Chapter 66: Justice, Served by an Old Knight

Uriel spent the night on a bench in the Knights' headquarters corridor.

"Spent" was generous. The bench was one man wide, and lying flat made every joint in his body threatened to resign. He balled his coat under his head, counted the mana-lamps at the far end of the corridor, and closed his eyes.

His legs wouldn't straighten. Stretch them even a little, and his calves either hung in the air or dangled off the edge.

He slept like that the entire night.

Morning came in the form of a dull ache across his back. Uriel sat up, twisted his torso, and listened to his spine pop like dry kindling. The corridor was already busy—off-duty knights filed past, glanced at him, and their expressions had shifted past suspicion or confusion into the kind of blank acceptance reserved for permanent fixtures.

"Morning." Uriel yawned.

"...Morning." The knight muttered back and walked faster.

The detention wing corridor at dawn. Uriel carried out his morning stretches as though he were in his own backyard.

Arms overhead. Side stretch. Forward fold, fingertips to toes.

One-two-three-four, two-two-three-four.

A junior knight carrying a breakfast tray rounded the corner, caught him mid-stretch, gave him a look of complete confusion, and took the long way around.

Uriel paused, watched the knight disappear down the corridor.

"Breakfast time," he told himself.

The headquarters mess hall didn't serve suspects, but the detention wing had its own catering. Uriel had already mapped the schedule—breakfast arrived at the cell door around seven-thirty, portions were fixed, but the ladle-wielding uncle behind the counter had taken pity on the kid who refused to leave and added an extra half-scoop of mashed potatoes every time.

He was heading back toward the cell when footsteps sounded behind him.

Unlike the brisk boots of the duty knights, these steps were slow and heavy. Soles dragged against stone, and a dry cough punctuated the rhythm.

Uriel turned.

An old knight stood in the corridor.

Sixty-plus, white hair combed back into a thin slick-back that was losing the war against gravity. Deep wrinkles crossed his forehead like old battle scars, and the deep laugh lines flanking his mouth looked etched with a chisel.

No armor. Just a faded uniform jacket, shoulder boards frayed to fuzz. His right hand leaned on what appeared to be a random stick but was, in fact, a retired officer's cane.

The old knight looked at Uriel. Uriel looked back.

"I heard about it yesterday," the old knight said. Gravel voice, solid lungs. "Some young fellow got released and still camped out in headquarters for a full day and night."

Uriel stayed quiet.

"Came to see for myself today." The old knight reached the bench, planted his cane, and stood straight. "Son, why aren't you leaving?"

Uriel's throat clicked.

Simple question. Tone no different from a grandpa making small talk at the park.

But those grey-blue eyes under the bushy white brows weren't sharp, weren't pressing. They just sat on his face, quiet. Quiet enough to make the back of his neck tighten.

He ran through his mental database of excuses.

Sore leg—used. Hungry—used. Looking for something—used. Treating the symptom, not the disease—also used.

Repeating any of those would be insulting the man's intelligence. Knights weren't all fools, especially not a veteran like this.

So what?

Say he suspected someone was waiting outside to ambush him? No way. Estrella was the kingdom's strongest, a Hero candidate. An ordinary student accusing her of attempted murder without proof was just volunteering to be the nail that gets hammered.

Say he was scared of dying? Too fake. Say he wanted justice? There was no injustice to report.

Uriel sat on the bench, face like granite, brain cycling through rejections faster than Estrella's multiple-choice quiz yesterday.

The old knight waited. Then lowered his voice, slowed his pace, and asked again.

"Did someone wrong you? Want to file a complaint?" He leaned forward slightly, white brows knitting together. "You can tell me quietly. I may be semi-retired, but my words still carry some weight."

Uriel studied him.

He saw the kind of earnestness that belonged to a different era—the look of a man who'd spent forty years inside the system, watching young recruits get screwed over and swallow it in silence. If Uriel actually had a grievance, this man would probably investigate it himself.

But he didn't have a grievance. He had a yandere lesbian cousin who was one rank away from Astral-tier and currently waiting outside to turn him into a pincushion.

So what excuse best matched his public identity?

Clang. An answer popped up. So simple it felt absurd, yet it slotted perfectly into the cover identity everyone already believed.

"Gotta go to class."

He said it.

The old knight froze.

"That's why I can't go back," Uriel added, as though it were the most self-evident thing in the world.

"You..." The old knight scratched the thin white hair at the back of his head. "What did you just say?"

"Skipping class." Uriel said, not blinking.

Then he cleared his throat. "Taking a leave of absence, officially."

Then he looked at the old knight and waited. His expression was textbook—the face of a student at the registrar's office saying I've got a headache, can I get a pass: earnest, calm, with just a hint of exhaustion.

The old knight didn't answer. He switched the cane to his left hand and pinched the sparse goatee on his chin with his right, rolling a few white hairs between thumb and forefinger, slower and slower.

He wants to tell me to stay in school. The thought was written across the old knight's face in neon letters. His mouth twitched, brows rose and fell, fingers slowed to a crawl.

But the lecture never came.

"Is the academic pressure really that bad these days?" the old knight muttered—more to himself than to Uriel, as if trying to convince his own brain.

He planted the cane back on the stone, straightened up, and gave Uriel one more look.

No suspicion. No scrutiny. Just the plain, honest bewilderment of a man who had trained hundreds of recruits and was now confronting behavior so far outside his experience that he chose, in the end, to simply respect it.

"Generation gap," the old knight sighed. He turned, cane tapping a slow rhythm against the floor. "Can't mess with a kid's education."

"Rather stay in headquarters as a prisoner." He shook his head, voice fading with each step. "Kids these days... the kingdom is so doomed."

Uriel watched the old knight's back disappear around the corner.

One more day secured on the strength of truancy.

By the Light.

---

Morning passed. Afternoon passed. Uriel's territory was limited to the cell, the corridor bench, and the latrine. He ate two prison meals and chatted with the duty guard about the culinary standards of the Knights' headquarters.

He even dozed off on the bench for a while. When he woke, someone had draped a thin blanket over him.

By evening he jogged a few laps to keep the blood moving. A female clerk-knight passing by did a double-take, her lips silently forming still here?

Another day.

---

The third morning.

When Uriel sat up, the ache in his back had graduated from sore to structural failure. His spine felt like a rusted drawbridge chain, every vertebra lodging a silent protest. He tilted his neck and was rewarded with a machine-gun rattle of pops.

He stood and shuffled through his warm-up.

"Two nights on a bench and my skeleton is ready to mutiny," he muttered, then started his calisthenics.

Halfway through, a muscle in his lower back spasmed. That familiar prickle at the base of his skull—his personal signal that trouble was coming.

Uriel rubbed the spot and stopped moving.

A bad feeling crawled up the back of his neck.

He was about to go wash his face when voices drifted in from the entrance.

The detention wing was separated from the main hall by two corridors and an iron-barred gate. Ambient noise usually died before it reached this far. But this voice was different—not loud, yet impossibly penetrating, each syllable landing on the eardrum like a hammer wrapped in velvet.

"My roommate Uriel was brought back here."

Uriel froze.

Unhurried pace. Faint stickiness between words. Soft, drawn-out endings. Like the heroine of a romance anime wearing a boy's uniform.

But no one on this planet understood the sheer terror encoded in that tone better than Uriel.

"Three days. Why hasn't he been released?"

Uriel shot to his feet.

The back pain was buried under a spike of adrenaline. He was already moving toward the gate, half-jogging, ears straining for every word from the hall.

"Is he eating enough here? Sleeping well?"

Two duty knights in the corridor exchanged a glance—not alarm, just confusion. They couldn't hear what was wrong, only that the kid was asking awfully specific questions.

Uriel heard it.

He knew every micro-shift in Tian's cadence. This was Tian clamping a lid on something. A pressure cooker with the valve held shut—nothing visible on the outside, but you knew what was rolling underneath.

He caught the guard's reply: "Who are you? You can't just walk in here."

"I'm his roommate." Tian's voice stayed level. "I heard he was arrested. I came to check on him."

"He's a criminal suspect. During the detention period, visitation is not—"

The air changed.

Pressure dropped. Eardrums swelled. A chill skittered across the skin.

The two duty knights straightened at the same instant, hands drifting to sword hilts. They didn't know why they were tense—their bodies just moved faster than their brains.

Uriel rounded the corner.

Tian stood at the entrance, still in school uniform.

Three knights faced him—one gate guard, two duty knights drawn by the commotion.

Tian's eyes were half-narrowed, lips pressed into a thin, pale arc. But Uriel saw the other hand hanging at Tian's side—and through his Observer, mana was already spiraling inward like a forming tornado.

"Tian!" Uriel barked at the top of his lungs.

Her gaze snapped to him. The instant their eyes met, a switch flipped: the furrow between Tian's brows smoothed, the narrowed eyes softened to their usual curve, the lips parted gently.

The entire face went from pre-combat state to mom spotting her kid at the school gate in under one second.

"Little—ah, I mean, Uriel."

Tian walked toward him, steps light and quick. Eyes swept top to bottom—hair, face, collar, cuffs, pant legs, shoes. Every detail filed away behind that gentle gaze.

Uriel watched the color return to Tian's knuckles.

Then Tian stopped, turned back toward the guard.

The pivot was utterly natural, as if something had just slipped his mind. But Uriel saw the half-profile clearly: eyes narrowing again, lips pressing back into that arc.

Combat face, reloaded.

"Hold on." Uriel closed the gap in one stride.

No chance for Tian to open his mouth. Both hands clamped onto Tian's shoulders, grabbed her shoulders and spun her a clean hundred-eighty degrees to face the main doors.

"Guess I'm heading out!" Uriel tossed over his shoulder at the knights, tone breezy as a classmate waving goodbye after last period.

No time for anything else. If Mom went off, it was over. Everything was over.

He pushed Tian forward.

Palm stayed on the shoulder—light pressure, never letting go. He walked half a step ahead, syncing their pace into a single rhythm.

The headquarters doors opened in front of them. Morning light spilled across the flagstones. The air smelled of dew and toast.

Down the steps, onto the side path leading to the main street, the iron gate swinging shut behind them on creaking hinges.

Twenty steps. Tian's voice floated back.

"Little Uri."

"Mm."

"You've got dark circles." Head tilted just enough to catch half of Uriel's face. "You didn't sleep well."

"I'm fine."

"Hair's a bit greasy."

"...Haven't washed it in two days."

"Looking a little off, too."

"I know."

Tian paused.

Then delivered the line Uriel had been bracing for—and his neck still tightened when it came.

"Were the meals bad, too?"

The tone was pure did the cafeteria treat you okay, sweetie?

But Uriel knew what that really meant.

Tell me they treated you badly. Please. Give me a reason.

He squeezed Tian's shoulder. Just a fraction harder.

"We'll talk at home." He dropped his voice, lips close to the back of Tian's head, words faster than usual. "Let's go home first."