Chapter 182. A Void Where a Childhood’s Worth of Ordinary Joys Should Have Existed
Lia didn’t respond. She couldn’t.
She simply stared at the ground, her jaw clenched so tight William feared her teeth might crack. He didn’t push further; he knew when a wound was too fresh to probe.
He let the observation hang heavy between them, unclaimed and devastating.
Eventually, the oppressive weight of the conversation began to lift, replaced by the natural settling of the afternoon sun.
After a silence that stretched long enough to become its own kind of presence, William stood up. The joints in his knees popped, a reminder of his own mortality.
He reached down and offered Lia his hand, an instinctual gesture born from decades of pulling broken, bleeding students off the training mats.
"Come eat lunch with everyone," he said.
His tone was soft, stripped of any instructor’s authority. "Not as an order, Lia."
"Not a command from the academy as well. Just... an invitation." William smiled. "The two thousand swings will still be there tomorrow."
"The training yard isn’t going anywhere."
Lia looked at his offered hand. Her eyes searched his, looking for a trap, looking for the hidden motive, looking for the reason why a man would bother trying to save something that seemed so beyond saving.
Something flickered behind her pupils, a spark of something old and buried, something she couldn’t quite name. Finally, with a hesitation that made her entire body seem fragile, she reached out and allowed him to pull her to her feet.
"Just this once," she said.
The qualifier was there, a defensive shield, a way to retreat into her discipline if this failed, but her voice lacked its usual conviction. The shield was already cracking.
"Just this once," William agreed with an easy smile that didn’t quite reach his concerned eyes.
He turned them both toward the mess hall, deliberately walking ahead to give her space. He didn’t point out that ’just this once’ was the most dangerous and most hopeful sentence she had ever spoken.
They walked together in a silence that had shifted; it was no longer the suffocating, pressurized void of moments before, but something lighter, more fragile. Yet, William couldn’t shake the unease.
Glancing sideways at her more than once, he noticed the telltale signs of a body that refused to disarm. Lia’s sword hand kept flexing unconsciously at her side, her fingers curling and uncurling against her thigh as if her tendons were wired directly to her weapon.
Her muscles remained coiled, ready to spring into a lethal stance at the slightest provocation. It was as if her body were betraying her mind; her conscious self had agreed to stop training, but her nervous system was still braced for a war that never ended.
’She doesn’t know how to exist without the threat of violence,’ William thought grimly. ’She’s not just trained; she’s conditioned to believe that any moment of stillness is a moment of vulnerability...’
...
That evening arrived with a hollow quiet. Long after the mess hall had emptied and the academy had settled into that particular, eerie hush, the kind that only arrives after a day of forced, unstructured rest, William found himself alone.
He sat near the edge of the training ground, perched on the same worn wooden bench Lia had occupied earlier. The sky above was performing a slow, bleeding transformation, shifting from a bruised orange into a deep, settling indigo that promised nothing but cold stars.
He sat there motionless, his mind working like a strategist’s ledger, turning each piece of the day over in his thoughts with the same clinical attention he usually reserved for cataloguing a student’s fatal flaws in combat technique.
He thought of Kaela. She had spent her rest day hunting, technically still engaged in violence, still tracking blood through the underbrush, but the way she had moved was different.
She wasn’t hunting for survival or tactical advantage; she was hunting because she loved the primal rush of it.
She had been surrounded by people, her laughter ringing out between kills, a life that clearly extended far beyond the sterile confines of the training ground. Her violence was a choice, an expression of her spirit.
Then there was Ellie, whose rest day had been defined by something entirely alien to the academy’s purpose: warmth. He pictured her laughing over ruined bread with Catherine, the two of them building something small, domestic, and real.
Even Catherine, despite the scars she carried, both seen and unseen, had managed to find room today for burnt loaves and the uncomplicated comfort of easy friendship.
And Clara. Clara had wandered into the quiet of the forest, her eyes not scanning for ambush positions or sniper nests but studying the delicate veins of a leaf.
She was writing about flowers instead of threats, discovering in real time that observation didn’t always have to serve a tactical purpose. That looking at something could be an end in itself.
Finally, his thoughts circled back to Lia, and the weight in his chest returned, heavier than before.
He saw her in his mind’s eye: six hours of unbroken, mechanical repetition. A girl who chased a daily quota she couldn’t even remember choosing for herself.
No hobbies to ground her. No favorite food nourished her soul.
No memory of ever traveling somewhere purely for the joy of the horizon. No friends outside the narrow, transactional relationships built entirely around the utility of combat.
He remembered the look in her eyes when she had been asked that simple, devastating question. Most people answer instinctively; they deflect with a joke, they answer with a shrug, or they answer with enthusiasm.
But Lia had stared into the abyss of her own identity and found nothing there.
When asked what made her happy, she hadn’t just struggled to answer; she had genuinely, honestly, been confronted with the terrifying truth that she had no answer.
’She’s a masterpiece of engineering,’ William mused, watching a lone hawk circle in the darkening sky, ’but there’s no one home behind the eyes.’
William had spent the better part of his existence surrounded by dedication. He had forged soldiers who pushed themselves past the brink of physical collapse in pursuit of absolute mastery, and he had mentored students who chased perfection with a religious intensity that had occasionally made his own blood run cold.
He understood discipline; he knew the particular, white-hot fire that drove a human being to excel far beyond what comfort, or even survival, would ever demand of them.
But this? This felt different, and this felt wrong.
Discipline, even in its most fanatical, most extreme forms, usually left room for a person underneath it. There was always some small spark of individual identity, a preference for a certain song, a specific way of eating, or a stubborn streak of humor that occasionally poked through the rigid architecture of the training regimen.
What William had witnessed in Lia today wasn’t a person disciplined by training; it was a person who had been consumed by it.
It was a complete, terrifying absence, an entire dimension of her humanity that had never been allowed to develop, replaced entirely by a singular, all-consuming pursuit that had begun so early and run so relentlessly that she no longer even recognized the shape of the void she carried.
’She isn’t a person holding a sword,’ William thought, his jaw tightening as he stared into the gathering darkness. ’She is a sword that happens to be holding a person.’
He thought back to Kaela. One of her hunting companions had joked earlier that afternoon that Kaela couldn’t sit still without beating something up first, an observation William had overheard and found genuinely amusing at the time.
But Kaela’s restlessness came from an excess of something. It was the manic energy of a life so full, so vibrant, that it required violence as an outlet.
Underneath that restless fury sat a person who knew how to laugh, who knew how to connect, who knew how to feel.
Lia’s stillness was the opposite. It wasn’t an excess of energy; it was a profound, echoing absence.
It was a void where an entire childhood’s worth of ordinary joys should have existed: the scraped knees, the idle games, the simple pleasure of being bored.
That space had been carved out so thoroughly and so early that she had stopped noticing the emptiness at all. She had mistaken the hollow ache in her chest for simply how life was supposed to feel.
For months, William had operated under a comfortable assumption. He had assumed Lia’s relentless, mechanical drive came from the same place most noble family pressures did: high expectations, a demanding household, and the suffocating weight that comes with being labeled a prodigy before you are old enough to understand the cost of the title.
He had seen that pattern countless times in soldiers who grew up under fathers who measured love in trophies rather than affection. That kind of pressure creates resentment; it creates a simmering anger that can be channeled into skill.
But sitting here now, replaying every micro expression, every stuttered breath, every hollow syllable of their conversation in his mind like a tactical briefing, William found himself doubting that explanation.
Pressure from a demanding family usually leaves scars a person can name. It leaves resentment that festers beneath the discipline, a private, bitter awareness of what they have sacrificed.
Even the most broken soldiers usually know what they have lost, even if they hate what took it from them.
But Lia hadn’t shown him resentment. She hadn’t shown him grief.
She hadn’t shown him even the faintest trace of anger toward whatever system had forged her.
She had shown him confusion. A raw, genuine, bewildered confusion at the very idea that a life could contain anything beyond the next strike, the next drill, or the next kill.
When he asked her what made her happy, she hadn’t looked like a girl who had been denied joy; she had looked like someone being asked to speak a language she had never been taught to understand.