The training grounds were still smoking when the class was dismissed.
The first-years filtered back toward the dormitories in loud, unsettled clusters. Rush walked among them in silence, his hands in his pockets, his expression carefully composed. Beside him, Slavic had already begun processing the afternoon's events aloud, his words tumbling over each other like coins spilling from a torn pocket.
"It is a systemic failure of output discipline, and frankly the fact that Dragonean is still on the grounds suggests the Captain is either politically cautious or genuinely blind to —"
Slavic turned to gesture at Rush for emphasis.
Rush was already gone.
Slavic stopped walking. He looked left. He looked right. The corridor stretched in both directions, students flowing past him like a river parting around a confused stone.
"...How does he do that?"
He stood there for a moment, genuinely baffled, before pushing his crooked glasses up his nose and turning back toward the dormitory.
He knocked on Room 215 five minutes later.
Ethan opened the door, already changed out of his training uniform, katana resting against the wall beside him. He looked at Slavic. Then past him at the empty corridor.
"Rush's gone," Slavic said.
Ethan glanced at the empty corridor for a second time.
"After what had happened on the training grounds, this feels… wrong."
Slavic nodded.
Ethan reached for his katana without a word. His thumb pushed lightly against the guard, loosening the blade in its sheath before he stepped into the hallway.
They checked the training grounds first. Then the eastern walkways. Then the courtyard near the main hall.
When that turned up nothing, they drifted farther along the Academy's outer paths, more out of stubbornness than any real expectation of finding him.
That was when they noticed a narrow opening in the ivy-covered boundary wall — a courtyard long abandoned by the groundskeepers.
Moss crept between the cracked stones. A gnarled willow draped its branches over a collapsed archway. The air here tasted of cool earth and old rain, untouched by the noise of the campus behind.
Rush was upside down.
His body formed a perfectly straight vertical line, not a single degree of deviation, his entire weight balanced on the tips of two index fingers pressed against the cracked stone. Sweat traced slow lines down his jaw and dripped onto the ground beneath him. His muscles burned with quiet, controlled ferocity. His breathing was even.
Slavic pushed aside a hanging willow branch and stopped dead.
"There you are," he said, slightly out of breath, his glasses sitting crooked on his nose. "You were not in the dormitory. We checked the training grounds. I genuinely do not understand how you are exercising right now."
In one fluid motion, Rush shifted his weight, pushed off his fingers, and flipped backward, landing without a sound. He dusted off his hands, his expression carefully composed.
"It clears my head," he said. "Why were you looking for me?"
"After what happened today, I thought you'd be tense," Slavic answered simply.
"I'm fine. Thank you for asking."
Ethan stepped into the clearing without ceremony. His dark eyes swept briefly over the cracked stone where Rush had been balancing — registering the sheer physical demand of it — before settling on Rush directly.
"He didn't lose control," Ethan said.
Slavic straightened. "What do you mean? Dragonean?"
"The trajectory was too clean." Ethan's voice was low and unhurried. "A ruptured spell disperses. That fireball held its shape until impact. He aimed it at you, Rush."
The courtyard went quiet. Leaves shifted in a passing breeze.
Rush already knew. He had known the moment the blast deviated — had felt the deliberateness of it in his spine before his body even moved. He hadn't said anything on the field because escalating on the first day, in front of Captain Malon and three upperclassmen, would have been wasteful.
Inside his mind, Beelzebub said nothing. The ancient entity's silence stretched like a held breath, leaving Rush entirely alone with the weight of the moment.
"Ethan is right," Slavic said, beginning to pace the cracked stones in short, agitated steps. "Dragoneans are proud, but they are fiercely loyal to the Crown's law. To fire a lethal spell on the first day, in front of a Knight Captain — Richard wouldn't risk expulsion over a simple rivalry. There has to be a precedent. Something deeper."
"He called out my family name," Rush said quietly.
"Exactly." Slavic's voice dropped. "Whatever this is, it has something to do with your house."
Rush kept his posture still. His mind moved fast and cold beneath the surface.
He thought of Castle Hart — its stone corridors and training yards, its firelit solar and the smell of his mother's lavender. He thought of Erwin Ryanheart standing at a window with a glass of wine, speaking of patience and trust. He thought of the library he had devoured entirely by the age of twelve.
Not a single page of it had mentioned the Ryanheart family's history.
Do you know anything about my father's connection to the Dragonean family? Rush asked inwardly.
Beelzebub's response came after a long pause, slower than usual."I have been sealed for close to a thousand years, child. The politics of your father's generation are beyond my sight. You are on your own here."
It was the most honest thing the entity had ever admitted.
"If a Dragonean wants you dead," Ethan said, drawing his katana and inspecting the edge with quiet precision, "there is a real reason. And you must know what it is."
Rush said nothing. He couldn't tell them he knew nothing about his own house's history. He was the heir to a family of assassins, and he had never once seen a document that explained what that truly meant.
Slavic's eyes lit with sudden, restless energy. "The Academy Archives. They hold unedited, restricted records — noble house histories, border conflicts, political sanctions. If the Ryanhearts and the Dragoneans have blood between them, it is documented there."
Rush hesitated for the span of a single breath.
"Lead the way," he said.
The Archives were buried beneath the Grand Auditorium, accessible only by a winding stone staircase that grew colder and narrower with every step. The smell changed as they descended — warm torchlight and fresh air replaced by dry ink, aged leather, and the particular stillness of a place that had not been disturbed in a very long time.
At the bottom, the staircase opened into a cavern of knowledge.
Towering shelves disappeared into the darkness overhead, lined with thousands of volumes and scroll cases. Floating orbs of golden mana drifted between the stacks like slow, patient fireflies, casting warm pools of light across the stone floor. The silence here was not empty — it was dense, accumulated, the silence of centuries of recorded history pressing against the walls from the inside.
At the center of the room sat a massive circular desk buried under scrolls, ledgers, and loose sheets of parchment. Behind it sat a figure who looked like he had been there since the Archives were built.
He was a half-dwarf — broad-shouldered and heavily bearded, with deep weathered lines carved into his face by what appeared to be a century of squinting at small text. A pair of thick spectacles magnified his sharp, assessing eyes. He did not look up when they entered.
"Visiting hours for first-years ended an hour ago," he said, his voice a deep graveled baritone. "Unless you three are lost, I suggest you turn around."
"We aren't lost, sir," Slavic said, stepping forward with practiced academic respect. "We are looking for historical records regarding two noble houses. The Ryanheart and Dragonean families."
The pen stopped.
The half-dwarf raised his head slowly. His magnified eyes found Rush immediately — taking in the dark hair, the composed stillness, the cold and measuring gaze — and stayed there for a long, uncomfortable moment.
"Ryanheart," the archivist murmured, as though confirming something to himself. He set his pen down and leaned back in his creaking chair. "The bearing gives it away, if not the face. I am Elvis Praston. Head Archivist. I have managed this dust pit for a hundred years, which means I have outlasted every arrogant noble, every supposed prodigy, and every genuine monster that has walked through this institution."
He tapped a thick leather-bound volume at the edge of his desk.
"The records you want are classified. Level-three restriction. Third-years, Student Council, and higher authority only." His eyes remained on Rush. "First-years do not get to read about the blood their fathers spilled."
Slavic deflated visibly.
Rush stepped forward. He held the archivist's gaze without blinking. "You knew my father."
It was not a question.
Elvis let out a short, humorless bark of laughter. "Erwin Ryanheart. Yes. He walked these halls almost twenty-five years ago." The old half-dwarf's expression shifted, something heavier moving behind his spectacled eyes. "They called him a monster, boy. Not merely because his strength was suffocating, but because of how ruthlessly he applied it."
Rush kept his face impassive. The man who had gently corrected his footwork in the courtyards of Castle Hart, who had lifted him onto his shoulders as a child and listened patiently to his endless questions — that man had been a terror to the rest of Atherland.
"Since the files are restricted," Ethan said quietly from the shadows, "tell us what isn't written down. Something that would make the Dragoneans treat a Ryanheart as an enemy."
Elvis looked at Ethan for a moment. Then back to Rush. He reached into his vest and produced a battered stopwatch, turning it slowly between his thick fingers.
"Rumors aren't records," he said carefully. "So I can speak of them freely." He set the watch on the desk. "Several years ago, the former patriarch of the Dragonean family — Alcristo Dragonean — was found dead inside his own heavily fortified estate. No breached walls. No traces of magical conflict. No witnesses. Just a clean, impossible kill that the Empire officially attributed to sudden illness."
The floating mana orbs drifted slowly overhead. The Archives breathed their dusty silence.
"The underworld told a different story," Elvis continued, his voice dropping to a register that didn't carry beyond their small circle. "The nobles who understand how power actually moves in this Empire whispered that the Ryanheart shadow organization struck him down. A sanctioned kill. Untraceable by design."
The pieces snapped together in Rush's mind with the cold clarity of a lock turning.
Assassins. His family weren't simply lords managing a quiet eastern domain. They were the Empire's blade in the dark — the instrument wielded when official hands needed to stay clean.
"Your father is truly something, boy." Beelzebub murmured, surfacing at last from his long silence. His tone carried neither judgment nor admiration. Just the flat recognition of one predator acknowledging another.
"The Dragonean family," Elvis said, "operates under one absolute, unbreakable principle. A grudge is passed down until it is resolved. If Richard believes your father's organization killed his grandfather, he will not stop at schoolyard provocation." The archivist's eyes were steady behind their thick lenses. "He will consider your death a sacred obligation."
Silence settled over the Archives.
"Thank you, Master Elvis," Rush said. His voice was perfectly calm.
He turned and walked back toward the stone staircase. Ethan and Slavic followed without a word.
The climb back up felt longer than the descent.
Rush walked in silence. Behind him, Slavic whispered theories to Ethan in a low, rapid undertone, but their voices dissolved into background noise before they reached him.
His thoughts stayed on one thing.
Erwin Ryanheart.
The man who had trained him in cold stone halls before dawn. Who had placed a hand on his shoulder at the castle gates and said every step forward will be yours alone. Who had sat by the fire and spoken of patience, of trust, of choosing the path of shadows or light.
The man who had never once mentioned the darkness that walked behind the Ryanheart name.
Rush didn't know if the rumor was true. He had no proof. No confession. No record.
But he knew his father.
And he knew that Erwin Ryanheart did not act without reason.
Whatever Alcristo Dragonean had done — whatever had placed him in the path of the Empire's quiet blade — Rush believed, with a certainty that sat cold and still in his chest, that the man had earned it.
If Richard comes after my life again, Rush thought, his footsteps silent on the stone, he won't be spared.
That night, Rush sat at his oak desk.
The mana lantern cast a warm, steady light across the blank sheet of parchment in front of him. Outside the window, the Academy grounds were dark and still, the distant torches along the walkways burning low.
He picked up his pen.
He wrote about the Academy — its scale, its architecture, the smell of the Archives. He wrote about Slavic's restless theorizing and Ethan's comfortable silences. He wrote about the training grounds and the professors, about the manaship descent and the first sight of Prasta breaking through the clouds.
He did not write about Richard Dragonean.
He did not write about Alcristo.
He did not write about the Archive, or the rumor, or the cold, quiet thing that had settled in his chest on the walk back up the stairs.
He signed it simply:
Rush.
He folded the letter carefully, pressed the Ryanheart seal into the wax with his thumb, and set it beside the lantern for the morning post.
Then he leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a long time.
The lantern flickered once.
For the first time since arriving at the Academy, Rush realized that the shadows surrounding his family were deeper than he had ever imagined.
Sleep, when it finally came, was quiet and dreamless.