Chapter 87: A Waste of Time

Caelus walked down the mansion’s main corridor with one hand in his pocket, still irritated by the conversation he’d had with Elysia after yesterday’s club fair.

She had tried reasoning with him, explaining that joining a club was part of the Academy experience and that he might benefit from interacting with students outside his usual circle. When that failed, she’d resorted to listing the practical advantages of each available club, as though presenting him with a sufficiently thorough report would somehow convince him to volunteer for more work.

Eventually, she’d given up, leaving him with an expression caught somewhere between exhaustion and irritation.

Caelus already had enough responsibilities without adding club activities to the list. Between his magical studies, combat training, and the various problems that seemed determined to find him regardless of whether he went looking for them, his time was hardly abundant. Clubs were mostly for people who had nothing better to do, or for those who hoped that participating in enough activities would compensate for whatever they lacked elsewhere. Some people even attended them for the sole purpose of socializing.

The thought genuinely confused him.

People were always finding new ways to stray from their purpose.

After returning to the mansion yesterday, he had resumed his magical studies and only then discovered that his first class this morning was World History.

There were few people who actively hated history, even in a world like this one. Learning about another civilization’s rise and fall could be entertaining, and a fantasy world offered enough material to make the subject feel like reading a novel within a novel. The problem usually began when an examiner expected students to remember whether an obscure town’s name had started with an A or a Z, as though the fate of humanity depended on the order of its letters.

Fortunately, Caelus had nothing to worry about.

Ha!

He was the one who had written the world. He could practically walk into the classroom, sit down, and collect a perfect score.

A faint surge of confidence rose within him before he suppressed it almost immediately.

That kind of thinking was precisely how people ended up making careless mistakes.

Besides, his knowledge of the world wasn’t infallible. He had written the novel, not personally documented every road, village, and historical disagreement that had occurred over the centuries. Still, he knew enough to feel reasonably comfortable about a history examination.

At least, he would have been comfortable if Mira hadn’t betrayed him.

He had originally allowed her to accompany him to the Academy this morning, but the moment she learned that his first class was World History, she abandoned the idea without the slightest hesitation. She had claimed that she had more important work to do at the mansion, delivered a perfectly innocent smile, and left him to fend for himself.

The betrayal was difficult to forgive.

Caelus continued down the corridor, considering whether to bring it up the next time she tried to persuade him to taste one of her cooking experiments.

By the time he realized how long he’d spent thinking about matters that deserved very little attention, he had already reached the Academy’s lecture building.

The classroom occupied one of the larger halls in the central academic wing, with a high ceiling and rows of ascending seats arranged to give every student a clear view of the lecturer’s platform. Since World History was a compulsory subject for all departments, the room accommodated first-year mages, knights, martial artists, and students whose abilities didn’t fit neatly into either discipline.

Caelus entered without drawing particular attention to himself.

Or at least, he had hoped not to.

"That’s the Apex."

"I heard he was only D-rank before the examination. There’s no way someone like that should be ranked first."

"Apparently, he can cast without incantations."

"That’s propaganda. Even the advanced students need incantations for most structured spells."

The whispers followed him between the rows. Some students lowered their voices when he passed, while others made little effort to hide their curiosity. A few looked at him as though they expected the Academy’s highest-ranked first-year to possess some immediately recognizable quality that would distinguish him from everyone else.

Caelus ignored them and chose a seat near the back, where he could see the entire classroom without being forced into conversation with everyone who happened to notice him.

If people wanted to waste their morning discussing his abilities, they were welcome to do so.

He settled into the seat and leaned back, allowing his gaze to wander toward the ceiling.

Elysia entered a few minutes later alongside Aelirya, the elven princess. They were already deep in conversation, speaking with the easy familiarity of people who had found something worth discussing together. Caelus watched them briefly and wondered whether they had always been this comfortable around each other. He had written them as people who would eventually share certain interests, but seeing that connection develop independently of his intentions was still interesting.

Elysia spotted him and waved with a smile, while Aelirya acknowledged him with a polite nod. They took the seats directly in front of his, continuing their conversation as though they hadn’t interrupted anything.

Caelus glanced around and noticed that the seats beside him remained empty. Students had filled much of the room, yet a small pocket of vacant space surrounded his row.

He felt a measure of pity for them.

They don’t know any better. Sitting beside me is practically an honor, and they can’t even recognize the privilege.

He settled more comfortably into his chair, satisfied that the other students’ loss was hardly his concern.

Something stirred beneath him.

Caelus’s eyes dropped toward his shadow just as its dark surface began to shift. The silhouette stretched upward, its outline gradually taking shape until a girl emerged from the darkness and stood beside his desk.

Black hair. Black eyes. A familiar expression that suggested she’d done nothing unusual at all.

Eve.

Caelus looked at her, keeping his face composed even as an unwelcome question formed in his mind.

When had she entered his shadow, and more importantly, how had she approached him closely enough to do so without his noticing?

He was accustomed to paying attention to his surroundings. His Eclipse Ring made him even more sensitive to changes in his immediate environment, yet Eve had apparently managed to bypass both his attention and his awareness of the space around him.

"When did you get in there?" he asked.

Eve smiled.

It was a perfectly ordinary smile by most standards, which somehow made it worse. There was nothing threatening about her expression, and she offered no explanation that might have reassured him. Instead, she sat beside him as though she had simply arrived through the door.

Caelus watched her for another moment before returning his gaze to the front.

He would have to ask Veyra about the practical limits of Shadow Affinity later, preferably before Eve found another way to demonstrate them.

Leon noticed the two of them from several rows away. He hesitated briefly, seemingly uncertain whether to interrupt, then approached and greeted Caelus before taking the empty seat on his other side. His presence made the arrangement look almost ordinary, though the students around them continued to maintain a suspicious amount of distance.

Further forward, Lucian, the Hero, was already seated near Seraphina, the Saintess. Nyra, the Beast Princess, occupied another seat nearby, while Ben and Cale had settled in among the other students. Their positions attracted considerably less attention than Caelus’s arrival, which he considered an unfortunate failure on the Academy’s part.

The lecturer eventually stepped onto the platform, bringing the remaining conversations to an end.

Caelus barely looked at him.

He had already heard enough speeches about the Academy’s importance to recognize the pattern, and the professor’s opening remarks followed it almost perfectly. The institution was described as a monument to humanity’s resilience, a place where generations of awakened had gathered to preserve civilization and prepare for whatever dangers might threaten it next.

The Academy had apparently never encountered an opportunity to praise itself that it couldn’t improve with another paragraph.

Still, the subject was compulsory, and Caelus had no particular desire to lose marks because he had spent the lecture staring at the ceiling. He listened as the professor began outlining the historical events that had shaped the modern world, allowing the familiar account to fill the room while he remained comfortably reclined in his seat.

More than five centuries earlier, humanity had lived without the constant threat posed by Corrupt creatures. Then the first Fractures had appeared, opening across the world without warning and releasing monsters into places where ordinary people had never expected to face them.

The locations were unpredictable. A Fracture might open high above a city, beneath the ocean, underground, or inside an occupied building, leaving little opportunity for anyone nearby to prepare. Corrupt creatures poured through these openings, attacking civilians and awakened alike, and the suddenness of their appearances often proved more dangerous than the creatures themselves.

Awakened fighters had tried to respond, but even superior strength meant little when an enemy emerged in the middle of a populated street or attacked a settlement during the night. Many died before they could draw their weapons, while others managed to fight back only to be overwhelmed by creatures arriving through additional Fractures nearby.

Humanity’s early victories were costly, and its defeats were worse. Communities disappeared, established territories became uninhabitable, and the surviving populations were forced to abandon places that could no longer be defended. The awakened fought wherever they could, but their efforts failed to establish lasting stability because no one could reliably predict where the next breach would occur.

The death toll continued to rise until maintaining an accurate count became increasingly pointless.

The professor’s voice remained steady as he described those years, occasionally emphasizing the courage of the first awakened defenders and the sacrifices that had allowed humanity to preserve its remaining settlements. The story was polished, but its central truth was difficult to dispute. The modern world had been built upon the ruins of a civilization that had nearly failed to survive its first encounter with the Fractures.

Caelus had known the broad outline of the story long before entering this world, yet hearing it presented to an entire room of students gave the events a different weight. What he had once written as historical background had become the foundation of the lives of everyone sitting around him.

He shifted slightly in his seat and finally directed his attention toward the professor.

The lecturer had moved beyond humanity’s first attempts to survive, preparing to explain the catastrophe that had changed the course of history and led to the rise of the figures who still governed the awakened world.

"Despite the efforts of the surviving forces," the professor continued, "humanity remained divided and vulnerable for decades. The Fractures continued to appear, and no settlement could be considered completely secure. Then, five hundred years ago, the world faced a disaster unlike anything that had come before."

Caelus’s gaze settled on the display behind the lecturer.

The image showed a vast rupture in the sky, its edges distorted by corrupted energy.

"The first recorded Catastrophe-class Fracture had opened, and the being that descended from it would become one of the greatest threats humanity had ever faced."

The professor paused, allowing the room to fall silent.

"Its name was Wrath, an SS-rank Corrupt creature."