Chapter 42: Strangle

Up in the prestigious private balconies reserved for the Seven Ancient Families, a certain broad-shouldered young man in a dark-indigo military tunic stood with his hands resting calmly atop his runic scabbard.

Cassian Valemont did not lean over the balustrade like the other curious nobles; he stood like an unyielding granite sentinel, his dark blue eyes burning with an intense gravity that made the hair on the back of Lucien’s neck stand up like iron filings near a magnet.

Beside Cassian, Silas was lazily peeling an orange with a stiletto, while Lyra was leaning precariously over the railing, her unruly violet hair trailing in the updraft, holding a pair of brass calipers with an expression of hungry delight.

Just touch the glass, Lucien commanded his shaking legs.

’Just wait for five seconds... a dull grey spark will ignite... give off a polite cough expected of a useless bum... Collect the exit slip, and leave peacefully. That’s it, everything would be peaceful and harmonious; you can do it, Lucien! Fighting!’

After brainwashing himself. Lucien stepped out from the auxiliary pen, the heels of his polished boots clicking against the sunstone pavers.

Every step felt heavy, as if the air around the obsidian plinth were thickening into cold syrup.

He reached the plinth.

The Grand Astral Orb hovered at eye level, a mesmerizing, swirling vortex of milky-white mist and pale golden sparks. It was beautiful, ancient, and undeniably arrogant.

"Whenever you are ready, Young Lord Everhart," Proctor Vane muttered, dipping his quill into black ink. "Let us make this brisk. The line for the third-year combat re-evaluations is out to the colonnades."

Lucien took a slow, measured breath through his single functioning nostril.

He raised his right hand and placed his bare palm firmly against the smooth, crystalline curve of the sphere.

For two seconds, nothing happened.

The orb remained cool, like polished ice beneath his skin.

The proctor began scratching the nib across the parchment: "Subject: Ethan Everhart. Mana Affinity: Negligible. Combat Designation: Civilian—"

Then, the universe cleared its throat.

****

It did not begin with a flash.

It began with an acoustic anomaly that made every dog within three miles of the capital city howl in existential agony.

VUUUUUUM.

The Grand Astral Orb did not light up with the fiery red of flame magic, the crisp blue of water, or the blinding golden radiance of the solar deities.

Instead, the milky-white mist churning inside the crystalline shell simply... died.

The light did not extinguish; it was ravenously inhaled backward into the core, collapsing in upon itself until the entire five-foot sphere turned into a swirling, light-devouring marble of pure, bottomless obsidian black.

The temperature within a fifty-yard radius dropped forty degrees in the span of a single heartbeat.

The three hundred crystal sconces mounted along the marble galleries flickered once, turned a sickly, bruised violet, and then guttered out, leaving the amphitheater illuminated only by the pale, cold, phantom moonlight filtering through the high skylights.

A smell rolled off the plinth, not the sulfurous stench of demonic summoning, nor the copper tang of standard magical overload.

It was the scent of dry autumn leaves crumbling under a coffin lid of ancient stone tombs sealed five centuries before the first king was crowned, and the faint, unmistakable fragrance of crushed winter mint.

CRACK!

A hairline fracture snaked across the surface of the three-thousand-year-old imperial relic.

"What in the...?" Proctor Vane choked, his braided rune-bells chiming frantically as his quill snapped cleanly in two beneath his liver-spotted fingers. "The resonance... the elemental polarity is inverted! The mana is not flowing out; it is being... it is being consumed!"

Inside the black sphere, three enormous, crimson-rimmed eyes of spectral soul-fire slowly opened, stared directly into Lucien’s face, blinked once with slow, amused recognition, and then dissolved into an explosion of violet text that hovered three feet above the plinth for every single spectator in the amphitheater to witness.

[ IMPERIAL VOCATION REGISTERED ]

Candidate: Lucien Everhart (House Everhart)

Elemental Mana Compatibility: [ABSOLUTE ZERO / NON-CONDUCTIVE]

Spiritual Resonance: [BEYOND REGISTRATION LIMITS]

Awakened Class: [ SOUL HARVESTER ]

Classification: [???]

Historical Precedent: None within recorded Imperial Dynastic Eras

Class Affinity: The Extraction, Manipulation, and Subjugation of Soul

Status: CONFIRMED BY THE AETHER.]

The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush an ox.

Six thousand aristocratic students, four hundred professors, twelve high inquisitors, and thirty-six imperial knights stood frozen in the dim violet gloom, staring at the floating words as though an ancient sea monster had just surfaced in their soup bowls.

Soul Harvester.

The name felt wrong in the mouth.

It tasted like ash and copper, and sounded less like an academy combat designation and more like a title one might find inscribed on an iron plaque bolted to the door of an ancient charnel house.

In the auxiliary pen, Rowan Ashford’s eyes rolled back into his skull.

His knees unlocked, and he collapsed backward into the arms of two terrified second-year water mages with a soft, dramatic whump, going unconscious.

Proctor Vane stood trembling, his hands hovering over the cracked, black-stained orb as if it were a venomous viper.

"Soul... Harvester?" the old man stammered, his beard-bells shaking like sleigh bells in a hurricane.

"A vocation unseen in three generations... No, in centuries! Not since the Great Purge of the Necrotic Heresy! But... but the boy has no mana! He has the magical conductivity of a dried turnip!"

Whispers, some hissing, some terrified, and some frantic, erupted across the tiered galleries like dry grass catching fire in an autumn gale.

"A Soul Harvester?!"

"Did the orb say subjugation of residual death-imprints?! That’s necromancy! That’s forbidden occultism!"

"No, look at the classification! It says three question marks! The ancient texts speak of souls that crossed the threshold of the Netherworld and returned with the authority of the grave!"

"Of course! The catacombs! He almost died down there! He was skewered by an abyssal beast, and his soul crawled out of the underworld carrying a piece of the dark!"

"An unawakened extra... possessing a unique class that hasn’t appeared since the founding emperors?!"

Down on the floor, Lucien slowly peeled his palm off the cracked, pitch-black surface of the Grand Astral Orb.

He stood there for five seconds, his face blank, staring at the floating violet letters that proclaimed his new identity as a harvester of human souls.

’I’m going to strangle that System,’ Lucien thought with cold grace.

’I’m going to find the algorithmic server where its consciousness resides, and douse it in holy water and cheap kerosene. Soul Harvester? Really? Couldn’t you have negotiated for ’Spectral Accountant’? ’Spiritual Administrator’? You had to give me the most cartoonishly ominous, edgelord-baiting profession in the entire dictionary?!’

He checked his coat pocket.

The almond pastry was slightly squashed.

’My life as a salted fish,’ Lucien realized, feeling despair hollow out his stomach, ’has not merely been compromised. It has been tied to an anvil and dropped into the Marianas Trench.’

Across the gallery, the initial shock was already beginning to curdle into something far more dangerous: one that’s full of greed.

To the common students, the title was terrifying.

But to the faction leaders, the ambitious third-year scions, the party captains, the noble houses maneuvering for dominance ahead of the grand inter-academy tournament, the diagnosis was a once-in-a-decade gold mine.

He has no conventional mana; the senior scouts in the upper balconies were already calculating, their eyes narrowing like hungry crows spotting a wounded hare in the brush.

He has no combat family backing; Duke Darius specializes in heavy earth defensive shields.

The boy is notoriously soft-spoken, frail, and chronically bedridden.

A pushover.

A weak, sickly, second-son invalid who possesses a unique occult authority that no one understands.

’If we recruit him... if we lock him into a party contract... we can exploit that unique trait for our own dungeon sweeps. We take the credit, harvest the ancient relics, and keep the invalid locked in the support rear-guard where he can’t cause trouble.’

Before Lucien could even take two steps toward the exit stairs to begin his retreat, the arena floor was breached.

****

"Young Lord Everhart!"

"Student Lucien!"

Sharp, booming voices sliced through the murmuring crowd as a tall, broad-shouldered third-year student, who was wearing the crimson-and-black mantle of the Iron Vanguard Faction, leaped over the balustrade, landing on the arena flagstones with a heavy thud.

Behind him came three more senior students, their breastplates adorned with the crest of the Azure Falcon Party.