Chapter 133: Admiral Garen
Boris opened with a technique clearly meant to end things fast, a Divine-rank strike that split the arena floor along its path, and Aidan didn’t so much as reach for a weapon to answer it.
Frost climbed the blade instead, crawling up from nowhere Boris could point to, and by the time the strike actually arrived the weapon had gone rigid and useless in his own grip.
Boris stared at his own frozen sword for a full second before remembering he was supposed to be fighting.
"That’s..." someone in the front row said slowly. "That’s not a technique. That’s just frost. Where did the frost come from?"
"I don’t know, but Boris looks personally offended by it."
He was, in fact, personally offended by it. He wrenched the blade free with visible effort, cracked ice scattering across the arena floor, and came in again low and fast, clearly trying to close the distance before Aidan could do whatever he’d just done a second time.
The ground beneath his next step simply got heavier.
Boris stumbled through what should have been a clean lunge, overcorrected, and nearly faceplanted directly in front of several hundred watching students.
The stands actually gasped.
"Did he just trip?"
"He tripped. The Divine-rank senior tripped."
"On flat ground."
"OVER NOTHING."
Aidan hadn’t moved from the spot he’d started in, hands still loosely in his pockets, watching the whole thing with the mild interest of a man observing weather he didn’t personally need to worry about.
"You’re doing that on purpose," Boris snarled, straightening up, dignity visibly fraying at the edges.
"I’m doing several things on purpose." Aidan tilted his head. "You’re just experiencing all of them at once."
Boris answered that with a full Divine-rank technique this time, channeling enough force that the air itself shuddered around the buildup, a strike clearly meant to be the actual answer to everything that had happened so far.
Aidan let Silence swallow it whole.
The technique arrived in complete, eerie soundlessness, all its force simply gone before it ever made contact, and Boris’s own follow-through stumbled through empty air where an explosion should have been.
The crowd’s reaction arrived in stages. First confusion. Then, from somewhere near the back, an actual laugh nobody could quite suppress in time.
"He just... muted it?"
"You can’t mute a technique."
"Apparently you can."
Boris’s face had gone somewhere past red into something closer to purple. He came again, faster this time, genuine desperation bleeding into every movement, and Aidan simply wasn’t where the strike landed anymore, a shadow peeling away half a second before impact and reforming three feet to the left, hands still in his pockets.
"Stand still!"
"I am standing still," Aidan said, from an entirely different spot than the one Boris was glaring at. "You’re just aiming at where I used to be."
By the fourth failed exchange, the laughter had stopped being suppressed at all. Someone near the front was openly wheezing. Another student had covered their face with both hands, shoulders shaking.
"I’m actually starting to feel bad for him," someone muttered.
"Don’t. He called that guy ’boy’ twenty minutes ago."
"Fair. Continue laughing."
"This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever watched," Layla muttered, not quite managing to keep the smile off her own face despite everything.
Boris, breathing hard now, hair coming loose from whatever careful arrangement he’d started the match with, looked less like a Divine-rank senior student and more like a man being personally mocked by the universe.
"ENOUGH." He threw everything he had left into one final strike, a technique big enough to genuinely worry the front rows into flinching back.
Aidan met it with an open palm.
The impact never landed anywhere near him. Frost and gravity and shadow folded together for just long enough to catch the strike, dissolve it, and leave Boris overextended and completely undefended for exactly the half second Aidan needed.
The slap that followed wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t need to be.
Boris’s head snapped sideways, eyes rolled back, and he hit the arena floor unconscious before most of the crowd had even fully processed that the fight was already over.
Silence held the arena for a solid three seconds.
Then it broke entirely.
...
"What," Hina said, staring at the crumpled shape at the arena’s center, "was that."
Beatrix didn’t answer right away, watching Aidan roll his shoulders like he’d barely broken a light sweat. "Aspects," she said eventually. "Just Aspects. No weapon."
"That’s not possible. Aspects take years to properly wield, and even then most people manage one at a time."
"He manages four without trying." Beatrix’s tone stayed carefully even. "Don’t ask me how. I’ve stopped asking."
"What’s his talent?" Hina’s voice climbed slightly, frustration bleeding through the shock. "It has to explain something."
"I don’t know."
"You don’t know?"
"I know he bonds with power differently than anyone else I’ve ever met." Beatrix kept her eyes on Aidan, who was already turning away from Boris’s unconscious body without a second glance. "Beyond that, I’ve genuinely stopped trying to categorize it."
...
The teachers arrived within minutes, five of them, Divine-rank presence rolling off the group hard enough to finally silence the last of the murmuring crowd.
The one in front, silver-haired and sharp-eyed, stopped a few paces from Aidan and looked him over with the particular caution reserved for something that had just embarrassed a senior student in front of the entire student body.
"Your Digicard," she said. "We need to verify your identity."
"It’s with your front desk already." Aidan didn’t bother hiding his impatience. "Go ask for it back once you’re done panicking over it. I’m heading out."
"You’re not going anywhere."
Another of the five, broader and visibly angrier, stepped forward. "You think you can walk in here, assault a senior student, and just leave?"
"He beat us too!" Corin’s voice cut through from the edge of the crowd, Roan nodding fiercely beside him. "He’s wanted by the authorities! Ask the front desk!"
The five teachers closed ranks around Aidan without another word of discussion.
"You can’t be serious." Aidan looked between all five of them, genuinely, briefly speechless.
They were serious. Barrier after barrier snapped into place around him, layered spellwork stacking thick enough to visibly warp the air, five Divine-rank techniques working in concert to make absolutely certain nothing was getting out.
Aidan exhaled slowly, patience audibly fraying for the first time since he’d walked into the building.
"Why are you all so annoying." He rolled his neck, cracking it once. "Or is it me? Maybe I’ve just got a patience problem today. Either way." His eyes narrowed, gold gone flat and cold. "I don’t care for this treatment."
Shadowfrost didn’t build up this time. It simply existed, bursting outward in every direction at once, bypassing each layered barrier like the walls had never been solid to begin with.
Cold swallowed all five constructs whole, froze them mid-formation, and shattered every one of them into drifting, glittering dust before a single teacher could react.
"Get out of my way."
"How dare you!"
All five came at him at once.
...
Back in Alliance Central’s verification office, the scanning had entered its third full pass, and the results hadn’t changed once.
"Nothing." The technician rubbed both eyes, exhausted. "No tampering. No falsified entries. No trace of manipulation anywhere in the data structure. This card is clean."
Her supervisor, standing rigid behind her, finally gave the order neither of them had wanted to give. "Pull the combat footage. All of it."
The footage came through in fragments, raw and unedited, and none of it made the room feel any better.
Attacks that shouldn’t have been survivable landing clean on Final-Stage Divine-rank Terrors, one after another, entire engagements ending in single exchanges. No wasted motion. No visible strain.
"That’s..." The technician’s voice had gone very quiet. "That’s not luck. That’s not even skill. That’s someone operating on an entirely different level."
Her supervisor was already reaching for the priority channel.
"Get me Starfall Harmony Academy. Now."
...
The headmaster took the call standing at his own office window, and by the end of the first sentence his face had gone the color of old paper.
"An Admiral." He repeated it slowly, like saying it twice might make it less true. "There’s a misunderstanding involving an Admiral. On my grounds."
"Sir, there’s more."
"An Admiral," he said again, louder this time, already moving toward the door. "What the fuck."
He crossed the academy grounds faster than he’d moved in years, robes streaming behind him, and the commotion found him before he found it, a crowd gathered thick around the training courtyard’s edge, murmuring in the specific, hushed tone of people who’d just watched something they weren’t going to forget.
He shoved through the crowd and stopped cold.
Five of his most senior teachers stood frozen from the neck down, ice thick and absolute across every inch of them, only their heads still capable of movement. Even the telltale shimmer of active Spirit Energy circulation had gone completely still, suppressed into total silence.
"He froze all five of them," someone whispered nearby, awe overtaking whatever fear should have come with it. "At once."
"I thought that was impossible against Divine-rank."
"So did they, apparently."
"Headmaster!"
Boris, freshly conscious and still unsteady on his feet, staggered toward him with one hand pressed to his own jaw.
"You have to kill this guy!" He pointed wildly at Aidan, voice cracking with equal parts fury and desperation. "He’s a wanted criminal! He’s hurting students and teachers, he needs to be stopped right now, he..."
Every eye in the courtyard swung toward the headmaster.
Aidan’s followed a half second later, mildly curious what the man was actually going to do.
The headmaster’s hand moved before anyone in the crowd had time to react at all.
The slap landed clean across Boris’s other cheek, snapping his head the opposite direction this time, and the sound of it cracked louder than anything that had happened in the arena all afternoon.
"You absolute idiots!"
The Headmaster quickly smiled at Aidan and apologized. "Please forgive these ignorant fools, Admiral Garen."