Chapter 185. Did the System Already Understand Something About Her Breaking Point?
The name landed with a physical weight, something far heavier than the System’s flat, informational tone should have been capable of producing. It felt less like data and more like a verdict.
William sat motionless. The easy morning warmth, the lingering phantom sensation of Catherine’s lips against his, drained from his body like blood from an open wound, leaving behind something cold and hollow.
His mind reeled backward, unbidden, dragged by an invisible chain to a memory that had been festering in the back of his consciousness.
He saw the training grounds: the cracked earth, the smell of iron and dried sweat, and a girl who had stood there like a statue carved from ice.
"Lia," he repeated quietly, the syllables feeling like gravel in his throat.
[Is something wrong?] the system asked.
The question was clinical, but in the silence of the kitchen, it felt intrusive.
William didn’t answer immediately. His mind was playing back six hours of unbroken, punishing repetition.
He remembered the way Lia’s sword arm had trembled not from weakness, but from a kind of mechanical exhaustion that went deeper than muscle. Two thousand sword swings, delivered with the grim, unquestionable obligation of a slave to a task.
When he had paused to ask her something simple, something human, she had looked at him with genuine, bewildered confusion.
’What do you do when you aren’t training, Lia?’
’What makes you happy?’
’What food do you actually enjoy?’
She had answered with nothing. No hobbies, no favorite colors, no memories of laughter, no friends outside the narrow, functional walls of her training regimen.
She was a weapon that had been forged so thoroughly that the smith had forgotten to give it a soul. She didn’t understand relaxation because she didn’t believe she had earned the right to exist outside of her utility.
"No," William said finally, forcing his voice to remain steady. "Nothing’s wrong... Just thinking."
[Take whatever time you need. The offer isn’t going anywhere.]
The system’s interface faded with a soft, digital whisper, leaving William alone in the kitchen. The morning sun still poured through the windows, indifferent to the storm brewing in his chest.
His tea sat forgotten on the table, a film forming over the surface as it grew stone cold. A knot of unease sat heavy in his gut, a visceral reaction that his rational mind couldn’t quite suppress.
He stood up, his movements mechanical, and began the walk back toward his quarters. But he couldn’t leave the name behind.
He turned it over and over in his mind like a cursed coin.
Completed.
That was the closest translation of what the system had implied. Bring Lia’s affection progress to completion.
The same threshold every other student on his roster would eventually cross assuming they survived long enough to build that level of trust.
On paper, the logic was sound. Catherine had crossed that threshold twice now, and both times it had been the result of something raw and real.
There had been no manipulation, no calculated moves, no exploitation of a system’s mechanics. It had been two humans finding something in each other.
There was no reason to assume Lia’s path would be any different.
Except William had spent enough of his old life before the System, before this world, reading the quiet, devastating hollows in soldiers.
He knew the look of people who had built entire identities around performing competence because competence was the only currency that kept them alive. He knew that when a person’s entire worth is tied to what they can do, they become terrified of who they are.
The timing was what gnawed at him. It wasn’t just a coincidence; it felt like a provocation.
The system had named her specifically, mere days after William himself had started lying awake at night, wondering what would happen to a girl who didn’t even understand the meaning of her own exhaustion.
A dark thought crossed his mind, one that made his pulse quicken with suspicion: was the System simply offering the next logical name on a list, the way it always had?
Or did this thing, this cold, calculating intelligence, already understand something about Lia’s breaking point that William himself had only just begun to suspect?
The uncertainty gnawed at him, a persistent, dull ache that refused to subside as he crossed the courtyard. His mind was still tangled in the system’s implications, caught between the clinical logic of an upgrade and the unsettling human reality of Lia Valestria.
He was walking through a world of sunlight and birdsong, but internally, he was navigating a minefield of unspoken consequences.
That distraction was precisely when Kaela decided to shatter his train of thought with all the subtlety of a charging bull hitting a wooden fence.
"Instructor Wade!"
William blinked, the sudden volume jolting him fully back into the physical world. The courtyard rushed back in with the smell of upturned earth, the distant clang of practice swords, and the heat of the midday sun.
"Kaela," he said, forcing his breathing to steady. "Hey. What’s up?"
Kaela didn’t answer with a greeting. She planted her feet, hands on her hips, looking like she was ready to declare war on the very concept of confusion.
"Are we doing the advanced footwork drill today, or the one from last week? Because Clara said one thing, Ellie said something completely different, and frankly, I’m tired of getting conflicting information from people who clearly just make shit up as they go."
"I did not make shit up," came Clara’s voice from somewhere behind Kaela, flat and utterly deadpan. "I read it directly from the schedule you posted."
"Maybe if you spent less time complaining and more time reading, we wouldn’t be having this conversation."
"The schedule you apparently can’t read correctly," Kaela shot back without missing a beat before whirling around to fix her attention back on William.
William realized, belatedly, that his guard was down. His expression must have still been carrying that strange, distant shadow, the look of a man whose soul was half submerged in a conversation with a ghost.
Kaela’s brow furrowed, her sharp eyes narrowing as she studied his face with unsettling intensity.
"Okay, seriously," Kaela said, her voice dropping its combative edge. "You okay? You’ve got that face."
William stiffened, instinctively trying to smooth over his features. "What face?"
"The face you make when you’re talking to the voice in your head that only you can hear."
William schooled his expression back into something neutral with the practiced ease of a man who had spent far too much time pretending he wasn’t hearing an omniscient AI narrating his life. "I don’t have a face for that."
"Oh, please... You absolutely do." Kaela crossed her arms, a smirk beginning to tug at the corner of her mouth. "The vice headmaster’s noticed it too."
"We’ve actually had meetings about it."
William felt a muscle jump in his jaw. "You’ve had meetings about my face...?"
"Obviously. Ellie came up with the official designation."
"I don’t want to know... Whatever it is, I refuse to acknowledge it."
"It’s not even that bad," Kaela said, her grin widening into something genuine and teasing. "We just call it ’the stare. "Very original, I know, and very mysterious instructor vibes."
"Truly inspired work, Kaela... I’m touched," William said dryly.
He could feel the familiar irritation rising, but beneath it, there was a grudging gratitude. The bickering, the petty arguments about schedules, the sheer normalcy of their teenage stubbornness—it was the perfect antidote to the cold, calculating implications of the System.
It grounded him.
"Anyway," he continued, shifting gears before they could dig any deeper into his psyche. "We’re doing this week’s footwork drill, not last week’s."
"Clara was right. So unless you want to spend the next hour arguing about literacy skills, get to the circle."
"See?" Clara said, appearing at Kaela’s shoulder like a vengeful spirit of accuracy. "I told you."
"Shut up, Clara," Kaela muttered, though there was no real heat in it.