Chapter 139. The Emotional Trauma of Poorly Seasoned Oak
The days following Corwin’s dissolution were not filled with the expected quiet of mourning but with the frantic, grinding machinery of institutional panic. The academy transformed from a place of learning into a fortress under siege from within.
William found himself caught in a whirlwind of bureaucratic chaos that he never could have anticipated when he first arrived in this world as a disrespected, Zero Class Instructor, the kind of man whose opinion carried less weight than a training dummy’s grunt.
Now, the man who had survived the impossible was being summoned to every high-stakes council meeting like a living relic of catastrophe.
Headmaster Albert had wasted no time. Within twenty-four hours of the attack, he had called for a scorched-earth review of every security measure, ward, and patrol route in the kingdom’s most vital academy.
Both William and Catherine the two survivors who had stared directly into the abyss were dragged into the center of a political storm that stretched long into the late afternoons.
The conference room was a sterile, oppressive space, devoid of any of the warmth Catherine found in her private study or the raw honesty of the training grounds. It was a room of polished mahogany, expensive ink, and cold, calculating eyes.
Around the long table sat the power players: city representatives with hungry eyes, senior instructors who looked like they wanted to be anywhere else, and academy administrators who treated human lives like entries in a ledger.
"The wards along the eastern gate failed catastrophically," one of the city’s ranking officials barked, slamming a meaty fist onto a spread out map.
His finger traced jagged lines marking where the mana disturbances had occurred. "They didn’t register a flicker until the disturbance had already manifested."
"That’s not just a gap; that’s an invitation!"
"We need detection systems that trigger before a rift even thinks about stabilizing, not after it’s already chewing through our walls."
"We are already in negotiations with the Royal Mages’ Guild," Albert countered, his voice carrying that particular calm that only comes from years of managing disasters. "We are proposing a secondary layer of wards specifically tuned to the frequency of Corwin’s signature."
"It won’t be instantaneous magic, as it has its limits, but it will shave precious minutes off our response window."
"Minutes are what separate survival from slaughter," William interjected, his voice cutting through the bureaucratic bickering like a blade.
The room went silent. When William spoke, he didn’t offer theories; he offered scars.
"When he appeared, it wasn’t just magic... There was a physical pressure, a sudden, sickening drop in air pressure that made your ears pop and your skin crawl."
"The air went still, unnaturally dead... Any sentry trained to recognize that specific silence would have given us more than just minutes."
Catherine nodded grimly, leaning forward to point at a tactical diagram. "The troop positioning was wrong."
"We were spread too thin on defensive formations that assumed a frontal assault..."
"We need mobile strike teams that can respond to mana spikes without breaking our primary perimeter." Her eyes were sharp and clinical, the instincts of a commander who had been forged in a furnace of betrayal.
Meanwhile, in the back row of the room, Kaela was suffering. Dragged along by Albert’s insistence that the ’next generation’ understand the stakes of governance, she looked less like a promising student and more like a prisoner awaiting execution.
She slouched so low in her chair that she was nearly horizontal, her chin resting on her palm.
"This is literal torture," Kaela hissed, leaning toward Lia. "I fought a six-armed nightmare three days ago."
"My ribs still hurt when I breathe too fast... And now? Now... I’m being asked to listen to a middle-aged man in a fancy suit drone on about... what?" Kaela scoffed. "The supply chain logistics for reinforced gate materials?"
Lia didn’t even bother to lower her voice, earning a sharp, disapproving glare from the city planner who was currently explaining the procurement costs of enchanted lumber.
"I find it fascinating, actually," Lia whispered back, her expression one of detached interest. "This is how civilizations actually function, Kaela..."
"You can’t just swing a sword at every problem."
"You have to understand the structural weaknesses of the system to prevent the next catastrophe from happening in the first place."
Kaela rolled her eyes so hard it looked painful. "You would find lumber requisitions fascinating..."
"You’d probably write a thesis on the emotional trauma of poorly seasoned oak."
"Someone in this room clearly needs to," Lia replied dryly, tilting her head toward the planner. "Though I suspect his interest lies more in the profit margins than the structural integrity."
"I heard that!" the planner snapped, though he quickly returned to his speech about requisition forms.
Kaela groaned audibly, sinking further into her seat. "If I die of boredom before the Hollow Circle gets to me, I’m coming back as a ghost just to haunt this meeting."
Kaela groaned again, a sound that was somewhere between a whimper and a death rattle, slumping so far down in her chair that she was practically sliding onto the floor. "If I hear the word ’procurement’ one more time, I am going to commit treason! I swear it!"
William caught her eye across the room. He didn’t scold her he knew better but he watched her with a keen, analytical focus.
Despite her theatrical displays of agony, he noticed the way her fingers unconsciously drummed a tactical rhythm against the tabletop when the mages discussed ward frequencies. She wasn’t just bored; she was processing.
She was absorbing the machinery of war.
Over the following days, William would occasionally interject with sharp, brutal observations about tactical response times, not the sanitized versions the politicians liked, but the real ones: the ones where seconds meant the difference between a clean kill and a squad being torn limb from limb.
His bluntness often made the city officials flinch, but it forced them to confront the reality that their pretty maps couldn’t stop a slaughter.
...
By the end of that week, the academy had begun to transform into something resembling a fortress. A new rotating patrol schedule was implemented, forcing constant, overlapping coverage along every gate to eliminate the blind spots that had been so lethally exploited.
The Royal Mages’ Guild had been given emergency access to establish new detection wards, and a formal reporting protocol was etched into the academy’s new bylaws ensuring that any mana anomaly, no matter how microscopic, would hit Albert’s desk within the hour.
It wasn’t a cure. The shadow of the Hollow Circle still loomed like a guillotine blade suspended over the kingdom’s neck.
But it was progress tangible, bloody, and immediate. It was the kind of foundation William had learned, across two lifetimes of violence, was worth building carefully rather than rushing into a suicidal charge.
Nearly a week later, the storm of bureaucracy had receded into a dull ache. On a morning where the sky hung low and gray, heavy with the threat of rain that never quite fell, Catherine found William.
"Will you come with me?" she asked.
Her voice was quiet, stripped of its usual command, but it possessed a deliberate steadiness that unnerved him. This wasn’t the raw, bleeding grief that had nearly consumed her after Corwin’s death.
This was something older. Something more permanent.
"I need to go to the cemetery."
The request carried a weight that told William this visit was a ritual, not an escape. For eight years, she had avoided this place as if the very soil were poisoned.
Now, she was seeking it out.
The cemetery sat on a gentle rise on the outskirts of the city, a place of muted colors and hushed wind. Rows of modest stone markers stretched across the carefully tended grounds like teeth in an old skull.
Catherine led the way toward the eastern edge with a haunting familiarity. She didn’t need a map; she didn’t need to hesitate.
Her feet moved with a muscle memory her mind had spent nearly a decade trying to erase, walking a path carved by years of suppressed memory.
They reached a small, isolated cluster of four headstones. They stood in a tight formation, defiant against the wind.
Each one was simply carved with a name and a date, clean, stark, and cruel. Beneath them lay nothing but empty earth, for the collapsed dungeon had claimed everything; no bodies had been recovered, leaving only names to mark the absence of flesh and bone.
Catherine carried a bundle of flowers simple, white blooms she had selected with careful deliberation. William stayed half a step behind her, his boots silent on the damp grass, his presence a silent anchor.
He watched her approach the first headstone. The girl who had once trembled at the sight of blood now approached the empty graves with a terrifying, unshakable steadiness.