Chapter 131: Meeting Hina, Shocking Digicard Sync
"Look." Aidan finally spoke, voice flat. "I don’t know you, nor do I care to know you. The only person I want to meet is Hina Riverfall. It won’t even take long."
Corin’s frown deepened. "And we’re saying, she won’t meet you. Claiming to be a dead person is a sick joke."
Aidan actually stopped for a second, genuinely thrown by the sheer stubbornness of it. "I’m not claiming to be a dead person, you dumbass. I am that person. I didn’t die."
"I was in a coma, and someone declared me dead instead of waiting around. Why am I even explaining this to you?" He rolled his shoulders, patience visibly thinning. "Get Hina here, or bring me to her. Don’t test my patience."
Roan scoffed. "Don’t test your patience? What exactly are you going to do, pretty boy?"
[Arthur: I think he wants to fill my stomach.]
[Cameron: Hoho. Quite cocky, this one.]
[Finn: He doesn’t know he can die in less than a second.]
"Alright." Aidan forced out a yawn, not particularly interested in getting genuinely angry over any of this. "I don’t have time for this."
In the next moment, both Roan and Corin froze completely. Not by choice.
One instant they were watching Aidan. The next, darkness swallowed everything.
Outside, both boys stood perfectly still, expressions blank. Inside their own minds, they faced something considerably less calm.
A massive skull hung suspended in the dark, hollow eyes flaring with crimson flames, and whatever composure either of them had left didn’t survive the sight of it.
[Jovan: This is, admittedly, a faster way.]
Aidan pressed into both minds without ceremony and pulled out exactly what he needed. Hina’s location. Nothing more.
He turned and walked back toward the front hall, Beatrix and Solenne falling in behind him without a word.
"Where are you going? What happened to those two?" The receptionist hurried after him as he made for the inner ground gate.
Aidan pulled out his Digicard and sent it flying toward her desk. "That’s mine. Not synchronized yet. While you’re busy panicking about me, go ahead and sync it for me. I’ll be back."
"Wait, you can’t go in there! You’ll be arrested!" She was already reaching for something on her console. "Guards! Stop him!"
The guards, as it turned out, were already handled. Peak Legendary-rank, both of them, and both already unconscious from a suppression they’d never even seen coming.
Aidan didn’t slow down. He vanished.
"Was that really a good idea?" Beatrix asked, wry despite herself.
Solenne shook her head. "Doubtful. But given his current strength, I don’t think the Alliance is in much position to do anything about it."
"Bingo." Aidan’s grin flashed for half a second before it faded back into something more focused. "You two disappear for now. Tom, get out here and take them somewhere safe."
[Tom: Tsk. So it’s fine if I get caught up in whatever mess you’re about to make?]
"Yep."
Tom appeared on his shoulder as Beatrix and Solenne folded away into a pocket dimension, and Aidan sped off alone, fast enough that nobody in the corridors he passed even registered he’d been there at all.
...
The training hall he finally reached sat quieter than the last one, sunlight pouring through high windows onto polished floors, and three people occupied it instead of four.
Hina stood at its center. Layla leaned against a support pillar nearby, watching a sparring match that had clearly paused the moment Aidan walked in.
The third was someone new, tall and broad-shouldered, dark hair swept back with the kind of deliberate care that suggested he checked a mirror often. Divine-rank pressure rolled off him with the easy confidence of someone comfortably in his mid-twenties and well aware of it.
Aidan had already let the disguise drop somewhere in the corridor outside. White hair, honey-colored eyes, the same face underneath both that had never actually needed to change.
Hina looked at him.
It took exactly one second for the shock to arrive, and when it did, it hit her whole body at once, a visible tremor running from her shoulders down to her hands.
"A-Aidan?"
"That’s me." He let out a short chuckle, mostly for his own benefit.
’As expected,’ he thought, watching her carefully. ’I feel nothing for her.’
But asking the question at all told him something the answer hadn’t. If he truly felt nothing, there would have been nothing to check in the first place. He wasn’t indifferent. He just wasn’t in love anymore either.
Curiosity, then. That was all this was.
"Impossible." Hina’s voice cracked around the word. "You can’t be him. He’s dead."
Aidan actually went quiet for a moment, genuinely unsure how to respond to someone this committed to a fact that was standing directly in front of her. "No. He’s not." He gestured at himself, unbothered. "He’s right here. Though I suppose he’s not exactly the same boy who foolishly died for you."
He glanced sideways. "Tom. Bring Beatrix out. If you don’t believe me, ask her."
Beatrix stepped free of the pocket dimension a heartbeat later, and recognition hit Hina almost as hard as Aidan’s face had.
"You’re..." Hina’s eyes went wide. "The former headmaster."
"That’s right." Beatrix inclined her head, calm as ever. "This is Aidan. I took his body away myself, and yes, I declared him dead not long after. Procedures were annoying, and it was simpler for everyone if the paperwork just ended there."
Layla’s brow furrowed. "But where are Roan and Corin? They should have gone after you already."
"Knocked out." Aidan shrugged. "Not my fault. They were being annoying, and I wasn’t here for them."
"What?" Hina’s eyes went even wider. "You knocked them out? Do you have any idea whose children they are? They’re both Final-Stage Divine-rank!"
Aidan blinked, entirely unmoved. "So?"
"So?!" Her voice climbed sharply. "Come with me right now, we have to apologize. This isn’t Earth!" She crossed the distance between them and grabbed his hand before he could react, urgency written across every line of her face.
Boris’s eyebrows rose at that, something proprietary flickering behind the expression.
"So." He stepped forward, voice cool. "Someone unrelated to this academy assaults two of our students and then walks straight in here uninvited. Do you have a death wish, boy?"
Aidan let go of Hina’s hand, gently but without hesitation. "I’m not here to apologize to anyone." He looked past Boris entirely, back to Hina. "I came to confirm something. As far as I’m concerned, you and I are little more than distant acquaintances now."
...
Back at the front hall, the receptionist finally got a quiet moment to deal with the Digicard sitting on her desk.
She synced it out of professional habit more than curiosity, fully expecting the usual scattering of minor contribution points most visitors carried.
The screen didn’t scatter. It flooded.
Numbers climbed faster than the display could properly render them, and the Alliance’s own network pinged an alert loud enough that two other staff members glanced over before she’d even fully processed what she was looking at.
[Contribution Sync Complete.]
[Final-Stage Divine-rank Terrors eliminated: 114.]
[Divine-rank Terrors eliminated: 900.]
[Total contribution threshold exceeds all current Admiral-tier benchmarks.]
The receptionist’s mouth fell open, the Digicard trembling faintly in her hand.
A hundred and fourteen Final-Stage Divine-rank Terrors. Nine hundred more beneath them. Numbers that belonged to entire war campaigns, not to one visitor who’d wandered in off the street looking for a girl who supposedly didn’t exist anymore.
[Alliance Notice: Contribution threshold met for Admiral-tier recognition.]
[Seat and title of Admiral to be formally conferred upon synchronization confirmation.]
She stared at the console for a long moment, then looked up toward the inner grounds where the man in question had vanished barely five minutes earlier, calm as anything, like he hadn’t just casually assaulted two Final-Stage Divine heirs on his way through the front door.
"...Who," she said slowly, to absolutely no one, "was that."