Chapter 45: An Unpleasant Reunion
The carriage rolled through the gates of the Primordial Academy.
Anna watched the structure rise around her, its towers and defensive walls making it resemble a fortified city more than a school. It was a welcome change from the palace, where every departure required formal farewells, every movement attracted attendants, and even silence seemed to require permission.
She leaned back against the velvet seat and exhaled.
At last, somewhere nobody needed her to stand still and look imperial.
Elsa sat opposite her, sorting through a stack of documents with the efficiency of someone who had been cleaning up Anna’s problems since childhood.
"Your Highness, I’ll handle the registration and arrange your accommodation."
Anna waved a hand. "Thanks."
"Would you like a guide?"
"No. I want to explore."
Elsa hesitated. "Your Highness, the academy is enormous. It would be easy to become lost."
"Then I’ll become lost."
Elsa sighed.
"You say that as though it’s reassuring."
"It is to me."
Elsa was not entirely pleased with the answer, but she didn’t argue.
"The entrance examination is still several days away," Elsa added. "Most students haven’t arrived yet."
"Even better."
Anna had spent enough time being watched that the prospect of walking somewhere without an entourage already felt liberating. She wanted to see what the academy looked like before the examination turned every corridor into a competition.
She opened the carriage door before it had fully stopped and stepped onto the stone path.
"I’ll deal with the rest later."
She left Elsa with the documents and headed into the academy.
Anna wandered without bothering to decide where she was going, enjoying the novelty of being somewhere no one expected her to follow a schedule. The academy was already beginning to fill with candidates from different kingdoms and noble houses, though the grounds were still quiet enough that she could move without being surrounded.
Different uniforms and insignias passed her along the way. Some candidates carried weapons openly, while others wore mage robes or the simpler clothing of martial artists. Every group seemed to carry its own assumptions about what strength was supposed to look like.
She found herself enjoying the variety.
One of the training grounds eventually caught her attention.
Practice dummies filled the outer edges, weapons lined the racks, and several sparring circles had already been claimed by students preparing for the examination.
They noticed her when she entered. A young noble recognized the imperial crest on her clothing and immediately straightened, prompting several others to do the same.
"Your Highness."
Anna gave them a small nod.
"Continue."
The students obeyed, though several remained visibly conscious of her presence. Their movements became slightly more careful, some trying to appear completely unaffected while others were clearly hoping she would notice them.
Anna couldn’t help smiling.
She walked farther into the grounds, watching the students work. A swordsman repeated a sequence of movements, while a mage patiently cycled through the same low-tier spell rather than attempting anything flashy. Near the far wall, a martial artist drove through a series of strikes with enough force to leave marks in the practice post.
Anna’s attention shifted toward another corner.
A young man stood alone beside a practice dummy, a sword already in hand.
He was studying the weapon as a faint blue layer formed along its edge.
Anna slowed. She recognized the technique immediately, or at least thought she did.
Mana coating was commonly used by stronger C-rank knights to reinforce a weapon, but something about this layer was wrong. Its flow didn’t behave like ordinary reinforcement. The mana wasn’t simply reinforcing the steel. It had been shaped into a structure of its own.
A spell.
Her attention sharpened.
He hadn’t chanted.
Anna stared at the blade.
Chantless?
So the rumors had been true.
The strange Vespera wasn’t merely a C-rank.
He was already experimenting with chantless spellcasting.
Caelus adjusted his grip and settled into his stance.
Anna watched the blade rather than him.
The blue layer remained stable.
He moved, and the instant the sword accelerated through the strike, the spell flickered. The Water edge distorted and disappeared, leaving the sword to carve only a shallow cut into the wood.
Anna’s eyes narrowed.
The spell itself wasn’t the problem.
He hadn’t figured out how to make it survive his movement.
Anna stepped forward.
She wanted to confirm it.
Before Caelus could reset his stance, she tore through the distance.
Her fist struck the same dummy, and the impact detonated through it. Wood exploded outward in a burst of splinters and red heat, the remains twisting into scorched fragments before Anna had even returned to where she’d started.
Caelus barely registered her movement.
Anna looked at the wreckage, then at the sword in his hand.
"Pathetic."
Caelus turned toward her.
Something flickered across his expression. He straightened and bowed.
"I greet the Imperial Princess."
He didn’t seem particularly pleased to see her. A faint tension appeared in his brow, barely perceptible but unmistakable.
"Congratulations on becoming weaker."
Caelus stared at her.
"That’s an unusual congratulation."
"I wasn’t present for the Vespera gathering, so I thought I’d make up for it."
Her smile sharpened.
"D-rank potential. What a waste."
She had expected the reunion to feel satisfying. She had imagined what she would say if she ever saw him again. Somehow, standing in front of him now, the old irritation had returned far more easily than she expected.
Caelus looked at her, his face remaining blank.
Anna’s eye twitched.
"I heard you became a mage." She kept her voice light. "Rumors, of course. It must be a difficult transition after wasting years trying to become something else."
"Have I done something to offend you, Your Highness?"
Anna blinked.
"You can say it directly," he continued. "There’s no reason to circle around it. It wastes both our time."
"You still look at people like you’re deciding whether they’re worth your time."
He tilted his head slightly. "I didn’t realize I was doing that."
She opened her mouth to respond, then stopped.
Her memory returned before she could stop it.
She had approached him because she wanted to become his friend.
He had looked at her as though she were an inconvenience.
"Sorry, but I don’t have time to play around with childish tantrums. Try with someone else."
She had remembered that sentence for years.
Anna expected something from him. A flicker of memory, an acknowledgment that he remembered the arrogant boy who had dismissed her.
She searched his expression for any sign of recognition.
"You haven’t changed much."
Caelus raised an eyebrow.
"Have we met?"
Her expression tightened.
"You don’t remember?"
"Should I?"
Heat rushed into Anna’s face.
He genuinely didn’t remember.
The tips of her ears turned red despite her efforts to control herself.
Caelus noticed.
"Are you feeling unwell, Your Highness?" His voice was calm, genuinely confused. "Your face seems red."
She snapped.
"You are an asshole. I hope you die!"
She turned and stormed away before she could embarrass herself any further.
Caelus watched her disappear down the path.
He glanced at the ruined dummy.
Then at the sword in his hand.
I really don’t understand women.
He turned back to the training dummy, or what remained of it. Anna’s attack had destroyed it completely, leaving only splintered wood and scorch marks. He would need to find another.
Her attack had been more useful than her insults.
She had crossed the distance before he could even respond, confirming what he already knew about the gap between his physical ability and the academy’s upper ranks.
More importantly, her timing had exposed the flaw in his spell.
The Water Blade wasn’t failing because the structure was unstable.
It was failing because the structure hadn’t been designed to account for the sword’s movement.
Caelus looked at the remaining shimmer of Water around his blade.
He would fix it.
He rebuilt the spell.
This time, he changed the binding rather than the cutting edge. The blue layer formed around the steel, thinner than before but more tightly anchored.
Caelus shifted his wrist.
The layer trembled but held.
He adjusted his stance and tried again.
---
Elsewhere in the academy, the library remained quiet.
Caelus had left several pages behind when he moved to the training grounds. Most were little more than discarded experiments: failed glyph arrangements, unstable binding sequences, inefficient Prana routes, and incomplete circles abandoned once they had stopped producing useful results.
A figure approached the table where Caelus had spent the night and gathered the loose pages into a small stack.
At first glance, they looked like ordinary Water-affinity experiments. Several were crude. Some were incomplete. Others had been crossed out so aggressively that entire sections of the diagrams were barely legible.
Then the pattern became clear.
The original spell was Water Blade.
But Caelus wasn’t trying to improve its projection.
He was changing its purpose.
The figure picked up another page.
One version altered the Prana route.
Another reinforced the binding.
A third attempted to maintain the spell while attached to a moving object.
None of them were finished, but each corrected a flaw in the one before it.
The work wasn’t polished. It wasn’t even particularly elegant.
But the person behind it understood the underlying structure well enough to dismantle an established spell and rebuild it without relying on conventional instruction.
That was unusual.
Very unusual.
The figure turned over the final page.
Then he smiled.