The Aegis Academy library was a truly magnificent place. It was a massive, silent dome with ceilings so high they seemed to touch the sky.
Sunlight streamed through huge crystal panels, illuminating floating dust motes that looked like tiny, glittering stars.
The shelves weren't made of wood; they were sleek, metallic constructs that hummed softly, and instead of regular books, most of them held glowing data slates and ancient, carefully preserved scrolls.
It was a temple dedicated to knowledge, a place where the brightest minds came to become even brighter.
Alex was there to fix a wobbly network port.
He pushed his rattling cart, loaded with spools of cable, a diagnostic tool that looked like a complicated TV remote, and a half-eaten bag of cheese puffs, into the grand, silent space.
A few students, scattered among the towering shelves, glanced at his drab gray uniform and immediately looked away, their focus returning to their important studies.
He was just part of the background, a ghost in a machine of learning, and that was exactly how he liked it.
His work order led him to a quiet, isolated section of the library dedicated to "Archaic Artifact Theory." The books here were old. Like, really, really old.
They were bound in leather and had titles written in languages that nobody spoke anymore. The air smelled of old paper and dust. The network port he needed to fix was located on the floor right next to a heavy, oak table.
And sitting at that table, surrounded by a mountain of ancient, dusty tomes, was the one person he was actively trying to avoid thinking about: Yuna Kwon.
The Ice Princess herself.
She looked completely miserable. Her normally perfect posture was slumped. Her face, usually a mask of cool calm, was etched with deep frustration.
A faint, almost invisible shimmer of cold hung in the air around her, making the space feel a few degrees colder than the rest of the library.
It was the tell-tale sign of her artifact's energy leaking out, a subtle symptom of the terrible flaw Alex had seen during the syncing ceremony.
She had a massive, ancient book open in front of her, but she wasn't reading it. She was just glaring at the strange, spiky letters as if she could force them to make sense through sheer willpower.
Alex sighed internally. Of all the network ports in all the libraries in all the world, he had to get this one. He considered just turning around and telling Fitz the job was impossible.
But that would draw attention, and his entire life was built around avoiding attention. So, with the practiced shuffling walk of a man who just wanted to finish his shift, he pushed his cart toward her table.
Okay, Alex, he thought to himself. Be a janitor. Think like a janitor. Your only concerns are dust, grime, and making sure the floor is not slippery.
You know nothing about S-Rank artifacts. You are here to plug in a thingy. That is your whole world.
He stopped his cart a few feet from her table, the rattling of a loose wheel sounding like a gunshot in the dead silence of the library.
Yuna's head snapped up, her dark eyes flashing with irritation at the disturbance. She saw him, looked at his uniform, and her expression immediately went from annoyed to dismissive.
He was no one important. She turned back to her book.
"Excuse me, miss," Alex said, his voice quiet and deliberately unremarkable. "Just gotta check this network port. Be out of your hair in a minute."
Yuna didn't answer, just gave a small, impatient wave of her hand, as if shooing away a fly.
Alex knelt down, his knees cracking loudly. The port was right next to the leg of her table. He got out his diagnostic tool and plugged it in.
The small screen lit up with error messages. He grunted softly, pretending to be confused by the technical data.
In reality, his [Debugger] ability was showing him that the port wasn't broken at all; someone had just spilled a sugary drink on it, and the sticky residue was interfering with the connection. A classic student mistake.
As he worked on cleaning the contacts with a special solvent, Yuna suddenly let out a long, frustrated sigh. It was a surprisingly human sound coming from the Ice Princess.
"This is useless," she muttered to the room in general. She slammed the ancient book shut, sending a cloud of dust into the air that made Alex want to sneeze. "Completely useless!"
Alex stayed quiet, continuing to scrub the port. The unofficial rule of being a janitor was that you were basically invisible furniture. People often talked to themselves or vented their frustrations around you, forgetting you were even there.
"Centuries of knowledge," she went on, her voice low and bitter. "Books about 'spiritual harmony' and 'finding your inner center.' It's all just poetry! None of it explains how to stop my own power from trying to tear me apart!"
She buried her face in her hands. The faint aura of cold around her intensified for a moment. Alex could see it with his own eyes, a subtle frost forming on the surface of the wooden table.
And with his [Debugger], he saw the angry red code flare within her, a tiny spike of the poison from her artifact.
He knew he should stay silent. This was not his problem. Getting involved was the opposite of his plan.
But hearing the raw desperation in her voice, and seeing the proof of her slow self-destruction right in front of him, something in him couldn't stay quiet.
He had to say something. But it had to be the right something. It had to be a janitor's something.
He finished cleaning the port and plugged his tool back in. A happy green light blinked on the screen. The connection was stable. He had his excuse.
He cleared his throat softly. "You know," he started, looking intently at the cable in his hand as if it were the most fascinating object in the world. "It's kinda funny. These network cables."
Yuna lifted her head, looking at him with a confused, slightly annoyed expression. "What are you talking about?"
"This cable," Alex continued, holding it up. He avoided making eye contact, instead focusing on the plug at the end.
"If you try to push too much information through it, too fast and too hard, you don't actually get a faster connection. The signal just gets all messy.
Full of errors and junk data. You get a lot of 'signal noise,' we call it in the biz. Sometimes, the best way to get a clean signal isn't to force more power through the cable..."
He paused, then looked up at her for just a second, offering a simple, helpful shrug.
"...it's about improving the 'data flow' to reduce that 'signal noise'."
He immediately looked back down at his work, packing his tools away as if he had just commented on the weather.
He had delivered the line. He had framed it in the simplest technical terms he could think of, an analogy drawn from the mundane task he was performing. It wasn't the advice of an SSS-Rank prodigy. It was a random musing from the IT guy.
For a long moment, Yuna just stared at him. Her mind, which had been stuck in a loop of thinking about power and control, suddenly had a new path to follow.
Signal noise. Data flow. She had been trying to suppress the backlash, to fight it, to overpower it. She was trying to force more power through a flawed cable.
The quiet IT guy, without even knowing it, had just handed her a completely new way to look at her problem. It wasn't about forcing the power. It was about smoothing it.
The advice was technically simple, almost laughably so. But for the very specific, hidden flaw in her [Glacial Core], it was a profound revelation.
It was like trying to solve a complex math problem for weeks, only for a stranger to walk by and point out that you were using a plus sign instead of a minus sign.
A flicker of genuine surprise crossed her face, cracking her icy mask. The frustration in her eyes was replaced by a look of dawning realization, and then, something else. Gratitude.
"Signal noise," she repeated softly to herself, the words tasting strange and new.
She looked at Alex, who was now standing up and wiping his hands on his gray uniform. She was seeing him for the first time, not as a piece of the background, but as a person.
A simple IT worker who had just given her a piece of advice more valuable than anything in the mountain of ancient books surrounding her.
"Thank you," she said. Her voice was quiet, but it was sincere.
"No problem, miss," Alex said with a small, harmless smile. "Port's all fixed. You should get a much cleaner signal now."
He gave a little nod, pushed his rattling cart, and walked away, leaving the Ice Princess sitting alone in the quiet library. He let out a long, slow breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. That was close. Way too close.
Oracle would have charged her a thousand credits for that tip, he thought with a bit of dark humor.
He didn't look back, but he could feel her eyes on him as he left the grand hall. He had helped her, just a little. But he had also planted a seed. A tiny, dangerous seed of curiosity in the mind of the one person on campus he really shouldn't have.