Chapter 73: We Know Everything

"You’re planning to take courses in both the Mage and Knight departments, right?"

Caelus nodded, then paused as his eyes moved around the office.

"Wait."

His attention returned to Veyra.

"Why are you in the Martial Artist Department Head’s office?"

Veyra looked at him.

"I’m the department head."

Caelus blinked twice.

"What?"

"I’m the department head."

"But you’re a mage."

"I am."

Caelus frowned, clearly unconvinced by how simple she was making the situation sound.

"What about the department head who gave the speech today?"

"I told the Headmaster to make him my substitute."

"And he agreed?"

"He did."

Caelus stared at her for another moment.

Veyra had always been a mage, and a remarkably gifted one at that, but nothing in his memories of the novel placed her in charge of the Martial Artist Department. She was an S-rank mage, one of the most talented people of her generation, but this position had never existed in anything he’d written.

"Just because I’m a mage doesn’t mean I don’t know how to use martial arts," Veyra said. "I can defeat any S-rank martial artist in hand-to-hand combat alone."

She delivered the statement without the slightest trace of arrogance, which somehow made it more convincing.

Caelus knew she was dangerous. In his writing, Veyra had reached S-rank at twenty-five, surpassing even Elysia’s father, a legendary Archmage and Primordial who had reached the same realm only at thirty-seven. She was twenty-eight now, and according to the future he planned for her, she was expected to eventually cross the threshold into Primordial.

The problem was that he had never actually written that far.

He had never shown Veyra reaching that point, and she had never been a department head.

Now she was a department head.

At some point, Caelus had stopped being surprised by changes like this. Trying to force every new development back into the boundaries of the story had become pointless. The world had already deviated far beyond what he remembered, and the only sensible response was to accept the changes and adjust accordingly.

Veyra brought the conversation back to the present.

"So you’ll become my teaching assistant."

Caelus looked at her with a frown.

"Why should I?"

"Because you’re my disciple?"

Her answer was so straightforward that Caelus almost found it irritating.

"That doesn’t explain anything."

Veyra’s expression remained calm.

"You’re weak, Caelus."

That earned her his full attention.

"Even with the spells and tricks you’ve developed, you wouldn’t stand much of a chance against someone with comparable intelligence and significantly more experience than you."

Caelus leaned back slightly.

"What does being a teaching assistant have to do with that?"

"I already told you. You need experience."

Veyra folded her hands on the desk.

"You have good observation skills. You notice things other people miss, and you’re good at predicting what someone is going to do based on what you already know about them. That works well when the information you have is accurate."

She paused.

"The problem is that you don’t know everyone."

Caelus remained silent, letting the implication settle.

"Your predictions are built on what you’ve already seen," she continued. "If you encounter someone whose technique, habits or physical ability falls outside what you’re familiar with, your advantage becomes smaller. The solution isn’t to rely on your predictions more carefully. It’s to give yourself more information to work with."

He absorbed the explanation without interrupting.

"You’ll be taking courses in the Mage and Knight departments anyway," Veyra said. "Pay attention to how people cast, not just what they cast. Watch their posture, the way they hold themselves before activating a spell, how their mana moves through their circuits and what changes in their body immediately before they attack."

She looked at him.

"And when you’re in the Martial Artist Department, pay attention to the same things from a physical perspective. Watch how they stand when they’re relaxed, where they place their weight, how they move before committing to a strike and what their body does when they’re preparing to change direction."

The more Veyra explained, the more Caelus understood what she was trying to teach him.

"So I study all of them."

"Yes."

Veyra’s eyes remained on him.

"A person rarely begins an attack at the moment their weapon moves. Their weight shifts first. Their shoulders change. Their breathing changes. Their balance shifts toward one side of the body before they commit. Experienced fighters learn to recognize those signs without consciously thinking about them."

She paused briefly.

"You need to do the same."

Caelus lowered his gaze.

She was right.

His ability to predict opponents had always been one of his strongest advantages, but much of it came from information he already possessed as the author. That advantage had become less dependable. And there were people here he’d never written, people whose abilities he had never seen and whose decisions couldn’t be pulled from a Chapter he remembered.

If he wanted to survive in this world, especially while remaining as the Apex, he needed to know how to read people without relying on the story.

"And don’t limit your observation to combat. Watch people when they aren’t fighting. The way they walk, the way they sit, how they carry themselves when they’re tired or relaxed. Even the way they eat can tell you something about how they move."

Caelus looked at her.

"That’s basically being a stalker, is it not?"

A faint smile appeared on Veyra’s face.

"It is only if they notice."

Caelus stared at her.

That didn’t sound right.

He decided not to comment.

The rest of the meeting became more practical. They went through his training schedule, the classes he would attend, the times he could work with Veyra on magic-circle development. They discussed how his physical recovery would affect the beginning of his training, which exercises he could safely resume and which ones would have to wait until his body had recovered further.

Veyra also went over the expectations attached to his teaching-assistant position. He would help review demonstrations, assist with evaluations when necessary and submit observations on techniques that caught his attention. It wasn’t simply a title that gave him access to another department. It would require him to actively study the people around him and turn those observations into something useful.

Caelus found the arrangement increasingly difficult to argue with.

It gave him access to three departments, direct exposure to different combat disciplines, higher-level training material and Veyra’s own knowledge. The position also solved a problem he had only recently begun to recognize in himself.

Knowing how something worked was no longer enough.

He needed to know how people actually used it.

Their conversation continued into his magic studies, his plans for developing new spells and the work he would be doing alongside Veyra. They discussed several smaller matters as well, some of which Caelus had never expected her to care about and others that had nothing to do with magic or combat at all.

Neither of them seemed to notice how much time had passed.

By the time they finished, the sunlight outside the windows had disappeared entirely.

Caelus stood and straightened his clothes, recovering whatever dignity remained after spending several hours being told that he had questionable survival instincts and that his most effective method of gathering information was essentially controlled stalking.

He gave Veyra a brief nod, then turned and left the office.

Veyra watched his retreating back until the door closed behind him.

She had genuinely believed he was going to die during the examination.

When he consumed the Corrupt cores, she had expected his circuits to collapse beneath the strain. Then Lucian’s Divine Mana had struck him, tearing through a body that had already been pushed to its limit. Finally, the S-rank creature had pierced him through the abdomen.

There had been several moments where she was certain they had lost him.

Yet he had survived.

The creature’s body had not adapted to its S-rank soul quickly enough, creating a weakness that the three of them could exploit. That had made the fight possible, but it didn’t explain how they had survived long enough to reach that opening, much less how Caelus had destroyed the creature’s core.

Eve and the Hero were easier to understand.

Their strength was obvious, and both possessed talents that made extraordinary growth almost inevitable.

Caelus did not.

His greatest danger wasn’t his strength.

It was the certainty behind everything he did.

He spoke with the confidence of someone who had already seen the answer before the question was asked. More than once, he had provided information that even the Imperial family would’ve had to pay heavily to obtain, and some of it had been more precise than information MIST itself had managed to uncover.

That was what troubled her.

At least one concern could be put to rest.

Caelus wasn’t a Contractor.

She was certain of that.

If he were secretly feeding the Contractors information of that quality, he would have already become a threat far greater than a single infiltrator, and the Empire would already be in considerably more danger than it was now.

Knowing that should have eased her mind.

Instead, she found herself looking at the closed door.

If Caelus wasn’t a Contractor, then the question remained.

Where had he learned all of this?

Veyra remained seated for a while longer.

MIST had always been the standard she trusted when it came to information.

Its network rivaled House Vespera’s on paper, and its reputation had been built around a simple principle.

We know everything.

Veyra had believed that for years.

For the first time, she wasn’t sure.