Chapter 95: Skill Book

Caelus continued toward the Martial Artist Department, with Elysia following at his side.

The corridors had grown busier since the duel, though conversations often quieted whenever students recognized him. Caelus paid them little attention. He had more important matters to attend to than the sudden generosity of people who had doubted him an hour earlier.

The Martial Artist Department occupied one of the Academy’s larger buildings, with reinforced training grounds extending behind its main structure. Sounds of practice carried through the corridors, from weapons striking training dummies to instructors correcting students whose movements lacked discipline. Caelus passed the grounds and headed toward the department head’s office.

He knocked twice before opening the door.

Then he stopped.

Veyra was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, a brown-haired, red-eyed girl sat behind the desk. She was considerably shorter than the veyra Caelus knew, with a lean, muscular build that suited a Martial Artist better than a mage. A cropped shirt and loose trousers completed the appearance, and she turned toward him with an expression that suggested his entrance had already tested her patience.

"What are you doing here?"

Her voice was different too, noticeably higher and almost squeaky.

She glanced at Elysia before returning her attention to Caelus. "Since when were students allowed to barge into a professor’s office without permission?"

Caelus stared at her.

He had come to discuss something serious and had no intention of wasting time playing along.

Caelus nudged Elysia.

She looked between him and the girl, then smiled. "Seems like you need some space. I’ll be outside if you need anything."

She left, closing the door behind her.

A faint vibration passed through the room. Veyra formed a barrier around the office, and the noise from the corridor disappeared as the spell settled into place.

When Caelus turned back, Veyra was already sitting behind her desk in her familiar appearance.

"Why did you change your appearance?" he asked.

Veyra raised an eyebrow. "You want to discuss confidential matters with a persona modeled after someone who died two hundred years ago?"

Caelus opened his mouth, then closed it.

I mean, there’s no problem with that. She’s already dead.

He pulled out a chair and sat down, deciding that pursuing the subject would accomplish nothing useful.

Veyra sighed. "Why did you accept a duel so soon? What were you thinking?"

Caelus blinked twice. "Because he challenged me."

"You were still recovering."

"I’m fine."

"Your mana circuits are damaged. I can tell, and walking around without collapsing doesn’t mean you’ve recovered." Her irritation sharpened. "You accepted a fight against a Wind Knight while your body was still recovering from the examination. What would you have done if the duel had gone differently?"

Caelus leaned back. He had accepted because Ruven’s challenge offered an opportunity to settle an existing problem in public, and he had considered the risk worthwhile. Explaining that would hardly make Veyra less annoyed.

She studied his expression before letting out another sigh.

"Fine. You didn’t come here to listen to me lecture you. What do you want?"

Caelus paused before speaking.

"I have a deal for you."

He reached into his spatial ring, withdrew a notebook, and tossed it onto her desk.

Veyra glanced at the cover before looking back at him. "What’s this?"

"Read it first."

She opened the notebook. The initial pages contained names, dates, locations, and brief notes divided into several sections, covering everything from noble families to obscure sites and individuals of interest.

Her pace slowed when she encountered an account of an incident that had appeared in one of MIST’s older investigations. The official record attributed it to a private dispute between two noble houses, but the notebook described events that contradicted that conclusion, including several names omitted from the public account.

She checked the dates before turning to the next section.

Another entry concerned a person whose movements MIST had spent months trying to reconstruct. The notebook connected that individual to a location and an artifact that had never appeared in the organization’s final report.

Veyra returned to the first entry, checking the details again, then closed the notebook.

"Where did you get this?"

"Does the source matter if the information is accurate?"

"Yes."

"Then verify it."

Her eyes narrowed, but she had little grounds to dismiss his answer. The entries were interconnected, with distinctions between confirmed details and information that still required verification. Whoever had assembled the notebook understood how intelligence needed to be organized, and some of its contents matched facts MIST had independently established.

What unsettled her was how much further the records went.

"Are these things true?"

"As far as I know. Some locations may have changed, and a few records could be outdated. I’ve marked what needs further verification."

"Who else has seen this?"

"No one."

"Not even your family?"

"No one other than you. I don’t trust that easily."

Veyra rested a hand on the cover.

She could not yet verify the entire collection, but the details she recognized were enough to justify a closer examination. If the remaining entries proved equally reliable, the notebook could save MIST years of work.

That still left the more troubling question of how Caelus had obtained it.

"Why are you showing me this now?"

"I’ve decided to contribute to the empire."

Veyra stared at him.

"Don’t lie to me, Caelus. What do you want?"

He exhaled through his nose. "You could at least pretend to consider the possibility that I’ve developed a sense of civic responsibility."

"I could. Then we’d both be wasting our time."

"Fair enough."

Caelus leaned forward.

"I have five more notebooks like this one. Different subjects, different information. I’ll give MIST copies of all six."

Veyra’s attention sharpened, though she did not reach for the notebook again.

"You’re offering me six collections of intelligence, most of which I haven’t seen, in exchange for something. What is it?"

"Three things."

"Tell me all three before expecting an answer."

Caelus inclined his head slightly.

"First, I want MIST to send a team into a specific labyrinth and retrieve a specific item for me. Your organization can keep any other resources it finds. I only want the item I’m after."

"You expect me to commit my people to a labyrinth without even identifying the target?"

"I’ll give you the details when we discuss the retrieval. You can assess the risks before dispatching anyone."

"And if the operation is too dangerous?"

"Then we negotiate the conditions or abandon it. I’m offering an exchange, not demanding that you send your people to their deaths."

Veyra tapped one finger against the desk, weighing the proposal.

"What’s the second condition?"

"You don’t act on the information in these notebooks unless it’s absolutely necessary."

Her finger stopped moving, her eyes turning cold as she stared at him.

"Explain."

"I don’t want you launching investigations, making arrests, or approaching everyone named in the records the moment you’ve read them. Some of them are connected to the Contractors, and you don’t yet know how those connections fit together."

"You’re asking me to sit on evidence of potential crimes."

"I’m asking you not to act prematurely."

"Those are not the same thing. If your information identifies an immediate threat, I’m not going to stand by while someone gets killed because you want me to preserve a larger investigation."

"If someone’s in immediate danger, act."

Veyra paused.

"I’m restricting premature action, not asking you to abandon your responsibilities. Don’t expose an investigation or alert the people we’re trying to identify before you understand what their connections mean. The Contractors are more deeply rooted than you think, and you could compromise the entire effort by moving against one part of their network without understanding the rest."

"How do you know that?"

"You’ll understand when you read the other notebooks."

"That’s not an explanation."

"It’s a promise that the explanation is there."

Veyra leaned back, displeasure plain on her face. She had spent years investigating dangerous people, and she was not accustomed to accepting restrictions on her work from a student who refused to disclose his sources. Caelus’s confidence did not make the demand any easier to accept.

"I won’t agree to a blanket restriction that prevents me from protecting people," she said. "I can agree not to launch operations against the names in these records before the information has been reviewed. Immediate threats are different."

"Then we understand each other."

"Don’t look so pleased. I haven’t accepted your deal."

Veyra gave him a sharp look before returning to the matter at hand.

"You understand that I could kill you and take whatever information you have, don’t you?"

Caelus considered her for a moment. He knew the difference between their capabilities. If this became a direct confrontation, he had no reason to assume he would win.

"You could," he said. "But I doubt you’d consider the consequences worthwhile."

"Convince me."

"My spatial ring is soul-bound. If I die, everything stored inside it is destroyed, including the remaining notebooks. You would get this one, lose the other five, and still have no way to understand how their information connects."

He let that sit.

"And you can decide whether killing a member of House Vespera is worth the consequences, particularly when it gains you so little."

Veyra studied him. "You think I won’t find another way to obtain what you know?"

"Try. If you can independently uncover the same information, you won’t need my notebooks."

Caelus met her eyes without flinching.

"You can refuse the deal, but you can’t force me to give you the rest of the information."

The distinction was clear enough.

"You’ve thought this through," she said.

"I try to avoid deals that depend on the other person behaving irrationally."

"And you expect me to believe you’re doing this because you suddenly care about the empire?"

"Yes. But now you to believe that the information is valuable and that I have my reasons for offering it."

Veyra looked down at the notebook.

"Fine. I’ll review this one and verify what I can. Once I’ve established its reliability, we’ll discuss the other notebooks and the retrieval. I’m not promising to accept the deal before I know precisely what I’m agreeing to."

"Reasonable."

"Don’t sound so relieved. You haven’t won anything yet."

He tilted his head.

"I wasn’t aware we were competing."

"You’re always competing, Caelus. You simply prefer to pretend everyone else is wasting their time."

He gave her a faint smile but let the remark pass.

"And the third condition?" she asked.

Caelus’s expression settled.

The duel had exposed a gap he could no longer afford to ignore. Defeating Ruven had required careful preparation, precise water manipulation, and an understanding of his opponent’s technique. His victory had been earned, but his damaged mana circuits and the strain on his body had made the cost impossible to overlook. That’s why he’s offering veyra a deal to change that.

If he intended to stand against the Corrupt King, he needed more than clever ways to survive stronger opponents.

He needed to improve his capabilities.

For too long, he had tried to limit changes to the original story, preserving his advantage by intervening only when necessary. That caution had its uses, but the world was already diverging. Keeping his knowledge unused would not preserve his advantage. It would only leave him unprepared when the threats he knew finally arrived.

Caelus looked directly at Veyra.

"Give me the skill book Headmaster Dover gave you. The one that allows you to change your body’s structure."

Veyra went still.

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A/N: Sorry for the late updateT-T