Chapter 181. A Prisoner Who Had Convinced Herself the Bars Were Part of Her Own Skeleton
William leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on his knees. He abandoned any pretense of casual idle chatter; the mask of the easygoing instructor had fallen away, replaced by something sharper, more focused.
He needed to probe deeper, not as a teacher testing a student, but as a man trying to find the pulse of someone who seemed to have none.
He kept his voice soft, gentle, almost hypnotic, hoping to reach through the armor of her discipline.
"Do you have a favorite food, Lia?" he asked. "Something you crave after a hard day?"
"Something that just makes you feel... good?"
Lia considered this. She didn’t answer immediately; she stared at the scorched earth of the training ground as if she were scanning a tactical map for any sign of an answer.
When she finally spoke, her voice was precise, devoid of any sensory pleasure. "I eat what maximizes recovery and performance."
"High-quality protein for muscle repair, specific vegetables for micronutrient density, and enough complex carbohydrates to sustain prolonged endurance training."
"I don’t think I’ve ever chosen a meal based on preference rather than biological function."
William felt a phantom pain in his own chest. The way she spoke about nourishment was like discussing fuel for a furnace.
There was no taste, no aroma, no joy, just input and output.
"What about the city festival?" he pushed, shifting gears. "The academy always gives everyone the week off."
"It’s a tradition: music, food, fireworks, people actually being people. You’ve been here three years now, haven’t you?"
"I’ve never attended," she said flatly.
William’s eyebrows shot up. "Not even once? Not even to see the lights?"
"I use that week to train uninterrupted," Lia said, and there was a perverse kind of pride in her tone. "It’s efficient."
"Fewer distractions, fewer students to slow down the training tempo, since most of the academy empties out for the festival... It is the optimal time to make progress."
’Optimal,’ William thought bitterly. ’She’s turning herself into a weapon of pure efficiency, and weapons don’t have weeks off.’
"Have you ever traveled anywhere?" he asked, his voice growing more urgent despite his best efforts. "Not for a tournament, not because your family demanded it, not because you were assigned a mission."
"Have you ever just... left? Just because you were curious about what was over the next mountain?"
Lia’s brow furrowed. For the first time in their entire conversation, her composure faltered, revealing something raw beneath: genuine, profound confusion.
"Why would I travel somewhere without a tactical or training-related purpose?"
"For fun, Lia," William said, the word feeling foreign and inadequate in the heavy air between them. "Just to see something new."
"To see something beautiful or strange or useless..."
"That’s a purpose." William smiled. "Being alive is a purpose."
Lia looked at him as if he were speaking a language she had never heard, a dialect of something ancient and extinct.
"I’ve never done that." She paused, and for a moment, William thought she might finally break, that the weight of her own emptiness might crack her skull open. "I don’t think I’ve ever considered it as an option."
The admission hung between them like a death sentence. She hadn’t just chosen this life; she had never even realized there was another one available to her.
She was a prisoner who had convinced herself the bars were part of her own skeleton.
William kept his voice light, weaving in small, almost self-deprecating jokes to prevent the conversation from tipping from a chat into a full-scale interrogation.
He was careful, hyperaware of the delicate balance: if he pressed too hard, she would bolt like a wounded animal; if he pressed too little, he would miss the chance to see what lay beneath the armor.
But beneath that veneer of easygoing mentorship, William had gone completely still. His mind was operating with the cold, analytical precision he used when reading a veteran soldier, the kind who came back from a massacre with thousand-yard stares and refused to speak of the blood on their hands.
Every question he asked was a scalpel, peeling back another layer of the same devastating pattern.
No hobbies. No pleasure in food. No festivals. No purposeless travel. No idle afternoons were spent simply existing.
As he listened, a grim picture began to form in his mind: a life constructed not of experiences, but of repetitions. Every waking second had been weaponized, organized entirely around the singular, unbroken pursuit of becoming more lethal, leaving nothing behind for the human being underneath.
"What about friends?" William asked eventually.
He kept the question casual, but his gut had gone tight and cold, like a coiled spring. "I mean, outside of the sparring circle..."
"Anyone you talk to just to talk? Someone who doesn’t care how fast your draw is or how clean your footwork is?"
Lia stared at him for a long moment. Her expression shifted; there was something almost apologetic in her eyes, a flicker of recognition that she understood her answer would fail his unspoken test.
"Not really," she said, her voice as flat as a blade. "I’ve never needed that."
"Everyone needs that, Lia," William countered, his voice dropping an octave. "Even the strongest steel needs a forge."
"I’ve managed fine without it," Lia said.
Her tone remained controlled, but William caught the faintest, almost imperceptible tremor. It wasn’t fear; it was something more tragic.
It sounded like a rehearsed line, a mantra she had recited to herself in the dark of her quarters for years until she had finally believed her own lie.
William didn’t push back immediately. He allowed the silence to stretch between them, letting it grow thick and uncomfortable, the way he had learned to do decades ago when a conversation reached the edge of something too raw to touch.
He knew that if he rushed to fill the silence, he would scare her off. He had to let her sit with the emptiness she had just described.
"Can I ask you something?" William asked quietly. "And you don’t have to answer it..."
"You can tell me to fuck off and go back to my office if you want."
Lia nodded slowly. Her wariness had deepened; she was no longer just uncomfortable, she was guarded, her shoulders tensing as if she were bracing for a physical blow.
"When’s the last time you did something purely because you wanted to?" William asked, his gaze locking onto hers with unsettling intensity. "Something with absolutely no goal attached to it."
"No training benefit, no skill improvement, no incremental gain you could measure, track, or report on afterward."
"No purpose, no strategy. Just... something that made you happy in the moment, simply because it existed."
The question hung in the air between them, more dangerous than any training sword. William watched her closely, waiting to see if the silence would finally break her or if she would simply retreat further into the hollow fortress she had built around her soul.
The silence that followed was suffocating. It stretched past the point of discomfort into something primal, a void that seemed to suck the very air from William’s lungs.
He watched her closely, his pulse thrumming in his ears. For a moment, he genuinely feared she wouldn’t speak at all, that the question had struck a nerve so deep it had severed something vital inside her.
Lia’s gaze drifted downward. Her hands, scarred from countless hours of gripping sword hilts and callouses grinding against leather, rested loosely in her lap.
And then, William saw it. It wasn’t a dramatic collapse.
There were no tears, no shaking shoulders, no choked sobs. Instead, it was something far more unsettling: a small, quiet fracture spreading across her carefully composed exterior.
It was as if the porcelain mask she had worn for years had developed a hairline crack, revealing the hollow, terrifying emptiness beneath.
"I don’t know," she said finally.
Her voice was smaller than William had ever heard it, devoid of its usual steel, stripped bare and vulnerable. "I genuinely... I don’t know."
"That’s okay," William said, his voice dropping to a murmur, gentle enough to soothe a wounded animal. "You don’t have to have an answer right now, Lia."
"Nobody expects you to be an expert on yourself."
"It should be an easy question," Lia snapped, though the anger wasn’t directed at him.
It was a raw, bleeding frustration directed inward, a self-loathing that tasted like copper. "Everyone else, they have these... these things."
"Kaela fights because she loves the adrenaline, the thrill of the kill..."
"Ellie spends her nights over a stove because she likes the smell of herbs..."
"Clara has her flowers, her journals..."
"They all have these anchors that hold them to the world."
Her breathing hitched slightly, the only sign of the storm raging behind her eyes. "Everyone has an answer ready."
"I just have... training... I just have the next strike, the next stance, the next kill."
"I don’t have an answer! I’ve never had one!"
’Because you weren’t raised to be a person,’ William thought bitterly, the realization twisting in his gut like a blade. ’You were raised to be a tool...’
’And you don’t ask a sword what its favorite color is.’
"That’s not a failure on your part, Lia," William said carefully, choosing his words as if walking through a minefield. "That’s not a flaw in your character."
"That’s just... something nobody ever gave you the permission to figure out."
"You were taught to survive, not to live."