By the time Soren made it back to his seat beside Amelia, the tightness that had been sitting in his chest for most of the day had eased into something lighter.
Not gone, not completely, but lighter.
The lesson with Carlen had confused him, and nearly made him feel as though his left eye had burst inside his skull, yet in spite of all that, or maybe because of it, his mood had lifted.
For the first time since Alex's challenge, his thoughts were not circling the duel like a trapped animal.
They had been dragged somewhere else entirely, toward the strange little revelation about magic circles, toward the possibility that he had just stumbled into a new way to fight.
Amelia glanced at him the moment he sat down.
"Well done," she said.
Then she flinched, her nose wrinkling faintly as she shifted away from him by a few inches.
Soren blinked.
"Thanks… What's wrong?"
"You smell."
He stared at her for half a second, then let out a small breath through his nose.
"Oh. Right."
In the rush of relief and confusion after the lesson, he had completely forgotten how much he had sweated.
His shirt had dried in patches and clung unpleasantly to his back, and there was probably dust on him, too, from dropping to the ground when the pain hit.
He lifted a hand.
"「Clean」."
Warm light passed over him in a thin wash, skimming over his clothes and skin, stripping away the worst of the sweat, dust, and grime.
It was never perfect, not like a proper bath, but it made him feel less like he had just crawled out of a ditch.
He looked back at her.
"Better?"
Amelia leaned in again, close enough that he thought she was merely checking from sight, only for her to pause and sniff lightly near his shoulder.
The sensation sent an involuntary shiver across his skin.
"That tickles."
She ignored that, studied him for another second, then gave a small nod and shifted back to where she had been before, though not quite as far away.
"Better," she said.
Her eyes moved to his face, settling on the left side.
"Is your eye okay?"
"I think so."
That was the truth, or at least the closest version of it he had.
It didn't hurt anymore.
There was a lingering soreness somewhere behind the eye, a dull aftertaste of pain, but nothing like the white-hot burst that had driven him to his knees.
If anything, the more unsettling part was that he still didn't know what had happened.
The brief moment of seeing mana directly, the strange shift in his vision, the sudden unbearable pain, and then that window.
That stupid, confusing window.
Soren hesitated for only a moment before making up his mind.
There was only one place he could look for answers.
"「Status」."
The familiar window opened in front of him.
.
[Status Window]
Name: Soren Arden
Race: Human (?)
◈ Unique Skills
- Library of Memories
- ?#@?
.
For a second, he simply stared.
Then he stared harder, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less ridiculous if he glared at them long enough.
His race.
His race now had a question mark attached to it.
Not beside some hidden class.
Not next to a title.
But his race.
"...What?"
He reread it once, then again, his eyes moving from the top of the window to the bottom.
The second unique skill had changed, too, though only slightly.
It was still mangled and unreadable, still buried under whatever invisible hand kept obscuring it, but it was not the same as before.
A few letters looked different.
Or maybe he was imagining that part.
But the race part was real.
Human with a question mark.
Not human, apparently.
Or maybe human, with caveats.
Human with an asterisk.
Human pending verification.
'I don't feel any different.'
Genuine confusion pushed aside everything else for a moment.
He flexed his fingers one by one.
Nothing strange.
He rolled his shoulders.
No change.
He shifted his legs, adjusted his breathing, and nudged mana through his circuits as lightly as he could while remaining seated.
It moved the same way it always had, familiar and controlled, neither fuller nor thinner, neither hotter nor colder.
No hidden strength surged through him.
No new sense opened.
No instinct told him something fundamental had changed.
He looked the same.
He felt the same.
His body didn't seem interested in explaining why his own status now sounded uncertain about what he was.
Amelia had been watching him the whole time, not the window itself, because she could not see it, but his face.
"Did something happen?" she asked.
Soren dragged his gaze away from the floating text and looked at her.
"I… don't know," he said honestly.
The answer sounded weak, but it was the only one he had.
Her ears twitched slightly.
"You don't know?"
"Something changed, apparently." He frowned faintly, still trying to make the idea sit properly in his head. "But I can't tell what actually did."
Amelia kept watching him, her expression unreadable in the way only hers could be, flat on the surface but too attentive to mean nothing.
"You look confused."
"I am confused."
That at least seemed to satisfy her.
She did not push further, perhaps because there was nothing to push.
Soren dismissed the window with a thought, and the text vanished.
The uncertainty did not vanish with it.
It stayed behind as a small unpleasant weight, the sort that settled in the chest and refused to explain itself.
There was always something with this world, some angle he had not seen, some rule he had misunderstood, some line he had stepped over without noticing until after the consequences arrived.
Still, as strange as it was, there was nothing he could do about it right now.
And the moment his thoughts loosened from that baffling little question mark, they drifted, almost inevitably, to the more immediate problem waiting for him further down the day.
Alex.
This time, though, the thought did not hit him like a plunge into cold water.
The fear was still there, but it had changed shape.
It no longer felt like a shapeless panic ready to drag him under.
Carlen's lesson had forced his mind somewhere practical, somewhere immediate, and that steadiness had not fully faded.
The duel was still dangerous, still loaded, still liable to go wrong in ten different ways, but Soren found that he could think about it now without feeling his thoughts scatter.
Alex was strong.
That had not changed.
If anything, now that Soren's pulse was calmer, he could look at the problem more cleanly.
'In the first place, that ranking is nonsense.'
Rank 125 in Martial Studies sounded manageable until the context was attached to it.
Alex had not ranked that low because he was bad in practical combat.
He had ranked that low because his theory scores had fallen off a cliff.
Soren still remembered the midterm results, remembered seeing the practical numbers and realising with a sinking sort of disbelief that Alex's actual combat marks were absurd.
The Hero's ranking was a lie built out of paperwork.
Which was, in its own way, a very Alex sort of problem.
Soren let out a small breath.
There were still ugly little thoughts at the edges.
What if he lost too badly?
What if he won in the wrong way?
What if this changed something it was not meant to change?
What if this whole thing had already changed too much?
But they stayed at the edges.
They crept rather than swarmed.
And right now, that counted for something.
There was no point feeding them.
He turned his head slightly and looked at Amelia instead.
"So, who are you fighting?"
Amelia's mouth flattened.
"...Nobody."
He blinked.
"Nobody challenged you?"
"Nobody."
The answer came with a very small shift in her expression, one that most people probably would not have noticed.
Soren noticed it anyway.
There was irritation there, buried under her usual stillness, a displeased little tightness around the mouth and eyes.
For a second, a laugh nearly escaped him.
He stopped it before it made it past his throat.
Honestly, it made sense.
If anything, it would have been stranger if someone had challenged her after everything she had shown.
Anyone with functional survival instincts would rather pick a fight elsewhere.
Still, that did not make it any less frustrating for her.
Amelia liked fighting.
More than liked it, really.
For someone like her, a whole mock duel day spent watching from the sidelines must have felt miserable.
"I see," Soren said.
Her ears lowered by the smallest amount.
It was ridiculous how visible she could be while still seeming invisible to everyone else.
Soren thought for a second, then said the first useful thing that came to mind.
"Let's get food together after this."
The reaction was immediate.
The irritation in her face softened, not dramatically, not enough for anyone who did not know her to call it a change, but enough.
Her eyes lost some of their faint sharpness, and the line of her mouth eased.
"Okay," she said.
Soren found himself smiling a little despite everything.
It was clumsy, maybe, but it had worked.
For now, that was enough.
————「❤︎」————