I made it back to my room, but the lock on the door did not bring safety. It only sealed me in with my own conscience. The room was a cage, and my thoughts were a circling predator.
"My most valuable asset."
Damien's words of praise were a sentence of damnation. My "success" with Thomas had been a horrific accident born of a simple, cruel order. But to Damien, it was a revelation. It was a proof of concept. And in his chilling, strategic mind, he had immediately promoted me.
I was no longer the bumbling sidekick. I was no longer the simple tool, the hammer to be aimed at a nail.
I was his scalpel.
And the horrifying difference was this: a hammer is told where to strike. A scalpel is expected to know where to cut. Damien had not given me a specific, crude order this time. He had given me a goal. "Make her loyalty a burden. Make her protectiveness a liability." He was asking me to be the architect of her ruin. He was trusting me to devise the plan, to find the weakness, to be as "elegant" and "precise" in my cruelty as I had been with Thomas.
I sank into the chair at my desk, my head in my hands. The very skills I was secretly honing—my finer mana control, my analytical mind from my past life, my ability to read people with Soul Resonance—were the exact "talents" Damien was so eager to exploit. My own weapons were being turned against me, used in service of the very monster I was trying to one day escape.
If I failed, I was useless, and Damien would discard me. If I refused, I was defiant, and he would destroy me. If I succeeded… if I succeeded, I would become a more valuable, more trusted, and more monstrous version of his creature. Every path was a different kind of hell.
There was no choice. I had to play the part. I had to design a plan. And to do that, I needed to know my target.
My mind, the cold, analytical part of me that was once Aiden Verne, pushed aside the waves of self-loathing and began to work. Mara Stonecroft. My Soul Resonance told me she was a "rock." Her aura was steady, defensive, and fiercely loyal. How do you break a rock? You don't. You find the existing, hairline fractures and you hammer a wedge into them until the entire thing splits apart.
Words of discouragement wouldn't work on her. Subtle magical attacks would only make her more suspicious and more fiercely protective of Leonidas, reinforcing her role as his "shield." Damien was right; a frontal assault was useless. The attack had to be indirect. It had to come from a direction she wasn't guarding.
I needed information.
The place I had once considered a sanctuary now felt like my primary workshop. I went to the Grand Library. The hushed, sacred air felt like a mockery. I bypassed the sections on philosophy and mana theory and headed for the academy's public archives. Here, any student could look up the general rosters, class schedules, and basic declared files of any other student. It was all public record, meant to help students form study groups.
I was going to use it to tear one apart.
I found her file in the registry. Mara Stonecroft. Age: 17. Admitted from: The Gray Hills, a small mining village in the northern foothills of the Ironspine Mountains. Scholarship: Partial (Defensive Mana Application).
It was a simple, clean, and respectable file. She was a hard-working girl from a poor background who had earned her place here. The file only made my task more sickening. I scanned the rest of the mundane information—her class schedule, her declared major in Combat Tactics—and then I saw it. Tucked at the bottom, under the section for emergency contacts and declared family.
Primary Guardian: Garon Stonecroft (Father, deceased).Secondary Contact: Elara Stonecroft (Aunt, Gray Hills).Declared Sibling: Kael Stonecroft (Brother, Age: 15. Residence: Aldren Capital, Lower Trades District. Apprenticeship: The Iron Hand Smithy).
A cold, terrible idea began to form. A perfect, elegant, and utterly depraved plan.
Her loyalty wasn't just to Leonidas and Thomas. She had a 15-year-old brother, an apprentice smith, living alone in the capital's lower district. The lower districts were a world away from the gleaming, protected spires of the Noble Quarter. They were rife with petty crime, gangs, and the kind of casual corruption that flourished in the shadow of great wealth. A 15-year-old apprentice would be vulnerable.
This was the hairline fracture.
If I attacked Mara, she would fight back. If I attacked Leonidas, she would defend him. But what if she heard a rumor? A whisper that her little brother, working in the dangerous part of the city, had "attracted the wrong kind of attention"? What if an anonymous "warning" was delivered to her, suggesting he had crossed some minor guild or criminal element?
It would do exactly what Damien wanted. It would make her paranoid. It would divide her focus. She would be torn between her duty to her friends at the academy and her desperate, protective urge to check on her brother in the city. She would become frantic, stressed, and her solid, rock-like presence would shatter into a dozen anxious pieces.
It was a plan that required no direct confrontation. No magic. Just a whisper. A poisoned truth delivered to the right ear. It was subtle. It was psychological. It was elegant.
I closed the registry book, a profound, icy cold settling deep in my bones. I had my plan. I, Lucian Greyfall, the scalpel, had just designed the perfect, vicious cut.
I left the library and walked, not to my room, but to the courtyard. The sun was setting, and I had a new, terrible purpose for my training. I needed to get stronger. I needed to get stronger so that one day, I could kill the man who was forcing me to become this. And I needed to get stronger, I realized with a fresh wave of self-hatred, so that I could survive long enough to protect my own life at the cost of everyone else's. The two motives were now locked in a death spiral, and I was at their center
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Author's Note- Next chapter also coming out in 15-20 minutes. Stay Tuned. Thank You.
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