Chapter 13: Emotions

His wand was gone — not broken, shredded, a branch torn apart by something that had never once slowed down for him. His palms were blistered raw where it had detonated in his grip, too close, too late. He didn’t feel the pain yet. That would come later, when his body decided it had permission.

The notifications kept arriving long after the ape had stopped moving. Long after the forest had gone quiet in that specific, ringing way that only follows something enormous dying.

[+ Level Up]

[+ Soul obtained]

[+ Level Up]

[+ Soul obtained]

They stacked across his vision until the screen blurred into a wall of light. Rael stared through them, not at them. Somewhere in the flood, the truth finally landed: a level 5 awakener had killed a Savage-rank beast. An ant had killed an elephant and was still standing on its legs to prove it. No archive, no tutor, no bedtime story from the old war veterans had ever described anything like it. The fact didn’t feel like triumph. It sat in his chest like a stone dropped into still water — too large, too heavy, refusing to stop rippling.

He forced the status window open with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking.

Status

Name: Rael

Race: Human

Class: Copy (F-Rank)

Copied Classes: Flamecaller (C-Rank), Archer (B-Rank)

Level: 5 → 9

Souls: 97 → 568

Bloodline: Abyssal Sovereign (+100% Multiplier) (Dormant)

Attributes

Strength: 36

Agility: 40

Mana: 40

Vitality: 36

Additional Stats: 8

Skills: Fireball (Apprentice), Ignite (Expert), Eagle Eyes (Expert), Piercing Arrow (Expert)

The numbers had climbed like something starving finally being fed. His body hadn’t caught up to them. It still felt exactly as broken as it had a minute ago — because it was. He planted his palms in the blood-flattened grass and pushed himself upright, and his right leg buckled the instant it took weight, a white flash of pain shooting up to his hip. He locked his jaw and locked the joint and made himself stand anyway. Every breath dragged against something wrong in his ribs, a grinding little reminder that he was not, in fact, invincible. Just lucky. Or maybe not even that.

Then he looked at Lila, and the numbers stopped mattering entirely.

She hadn’t moved an inch since the fight ended. Blood matted one side of her face, dark and drying at the temple. Both arms hung at angles that made his stomach turn just to see. She could have run. The ape had wanted him, only him, and she’d had a clean line to the tree cover the whole time. She could have vanished and lived and no one would have blamed her — he wouldn’t have blamed her. She had stayed instead. Standing over him, drawing an arrow, buying him the half-second he needed.

That realization hit harder than any of the level-ups. Harder than the bloodline notification. Harder than anything the screen had shown him.

He slid his arms beneath her, careful of the arms that weren’t supposed to bend the way they bent, and lifted. A princess carry was the only hold that wouldn’t make her scream in whatever place she was currently hiding from the pain. His own leg screamed instead, buckling on the first step, and he locked it again and kept moving because stopping wasn’t a choice that existed right now. Open ground was a death sentence. If the summoner who’d sent that ape realized two half-dead survivors were sitting beside its corpse, every leashed beast in a mile radius would come looking. So he walked. Slow, stubborn, refusing steps, the only rhythm his body had left to offer — carrying her toward the cave like it was the only decision he’d ever been sure of.

He thought, absurdly, of the noble houses. How they trained for this exact night for years before it ever arrived — how children were sent into the Dream Realm in groups, flanked by branch families and alliance houses who’d drilled contingencies since before those children could walk. Supply caches. Assigned roles. Rituals of readiness passed down like inheritance. If the stone had given him any ordinary class, he’d have stepped into the first realm surrounded by people who already knew his name, his weaknesses, his blind spots. Instead he was here — dragging a dying girl through undergrowth on a leg that wouldn’t hold, an F-rank Copy class limping through the dark like a joke the universe hadn’t finished telling yet. The first awakening was never supposed to be this hard. He turned the thought over and over and found no answer waiting on the other side of it.

The cave mouth opened up between the bushes, black and narrow and, for the moment, safe enough. He lowered Lila onto the stone as gently as his shaking arms allowed and knelt beside her, and for a second he just knelt there, breathing, because moving again meant admitting how little time she might have left. Without treatment she would die. That thought moved him faster than fear ever could. He pried open her storage ring with fingers that fumbled twice before they worked, and searched until his hand closed around a single glass vial.

Health potion

A liquid that closes wounds and knits bone at a speed no ordinary medicine can match.

He could have drunk it himself. He was in no better shape than she was, and no one on earth would have blamed him for choosing his own survival — that was simply how the world worked, how it had always worked for people who weren’t born with a name that opened doors. Instead he tipped it carefully between her lips, one slow swallow at a time, willing none of it to spill. She drank without waking. The worst of the gashes along her scalp began to knit shut before his eyes. The wrong angles of her arms shifted, resettled, corrected themselves with small wet sounds he tried not to listen to. Color crept back into her face in careful degrees, like dawn deciding whether the day was worth it. She still didn’t open her eyes. Her body had simply chosen to rest, trusting that someone would still be there when it woke.

He looked at the empty vial in his palm for a long moment. The recipe was locked behind royal decree, guarded tighter than most bloodlines. Even the great houses couldn’t brew it themselves — only the Solaria family held the right, under strict quota, at a price that had quietly buried the old hospital trade a generation ago. One vial was a small fortune. Lila had carried exactly one, and she had spent it on a boy she’d known for less than a season.

He understood, with sudden and unbearable clarity, exactly what that meant.

Silence filled the cave after that — total, complete, with no one left to break it. It pressed into every place still hurting: his ribs, his leg, the raw place behind his eyes where exhaustion had started pooling hours ago and never drained. He thought of home. The long stone corridor he used to race down as a boy. Sparring with his siblings until the sun went down. Laughing with friends who’d sworn nothing would ever change between them. For years he had carried the quiet certainty that Blackthorn blood did not fail — that whatever happened, the name would hold him up. That certainty had died the moment his awakening stone stayed dark in front of the whole hall. And in the hollow it left behind sat a colder, uglier question, one he hadn’t let himself ask until now: how fast they had all moved on. Not slow, not reluctant — fast. No message since. No name called into the dark. Just a door closing, quietly, like he’d never been expected to walk back through it.

"Mother," he said, to no one, his eyes fixed on nothing.

The word left him thinner than he meant it to. A single tear cut a clean line through the dirt on his cheek before he could stop it, and he let it fall. He had spent years perfecting a face that didn’t flinch — through the humiliation, through the failure, through the public silence that followed a failed awakening like a smell that never quite left the room. He had absorbed all of it without once letting the crack show, had told himself he was building toward the day he could say, truthfully, that he didn’t need their love anymore. That day had not come. The crack was showing now, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, he didn’t try to close it. All he had ever actually wanted — underneath the training, the ambition, the desperate hunger to become strong enough to matter — was to be loved by the people he loved. Not power for its own sake. Not vengeance. Just his family, beside him, the way it used to be. Especially her.

"I miss you," he said, quieter now, the words barely making it past his throat. "Was it fake too? Was your love fake too?"

No answer came back. He hadn’t expected one. Some part of him had been asking that question into empty rooms for weeks now, and some part of him already understood that the answer, whatever it was, would not be coming from this cave, tonight, or maybe ever.

He lowered himself down beside Lila, close enough that their shoulders touched, and took her hand in his. He told himself it was so she wouldn’t wake alone in the dark, in a strange cave, with no memory of how she’d gotten there. The quieter, truer reason was that he didn’t want to feel the empty stretch of stone on his own side of the cave — didn’t want one more night of reaching for something that wasn’t there. She had stayed when leaving would have cost her nothing. That single fact was the only ground under him that still felt solid.

He closed his eyes. The last thing he registered, before sleep dragged him under, was the slow, steady warmth of her fingers curled against his — proof, small and stubborn, that not everyone left. Then sleep took him, heavy and without dreams.

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