Morning arrived like an unwelcome guest.
Sunlight crept through the dormitory window and found Revan on his back, still wearing last night's bloodstained shirt. His eyes were already open. They had been for a while.
The obsidian coin sat on his nightstand.
Revan flexed his fingers. Something sharp traveled from his knuckles to his elbow.
'Still attached. Good start.'
He sat up slowly, each vertebra protesting. The gash across his back had stopped bleeding hours ago, but the skin around it was stiff and hot. Infected, probably.
He swung his legs off the bed. Stood. Waited for the black spots to pass.
They didn't, so he walked anyway.
The bathroom mirror showed him exactly what he expected. Pale skin stretched over sharp bones. Dark circles deep enough to store secrets in. A bruise climbing his jawline like ivy on a wall.
'Charming as ever.'
He turned on the faucet. Cold water hit his face and he held his breath against the sting. The dried blood on his hands dissolved into pink trails that spiraled down the drain.
Three men dead. One mysterious woman with violet eyes. And a coin that apparently doubled as a tracking device or a calling card. He still hadn't decided which was worse.
Revan exhaled. Long, slow, through his nose. The kind of breath that carried the full weight of a night that should have killed him but somehow didn't.
'At this rate, I should start a loyalty card. Ten near-death experiences, get the eleventh free.'
He wiped his face and stared at the water still running. Honestly, when he'd closed his eyes last night, a part of him had been quietly convinced that he wouldn't wake up here.
That the next thing he'd see would be that endless white void again. The park bench. The silence stretching in every direction. That damn kid sitting with his back turned like a ghost who'd given up on haunting anyone.
Strangely enough, that possibility hadn't been the one that made his stomach clench.
The real nightmare was opening his eyes to find a pair of pale violet eyes already staring down at him. Sylvia, standing at the foot of his bed like a statue carved from winter itself. Arms crossed. Expression empty. The air in the room three times heavier than it should be.
'So. You left your dorm.'
Just imagining the scene made his skin prickle.
He turned off the faucet. Silence rushed back in.
Revan turned around slowly. Scanned the room.
Wardrobe, closed. Desk, untouched. The chair in the corner, empty. No black envelope on his pillow. No pressure bending the air around him. No scent of winter roses and old parchment that always preceded her the way tremors preceded earthquakes.
Just dust drifting through morning light. His bloodied shirt on the bed. The cobweb in the ceiling corner that he kept promising himself he'd deal with.
Sylvia didn't know.
'...Thank God.'
The tension drained from his shoulders so fast it almost made him dizzy. Or maybe that was the blood loss.
'Let's keep it that way.'
But relief didn't fix the problem underneath. The Minor Healing Elixir had done its job and nothing more. His muscles were shredded, his back was likely infected, and one wrong movement could reopen everything.
The real concern wasn't the wounds themselves. It was timing.
Sylvia could summon him at any moment. A sealed letter on his pillow. A single word through the communication seal. And when that happened, she would expect her weapon to be sharp. Ready. Functional.
One look at him right now and she'd know. Sylvia von Vespera didn't ask questions she could answer with her own eyes. And those eyes missed nothing.
He needed to be healed before that summons came. Not tomorrow. Not tonight. Now.
Academy infirmary was out. Too many questions about stab wounds for a student supposedly resting in his dorm.
Sylvia herself was obviously out. "My Lady, I disobeyed your direct orders and got jumped by assassins. Could you patch me up?" would be the last sentence he ever spoke.
That left one option.
Elara.
Not because she was convenient. It was because Elara didn't ask the right questions. She asked plenty, sure, but they were always her questions.
Questions she'd already half-answered in her own head before the words left her mouth. She saw wounds and built a narrative around them, filling the gaps with her own logic, her own assumptions, her own kindness.
She never pried into the spaces where the truth actually lived.
And in a world where every smile hid a knife and every handshake was a transaction, that made her rare.
Revan could count on one hand the number of people he trusted not to weaponize what they knew. Elara was near the top of that very short list.
Revan pulled a clean shirt from his wardrobe. Getting it over his head took more effort than it should have.
The fabric dragged across the wound on his back, and he bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste iron.
'Right. Let's go visit the one person in this academy who heals people for fun.'
***
The morning corridors of Valtheris Academy had a rhythm. Staff swept stone walkways. Fresh bread drifted from the kitchen wing. First-years shuffled past, half-asleep.
Revan moved through it all with practiced invisibility. Head down. Pace steady.
His body disagreed with "steady." Each step sent a dull throb through his left side where the Garden operative's blade had found a gap.
He adjusted his posture, leaning just enough to take pressure off the wound without looking like he was limping.
He found Elara in her research lab, a converted storage room near the east wing.
The door was ajar. Through the gap: books stacked in towers that defied architectural logic, glass vials in color-coded rows, and handwritten notes pinned to every surface, connected by colored strings forming a web that probably made sense to exactly one person on the planet.
Revan knocked twice on the doorframe.
"Lady Elara."
A yelp. The sound of something glass wobbling dangerously. Then a face appeared from behind a fortress of medical textbooks. Green eyes wide behind oversized spectacles, a smudge of blue ink across her left cheek.
"R-Revan! I didn't... you startled... I was just—"
She stopped. Blinked. The nervous flutter in her expression shifted.
Her eyes traced down from his face to his posture. The way he stood with his weight slightly off-center. The stiffness in how he held his left arm. The thin line of sweat on his temple that had nothing to do with the mild morning temperature.
The stammering vanished.
"Sit down."
Her voice dropped into a register Revan had only heard a few times. Not the shy girl who couldn't maintain eye contact. The prodigy. The daughter of the Imperial Grand Sage, whose intellect could dissect a medical anomaly faster than most doctors twice her age.
Revan sat on the edge of her examination table without argument. The wood creaked under him.
"Shirt off."
He hesitated for exactly one second. Then pulled it over his head, jaw tight, air hissing between his teeth as the fabric separated from where it had stuck to dried blood.
Elara's hands were already glowing. A soft green luminescence that pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat. She moved behind him and went still.
The silence stretched for three seconds. Four.
"...These are deep."
Her voice was quiet. Clinical. But underneath it, something harder.
Revan stared at the opposite wall. A chart about mana circulation pathways stared back at him with cheerful annotations.
"Looks worse than it feels."
"You have a seven-inch laceration across your trapezius and two puncture wounds in your lateral oblique."
A pause.
"It does not look worse than it feels."
'Fair point.'
Elara's healing magic seeped into his wounds like warm water filling cracks in dry earth. The relief was immediate. Not the violent, forceful regeneration of a combat elixir, but something gentler. Patient. Like his body was being asked to heal rather than ordered to.
Her palm pressed flat against the skin below his shoulder blade, and Revan felt the warmth of her mana spread through the damaged tissue. It moved slowly, carefully, mapping the wound before repairing it.
Then her hand stopped.
A small, confused sound escaped her throat.
Revan's pulse spiked.
'She found something.'
But Elara said nothing. Her fingers shifted slightly, pressing deeper into the tissue around his spine. The healing resumed after a moment, her mana flowing again, though Revan could swear her touch had become more careful. More searching.
He stared straight ahead and kept his breathing even.
He knew exactly what she'd brushed against. The faint residue of Sylvia's healing magic, still lingering in his tissue from weeks ago. Gravity Mana woven into regenerative spellwork. A combination so rare that only one person in the entire kingdom used it.
Fortunately, the residue was old. Faded. Almost gone. Whatever Elara sensed, it wasn't strong enough to identify. Not quite.
'If she'd healed me a week earlier, when the signature was still fresh...'
He didn't finish the thought. The implication was loud enough on its own. Elara would have recognized Sylvia's mana immediately. And the question that followed, "Why is Lady Vespera's personal healing magic inside a servant she supposedly ignores?", would unravel everything, and trying to spin a convincing lie would be a nightmare he didn't have the energy for.
Her fingers paused at the edge of the slash wound.
"How long ago?"
"Last night."
"And you waited until morning?"
"I'm a deep sleeper."
Her reflection in the glass cabinet across the room showed an expression that made it very clear she did not find that amusing.
She worked in silence after that. Revan watched the green light pulse against the walls. His breathing gradually eased as the deep ache faded from screaming to muttering.
Elara finished with the back wound and moved to his side. Her brow furrowed when she examined the puncture wounds. Lips pressed thin.
Angry. Not at him. For him.
"This pattern," she said, almost to herself. Her fingers traced the air above the entry wound without touching it. "Blunt approach. Deliberate targeting of organ-adjacent areas. No attempt at lethality. Just maximum pain."
She straightened. The clinical mask cracked, and what showed through was the face of a sixteen-year-old girl trying very hard not to cry from frustration.
"It was them again, wasn't it."
Revan blinked.
"...Them?"
"Erison's group." Her voice trembled. Not from weakness, but from the effort of keeping it level. "They've been getting worse. Everyone knows it, but nobody does anything because his family donates half the academy's annual budget."
'Oh.'
'She thinks I got jumped by bullies.'
The most logical conclusion, honestly. The academy's resident punching bag, another beating from the usual suspects. Erison's lackeys did target non-lethal areas. They did prefer group attacks at night.
The only difference was that last night's attackers carried Aura-enhanced blades and suicide capsules in their teeth.
"It's fine," he said. "Nothing I haven't handled before."
"It is not fine."
Her hands stopped glowing. She stepped around to face him directly, and the timid girl who could barely ask to share a lunch table was gone. In her place stood someone whose eyes burned with the kind of fury that didn't shout. It decided.
"I'm reporting this to Instructor Valen."
"Elara."
"I have physical evidence now. Wound depth, tissue damage, residual impact patterns. They can't dismiss it this time."
Revan looked at her. At the trembling fists. At the wet eyes trying so hard to stay dry. At the girl who had decided to go to war over a lie she built herself.
He sighed.
"Do what you think is right," Revan said.
Elara paused. Something in his tone, flat, unbothered, almost gentle, made her search his face for a meaning she couldn't quite find.
"You're not going to argue?"
"Would it change anything?"
"...No."
"Then save your energy for the report."
A small, determined nod. She turned back to his wounds, the green glow returning to her palms.
Revan closed his eyes. Let the warmth do its work.
In the darkness behind his eyelids, a face materialized uninvited. Erison van Caldris. That smug, punchable face with yellow eyes that lacked the sharpness of his three genius brothers. Fourth son of Duke Alaric. The family disappointment stuffed into Class A like a defective product no one bothered to recall.
'Sorry, Erison.'
Revan almost felt bad. Almost.
'Someone has to take the fall, and between you and a secret assassination squad... you're the safer option. Think of it as community service.'
The best part? It would actually work.
Erison had no backing. Duke Alaric had stopped acknowledging his existence years ago. The other three sons were prodigies who carried the Caldris name with pride. Erison was the crack in the porcelain they pretended wasn't there.
Which meant the academy had zero reason to protect him.
No family pressure. No political consequences. No one to whisper in the headmaster's ear about "boys being boys."
When a report landed on Instructor Valen's desk with medical evidence attached, the institution would do what institutions always did when there was no powerful hand to stay theirs.
They'd come down hard.
Revan had seen it before. Twice, actually. Both times, Erison had been dragged before the disciplinary board, stripped of privileges, and subjected to punishments creative enough to make even senior students wince.
Manual labor in the training grounds. Public reprimand in front of the entire class. Suspension of combat privileges for a full semester.
And both times, Revan had watched from the back row with the quiet satisfaction of a man enjoying a well-aged wine.
Not because he hated Erison. Hate required energy, and Revan was too tired for that.
It was simpler than hate. It was justice, arriving late but arriving nonetheless, wearing the academy's bureaucratic face and carrying a stack of disciplinary forms.
' Erison. Your sacrifice will not be forgotten.'
'Actually, it will. Immediately. But it's the thought that counts.'
Outside, the morning bell rang. The academy continued its polite routine of pretending nothing was wrong with anything.
And in a cramped laboratory that smelled of old paper and healing herbs, a girl slowly dying from her own kindness carefully mended the wounds of a boy who couldn't tell her the truth.
Neither of them heard the footsteps that paused outside the door.
Neither of them saw the shadow that lingered for exactly three seconds before moving on.
But Revan's obsidian coin, tucked inside his trouser pocket, pulsed warm against his thigh.
Just once.