Chapter 74. Nobody Suspected the Real Reason Until Clara Did
It began as something so infinitesimal that even William’s hypervigilant mind failed to register it as a threat. At first, it was merely a ripple in the water, a slight deviation from the relentless, punishing routine he had cultivated for his students.
Three days after the nightmare in the third chamber, the first crack appeared. The training session should have been a grueling ninety-minute marathon of sweat and muscle failure.
Instead, William called it off nearly twenty minutes early. The moment Lia’s redirect technique clicked cleanly into place for the fourth consecutive time, William didn’t push for the fifth or sixth repetition.
He didn’t demand the extra blood and exhaustion he usually required. He simply stopped.
’Something is off,’ a voice whispered in the back of his mind.
But he dismissed it. He blamed it on the lingering adrenaline from the dungeon, the unspoken tension that still hung over the group like a guillotine blade.
The next day, the pattern repeated, and the unease began to fester. Kaela was mid-swing, her blade whistling through the air as she built the momentum necessary for a devastating Ember Stance strike, when William cut her off.
He didn’t critique her form, and he didn’t offer a correction. He simply signaled the end.
William found himself glancing toward the exit of the training grounds before the students had even finished catching their breath, his eyes scanning the treeline, the shadows, and the spaces between breaths. His body was coiled, ready to sprint, ready to fight even when there was nothing to fight.
By the fourth day, the subtlety had evaporated. The pattern had become a glaring wound.
"That’s it...? We’re fucking done?" Kaela’s voice exploded across the training field, raw with disbelief and rising fury.
She stood in the center of the dust-choked arena, her sword still raised mid-thrust, her chest heaving. "Are you serious right now, Instructor Wade? We’ve been at this for what... forty minutes?"
William didn’t meet her eyes. He was already methodically gathering his equipment, his movements precise but uncharacteristically rushed.
"Forty two," he corrected flatly. "That’s a solid session, Kaela... Take the rest."
"A solid session?" Kaela barked a harsh, incredulous laugh that sounded more like a snarl. "We’ve been grinding for forty-two minutes!"
"We usually push until our hands bleed and our mana reserves are bone dry."
"That’s how you learn!"
"We covered everything I wanted to cover today," William said.
His voice was a controlled monotone, but beneath the surface, his pulse was drumming a frantic rhythm. His mind was racing through every tactical contingency.
’The rift wasn’t a random anomaly... Those creatures were coordinated...’
’They knew where we would be... They were waiting...’
"Bullshit," Kaela snapped, stepping toward him, her boots kicking up clouds of dry earth.
Her eyes were narrowing with open, venomous suspicion. "You said the exact same thing yesterday. And the day before that..."
"You’re cutting us off before we even get warmed up."
William moved past her toward the gate, his stride long and urgent. Every muscle in his back felt like a drawn bowstring.
The silence of the surrounding woods felt too heavy, too deliberate. Every rustle of leaves sounded like the scraping of chitinous armor; every shift in the wind felt like the approach of a predator.
"Coincidence, Kaela... Go study," William threw over his shoulder, but the words felt hollow even to him.
"Coincidence doesn’t have a schedule, Instructor Wade!" Kaela shouted after him, her voice echoing off the stone walls of the academy. "That’s not a coincidence... it’s more like a goddamn pattern!"
William didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop.
He could feel the phantom weight of Aetherion at his hip, calling to him, demanding he be ready for the moment the shadows finally decided to stop watching and start attacking.
William, who had genuinely not expected to get caught this quickly, offered nothing further beyond a vague, noncommittal wave over his shoulder as he disappeared through the gate, and Kaela turned to the rest of the group with the particular, indignant energy of someone who had just uncovered a conspiracy she fully intended to investigate.
Kaela stood frozen for a moment, staring at the empty space where he had been. The indignation rolling off her was palpable, a physical heat that seemed to make the air around her shimmer.
She whirled around to face the rest of the group with the razor-sharp energy of someone who had just stumbled upon a conspiracy and was already mentally sharpening the blade she would use to expose it.
"Is it just me," Kaela demanded, her voice cracking like a whip across the field, "or has training been getting shorter every single goddamn day this week?"
"It’s not just you," Ellie admitted.
She sank onto the stone bench beside Clara with a heavy, defeated sigh, wiping sweat from her forehead with a trembling hand. "Yesterday... my mana control session got cut to twenty minutes..."
"I was barely beginning to feel the flow before he just... called it."
"Twenty minutes, Kaela?" Lia interjected, joining them, her brow furrowed in deep concentration. "I barely got through two increments..."
"I didn’t even have time to work up a proper sweat, let alone a proper technique."
"See?! I fucking knew it!" Kaela shouted, throwing her hands up in the air.
There was a perverse air of triumph in her voice, the kind that comes from someone who has been privately stewing in suspicion and has finally found proof. "I’ve been counting it! Every fucking second!"
"You’ve been timing the sessions?" Olivia asked, blinking in surprise.
"Of course I’ve been timing them!" Kaela snapped, producing the claim with the intensity of a prosecutor presenting evidence. "Monday was an hour and ten... Tuesday was fifty-five minutes... Wednesday was forty-five, and today’s pathetic forty-two."
She stomped her boot against the packed earth hard enough to send a cloud of dust swirling around her ankles. "We’re losing nearly ten minutes of progress every single day!"
"At this rate, by next week, he won’t even bother showing up at all!"
The accusation hung in the air, heavy and bitter.
"Are we...? I don’t know..." Ellie asked softly, trying to inject a note of levity into the conversation, though her voice wavered with genuine anxiety. "Maybe we’re just not a priority class anymore?"
"Did we do something wrong to upset Instructor Wade?"
"Did he think we weren’t taking the dungeon incident seriously enough?"
Clara, who had been uncharacteristically silent, her quill scratching methodically across the parchment of her journal, finally lifted her head. Her pale eyes moved over the group with the unsettling, clinical calm of someone who had already solved a puzzle while everyone else was still looking for the pieces.
"Well, duh... it’s not you," Clara said flatly. Her tone carried the weary certainty of someone who had been waiting for the others to stop being emotional and start being observant.
The group turned toward her instinctively. Clara didn’t flinch at the sudden attention; she simply closed her journal with a deliberate thud and settled it in her lap.
"It’s not about your performance, Ellie... Or your discipline, Kaela," Clara continued, her gaze sharpening. "It’s about where he goes immediately after he cuts us off."
"Every single session that has been shortened this week has ended with Instructor Wade heading directly toward the administrative wing."
"Not the barracks, not the infirmary, nor the mess hall, but the vice headmaster’s residence."
A cold shiver seemed to ripple through the group. The implication was clear: something was happening behind closed doors, something urgent enough to derail the most disciplined instructor in the academy.
"I’ve been tracking his movements the same way Kaela’s been tracking the minutes," Clara said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. "Just a different variable..."
"Every time he leaves early, he’s not going to rest or he’s going to report, but he’s being summoned."
She paused, her eyes scanning each of their faces, seeing the dawning horror in their expressions.
"Think about the dungeon," she whispered, the words carrying a weight that made the air feel suddenly thin. "Think about what happened to Catherine down there and think about the rift."
"The way she froze," Ellie whispered, her voice barely audible as she instinctively hugged herself, the memory of those chitinous claws and the screaming rift flooding back like poison.
Lia, who had gone quiet during the exchange, nodded slowly, something settling into place behind her sharp, focused eyes. "Yeah, I noticed about that too... she hasn’t been the same since."
"I noticed it in the corridor, and again the next day at the academy, the way she flinched when Headmaster Albert dropped a stack of files a little too loudly near her office."
"You think Instructor Wade’s been spending his extra time helping her with that," Ellie said, understanding dawning across her face. "Not just, like, checking in...? But actually helping her train through it."
"That would explain the timing," Clara said. "And honestly, it makes sense..."
"She’s important to him... and to all of us, really, even if we don’t always show it the way we probably should."
Kaela, who had opened her mouth clearly intending to continue her earlier indignant campaign, found herself, somewhat to her own visible surprise, without much left to say. She sat down heavily on the bench beside Ellie, arms crossed, staring at the empty training ground where William had disappeared a few minutes earlier.
"Well," she said eventually, considerably more subdued than her usual register, "that’s annoyingly hard to argue with..."