Chapter 15: A new life

Kōya discovered on his second morning at the Royal Academy that waking before sunrise did not grant him silence. It merely extended the duration he was forced to endure the noise.

He opened his eyes in the unfamiliar dormitory, staring up at the high, vaulted wooden ceiling. For several seconds, he remained completely still, letting his mind stitch together the architecture of his surroundings.

The Academy. He sat upright. The room was modest compared to the sweeping, arrogant halls outside, but it was considerably larger than the cramped quarters he had grown accustomed to in his village. A narrow bed hugged one wall, a sturdy writing desk sat beneath a leaded window, and a washbasin rested beside a heavy oak wardrobe.

Pale morning light bled across the floorboards. Operating on centuries of ingrained instinct, Kōya reached blindly for his sword.

His fingers hooked empty air.

He stopped. Frowning, he turned his head. The weapon was leaning against the wall beside the desk, a full three paces away. His chest tightened with a sudden, quiet dread. He had slept deeply enough that his subconscious had failed to track the blade’s exact position in the dark. In his previous life, such a lapse would have meant a severed throat. It was entirely unacceptable.

Then, releasing a slow breath, he paused. Perhaps, in this place, it was also normal.

By the time he dressed and stepped into the corridor, the dormitory was already vibrating with chaotic life. Students emerged from their rooms in varying states of panic and readiness. Some were immaculate in their uniforms; others were frantically buttoning tunics or hopping on one foot to force a heel into a leather boot. One boy stumbled past Kōya, entirely focused on tying a knot, and nearly collided with a stone pillar.

"Morning!" the boy threw over his shoulder, blindly correcting his trajectory.

"Good morning," Kōya replied, stepping smoothly out of the collision path.

The boy skidded to a halt, looking at Kōya, then at the pillar, and then back at Kōya. "Right. You’re the new guy. Kōya." With a quick, breathless smile, he resumed his sprint down the hall.

Kōya watched him disappear around the bend. No killing intent. No hidden agenda. No tactical significance whatsoever. Just a youth terrified of a tardy mark. Kōya was beginning to suspect that the Academy was heavily populated by individuals who had absolutely no concept of how to move efficiently.

Following the erratic flow of students, he navigated his way toward the dining hall. He located Haru almost immediately. The brown-haired boy was standing perfectly still in the center of the massive room, looking lost while balancing two heavily loaded wooden trays.

"You’re alive!" Haru announced as Kōya approached.

Kōya stared at him. "I wasn’t aware my survival was in doubt."

"It was your first night here. New bed, new people, weird magical drafts. Anything could’ve happened."

"I slept," Kōya said flatly.

"Exactly. Suspicious." Haru shifted his grip on the trays.

Kōya looked down at the sheer volume of food. "Why do you have two?"

Haru glanced at his hands, looked around the hall as if searching for an excuse, and shrugged. "I accidentally took two."

"You accidentally carried two entire trays of rations?"

"I was hungry."

The explanation possessed a certain primal logic that Kōya found difficult to argue with. He followed Haru to an empty table near the periphery. The dining hall was a cavernous marvel of architecture. Long wooden tables stretched endlessly beneath a soaring, arched ceiling. Spheres of luminous mana floated above each section, casting a warm, golden glow over the morning meal.

The room was a tapestry of intersecting races and overlapping conversations. A dwarf was locked in a heated debate with a human over the thermal properties required to properly fry an egg. A pair of beastfolk were loudly critiquing yesterday’s hand-to-hand combat exercises, their tails twitching with leftover adrenaline.

Nearby, a contingent of noble-born humans discussed political rumors with the grim, hushed tones of senators deciding the fate of a kingdom.

Kōya slowly scanned the room. It was remarkably peaceful. Not because there was an absence of conflict—there were dozens of micro-aggressions and disagreements occurring simultaneously—but because not a single one was being resolved with drawn steel.

Haru shoved one of the heavy plates across the table. "Eat."

"I am capable of feeding myself," Kōya noted, looking at the mountain of bread and cured meats.

"I didn’t say you couldn’t."

"The gesture heavily implied it."

"It absolutely did not."

Kōya picked up a piece of bread, conceding the point in silence.

Haru grinned around a mouthful of food. "So. How was your first day?"

"Educational."

Haru paused, staring at him. "That’s your entire review?"

"Yes."

"You sound like a seventy-year-old archmage who hasn’t left a tower in a decade."

Kōya took a measured bite of his bread. "The lectures were stimulating. The Academy’s layout, however, is poorly organized. The map is unnecessarily complicated and borders on tactical sabotage."

Haru nodded solemnly. "Congratulations. Now you’re beginning to understand civilization."

Kōya almost smiled. The muscle in his cheek twitched, but before the expression could fully form, he noticed a sudden, drastic shift in Haru’s demeanor. The boy’s breathing hitched, accelerating slightly. His shoulders pulled back, straightening his spine, and his hand flew up to hurriedly smooth down his messy hair.

Tracking the shift in tension, Kōya looked over his shoulder. A girl had just entered the dining hall. She had long, dark-blue hair tied loosely behind her shoulders and carried a heavy stack of leather-bound books pressed against her chest. She navigated the crowded aisles quietly, completely oblivious to the physiological transformation she had just triggered at their table.

"That’s Aoi," Haru whispered, his voice strained.

"I have heard the name."

Haru leaned in, lowering his voice further. "The girl."

"There are several hundred girls in this hall," Kōya pointed out.

"The one with the books."

"That narrows the tactical field to approximately fifty individuals."

Haru looked deeply offended. "The really, really pretty one."

Kōya examined the room again, locating the blue-haired girl who had stopped near the entrance to speak with a professor. He turned back to his companion. "Your pulse has elevated."

Haru nearly choked on a piece of meat. "What?"

"Your respiratory rate changed. Your shoulders elevated in a subconscious display of physical readiness. Your pupils—"

"Stop analyzing my biology!" Haru hissed, looking frantically around to see if anyone was listening.

Kōya blinked, genuinely confused. "Why? I am stating objective observations."

Haru buried his face in his hands, letting out a muffled groan of absolute defeat. Kōya observed him for several seconds, trying to calculate the most efficient way to resolve the distress, before finally asking the obvious question.

"Do you intend to mate with her?"

Haru’s head snapped up, his face burning a violent shade of red. "I—like her! You can just say like!"

"Then inform her of your intent."

Haru stared at him as if he had just suggested burning the Academy to the ground. "You make that sound incredibly easy."

"It is a straightforward exchange of information."

"You don’t understand."

"I understand perfectly."

"No, you really don’t." Haru pointed a subtle finger toward Aoi. "She’s brilliant. She’s one of the top-ranked students here. And she’s incredibly kind."

Kōya nodded. "Those are positive attributes. There appears to be no strategic disadvantage."

Haru groaned again, letting his head hit the wooden table with a dull thud. "You are terrifyingly bad at this."

"At what?"

"Being a person."

Kōya looked around the loud, chaotic dining hall, watching a student accidentally spill hot tea onto his neighbor’s lap. "That is becoming increasingly apparent."

Haru let out a sudden, breathless laugh. And for a reason Kōya couldn’t entirely parse, he found a quiet, fleeting laugh escaping his own chest.

The morning lectures passed with surprising speed. Magic theory steadily climbed in complexity, but it was History that caught Kōya entirely off guard. He had expected a dry, sanitized sequence of names, dates, and ratified treaties. Instead, the professor spoke of vanished kingdoms, of civilizations buried beneath the bedrock of modern cities, and of horrific, world-shattering wars fought over resources that had long since dried up.

Kōya listened with an intensity that bordered on predatory. The historical accounts contradicted his own memories. The textbooks were written strictly from the perspective of humanity and the kingdoms that had survived the bloody ages. Raizen had existed on the opposing side of those battlefields.

The professor spoke of heroic last stands; Kōya remembered them as absolute, one-sided massacres. The texts celebrated ancient kings as benevolent liberators; Kōya remembered them as desperate opportunists who had offered him the heads of their own children in exchange for mercy. There were entire genocides swept under the rug, their causes lost to time and willful ignorance.

He stared at the crisp, ink-stained pages. History was not memory. It was an agreed-upon interpretation. As he slowly closed the book, a quiet, unsettling thought took root in his mind: if they had misunderstood so much of what he had done, how much of his own past had he misunderstood?

That heavy introspection followed him into Alchemy.

The laboratory was a sensory overload of bubbling glass, sharp chemical scents, and ambient heat. Copper pipes carrying raw, heated mana ran along the stone walls, feeding energy into rows of intricate workstations. The shelves were crammed with dried herbs, pulverized monster bone, crystalline structures, and thick, viscous fluids.

The professor, a stern woman with hair the color of polished silver, paced between the aisles. "Alchemy is not magic," she announced, her voice cutting through the hiss of the pipes. She lifted a small, jagged crystal between her thumb and forefinger. "It is the manipulation of material properties through controlled magical reactions."

She dropped the crystal into a glass crucible filled with a pale liquid. The fluid instantly violenced into a deep, boiling violet. Several students leaned in, mesmerized. Kōya did the same, his eyes tracking the subtle shift in the ambient mana in the air.

The professor caught his movement. "You. Initiate."

Kōya looked up. "Yes?"

"Come here."

He stepped forward smoothly. She handed him the glass vessel; it was hot against his palm. "Tell me what you see."

Kōya didn’t hesitate. "The mana concentration within the fluid has increased by a factor of three."

"Correct."

"The crystal is not dissolving; it is acting purely as a catalyst, forcing the liquid to absorb the ambient energy in the room."

"Correct."

"The reaction is inherently unstable."

The professor offered a thin, approving smile. "Very good."

Kōya kept his eyes on the violently bubbling liquid, feeling the microscopic fractures beginning to form in the glass. "Approximately twenty seconds before thermal collapse and an area-of-effect detonation."

The professor’s smile vanished. She snatched the vessel from his hand with startling speed, quickly channeling a suppression spell into the glass just as it began to glow a dangerous, bright white. The liquid hissed, turning inert and gray.

A tense silence fell over the room, followed quickly by the nervous laughter of several students.

Kōya frowned. "Was my assessment incorrect?"

"No," the professor breathed, setting the crucible down carefully.

"You were disturbingly correct. Return to your seat."