Chapter 541. Counting Heads, One Is Missing

Chapter 541: 541. Counting Heads, One Is Missing

The dumpling contest did not end with a victory; it ended in a state of mutual, exhausted defiance.

Both competitors two young men who had clearly underestimated the sheer volume of dough required for such a feat sat slumped at the table, their faces ghostly pale, sweat beading on their foreheads like condensation on ice.

Neither would concede. Both pointed accusatory fingers at the other, shouting incoherent claims of hidden fillings, poisoned spices, or magical assistance.

"He used a wind spell to swallow faster!" one wailed, his voice cracking.

"Liar! You had a hidden pocket in your sleeve for extra pork!" the other screamed back.

A very patient, very weary judge finally intervened, rubbing his temples as if nursing a migraine. "Enough! Both of you!"

"You both ate until you couldn’t breathe, and you both refuse to die."

"Therefore, you are co-champions." He handed each of them a small, crudely carved wooden trophy shaped like a dumpling.

The two men accepted them with grim, hollow expressions, looking less like winners and more like survivors of a siege.

William found himself standing nearby, sighing as he produced several coins to pay the bill for the folding table that had suddenly given up the ghost.

A hairline fracture had spiderwebbed across its surface when Kaela had leaned her elbow on it with her characteristic enthusiasm. She hadn’t even noticed the structural failure at the moment it happened.

When she finally did realize the table was now a liability, she didn’t apologize to William or the vendor; she leaned down and whispered a sincere, mortified apology directly to the splintered wood.

As the afternoon sun began its slow descent, William wandered through the teeming crowd with a meat skewer in one hand, feeling a strange, almost desperate compulsion to memorize everything.

The way the light caught the steam rising from the food stalls, the specific pitch of the street musicians’ flutes, and the smell of gunpowder from the distant fireworks made him want to burn it all into his memory.

From across the plaza, he spotted Clara and Ellie. Clara had managed to drag Ellie away from the academy stall to a dusty, cramped used book stall near the square’s edge.

William paused, watching them from a distance. They were huddled together over a book with a cracked spine, their heads bent close.

Then, he heard it: laughter.

It wasn’t the polite, measured amusement of a student at a festival. It was genuine and raw.

A warm, uncomplicated sound that seemed to cut through the chaotic noise of the city. For a moment, the weight of his notes the anomaly levels, and the ’clean’ mana, the Hollow Circle seemed to lift.

But the feeling was fleeting. A darker, more cynical part of his mind whispered that this might be the last time he heard either of them laugh like that.

He forcibly shoved the thought into the dark corner where he kept his fears, refusing to let it poison the moment.

As sunset began to bleed across the sky, painting the clouds in bruised violets and fiery oranges, Ellie found him. She approached quietly, stopping beside him at the fountain.

She didn’t offer an explanation or an apology for her absence. She simply stood there, holding a steaming paper cup of cider, watching the sunlight turn the fountain’s water into liquid amber.

For several minutes, they said nothing. The only sound was the rhythmic splashing of the water and the distant roar of the crowd.

The silence between them wasn’t uncomfortable; it was heavy, charged with everything they both knew but couldn’t say.

"Thank you," Ellie said finally.

Her voice was soft, almost lost in the evening breeze. "For not asking me every day..."

"I know you’re worried. I can see it in the way you watch me."

William didn’t lie. He couldn’t.

"I’m still worried, Ellie... Every time you stumble, every time you go quiet... I’m worried."

She turned to face him, the orange light of the setting sun catching the gold in her eyes, eyes that seemed almost too bright, too luminous. "I know."

A small, fragile smile touched her lips. "But today... today I don’t want to be an anomaly."

"I don’t want to be a puzzle or a threat."

"I just want to be someone who eats dumplings and looks at lanterns... Is that okay?"

William looked at her, really looked at her, searching for the void Grock had described, but all he saw was a girl trying to hold onto a moment of normalcy before the storm broke.

He took a slow breath, feeling the tightness in his chest loosen just slightly. He couldn’t solve the mystery tonight.

He couldn’t protect her from whatever she was becoming. All he could do was be present.

"It’s an excellent plan," William said, offering her a genuine smile. "Count me in."

...

As twilight deepened into true night, the city performed its final act of magic. With a collective exhale of cheers and whistles, the lanterns were released.

They rose from rooftops, balconies, and the plaza floor in soft, glowing clusters of hundreds of them, drifting upward like a slow tide of embers that turned the velvet sky into something warm and alive.

Ellie tipped her head back, her throat exposed to the starlight, watching the lights climb toward the heavens. William stood beside her, shoulder to shoulder, saying nothing.

In that moment, he didn’t need to be the strategist, the protector, or the skeptic. He didn’t need to be clever.

He simply existed in the space beside her. He took a mental photograph of the moment—the smell of burnt wick, the amber glow on her skin, and the distant murmur of the crowd—and stored it away in a private vault.

If the coming days were going to be as brutal as the system’s warnings implied, he would need this memory to anchor him when the world started to burn.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw it.

A fractional movement. Ellie’s hand drifted to her lower back, fingers pressing briefly against the small of her spine.

It was a gesture so fleeting it would have been invisible to anyone else, but to William, it was as loud as a scream.

For the span of a single heartbeat, her smile cracked a flash of raw, unguarded agony that transformed her features into something fragile and broken before she forcibly repaired the mask, smoothing her expression back into serenity.

William said nothing. He kept his gaze fixed on the ascending lanterns, his jaw tightening.

He let her believe she had gotten away with it, but the seed of dread he had been carrying finally began to sprout.

Three nights later, the festive warmth had been replaced by the sharp, biting chill of autumn. William called the evening training session on the main practice field as usual.

The air smelled of damp earth and whetstones.

On the surface, he was in a decent mood; the festival had been a success, the stall’s profits had been delivered to the local children’s orphanage, and the group had settled back into the comforting grind of academy routine.

But routine was an illusion.

Lia arrived first, marching onto the field with a neatly written list of combat techniques she intended to refine with surgical precision. Kaela followed close behind, practically vibrating with energy, two practice swords clattering at her hips and her heavy gauntlets slung over one shoulder.

"Tonight’s the night, William," she grinned, the competitive gleam in her eyes unmistakable. "I’ve been practicing that feint you showed me... Prepare to eat dirt."

Olivia arrived last, carrying a flask of tea and a small cushion she clearly intended to use as a throne while she observed their progress. The evening began not with training, but with the inevitable, thunderous argument over who would get to spar with William first.

"I need to test my reaction time against a real opponent, not a child playing pretend," Lia stated flatly, pointing at Kaela.

"Oh please, Lia, you’d spend thirty minutes adjusting your stance before you even swung," Kaela shot back. "I’m the only one here with enough actual aggression to make it worth his time."

After five minutes of escalating volume, they finally settled it with a decisive round of rock, paper, scissors. Kaela lost four times in a row.

"The lighting!" Kaela shouted, throwing her hands up in exasperation. "The shadows on this field are completely rigged!"

"It’s impossible to read your hand movements!"