Magic Academy's Bastard Instructor

Chapter 263: Karina Maeril [1]

“Huh.”

It was surreal.

Of course, this was not Karina’s first experience within a frozen domain. She had sealed equilibrium countless times before, pushing the environment into a state where motion slowed to the point it resembled suspended time.

But that had always been all it was.

A misdirection.

An illusion born from extremes.

A confined radius where everything moved so slowly that the mind interpreted it as solitude.

But this was different.

Karina knew it the moment she looked around.

This was not a zone where things moved forward at a glacial pace. Nothing was moving at all.

Karina looked up.

The clouds above had ceased and frozen mid-formation. The sea below, which by all logic should have been locked into ice, remained liquid, yet utterly motionless.

There was no flow.

There was no progression.

There was no allowance for change.

For the first time, Karina understood the distinction clearly.

Before, she had slowed the world.

This time, she had denied it permission to continue.

Karina moved through the vessel in utter silence.

She waved a hand in front of the men frozen around her.

“….”

But there was no feedback.

Not even the slightest twitch of a pupil. From experience alone, there should have been something. A microscopic reaction or a delayed response. But there was nothing at all.

She stepped closer to Vice-Admiral Iridelle Vermillion.

Iridelle was caught mid-motion, sweat suspended on her brow as she maintained the Phoenix Curtain.

Karina waved her hand in front of her eyes.

“….”

Still, no reaction.

She reached out and gently poked Iridelle’s cheek.

There was no resistance or rebound in the muscle. The flesh felt as if it had been sculpted rather than alive, like a statue.

Karina slowly withdrew her hand.

Then she looked up.

“….”

Toward Vanitas.

He stood apart from everyone else with his back turned and his hands tucked into his coat pockets. As if this impossible situation had never concerned him in the first place.

Karina ascended the stairs leading to the command platform, where Vanitas and Vice-Admiral Romolus Neuschwan were overseeing the battle.

She slowed to a halt and took a good look at Romolus.

This had all been his idea. Bringing the Aetherion crown here. A calculated ploy conceived between the Celestine Hegemony and the Zyphran Dominion, meant to erase both the Emperor and his right hand in one stroke.

Cooperation disguised as assistance. Aid offered with one hand, a knife hidden behind the other. They would wring out every ounce of value they could, then strike once the work was done.

There was no honor in it.

But Franz Barielle Aetherion and Vanitas Astrea were never meant to be granted honor in the first place.

Karina stepped into Vanitas’s space.

Like everyone else, he was completely frozen.

This was it.

One touch.

One shard of an ice driven straight into his heart, and Vanitas Astrea would die just like that.

A simple death without resistance, as if all the suffering tied to his name amounted to nothing more than this anticlimactic end.

This professor who had once pleaded with her.

This man who had shown her nothing but kindness in the past.

Kindness she had convinced herself were lies because she refused to believe that two opposing truths could exist at the same time.

Lately, Karina had begun to doubt herself.

She wondered who had truly been right, and who had been wrong.

Whether there had been truth in his words after all.

Whether, no matter how many lies he had spoken, the sorrow in his eyes had always been telling her a different story.

“O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved…”

With a conflicted expression, Karina lifted her hand and gently reached for his cheek.

“….”

Or rather, she thought she did.

Her hand stopped midair, or rather, stopped.

“This is…”

A wind barrier.

Even in a frozen constant where time itself refused to move, Vanitas’s guard had never fallen. His defenses remained absolute, like an unseen wall standing between him and the world.

Karina couldn’t help but let out a breathless chuckle.

Despite everything.

Despite this never-ending calm.

Despite having all the time and control in the world.

She still could not reach him.

And perhaps that was fitting.

Perhaps that was the irony in every choice she had made.

She had pushed him away. Called him a liar. Accused him without mercy. And now, the world itself denied her the right to stand beside him.

She had no right to hold him.

No right to touch him.

No right to take his hand.

No right to reach his heart.

The distance between them had always been there.

Only now, it had finally become absolute.

Karina closed her eyes, sinking into self-reproach.

For all the shame she carried, for all the regrets that stuck to her like frost that would never melt, she finally allowed herself to feel it.

For every mistake.

For every misjudgment.

For every hour squandered while believing she was moving forward.

She, who wielded dominion over time, had wasted more of it than anyone else.

A full year spent chasing vengeance, sharpening a blade meant for someone else, only to turn it toward the wrong person.

The wrong target.

The wrong moment.

It was bitterly ironic.

Time, which she believed she had mastered, was the very thing that had exposed her.

Time peeled back the lies she told herself.

Time dragged her wounds into the open, one by one, until she could no longer look away.

It was time that forced regret upon her.

It was time that demanded she open her eyes.

It was time that compelled her to finally see.

“….”

And what she saw was unbearable.

Perhaps Vanitas Astrea had been telling the truth all along.

Perhaps every word she dismissed, every look she mistrusted, held sincerity she refused to acknowledge. Like a frozen lake hiding its misery under the surface, the truth had always been there, waiting for the reality to become too much.

In that sense, this frozen world felt fitting, like a mirror she could not shatter.

A moment suspended between what she had been and what she could never return to.

In this silence, where even regret had nowhere left to run, Karina finally understood that stopping time did not mean escaping it.

It only meant being forced to face it.

“What are you doing?”

“Huh?”

“Finish the poem.”

“How—”

“You are better than a well-beloved,” Vanitas continued calmly. “Because I know that on the day of my final agony, you will be there, lying in my sheets…”

“Vanitas…”

In this frozen constant, he alone remained unbound, speaking freely as though she had not just sealed the world into a deadlock.

Time that went still for everything else felt irrelevant around him, an inconvenience rather than a prison.

“O’ sorrow, so that you might once again—”

“Attempt to enter my heart,” Karina finished for him.

Karina did not look away, nor did she step closer.

In this suspended moment, distance meant nothing, and closeness meant even less.

“You’ve grown,” Vanitas said. “I barely recognize you from two years ago.”

“I still have much to learn.”

“That’s human nature. The hunger for knowledge is what allows progression.”

“Then it seems progression has halted for a while.”

Vanitas glanced around, finally taking in the unmoving world.

“What did you do?”

Karina looked at him. “How are you even talking?”

“I don’t know.”

“…I froze everything accidentally.”

“So you can’t do anything about this?”

“I don’t even know how I did it.”

Vanitas exhaled through his nose. “Then I take back what I just said.”

“Can you not?”

Despite the frozen world around them, the exchange felt oddly ordinary, like the kind of back-and-forth they might have had years ago, before everything went wrong.

“Vanitas—no, Professor…” Karina corrected herself. “What should I do?”

The familiar way she addressed him made something loosen in her chest, as if asking him for help at a dead end had always been the most natural thing in the world.

“First,” Vanitas said, “unfreeze me, somehow.”

“Huh?”

“I can talk, but I can’t move my muscles at all.” His voice remained maddeningly calm. “I’m trying my best, but it feels like forcing my shit that just refuses to come out, no matter how hard I push.”

Karina stared at him in disbelief, feeling the sudden urge to laugh.

“Pfft—what is that?”

“Just do it.”

“I don’t know how to.”

“You’re really letting me down here, Assistant Professor Maeril.”

“….”

Karina’s eyes widened in shock. Assistant Professor. Right. That was what she had once been.

“…You never even called me that before.”

“It’s never too late for change.”

“….”

Silence fell between them.

Karina felt her fingers twitch, and for a moment she forgot how to speak. Time had always bent for her, yielded to her will, and slowed at her command.

Ever since her doubts arose, she had told herself that the past was immutable, that her choices had locked her into a single, irreversible path.

That the blade she raised could never be lowered again. But standing there, surrounded by a world she had forced into silence, she understood the flaw in that thinking.

Regret did not rewind time.

What mattered was what came next.

At that moment, Vanitas’s fingers twitched.

“Oh?” he said. “Would you look at that. Your magic is flawed.”

“How are you even—”

“Thaw me out. Now.”

“I…”

Karina tried to make sense of it. Thaw him out? He was not encased in ice. Still, she extended a hand and murmured a chant, reversing the flow the same way she always did when dispersing ice.

Vanitas bit down hard.

“Too cold!” he snapped. “I said thaw, not freeze!”

“I tried reversing it the way I do with ice—”

“That is exactly why I told you to thaw.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?! Hit you?!”

“Yes. You imbecile.”

“…Excuse me?”

“Thermal shock,” Vanitas said through clenched teeth. “You dragged everything into a static extreme. You don’t undo that by pulling harder in the opposite direction. You break equilibrium.”

Karina stared at him. “You want me to apply heat.”

“Anything that forces motion back into the system.”

“That’s reckless…”

“Freezing time itself was reckless. This is damage control.”

Her jaw tightened. For a split second, old habits resurfaced. Fear of doing the wrong thing.

“…Fine.”

Karina stepped closer, drew back her hand, and released a burst of raw heat directly at his chest.

Vanitas gasped.

The air shook.

Something invisible cracked, like the pressure that was holding the world still.

His fingers twitched again.

“Now, circulate the heat with my barrier.”

It was the only active spell he still had at his disposal.

Karina understood at once what he was trying to do. This was not about melting ice through heat in the conventional sense. Vanitas was circumventing resistance through constancy, using the barrier as a medium rather than a shield.

Magic followed rules, after all, and rules could be negotiated.

By allowing her mana to circulate through his barrier, the domain was being rewritten. The frozen constant no longer recognized Karina as a singular authority imposing her will upon the system.

Instead, the laws themselves were being persuaded that the caster was plural. That the interference was shared.

In doing so, the burden of rewriting the laws stretched outward and latched onto Vanitas.

Simply put, it was never about heating him enough to force movement. But letting her mana flow around him, guided and distributed by the barrier, until the world itself accepted his presence as part of the equation.

Not an intruder to be frozen, but a participant allowed to move.

And once the rules were convinced of that, the ice no longer mattered.

Shatter——

“There we go.”

Vanitas finally stepped forward.

The wind barrier, once invisible to the naked eye, came into view. Only now could Karina see her mana circulating around him in a controlled loop clearly, flowing like celestial bodies locked into orbit around him.

She narrowed her eyes.

“What happens if you stop circulating my mana like that?”

It looked tedious.

No, more than that.

It demanded concentration beyond what should have been humanly possible. Not a single thread of her mana could be allowed to leak. It had to keep flowing, endlessly, without deviation, without collapse.

Vanitas turned to face her.

“Then I’d probably cease to exist.”

It meant that the laws of time would then reject him.

The moment the circulation stopped, the illusion would shatter, and the frozen constant would recognize Vanitas Astrea as an intruder.

“Gone, into the void.”

And intruders, in a world that had ceased to move, were not erased kindly.