his headband, hair sticking up like he’d been in a wind tunnel. “Okay,” he said, noble and definitive. “He’s on our squad forever.”

Mikel took his time to unglove, searching for a way to say that was astonishing and I hate you that didn’t make him sound like he meant either part. He settled on, “Not bad, transfer.”

Cale took off the headset like he was removing a hat he hadn’t known he’d put on. He looked exactly the same as when we’d walked in: unruffled, even, uninterested in applause.

I grinned at him anyway. “Told you this place was good.”

He gave me a single nod. “It is.”

Darren shoved a skewer into my hand before I could ruin the moment with more words. “Victory meat,” he said solemnly, then handed one to Cale with a little less solemnity and a little more awe. “For the war god.”

“Please stop,” Mikel said. “You’ll make him leave.”

I bit into the skewer and nearly cried. The spice hit perfect; the grease soaked through the bread in a way that made you count your blessings. Around us, a couple of other kids pretended they weren’t staring. One actually took a step in our direction and then chickened out and detoured to the mana-cola crate instead.

For ten minutes, the world narrowed to snacks and trash talk and the pleasant hum of a place where the worst thing that could happen to you was a loss you could log and forget. Darren argued about patch notes with the clerk. Mikel set the next queue and pretended he wasn’t doing what I knew he was—positioning himself so he’d end up between me and anyone who wanted to say something stupid about who I was sitting with. Cale watched quietly, every now and then dipping his head as if tasting the room’s rhythm.

“Another?” I asked, when the second skewer was nothing but stick and memory.

Cale could have said no. He could have stood and walked out as easy as he breathes; he could have returned to his pillar and his rumors and his gravity. Instead he glanced at the crystal rigs, at the kids stacked three deep at the counter, at me.

“One more,” he said.

Darren whooped. Mikel rolled his eyes and tried not to smile. I set the queue and tried not to explode.

Outside, the city went on being itself. Somewhere further south, power changed hands in rooms with soft chairs and dangerous carpets. Up here, in a crooked shop that smelled like oil and sugar and ozone, four boys who weren’t supposed to be a team became one.

Chapter 17

Ellara

The days after the fight felt like walking through a chapel where someone had just smashed a stained-glass window and everyone was pretending not to see the glass.

Officially, it was a “training exercise accident.” The Wardhall put that on a neat placard by the entrance, and the Vice Principal repeated it in three separate missives, as if the words themselves could glue the courtyard back together. Unofficially, thirty seniors were treated in a single afternoon. The smell of their burned uniforms lingered in the stone. The gossip howled for a night and then went quiet, like a dog kicked under a table.

In that quiet, everything else got louder.

Cale and I fell into a rhythm because rhythm was the only thing that felt like it belonged to us. He met me by the front gate each morning without ever saying he would. He walked me to class. He waited under an arch. He walked me to the next class. He didn’t rush or loom or act like a guard. He simply existed beside me, and the path rearranged itself around us.

Students moved aside now. Not dramatically—no one wanted to be seen giving way—but a half-step here, a shift of a shoulder there. The way water parts for a boat when it isn’t sure it wants to be seen moving. Nobles pretended to be bored; eyes slid away too neatly, laughter polished thin and brittle. Scholarship kids lowered their eyes not out of shame but out of caution, like they’d learned there were questions you could be punished for simply by thinking them too loudly.

Admiration grew teeth. I could feel it. Girls who never noticed the scholarship girl who sat behind them in Expression Studies started finding me after lecture. Not to be cruel, not this time, but to pry through kindness.

“Ellara,” one whispered as we crossed the green, cheeks flushed, crest gleaming. “Your brother… does he have a girlfriend?”

“Is he seeing anyone?” another asked two days later, eyes wide and hopeful and terrified of her own audacity.

A third didn’t bother with pretense. “You know his type, right? Is he into nobles? He looks like he would be. Not—oh gods, I didn’t mean—”

I learned very quickly that there are only two answers that work in a place like Arclight: I don’t know and I’m not sure. Anything else is a stick you hand someone to beat you with later. So I said those two things, and I said them with the softest edges I could manage, and then I found the nearest door and put myself through it.

Even when they didn’t ask me, I caught them watching him from safe distances. From behind a colonnade, from the shade of a warded tree, from the second-floor balustrade outside Scriptura. They stared like he was a secret written in a language they almost remembered how to read—laughing, whispering, daring each other to walk three steps closer and then backing away with the speed of survivors.

The seniors—the broken ones, the ones with bandages under their cuffs and gaiters—said nothing at all. They wore silence like armor. I watched two of them limp past Cale near the fountain and never lift their eyes. One adjusted his bracer and muttered training accident to no one in particular, as if saying it in the open would keep the lie stitched to the skin.

Parents didn’t know yet. You could feel it in the empty spaces of conversation, the way messages home were written with light hands and sent with shaky seals. But the rumors were already leaking beyond campus. The pastry vendor at the east gate asked Selene if the “accident” had anything to do with the Minister’s son. Two underclassmen argued about whether the Regent would shut the school down for a week to “recalibrate wards” if this went public. Somebody in Dominion colors stood at the Wardhall desk one afternoon and left with a face like he had stepped in something that wouldn’t come off his boots.

It would become a problem later. I knew that. Arclight’s annual Dueling Tournament sat on every noble calendar like a coronation with better seats. If half the senior class couldn’t lift their practice blades without wincing, the scandal would outlive the cover story. You can hide a rumor. You can’t hide a tournament bracket.

Through all of it, Cale never changed. Or maybe he did, and the changes were small and careful, reserved for me. Between classes he pointed out flaws in the Technica lamps that ringed the quad—old runes that made the light stutter on damp mornings. He taught me the trick to the eastern stair (step on the third riser from the bottom or the ward hums at you like a scold). Once, passing the pastry stall, he bought a chocolate twist and handed it to me without comment. I bit into it and almost cried; the heat loosened some knot I hadn’t known I’d tied around my heart.

He joked sometimes. Quiet things. Once he tapped my overstuffed notebook and asked if I planned to use it as a shield. I told him yes, and that I would beat him with it if he dared me, and he made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had let itself be.

Other times, the air changed. Not always. Not for show. Just… a pressure, like before rain. The space around us tightened by a hair and everybody’s spines learned what the word straighten meant. My bracer would give a soft, annoyed hum under my sleeve—stability marginal—the way it did when too many people crowded into a hallway and refused to admit they were crowding.

If I looked up at him in those moments, I caught the stormglass in his eyes deepen, as if something behind it had turned and noticed a window. Once—just once—I saw a thread of red slip through the violet and disappear before my brain could decide whether to be afraid. I blinked and it was gone. He blinked and it was gone. We walked on, and I pretended the world hadn’t moved under my feet.

Leira avoided me. Or rather—she avoided me when she was alone. In pairs, with Alessa and Brin flanking her like little moons, she found ways to be at the edge of my vision. She smiled when she knew I was looking. Once she lifted a hand in a half wave whose shape made my cheek sting by memory alone. I pressed my palm against the place the bruise had been and kept walking.

“Don’t give her your eyes,” Mara warned me, blunt as a stone. “She only smiles when she’s taking something.”

Selene, to her credit, tried to unfurl the tension with ribbons. “It will all settle,” she insisted. “It always does. School has a way of swallowing things.” She didn’t convince herself. You could hear it in the way her voice tripped over always.

We ate in the smaller courtyard behind Arcanum Hall on the third day because the larger greens felt like theaters. Cale tore his bread into small, methodical pieces and listened to me babble about Professor Arlewyn’s lecture on “core identity alignment” as if the words mattered. When I told him I’d been called on and had not fumbled the answer, he tapped his messaging device twice in a little rhythm that made me smile like a fool. Little victories felt allowed again.

People were brave enough to ask me where he’d come from when Cale wasn’t there. They were less brave about how they asked.

“Your brother,” a girl from Scriptura murmured, glancing over her shoulder. “Ten years in the Wastes? Truly?”

“Is he… I mean… is he registered? Properly?” a boy from my Sanatio elective asked, cheeks pink. “I only wonder because the paperwork must be… a lot.”

“You don’t have to answer,” Mara said when I opened my mouth and nothing polite came out.

“I don’t know,” I said, which was a kind of truth. I didn’t know how you register someone who’d fallen out of your life and then walked back in carrying something the school didn’t have words for.

“Is he from a house?” the Scriptura girl persisted, crest bright enough to blind. “An unacknowledged branch, perhaps? No one looks like that unless—”

“Unless what?” I asked, sharper than I meant.

She blinked. “Unless they’re important,” she said softly, as if she had said beloved instead.

After that, I kept my answers to I’m not sure and I don’t know, and learned how to smile in a way that closed conversations.

At the end of the week, the tournament posters went up. Formal script. Gold ink. Arclight Dueling Tournament — Heats Begin Next Fortnight. Names would be announced after sign-ups closed. Practice lists opened that afternoon, and the line outside the drill yard wrapped the colonnade like a snake.

I watched two seniors in immaculate jackets read the poster and pretend to laugh. “We’ll be fine,” one said. “We always are.” His knuckles were bruised under his cuff.

When I told Cale about the tournament, he only said, “A lot of rules. Not much fighting.” It was not contempt. It was an observation.

“Will you… enter?” I asked. It came out before I could swallow it. Stupid. Brave. Both.

He glanced down at me, and for a heartbeat I saw the boy I remembered—the one who’d made a wind chime that never hung right and pretended it sang like a cathedral. “If I do,” he said, “you’ll complain about the practice schedule.”

“I’ll complain no matter what,” I said, and he smiled with his mouth, if not his eyes.

That night, on my way home, two first-years argued outside the pastry stall.

“If he signs up, it won’t be fair,” one whispered. “Not after—”

“Shh,” the other hissed. “Do you want to get expelled by rumor?”

The vendor caught my eye and lifted her chin toward the Wardhall. “They keep saying accident. I’ve never seen an accident that leaves cracks in the stone.” She wrapped my bread tighter than usual. “You be careful, little one.”

I promised I would.

In bed, staring at the ceiling while the house settled into its night noises, I let myself admit what everyone else was pretending not to: nothing had settled. The fight hadn’t faded into the tapestry. It had torn a seam. Nobles were dressing it with words and silences, but I could see the raw edges. The tournament would tug at them. Parents would hear. The school would have to choose between the story it liked and the truth it had met in the courtyard.

I turned and pressed my cheek to the pillow. The red was gone. The stormglass wasn’t. I didn’t know which one scared me more.

In the morning, Cale would be at the gate. We would walk. We would pretend. We would gather our small moments and make them into a path while everyone else decided whether to follow it or throw stones.

Rhythm, I told myself, is still a kind of victory. Even when the floor remembers how it cracked. Even when the glass under your shoes glitters, reminding you what broke.

And outside, in halls that smelled faintly of chalk and ozone and secrets, Arclight pretended not to hold its breath.

Chapter 18

Lucien

The healers said the ribs would knit in a week. They lied. Every breath still burned. The ache wasn’t the real wound anyway—it was the silence that followed me everywhere.

Arclight had swallowed the fight whole and spat out a neat sentence for the record: training exercise accident. Every corridor repeated it like a prayer. Professors said it with measured patience. Students whispered it with relief. Nobody laughed when I walked by, and somehow that was worse.

Thirty seniors in the Wardhall, half of them still wrapped in bandages, and nobody dared to ask why. No one mentioned Cale Arcanus.

My father’s messages had stopped after the first inquiry. Handle it, he’d written. We cannot afford another scandal before the Tournament. My mother hadn’t written at all. She didn’t have to; I knew what she’d think. You lost control. Fix it.

So I did what Veylans always did when control slipped.

I bought new control.

The lower wards of Arclight were nothing like the marble spires above. Down here, light came from Technica lamps that hummed with static and smelled of copper. The air was thick with the sound of distant gears and the hiss of mana lines running beneath the cobbles.

I pulled my hood lower as we entered the tavern. Two of my classmates followed—Riss and Marn—good at obedience, bad at thinking. They looked out of place among the ruin-divers and scrap merchants.

The man I’d come to meet was waiting at the back, nursing a drink that glowed faintly green. A broker. No name, just a face like melted wax and eyes that had seen enough of the undercity to know what lived in it.

“You’re early,” he said.

“I’m paying,” I answered, dropping a purse onto the table. It hit with the sound of metal and certainty.

He thumbed through the coins. “Dominion mint. Good weight.”

“I need someone,” I said. “Strong. Not polite. Not tied to the Academy.”

The broker’s mouth twitched. “You nobles always say that when you want someone to bleed for you.”

“I want him broken,” I corrected.

He gestured toward the back room. “Then you want her.”

The door opened and heat came out with her.

She moved like someone who’d forgotten how to be afraid. Leather jacket scorched at the cuffs, fire tattoos crawling up one arm in a slow, lazy pulse. Her hair was black with streaks of red near the ends, like it had caught flame and decided to keep the memory.

“Lucien Veylan,” she said, as if reading it off a wanted poster. Her voice carried the smoke of a dozen back-alley fires. “The boy who lost a duel to a transfer student. I was starting to think you were a myth.”

Riss bristled. I raised a hand to quiet him.

“You have me at a disadvantage,” I said.

She smiled. “Most people do, at first.” She didn’t offer a hand. “Sarien Draeven. Maybe you’ve heard of the Ember Fangs?”

I had. Even in the upper halls, the name came up in half-joking threats. A street gang that had started as ruin scavengers and turned into something larger, meaner. They ran the undercity’s trade in enchanted scrap and Technica weapons. She was the reason the patrols avoided whole districts after dark.

“I need a job done,” I said. “A student at Arclight. I want him reminded of his place.”

Her smile widened, teeth bright in the lamp glow. “You want him dead.”

“Not yet.” I leaned forward. “I want him to remember.”

She tapped the table with a scarred finger. “Pretty words. What do you pay?”

“Gold. A lot of it.” I nodded to the purse. “And protection. The patrols won’t touch your business for the next two months. I can make that happen.”

Her eyes flicked to the bag, then back to me. “Protection from the patrols? You sound like a boy borrowing his father’s name.”

“I’m offering you a chance to make that name useful.”

For a long moment she said nothing. Then she reached out and dragged the purse closer. The clink of coins sounded like a verdict.

“Fine,” she said. “But if your pretty-boy target is half as dangerous as the stories say, I’ll be charging hazard pay.”

Riss couldn’t stop himself. “He’s nothing! Just a freak with a trick—”

Sarien’s eyes snapped to him. Heat shimmered around her knuckles. “Speak again and you’ll be the trick.”

Riss swallowed hard and shut up.

She stood, pocketed the purse, and stretched. The tattoos along her arm flared brighter, shaping themselves into the outline of a flaming serpent before fading. “I’ll need a night to gather my crew.”

I nodded. “The Academy’s eastern gate. Tomorrow evening. He walks his sister home every day around dusk.”

“Sweet,” she murmured. “Always the family ones.”

She turned and left, boots ringing against the floorboards.

The broker poured another drink. “You sure about this?” he asked once she was gone.

“She’s a thug,” I said. “That’s all I need.”

“She’s more than that,” he warned. “Sarien Draeven doesn’t take jobs she can’t enjoy.”

I rose, pulling the hood back up. “Then she’ll enjoy this one.”

Outside, the city wind smelled like burnt metal. The lamps overhead flickered as if listening.

Riss and Marn trailed me in uneasy silence until we reached the tram stop. Marn finally spoke. “You think she can do it?”

“She’ll try,” I said. “And if she fails, the story will still end the same. Everyone will know Arcanus bleeds.”

I looked back once, toward the lower wards where the tavern lights still burned. For a heartbeat, I saw fire rise against the sky—one of Sarien’s tricks, probably, a flare to summon her gang. It painted the clouds red and gold.

Perfect.

If Cale wanted to play hero, I’d make sure the whole city watched him burn for it.

Later that night, Sarien’s crew met in a warehouse by the mana lines. They called themselves the Ember Fangs—half ruin-divers, half arsonists. She stood on a crate while they prepped Technica gauntlets and rune-etched chains.

“Target’s a student,” one said. “Pretty face. Supposed to be fast.”

“Fast dies like slow if you know how to aim,” another grunted.

Sarien held up a hand. A flame coiled around her fingers, snapping the air into silence. “You’ve all heard the rumors. Thirty nobles down. Red eyes. Aura that cracks stone.” She let the fire vanish. “I don’t care. He bleeds. Everything bleeds.”

Someone laughed, nervous. “How much we getting paid to find out?”

“Enough,” she said, grinning. “And if he really is what they say, I want to see how bright he burns before he goes out.”

She pulled on her gloves, the runes along the leather lighting up one by one. Outside, rain started to fall—soft, steady, turning the street lamps into blurs.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “We remind the nobles and their monsters who owns the night.”

I couldn’t sleep.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw lightning-clad skin behind my eyelids. I felt the heat of humiliation crawling under my skin.

After a couple of hours, I abandoned my attempts and poured myself a drink instead. I stood by the dorm window as Arclight’s spires glowed faint blue in the distance. Somewhere beyond them, in the city’s dark veins, a fallen noble with fire in her blood was gathering her pack.

This weekend I would go home. I would make myself scarce, and those who thought they were strong would find out what it was like to be hunted.

Chapter 19

Cale

“I don’t think you understand the importance of this,” Rade was saying.

The bell rang, and the noise of the hallway swallowed half his words. We stepped out of the lecture hall into the bright courtyard, the kind of afternoon that made everything feel more serious than it probably was.

I shook my head. “No, I understand the importance of it to you. I just don’t understand the importance of it to everyone else.”

Rade grinned. “Because you’re not paying attention. These games are basically life. You conquer the game, you conquer life.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Explain to me how conquering a role-playing game helps us conquer life.”

He stopped walking long enough to fix me with a very serious stare. I almost laughed, but I didn’t want to make him feel bad for believing what he said.

“The Dungeon Diver game teaches you everything about life,” he said. “It teaches you the basics you need to survive. You have to make proper decisions for the situation you’re in. For example—what do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do? Diving the Dungeons gives you a class, gives you abilities, and helps you make a determination about yourself.”

I put up a hand. “I’m not sure that’s true. You pick a class and abilities at the start. Who really knows at the beginning what they’re going to turn into? Making a conscious decision about where you want to be in ten years—and having that choice define everything from the start—doesn’t sound particularly fair.”

Just then, Ellara and two of her friends joined us from the other wing.

“My brother has a point,” Ellara said, sliding into the conversation. “That’s why I always thought picking your core at fifteen feels like making a really important decision way too early.”

Rade gave her a surprised look. “What do you mean?”

“Well, there are essentially four core types you can choose from,” she said. “Most people can develop two cores—some even three—but that first choice shapes everything afterward. Making that decision so early in your life… I don’t know. It feels like you’re locking away every possibility you haven’t met yet.”

She glanced at me then, thoughtful. “Maybe that’s why I like your argument, Cale. The idea that who we are at the start doesn’t have to decide who we become later.”

Rade rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “Sure, sure. Philosophers, the both of you. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here grinding dungeons and getting results.”

Ellara laughed. “And maybe that’s the real secret—just keep playing until you figure it out.”

Rade pointed a finger at her, grinning. “Exactly! Progress through experience.”

“Or you just get better at the game,” I said.

“Same thing,” he said, already halfway ahead of us, talking about new builds and patch updates, while Ellara shook her head and smiled.

For a moment, it felt almost normal—no whispers, no rumors, just a conversation about games and choices, and how sometimes you don’t realize you’ve made the important ones until much later.

“That actually makes for an interesting segue,” Rade said as we crossed the courtyard, the afternoon light spilling across the stone. “Everyone’s talking about picking their cores lately. What about you, Ellara?”

Ellara hesitated. Mira and Selene, walking on either side of her, perked up instantly. I watched her. We would have to talk about this core thing later. There were things she needed to know.

“Well, everyone knows Aura’s the most popular,” Ellara said. “It’s the easiest to form because it’s closest to the body—people can feel it naturally. Most start with it for the physical boost alone. Strength, endurance, reflexes. You can’t really go wrong with Aura.” She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “But… I’ve been thinking about Arcanum too. It has a broader range of applications. I know I want at least Aura or Arcanum if I have to pick one. I’m just not sure what to do for the second or even if I can make that happen.”

“Sanatio’s underrated,” Selene added softly. “People forget how much flesh magic changes a fight. A good Sanatio user can keep a whole squad standing.”

Mira shook her head. “If you’re looking long-term, Technica is the smart path though granted probably not for your first core. It does have massive applications for career and advancement though. The Dominion army practically runs on it now. Even weak casters can channel Aura into Technica weapons. A single-core soldier with a Technica rifle can fight like a dual-core elite. It’s a complete game-changer.”

“That’s why I’m so torn,” Ellara said. “Everyone talks about Aura and Arcanum like they’re the only real choices, but Technica and Sanatio have just as much potential in the right hands.”

Rade stretched, his tablet flashing faint blue in the sunlight. “You’re all overthinking it. You pick Aura, you hit harder, you live longer. Done.”

Mira groaned. “Typical.”

“It’s true!” he protested. “Half the Academy starts with Aura, and the other half wishes they had. You can talk all you want about Technica rifles or fancy Sanatio healing, but it’s Aura users that actually survive the first year of field training. I am not exactly the jock type but having Aura is sort of no brainer it gives you time, life and health. Cannot beat that.”

Selene laughed. “You sound like Professor Halden.”

“Good! He’s the only one making sense.”

Ellara smirked, then turned to me. “What about you, Cale? You haven’t said a word this whole time.”

They were all watching now, curious but cautious. No one asked outright because the thought would have been redundant. The whole Academy knew about the fight even if they didn't get the details and record devices confiscated. Everyone had drawn the same conclusion.

“He clearly chose Aura and Arcanum already,” Mira said before I could answer doing so in a whisper so they weren't overheard. “No one moves like that unless their body’s conditioned, and the lightning during the fight—what else could it be?”

Rade nodded. “Yeah, that pressure you give off? Definitely Aura. And the Arcanum’s obvious. You don’t throw lightning by accident.”

I didn’t correct them. I just looked out over the courtyard, where banners hung from the stone arches, rippling in the late breeze.

“Maybe,” I said.

Ellara frowned slightly, sensing the deflection. “You don’t like to talk about it, do you?”

“Not much to talk about.”

Rade chuckled. “Right. Some of us are still trying to get our first core created or stabilized, and you’ve already mastered two. Nothing to talk about at all.”

The others laughed, but the sound carried that strange mix of admiration and unease that followed me everywhere now.

Ellara changed the subject after that, thank the gods. Mira went back to rambling about Technica rifles, Selene about the Sanatio field exams. But as we crossed the quad, I caught the looks people gave us—half awe, half distance.

They didn’t ask what I really was. They just assumed they knew. Aura and Arcanum. The perfect, textbook combination.

If only it were that simple.

Chapter 20

Atum

From the roofline, the Arclight river district looked almost gentle—lamps tracing the water like a line of gold coins, students laughing as they crossed the promenade, the faint hiss of mana lines under the street. Too clean. Too bright.

I crouched beside a vent chimney and peered through the shifting heat, watching for my quarry. There were five of them: the boy and the girl everyone in the undercity had been whispering about, flanked by three tag-along friends. The siblings walked close, the boy relaxed but not careless, his hand always hovering near the girl’s shoulder.

“That’s him,” one of the Fangs whispered behind me.

I didn’t answer. The air around the transfer rippled in the mana spectrum, faint but steady—like the hum of a tuned string. That wasn’t just Arcanum; spellcraft alone doesn’t make that kind of pressure. This was the natural kind, the resonance that comes only from Aura. So the nobles hadn’t exaggerated—he had presence. But that was it. He was an amateur. I could tell.

Sarien climbed up beside me, her cloak brushing my knee, the orange tip of her cigarette painting her face in half-light. “You see him?” she asked quietly.

“At this distance, I could cut his throat before he blinks.”

Her mouth twitched around the smoke. “You could try.”

I turned the lenses on my gauntlet, narrowing the rune aperture until the heat signatures sharpened. The boy’s energy field was compact, layered, steady as a forge flame. The girl’s aura flickered beside him—fainter, untrained. The other three were background noise.

“One boy. One girl. Three friends,” I said. “Hardly a challenge.”

Sarien exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “We’re here for him, not them. Stay sharp. And don’t touch the girl.”

I smirked. “You always say that.”

“And you always forget why.”

I didn’t reply. I knew the story—how her sister had been sold off during the fall of House Draeven, how the prince’s greed had burned their name from the registries. How she had fallen sworn to make a come and ended up on the street. That was all dandy. I respected her strength, but her rules kept the Fangs small, respectable in all the wrong ways. No innocents. No girls. No pointless kills. The kind of code that makes you die clean instead of live dirty.

I gestured for the six men below to fan out. They moved with practiced ease, cloaks blending into the glow of the Technica lamps, rune-blades strapped along their belts. Enchanted chains, shock-gauntlets—good gear, good killers.

Across the promenade, the students stopped at a food stall. The boy—Cale Arcanus—bought something for his sister. Ordinary. He handed her the pastry, said something that made her laugh. The sound carried even up here, clear and soft.

I rolled my shoulders, drawing mana into my fingertips. Symbols flared across my gloves: crimson sigils forming the framework of a mirror array. The Arcanum gathered, hungry to shape itself. One clean strike from here and the job was done.

Sarien caught my wrist.

“Not yet,” she said.

I glared down at her hand. “He’s right there.”

“And he’s walking with innocents.”

“Collateral,” I said flatly.

Her grip tightened. “No. Innocents are not collateral.”

For a heartbeat, our gazes locked. Fire rippled across the tattoos on her neck, answering her anger, and for the first time I saw her not as a mentor but as a wall between me and greatness.

I pulled free. “You keep talking like that, and the Fangs will die of good manners.”

“Better manners than stupidity,” she said, flicking ash into the wind. “We wait until he’s alone.”

I looked back down at the laughing group, their faces lit by lamplight. Something in my chest twisted—not guilt, never that—but irritation. The boy didn’t look like a noble brat. He looked calm. Simple. And that made me want to see what color his blood really was.

I settled back on my haunches, fingers flexing over the sigils, feeling the weight of my power hum just beneath my skin.

Soon.

Sarien turned away, cloak sweeping over the roof tiles. The firelight of her tattoos dimmed again. “Keep eyes on them,” she said. “We strike when the street’s empty.”

I nodded, though my mind was already racing ahead, thinking of how to make my move first.

Below, the boy paused mid-step, head tilting slightly, eyes flicking toward the rooftops. The mana around him shivered, a pressure wave rolling outward just strong enough to make my skin prickle.

He knows.

I froze, breath caught between nerves and excitement. The boy didn’t look up again, but the laughter of his group faltered for a moment before picking back up.

Sarien didn’t notice. She was already moving to the next roofline, silent as smoke.

My pulse raced. “One boy,” I murmured, the words tasting like a promise. “Let’s see how you burn.”

I crouched in the dark, watching as they turned down a narrow lane toward the river, the reflections of the lamps trailing after them like molten gold.

The hunt had begun.