Damien Crowhurst stood there with the kind of confidence that made people want to throw something at him just to wipe it off his face. His long blond hair fell in layered waves, the front strands tucked behind one ear while the rest drifted down his shoulders like he was auditioning to be the cover model of some elite academy brochure. His blue eyes were sharp, icy, annoyingly self-assured, eyes that always seemed to say you should feel honored I'm looking at you at all. His skin was fair, almost porcelain in a way that made him look like he'd never once suffered under the brutality of a P.E class.
He was a head shorter than Silas, but he carried himself with the smug posture of someone who believed height was merely optional when you could bend reality with your fingertips. And Damien could manipulate gravity with the kind of ease that made even teachers tread lightly. Not that he ever needed to show off; everyone in Class 3-A already treated him like royalty by default.
Silas, of course, was in Class 3-B.
The universe loved its jokes.
—
Fights weren't banned at Valecrest. Quite the opposite, actually. The administration had a very specific stance: better a bruise today than a funeral tomorrow. It was practically etched into the welcome brochure. The world was changing, rifts appearing like cosmic doorbells no one remembered installing, and danger didn't wait politely for anyone to mature.
So Valecrest made a choice long ago: no banning of fights.
Regulating them, sure. Intervening before someone got permanently rearranged, absolutely.
But banning? Never.
They believed in preparation, and that meant letting students test their limits in controlled chaos. A scuffle in the courtyard was better than panic during a real rift event. Combat built reflexes, sharpened instincts, and revealed who would freeze and who would move when the world went sideways.
There was also an older, quieter belief woven into Valecrest's foundations. The school had been built near a site where one of the earliest minor rifts had flickered into existence decades ago, just long enough to scare the life out of the townsfolk, then vanish. Ever since, Valecrest leaned into the idea that power demanded readiness, and readiness demanded conflict.
So fights continued. Rivalries bloomed. And the faculty pretended not to watch from the windows with thinly veiled curiosity, which led to this moment, Damien's smug grin, Silas' clenched jaw, and the brewing storm between Class A's golden tyrant and Class B's unpredictable powerhouse.
At Valecrest, this wasn't rebellion; this was tradition, and everyone knew it was about to begin again.
Damien stepped forward, hands in his pockets like he was taking a casual stroll rather than instigating a showdown. His grin stretched wider, sharp enough to cut silk.
"Well, Silas," he said, voice dripping with false sympathy, "should I congratulate you? You've managed to turn walking into a hazard. Truly, you're evolving."
Silas stared back, jaw tight. His brain wasn't fully processing the words, too busy chanting not now, not now, not now at the stubborn heat throbbing in his lower half. He needed to leave. Immediately. Before the wrong person noticed the wrong thing.
"Move," Silas muttered. "I've got somewhere to be."
Damien clicked his tongue. "Somewhere to be? What, finally giving up and transferring out of B-Class? Or did you come out here to cry after P.E again? Careful, your reputation might bruise before you do."
Silas exhaled sharply. "Damien. I don't have time."
"Oh, but I cleared my entire afternoon," Damien continued, spreading his arms in a mock display of generosity. "Prepared the stage, gathered the audience, even brought the sacrificial lamb. The least you can do is stay long enough for me to embarrass you."
A few students exchanged glances, some backing away instinctively. The tension didn't just thicken, it ossified.
Silas grit his teeth. Each second standing here made his current predicament worse. His body didn't care about logic or humiliation or the fact that this was absolutely the worst time for Damien's nonsense.
"Seriously," Silas growled. "Get lost."
Damien stepped even closer, until Silas could see the faint reflection of himself in those irritatingly bright eyes.
"What's wrong?" Damien cooed. "Finally scared of a real fight? Or..."
Silas' patience tore clean down the middle.
He straightened, shoulders rolling back, expression cooling into something flat and lethal. The shift was subtle but unmistakable. Even Damien blinked.
Silas' voice dropped low. "I said. Move."
Silas lunged.
Gasps rippled through the courtyard. Damien reacted instantly, muscles tensing as a pulse of warped gravity swirled around him. He swung his palm outward, the air bending like a warped lens as he unleashed a sharp gravitational crush aimed to knock Silas off balance and flatten him to the ground.
But Silas wasn't there.
His body shifted with a clean, vicious elegance, ducking under Damien's attack as if he'd seen it days in advance. The gravitational wave slammed into empty space.
Damien's eyes widened, a rare crack in his perfect control. Silas slipped behind him, silent as a ghost. Then... tap. Two fingers pressed lightly between Damien's shoulder blades.
Damien froze.
Silas leaned close enough that only Damien could hear him. His breath brushed Damien's ear as he whispered, voice calm and cold:
"You're slow."
And before gravity could ripple again, before Damien could whirl around, Silas was already gone.
He sprinted toward the dorms with a speed that made the crowd instinctively part like water around a speeding ship. Backpack still clutched tight to hide his problem, expression dead set on survival, of the social kind.
Behind him, Damien remained rooted to the spot, stiff with disbelief. The courtyard erupted into frantic whispering.
"Did… he dodge Damien?"
"No way, Damien never misses..."
"He just ran. Did he just RUN?"
"What just happened?!"
"Is he scared? Or did he win? Or… did something happen with his..."
"SHH!"
Damien finally snapped back to life, face flushed with equal parts rage and humiliation. Silas was already halfway across the grounds, a blue blur vanishing into the dorm building. Damien clenched his jaw. Tomorrow was going to be war. And no one, not even Silas' own pride, understood what kind of chaos had truly been set in motion.
—
Silas slumped deeper into his seat, his chin propped on his palm in the heroic, noble posture of a teenager on the brink of intellectual death.
'Man, this class is sooo boring…'
His brain was already halfway out the window, drifting somewhere far from the chalk-stained battlefield Mr. Gilbert insisted on calling a classroom.
And yet, there the man stood, balding, bespectacled, and armed with the unstoppable weapon of monotony, lecturing about how "one hundred Spartan warriors repelled an entire Syrian battalion with nothing but swords, shields, spears, and the renowned crimson cloaks flapping heroically in the breeze."
The story had all the ingredients of something epic: ancient valor, impossible odds, enough testosterone to sculpt a statue.
But in Mr. Gilbert's delivery? It became a slow-moving swamp, a swamp made of beige. The kind of swamp where excitement goes to die.
He paced back and forth at the front like a metronome, voice droning at a single pitch that sounded suspiciously like a fan running on low power.
"In the… ah… early confrontation of the eastern Peloponnesian conflicts…" he continued, his tone carrying the raw, unfiltered energy of a lullaby read by an exhausted accountant.
Silas's eyelids drooped. Again.
He was on doze number… what, fifteen? Seventeen? At this point, he could probably fall asleep standing up. Around the room, various students displayed their own contributions to the art of staying conscious under extreme conditions.
Morgan, in the third row, sat up perfectly straight, eyes wide, but her pupils were dilated in that I-have-left-my-body-and-am-watching-from-the-ceiling kind of way.
Jace and Naomi were passing notes behind their textbooks with the precision and secrecy of professional spies. Jace's shoulders shook with silent laughter every few seconds.
Emma, who normally adored history, was doodling Spartans with speech bubbles that read things like:
"Help, we're dying!"
and
"Why is he still talking?"
One guy at the back had actually propped his forehead against the cool window pane, absorbing salvation through temperature conduction.
And then there was Reyna, the class topper, who genuinely tried, she really did, but her head bobbed every few seconds like a sleepy pigeon. She'd jerk upright, blink rapidly, refocus on Mr. Gilbert… and then slide right back into dreamland.
Mr. Gilbert, oblivious to the academic carnage, raised a hand to adjust his glasses and continued in that perfectly flat intonation:
"Now… ah… if we refer to documented accounts of the battle… we note that the Spartans' strategic placement on the ridge… significantly hindered the enemy's advance…"
He tapped the board with his chalk.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Each tap was somehow more boring than the last.
Silas felt his soul exit his body, perch on the fluorescent light above, and debate whether to return.
He let out a silent groan.
This was torture.
Ancient, legal, institution-approved torture.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, the faintest flutter of his new Heartweaver sensitivity stirred. Emotions flowed faintly across the room: boredom, frustration, drowsiness, and mild existential crisis. Honestly, it was like tasting lukewarm oatmeal.
Silas slumped even further down his chair as Mr. Gilbert continued, his voice droning like a dying lawnmower:
"And thus… the Spartan resistance exemplifies… ah… perseverance in the face of overwhelming opposition…"
Silas's brain muttered one last desperate plea before short-circuiting:
'If someone doesn't open a rift in this room right now, I might.'
The lesson marched on, steady and relentless, and the class marched along with it, dragging their sanity behind them like a broken wheelbarrow.
The universe clearly wasn't planning to save them anytime soon.