Chapter 526 | The Cost of a Miracle [GT BONUS]

Chapter 526: 526 | The Cost of a Miracle [GT BONUS]

The stamina bar was gone.

I noticed that first. Not gone in the sense that it had emptied and was waiting to refill, but gone in the sense that the interface had stopped rendering it entirely, like the System had looked at the math and decided there was no point in showing me a negative number. The Demigod recovery rate was still processing somewhere in the background, doing its slow patient work, but something structural in my chest refused to cooperate with the rebuild and the golden light that had erupted from my back when I took Silas’s fire was completely spent. Burned to nothing.

I was aware of the following things in sequence: the pain, which arrived as a comprehensive inventory rather than a single spike. The floor, which was tile and broken and very cold under my cheek. Sloane’s hand on my face, her palm warm and her fingers shaking. The specific quality of silence that follows violence when nobody has won and everyone is too tired to pretend otherwise.

Breathing hurt.

I filed that observation under problems I could not solve in the next sixty seconds and moved it to the back of the queue. My ribs made their objection known and I told them to get in line behind my shoulder, which had separated completely at some point during the Silas exchange and was now hanging at an angle that my brain kept trying to process as wrong and my body kept confirming was extremely, painfully correct.

Sloane’s thumb moved across my cheekbone.

"Stop moving," she said.

Her voice had gone flat and hard in the way it went when she was terrified and refusing to acknowledge it. I could feel her through the bond, a constant pressure in my chest that sat adjacent to all the other pressures and somehow made them more bearable. She was scared. She was furious. She was counting my breaths the way you count seconds on a timer, and the fear underneath the fury tasted like copper.

"Not moving," I managed.

My voice came out rough and torn. Talking hurt almost as much as breathing, which was impressive considering breathing was already filing complaints with management.

Percy’s voice crackled through the channel.

"Headcount," he said.

His tone was flat and precise in the way that meant he had been holding himself together through data for the past forty minutes and intended to keep doing so because the alternative was not useful to anyone. I could hear the notebook. The pen scratching against paper in the background, steady and relentless.

"Kennedy."

"Here." Maribelle’s voice, soft and steady.

"Ashida."

"Present." Ren sounded exhausted.

"Vale."

"Yeah." Rocco, quiet for once.

Percy kept going. He moved through the roster with the mechanical precision of someone who had practiced this exact scenario in his head sixteen times and was now executing the seventeenth iteration. Each name got a response. Each response got recorded. The pen kept moving.

He counted forty students.

He counted them again.

"Forty confirmed," Percy announced into the channel.

Then he was quiet for a moment that he did not explain and did not have to. The silence carried the weight of the math underneath it, the calculation that forty was the correct number and forty meant nobody had died and forty was the best possible outcome and also forty was not good enough because forty should not have been in danger in the first place.

I closed my eyes.

The medical assessment started without me asking for it. Voices filtered through the channel as students reported injuries, some minor, some significantly less minor. Percy coordinated the flow with the calm efficiency of someone who had spent two years preparing for exactly this kind of administrative nightmare.

"Dravid," someone said.

I opened my eyes. Cole was thirty feet away, propped against a pillar with his broken cane in pieces beside him. Blood ran down his temple from a cut that looked worse than it probably was, and his breathing came shallow and careful in the specific way that meant broken ribs and probable internal complications. He was conscious and looking at the cane with an expression of profound irritation.

"Multiple rib fractures," Percy reported. "Concussion flagged. Possible internal bleeding pending trauma assessment. Conscious and responsive."

Cole’s eyes moved to me across the plaza. He looked at me for three full seconds without saying anything, and I could see him doing the math, cataloging the damage, updating whatever file he kept on students who should not be capable of what they were demonstrably capable of. His expression did not change.

He looked back at his cane.

"Steele," Percy continued.

Imara sat against the far wall with her right arm in her lap. The burns from Silas’s fire ran from wrist to elbow, black and cracked and weeping in places that made my stomach turn. Her hand would not close into a fist. I could see her trying, could see her fingers twitching in response to neural signals that were no longer reaching their destination.

She was looking at the arm with the expression of someone doing professional math about what the damage meant for the rest of her career.

Her jaw was set. Her eyes were dry. She had done this calculation before in her head as a theoretical exercise and now she was doing it again as a practical reality, and the answer had not improved with repetition.

"Right arm," Percy said. "Nerve damage, full extent unknown. She will require specialist evaluation."

Steele’s good hand clenched into a fist.

Among the students: Sloane’s right arm had cuts across the forearm where debris had caught her during one of her charges. The cuts were shallow and already clotting but they were there, visible proof that she had pushed past her ceiling and kept going anyway. She was functional and furious about it in equal measure, furious that she had been injured, furious that I had been injured worse, furious that any of this had happened at all.

I could feel her cataloging targets. The list was growing.