The morning after was worse. Waking up was a negotiation with a body that felt both bruised and brittle. The self-inflicted punishment of my nightly training had left me with a deep, throbbing ache that was a constant, grim reminder of the previous day's events. I felt hollowed out, a ghost haunting Lucian Greyfall's life.
As was now my duty, I presented myself at Damien's door to deliver my report. I felt like a soldier reporting a successful sortie that had cost him his soul.
I stood before him in his immaculate room and recounted the events with a clinical, detached voice. "I secured the west training yard as ordered. The targets arrived on schedule. I informed them of their place and offered specific discouragement to the one named Thomas Fell. The effect was… pronounced. He was visibly unsettled, and their group cohesion was disrupted."
Damien listened with a raptor's stillness, a small, cruel smile playing on his lips as I spoke. He savored the details of my report like a connoisseur tasting a fine, poisoned wine. My Soul Resonance felt waves of smug satisfaction and cold, intellectual pleasure rolling off him. He was enjoying his experiment.
"Excellent," he purred when I finished. "A perfect opening move. The boy's confidence is fragile. A fragile thing is meant to be broken." He steepled his fingers, his golden eyes gleaming with fresh malice. "Tonight, you will escalate."
My stomach tightened. I had known this was coming.
"Find them again," Damien commanded. "I don't care where they are hiding. This time, you will not engage them with words. You will use your magic. While the Fell boy is attempting to cast, I want you to discreetly use Shadow Veil from a distance. Don't reveal yourself. Just a flicker of darkness near him, a whisper of cold in the air. Make him think his own mana flow is tainted and unstable. An aspiring Weaver who cannot trust his own magic is no Weaver at all."
It was a vile, insidious escalation. Physical bullying was one thing; this was an attack on the very core of a mage's being—their connection to their own power. To a struggling student like Thomas, it could be a crippling blow.
"Consider it an exercise in subtlety for you as well, Lucian," Damien added. "A skill you sorely lack. Do not fail me."
There was nothing to say but, "Yes, Damien."
For the rest of the day, I was a ghost. I drifted through my classes, the professor's words meaningless noise. My mind was consumed with the task ahead. Part of my mission required reconnaissance, so I spent the afternoon searching for my targets. I found them in a secluded, forgotten corner of the campus, a patchy lawn of overgrown grass near the outer retaining wall of the island. It was a pathetic excuse for a training ground.
I watched from a safe distance, concealed within a grove of weeping shadow-oaks. The scene before me was exactly what I had dreaded. Leonidas and Mara were trying their best to encourage Thomas, but the boy was a mess. He stood there, attempting the simple wind spell, but his hands trembled. His chants were hesitant. Every time he tried to draw upon his mana, he would flinch, his spell fizzling into nothing before it even formed. My words from yesterday had been a poison, and it was still working its way through his spirit.
His aura, which I could feel even from this distance, was a flickering, sputtering candle flame of self-doubt. Every failed attempt made it shrink a little more. The sight was a fresh twist of the knife in my own gut. I was a saboteur who had to return to the wreckage he had caused and plant another bomb.
Unable to watch any longer, I retreated. I needed a different kind of sanctuary, a place where I could think. I found myself walking the familiar path to the Grand Library. The silence and the endless rows of accumulated knowledge were the only things that could soothe the chaos in my mind.
I was in a remote section, scanning titles on advanced mana theory, when a calm voice spoke from behind me.
"I heard what happened at the west training yard yesterday, Greyfall."
I froze, then turned slowly. Seraphina Vael stood there, her arms crossed, her sapphire eyes not filled with the anger I had expected, but with a sharp, analytical curiosity.
"Word travels fast at this academy," I replied coolly, turning back to the bookshelf, hoping she would take the hint.
She didn't. She moved to stand beside me, her gaze steady. "It doesn't make sense," she said, her voice a low, thoughtful murmur. "The person who offered a novel insight into the entropic decay of runic matrices… is the same person who would find sport in cruelly mocking a first-year for his lack of talent?"
She was looking right at me, her gaze piercing through the layers of my carefully constructed mask. "Which one is the real you?"
The question hit me with the force of a physical blow. I felt a desperate, insane urge to just tell her. To tell her everything. That I was a prisoner, that this was a role, that I hated every moment of it. But I couldn't. It would be a death sentence for me and potentially for her as well, if Damien ever found out.
I fell back on the only defense I had: the character of Lucian.
"Don't mistake one lucky guess for a personality, Vael," I sneered, the harshness of my own voice grating on my ears. "The weak exist to be reminded of their place. It's the natural order of the world. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have better things to do than entertain your pointless questions."
I turned to walk away, my heart pounding. I needed to get out of there.
"I don't believe you," she said softly, but with unshakeable conviction.
I stopped in my tracks but didn't turn around.
"A shadow that large," she continued, her voice thoughtful. "It must be hiding something significant. I just haven't figured out what yet."
I walked away without another word, her parting shot echoing in my mind. The encounter had rattled me more than my meeting with Damien. Damien's evil was a known quantity, a force of nature I had to navigate. Seraphina's perception was something else entirely. She was a variable I hadn't accounted for, an intelligent, inquisitive mind that was actively trying to solve the puzzle of Lucian Greyfall.
As I stepped out of the library and into the fading afternoon light, I felt more trapped than ever. I was being squeezed from every conceivable side: by a villain's cruel orders, by the righteous anger of the heroes I was forced to torment, by the crushing weight of my own conscience, and now, by the probing gaze of the one person in this world who might be smart enough to see the truth. And night was coming.