The silence in the amphitheater was not the respectful quiet of students waiting for a lecture to begin. It was the absolute, suffocating stillness of an execution crowd waiting for the blade to drop.
"Miss Sinclair," Cicero continued, gesturing smoothly toward the circular brass plate in the center of the staging area. "And her... escort. Please, step onto the projection plate."
I didn't look up at the tiered seating. I kept my eyes fixed dead ahead, projecting the hollow, vacant expression of a man whose central nervous system had entirely stopped caring about social perception.
Syevira moved first.
She glided down the steep stone steps toward the staging area with the flawless, unshakeable composure of an aristocrat walking toward a guillotine she had expected for ten years. She did not look at the massive Odic Projector. She did not look at the instructor. She simply stepped onto the brass plate, folded her pale hands, and stood perfectly still.
"Fascinating," Cicero murmured, stepping up to the heavy control console. "Let us observe the pristine architecture of House Symbiode."
He pulled a heavy brass lever.
The Magitech array hummed, a low, mechanical vibration that rattled the floorboards. A pale, sterile blue light cascaded down from the overhead lens, washing over Syevira's body. Instantly, a massive, translucent three-dimensional hologram of her internal engine—her Odic Circuit—materialized in the air above her.
The entire lecture hall leaned forward.
I held my breath.
If the projector renders the Shard Parasite—if it displays the jagged, ancient tumor rooted deep inside her primary valves—the Headmaster's secret is obliterated. Her identity as a walking biological weapon will be broadcast to the entire first-year cohort. The original plot of this world won't just irreparably fracture right here, right now.
Unless it already broke the moment I decided to sit next to her in the Grand Hall.
The holographic circuit stabilized.
The seven primary nodes glowed in the projected air. Her Crown, Throat, and Heart nodes burned a beautiful, pristine silver-white. But as the pale light traveled down to her Solar Plexus—the fourth node, the Master Hub—the pristine architecture violently broke down.
The node was a chaotic, heavily bruised mess. The Odic channels surrounding it were swollen and inflamed, throbbing with an erratic, desperate rhythm.
But the core itself? The ancient, suffocating reservoir of toxic anomaly poison? It was gone. Completely drained.
What the projector displayed was not a lethal biological weapon. It was an internal engine that looked as though it had suffered a catastrophic fuel-line blockage, only to be violently, aggressively forced open.
The ghost doctor's scalpel had done its job flawlessly.
To a high-grade medical scanner, it didn't look like a parasite anymore. It looked exactly like localized, severe physical trauma.
Cicero's predatory smile faltered. He pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose, leaning physically closer to the console as if the machine had just insulted his intelligence.
"Miss Sinclair," Cicero noted, his voice entirely stripped of its theatrical edge, replaced by a cold, genuine clinical confusion. "Your Solar Plexus node is heavily traumatized. The surrounding vascular channels are vibrating with extreme kinetic friction. This does not resemble a standard mana blockage. This looks as if your primary engine was struck by a raw kinetic hammer."
Every eye in the amphitheater snapped to Syevira.
Syevira did not flinch. She did not hesitate. For ten years, she had endured rooms staring at her with pure terror and disgust; this was merely a different flavor of attention. The absolute wall of aristocratic ice in her expression did not melt by a single fraction of a degree as she delivered the lie we had hastily assembled on the stairs.
"I experienced an acute nodal cramp this morning due to the temperature drop in the Western Courtyard," Syevira stated. Her voice was perfectly flat, carrying the distinct, haughty irritation of an aristocrat being forced to explain a minor, embarrassing inconvenience.
She turned her head slightly, shooting me a look of such profound, icy disdain that for a fraction of a second, even I genuinely believed she hated me.
"I was unable to regulate the bottleneck," she continued flawlessly. "This unranked provincial happened to be walking past. Before I could instruct him otherwise, he panicked. He applied a brute-force manual flush directly to my fourth node using raw kinetic mana. It was sloppy, violently intrusive, and highly unprofessional." A perfectly timed, dismissive pause. "But it restarted the circulation."
The lecture hall shattered into frantic, horrified whispers. The sheer aristocratic revulsion was palpable.
"A brute-force flush?! On an unranked circuit?"
"He just walked up and punched her Solar Plexus with raw mana?"
"That is literal medical assault! He could have shattered her valves into dust!"
Syevira stepped off the brass plate with a quiet, irritated huff, playing the role of the violated aristocrat to absolute perfection.
She isn't just acting, my exhausted brain noted, observing the flawless geometry of her posture. She has spent ten years learning exactly how polite society expects a monster to behave. Now, she is weaponizing their own aristocratic prejudice against them. They expect a Noble Lord to be arrogant, easily inconvenienced, and disgusted by provincial commoners. She is giving them exactly the narrative they want to hear.
Absolute, clinical perfection. A flawless institutional alibi.
I kept my face completely vacant, staring blankly ahead. Down in the center rows, however, I watched Arga Orlando slowly narrow his eyes.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ANNOTATION — Arga Orlando ]
◈ [GREEN] [EYE]
◈ [RED] [CROWN]
…
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Green Eye. He is aware of me.
And he isn't buying a single word of this. A veteran Regressor who has died and restarted this world thousands of times knows exactly what a raw kinetic flush looks like. He knows it doesn't explain why I can stand inside her three-meter deadzone without coughing up crystallized blood.
But he can't prove a thing because the machine is actively confirming our lie.
Yet, the heavy, mechanical hum of the Odic Projector above us drowned out his suspicion, stamping our lie into absolute medical fact.
Syevira stepped down. Her boots scraped against the stone, pulling the amphitheater's collective breath away with her.
The brass valves of the machine hissed, venting a plume of scalding steam that washed over the back of my neck.
The scanning plate was empty.
Waiting for me.