She was playing the role of the bright, textbook-perfect student. She had just delivered a poetic, hopelessly romanticized theory about mana flowing through the body to heal surrounding tissues. It was exactly the kind of answer that worked flawlessly in standard fantasy novels.
It was also exactly the kind of answer that Instructor Cicero despised.
"Excuse me?" Nova said, her voice instantly losing its sweet, performative cadence. Her eyes narrowed as she took in my mud-stained uniform and the absolute deadpan exhaustion on my face. "I was addressing the Instructor. The theoretical texts clearly state that a kinetic application encourages the blocked mana to seamlessly—"
"Silence, Miss Melody," Cicero interrupted.
His voice wasn't loud, but it sliced through her defense like a cold scalpel. He didn't even look at her. His predatory eyes had immediately snapped upward to the middle rows, locking directly onto me. The elegant, academic sociopath had smelled blood in the water.
"A 'Steal' has been initiated," Cicero announced, a slow, terrifyingly cold smile curving on his lips. He tapped his brass rod against the edge of the console. "Mr. Astarte has decided to wager a catastrophic disciplinary penalty in order to correct your romanticized idiocy. Let us hear him."
Cicero leaned forward, resting both hands on his desk, his gaze boring into me.
"If raw mana does not disperse like a 'gentle breeze', Mr. Astarte... what exactly does it do? Proceed. Be as brutally precise as your back-alley surgery was."
The silence in the amphitheater was absolute. The students held their breath, and the only sound was the faint hiss of the Odic Projector's cooling vents struggling to release heat on the stage below.
Down in the third row, Nova Celestine Melody stared at me. Her perfect, confident smile had completely vanished, replaced by the sharp, calculating glare of realizing a background character was actively ruining her scene.
"Mana is a volatile thermodynamic fluid, not a gentle breeze," I stated, staring straight down at Instructor Cicero, picking up exactly where I had cut her off. "Striking a congested primary node is exactly like hitting a jammed, high-pressure steam pipe. Yes, the mana is forced through the blockage, but it creates fatal kinetic friction."
I leaned back in my chair, my face a completely vacant, exhausted canvas.
"I panicked this morning," I continued flatly. "But structurally, letting that blockage remain would have killed her in minutes. Hitting her solar plexus with brute force was the only way to smash the pipeline open. I made a rough gamble that her body could vent the residual friction heat before her chest cavity melted."
Every aristocratic student in the hall stared at me in sheer horror. I had just publicly admitted, without a single blink of remorse, that I had gambled a noble girl's life on the crude logic of an exploding water pipe.
Down on the stage, the lingering revulsion Instructor Cicero felt toward Nova's poetry vanished completely. He stared at me for two seconds, and then a terrifying, clinical smile spread across his face.
"A profoundly crude, brutal, and sociopathic gamble from a provincial," Cicero announced, his voice ringing across the amphitheater with deep satisfaction. "But mechanically... brilliant."
Cicero tapped his brass rod against his desk, sweeping his predatory gaze across the terrified class to complete my theory.
"Mr. Astarte is correct! The human body acts exactly like a mechanical Governor Valve on a steam engine. When mana is violently forced through, the body aggressively overheats to vent that lethal friction into the atmosphere as thermal waste! If the body fails to vent it, the secondary channels don't 'safely absorb it' like Miss Melody's fairy tale suggests. The channels flash-boil and shatter!"
Cicero pointed his brass rod directly at me.
"For a ruthless survival instinct and an accurate foundational diagnosis, twenty points to House Abyssion."
A translucent interface blinked in the corner of my vision.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ODICIOS / ACADEMIC LOG UPDATE ]
[ Authorization : Instr. Cicero Lawless Ardennes ]
[ Macro-Merit Awarded : Foundational Diagnosis & Theoretical Correction ]
[ + 20 AP ]
[ Total Academic Points: 20 AP ] ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Down in front of me, Nova Celestine Melody stared, her face burning crimson with public academic humiliation. She thought she held the cheat codes to this world, only to watch her elegant theory get trampled by the mechanical reality of an unranked student.
Above her head, my Native System reacted.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ANNOTATION UPDATE — Nova Celestine Melody ]
◈ [GREY] [EYE] ➔ [GREEN] [EYE]
…
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Green eye. Stable, but active.She is no longer ignoring me. The arrogant aristocrat who thought she owned the classroom has finally realized there is a variable in this room operating on a much crueler rulebook than hers.
Beside me, Syevira slowly turned a page of her textbook.
Syevira didn't look up. Her silver pen traced a slow, meaningless line across the margin of her page.
"You just convinced an entire lecture hall you treated my circuit like a clogged steam pipe." Her words hit the air like dropping ice cubes.
"The plumbing analogy pays out." I kept my posture rigid, anchoring my eyes to the chalkboard at the front. "Twenty points is twenty points."
Down in the pit, the rhythmic tap of the brass rod stopped.
Instructor Cicero wasn't looking at Nova anymore. The massive Odic Projector behind him vented a ragged, wet hiss of steam. Its heavy brass heat-sinks ticked, warping the air around the staging area with residual heat. Cicero pivoted slowly. His predatory gaze locked dead onto me.
"A flawless grasp of thermodynamic friction," Cicero murmured. The acoustics of the amphitheater carried the poisoned, clinical satisfaction in his voice straight to the back rows. "So flawless, in fact, it demands a reassessment of this morning's... inconvenience."
My stomach clamped down. The newly evolved E-Rank circuit feeding on my last fat reserves flared, flooding the back of my throat with the taste of rusted copper.
Shut up. Don't finish that sentence.
"A machine runs perfectly for decades, then suffers a catastrophic thermal overload the exact second you step onto the plate." Cicero tilted his head. The harsh overhead light caught the glare of his wire-rimmed glasses. "I initially filed it under provincial incompetence. But after that breathtakingly precise diagnosis..."
Wood scraped hard against stone. Three rows down, a Glyphron aristocrat pushed his spine flat against his chair, putting as much distance between us as physically possible. A girl to my left sucked in a sharp breath and forgot to exhale.
The silence in the room shifted. It grew teeth.
I didn't shift my weight. I didn't break eye contact.
"The projector's cooling valves were antiquated," I said. My voice came out completely flat, dropping the words into the dead silence with the clinical weight of an autopsy report. "A localized feedback loop is a standard risk for outdated hardware. It was an accident."
Cicero smiled. It was not a warm expression.
"An accident?" He rolled the word around like a joke only he understood. "From a student who just mapped the exact mechanics of a kinetic overload to perfection? No, Mr. Astarte. That was not an accident. That was a practical, highly calculated demonstration of the very violence you just detailed."
He just twisted my defense into a confession of academic terrorism.
"Vandalism of elite institutional magitech is a severe violation of conduct," Cicero declared. His smile hit its absolute peak. "Fifty points from House Abyssion. We will be watching your career with immense interest."
A translucent blue interface sliced into my peripheral vision, chiming with cheerful, systemic cruelty.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ODICIOS / ACADEMIC LOG UPDATE ]
[ Authorization : Instr. Cicero Lawless Ardennes ]
[ Major Infraction : Vandalism of Institutional Magitech ]
[ - 50 AP ]
[ Total Academic Points: - 30 AP ] ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The crisp tear of a turning page severed the quiet.
"Your institutional immunity is in debt," Syevira whispered to her textbook.
My intercostal muscles locked. My starving circuit aggressively cannibalized its last remaining reserves just to paralyze my vocal cords, trapping a scream of pure, unadulterated financial terror inside my chest.
I am going to murder this four-eyed sociopath.