Chapter 44: Anna Aurelia Draconis
By the time Caelus finished the latest revision, there were only a handful of lamps still burning around him.
He looked down. The table had disappeared beneath paper.
Glyph sequences overlapped one another in the margins. Several spell circles had been drawn, dismantled, and redrawn so many times that the parchment had begun to warp. Notes concerning Prana flow ran alongside calculations for pressure, stability, duration, and the binding sequence required to keep the Water Blade attached to the sword.
None of it had existed when he first sat down to work.
The original Water Blade had been simple.
His modification was considerably less cooperative.
His first attempt produced impressive pressure and almost nothing else. The edge formed beautifully, remained stable, and consumed enough Prana to make continued use idiotic.
He fixed the consumption problem in the second attempt, only for the binding to fail the moment he moved the sword.
The third stayed attached.
It also made the sword feel as though someone had welded armor to one side of it.
That one had irritated him enough that he had spent nearly an hour staring at the same three glyphs.
They were correct individually.
Together, they were wrong.
He hated that kind of problem.
Eventually, the structure stopped fighting him.
A thin layer of water gathered along the blade, compressing until it formed a narrow edge that clung to the steel without spilling over into useless mass. The pressure remained concentrated where he wanted it, and the Prana drain, while heavier than he preferred, was at least sustainable.
Caelus rotated the sword once.
The edge held. Barely.
He tried another angle.
It held again.
Good enough for a prototype. Not good enough for a finished spell.
Caelus leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
He had once considered spell construction interesting a while ago.
I take it back.
That wasn’t fun at all.
The amusing part had ended somewhere around the fourth failed binding sequence.
He lowered his gaze to the scattered notes.
The examination was six days away.
He had spent nearly an entire night getting one prototype into a usable state.
At that rate, three spells were an ambitious way of describing a nervous breakdown.
Caelus gathered the papers he actually needed.
The failed versions had already shown him which structures were unsuitable, and that information would save him time later. He stored the useful diagrams in the storage ring, leaving the discarded pages behind.
At least the night had produced something.
One working prototype.
Two more to go.
He rose, slid the remaining books into a neat stack, and left the table behind.
Outside the tall windows, the sky remained dark. Dawn was close, though the academy had not yet fully begun to stir.
Caelus stepped out of the library and paused in the corridor.
The silence gave him a rare opportunity to actually look around.
The academy grounds were quiet.
It had been one of the locations he knew best while writing the novel, but he had written the important parts, not every corridor and support building. The central layout remained familiar. The smaller sections did not.
He mentally marked them as he passed.
The more he walked, the more obvious it became that the academy functioned less like a school and more like a self-contained city whose only real industry was producing people capable of surviving the outside world.
The four major departments occupied separate sections of the grounds.
The Knight Department came first, its broad training yards designed for formations rather than individual sparring.
The Mage Department was built around circular fields capable of containing magical effects.
The Martial Artist Department was more understated, consisting mostly of open ground and training spaces for students who relied on their bodies rather than conventional spells or aura.
Then there was the Special Abilities Department.
Caelus slowed.
It housed abilities that refused to fit neatly into the Affinity system, whether they originated from the body, soul, bloodline, or something stranger.
Veyra’s body-reformation ability belonged there.
So did the Hero’s Sight.
He remembered the department’s existence well.
Its actual development was another matter.
He had written the concept and moved on.
Most of the details had never made it onto the page.
By the time he reached the candidate residence, dawn was beginning to lighten the eastern windows.
His room was exactly what he had expected from an institution that valued practicality over comfort: clean, functional, and far better than the city inns that had refused him.
Mira had already been awake.
Breakfast waited on the table.
Caelus stopped at the doorway.
Mira looked up.
"Good morning, Young Master."
Her eyes immediately settled on the dark circles beneath his.
"You stayed up again, didn’t you?"
"I did."
She sighed in a way that suggested this was becoming a familiar problem.
"Young Master..."
"I’m Awakened."
"That doesn’t answer the question."
Caelus pulled out a chair.
"It answers enough of it."
Mira remained standing.
Caelus picked up his utensil, noticed she had no intention of joining him, and looked across the table.
"Sit."
Her eyes widened.
"Young Master, I could never—"
"Mira."
She stopped.
She slowly took the seat opposite him, looking as though she had just committed a crime against the entire noble hierarchy.
Caelus found the reaction faintly ridiculous.
They ate quietly.
Mira occasionally glanced toward him before looking away again, while Caelus removed his glasses and placed them beside his plate. The silence was comfortable enough that he didn’t feel the need to fill it.
Mira finally spoke.
"Young Master, you received a letter yesterday."
Caelus looked up.
"When?"
"Yesterday. While you were in the library. I didn’t want to interrupt you."
She reached beside her chair and produced the envelope.
There was no wax seal or crest. No sender’s name.
He turned the blank envelope over once, then fed a thread of mana into the paper.
Dark marks surfaced across the empty page.
Not the common script used by the academy.
World Language.
Caelus recognized it immediately.
The version written here was crude compared with the original, the structure thinner and more diluted, but it was still unmistakable.
Whoever had sent this had made an effort to keep the message discreet.
He began reading.
I’ve assigned someone to you as we planned.
Her name is Sion. Blue hair. Knight Department.
She’s shy, so don’t expect her to introduce herself directly. She probably handed the message to someone else rather than delivering it herself.
Since mana communication devices aren’t permitted, she’ll act as a messenger.
Your next lesson will be interesting if you take first place.
I expect you to.
One more thing.
The rumor surrounding you is spreading. It will not benefit you during the examination. Be careful.
Caelus read it twice.
The Sion assignment was useful.
The warning was more useful.
Apparently the Contractor rumor had already reached people with enough information to monitor the academy.
He folded the paper once.
The script dissolved beneath his fingers, the World Language collapsing into black dust across the table.
Veyra had made sure nothing remained.
Sensible.
Caelus appreciated sensible people.
Mira noticed. "Young Master?"
"Nothing important."
She did not press.
He stood.
"Young Master, shouldn’t you sleep?"
"I should."
Mira stared at him.
He walked toward the door.
Mira sighed.
---
The training grounds were quiet at this hour.
Only a few students had arrived early enough to use them. One was already working through sword forms near the outer wall, another sat cross-legged in meditation, and a third was running the same circuit around the field for what looked like the tenth time.
Caelus ignored them.
He chose a practice area far enough from the others to avoid unnecessary attention and drew his sword, standing before a training dummy.
He rebuilt the spell in his mind.
The structure assembled without a chant.
Mana moved through the Twilight Circuit and spilled into the formation.
Water gathered around the blade, compressed until a thin blue edge formed along the steel.
Caelus watched it carefully.
Better than last night.
He adjusted his grip and stepped forward.
His blade blurred toward the dummy.
The Water Blade flickered.
The edge twisted half a handspan away from the steel and collapsed.
Caelus’s sword struck the dummy with a dull crack, carving only a shallow line through the wood.
He stopped with the blade lowered.
The formation itself was stable. The binding held until the blade accelerated or changed direction.
He replayed the sequence in his head.
One glyph was compensating for movement incorrectly. He just didn’t know which one.
Caelus frowned at the blade.
He adjusted a glyph’s position by instinct.
The spell formed again.
Blue water wrapped itself around the sword, tighter this time.
Caelus settled into his stance.
He had just begun to move—
Something tore through his peripheral vision.
The training dummy exploded.
Red fire tore through the wooden frame, splitting it apart before the remaining pieces were scorched black. Heat rolled across the training ground, and Caelus stopped mid-step.
He turned.
A girl stood several paces away.
Red hair. Confident posture. Her arms were crossed, her expression openly unimpressed.
Caelus stared at her.
Princess Anna Aurelia Draconis.
Her gaze moved from the destroyed dummy to the faintly unstable Water gathered around his sword.
She looked disappointed.
Caelus’s eyes narrowed slightly.
Anna uncrossed her arms.
"Pathetic."