Reincarnation Of The Magicless Pinoy
From Zero to Hero : "No Magic?, No Problem!"
Encounter 25: Later,Then.
The rain had turned the Grey Estate's outer walls slick and black, like wet obsidian under the moonless sky. Rolien moved low along the eastern ivy-choked trellis he'd planted himself at thirteen—back when climbing it was just a way to sneak extra tools from the smithy without anyone noticing. The vines were thicker now, older, their grip stubborn enough to hold his weight even with the Jawbreaker arm adding extra pounds.
He paused halfway up, rain drumming against the mask's lenses, listening. No patrols on this side tonight. Luke probably thought the storm would keep intruders away. Arrogant as ever. Rolien's lips twitched under the metal. Good.
A quick flex of the mechanical fingers, and the small grappling hook in his palm hissed out on its thin cable. He flicked his wrist; the claw bit silently into the stone ledge of the second-floor servants' corridor window. One smooth pull and he was over the sill, rolling into shadow.
Inside smelled the same. Old wood polish, faint lavender from the linens, a whisper of coal smoke from the distant kitchens. Home. The ache in his chest sharpened, but he shoved it down. Not now.
He ghosted through the back passages—narrow, unlit corridors he'd mapped in his head like circuit diagrams. Past the linen closet where he and Elara used to hide during thunderstorms. Past the dumbwaiter shaft he'd once rigged with pulleys so Elian could send him midnight snacks without waking the staff. Every step felt like stepping on memories.
The last turn brought him to the library's rear wall. The bookshelf that wasn't a bookshelf.
He pressed two fingers to the spine of Treatise on Mana Resonance, Vol. III—the one nobody ever read because the binding was ugly—and pushed. A soft click. The whole section swung inward on oiled hinges he'd rebuilt twice.
Darkness swallowed him. Then the familiar scent hit: machine oil, heated brass, scorched wiring, and that faint metallic tang of mana-infused steel he could never quite scrub out of the air.
The workshop.
He let the door ease shut behind him. No light yet—he knew the layout blind. Ten steps forward, left around the big lathe, duck under the hanging chain hoist, right past the steam accumulator tank that still leaked a little at the joints if you didn't torque the bolts just so.
Only when he was sure no one was waiting did he tap the small rune-stone embedded in his Jawbreaker's palm. A soft blue glow bloomed from the vents, enough to see by without spilling under the door.
The place looked… violated.
Drawers yanked open, papers scattered like dead leaves. Half his prototypes smashed on the floor—gears crushed, pistons bent, crystal conduits shattered. Someone had taken a hammer to the workbench itself, splintering the oak top he'd planed by hand. Luke's men, probably. Or Luke himself, throwing a tantrum when the hidden door refused to yield to brute force or magic.
Rolien's throat tightened. This wasn't just tools. This was six years of nights spent hunched over blueprints while the rest of the world slept. Every dent, every scorch mark, was a piece of him.
He forced himself to move.
Rolien crouched in the dark of the workshop, rain hammering the skylight above like impatient fingers. The steam-rifle prototype still hung from its sling on the wall—half-finished, ugly, beautiful in the way only incomplete things can be. The barrel was rifled but the feed mechanism jammed every third shot in testing; the pressure regulator was a kludge of brass shims and hope. He'd never fired it for real. Tonight wasn't the night to find out if it would blow up in his face.
He left it where it was.
Instead he moved to the workbench's false bottom again. Under the schematics he pulled two small canvas-wrapped bundles. One was the backup Jawbreaker core—spare power cell, denser crystal lattice, the one that might actually let him run the arm at full output for more than ten minutes without melting the vents. The other was a fist-sized lump wrapped in oilcloth: the half-built chest plate he'd been mocking up before the betrayal. Layered ceramite over boiled leather, vents for heat dissipation, mounting points for future ablative panels. It would stop a dagger, maybe turn a sword-slash. Against anything heavier it was just expensive kindling. Still, he strapped it on under his cloak—awkward, uneven, pressing cold against his ribs. Better than nothing.
Everything else in the room—the lathe, the crystal conduits, the half-assembled automatons, the notebooks filled with six years of fever-dream ideas—he couldn't carry. And he wouldn't let Luke have them.
He pulled the last thing he needed from the drawer: three mana-nullifier charges. Not grenades exactly—small brass cylinders, clockwork timers, packed with a compound that ate ambient mana like acid. He'd designed them to kill spellwork in a thirty-foot radius for about ninety seconds. Nasty in a mage duel. Devastating in a room full of delicate prototypes.
He set two of them on the workbench, twisted the timers to thirty seconds, and wedged them deep among the gear piles where they'd do the most structural damage. The third he pocketed. Insurance.
Then he killed the glow from his arm and slipped back through the bookshelf.
Shouts were already rising from the upper floors. Someone had found the unconscious guard in the corridor.
Rolien didn't run. He flowed—low, fast, using the servants' passages like veins. Down the back stairs, past the still-warm bread ovens, into the cellars. The air grew colder, damper, thick with the smell of wet stone and old iron.
Two guards stood outside the lower cell block, lanterns swinging, swords half-drawn.
They never saw him coming.
He hit the first one from the side—Jawbreaker fist driving up under the ribs, lifting the man clean off his feet. The guard's breath exploded out in a wet cough; his sword clattered. Rolien spun the body like a shield, slamming it into the second man before the guard could shout. Metal elbow cracked against temple—clean, surgical. Both dropped limp.
No blood on the floor. No alarm yet.
He snatched the ring of keys from the first guard's belt and moved to the third cell.
Lyra was inside, slumped against the wall, wrists still in the mana-suppressing cuffs. Her head lolled forward, silver hair hiding her face. Burns marched up her arms in ugly red lines; one on her collarbone still oozed. She wasn't moving.
Rolien's stomach lurched.
He dropped to his knees, worked the lock with shaking fingers—metal ones steady, flesh ones not. The cuffs came off with a dull clank. He checked her pulse: slow, thready, but there.
"Auntie," he whispered.
Nothing.
He scooped her up—careful, so careful—cradling her against his chest. She weighed almost nothing. Her head fell against his shoulder; a small smear of blood transferred to his cloak.
Thirty seconds had to be almost up.
He turned and ran.
Up the cellar stairs, through the kitchens, out the side servants' door into the storm. Rain hit like needles. Behind him the estate lights were coming on one window at a time.
He made it to the outer wall—same ivy trellis he'd climbed earlier. One arm around Lyra, the other gripping vines, he hauled them both up and over. Dropped into the muddy ditch on the far side just as the first muffled boom rolled out from the house.
Not one explosion—three, chained together.
The workshop went first. A deep, chewing crump as the mana-nullifiers ate through everything enchanted or crystalline, then the stored steam tanks ruptured in sympathy. Windows blew outward in glittering sprays. Stone cracked. Timbers groaned and gave. Half the east wing sagged, then collapsed inward with a roar that shook the ground.
Rolien didn't look back. He just ran—through the dripping woods, boots sucking in mud, Lyra's weight a steady anchor against his chest.
He reached the fallback rendezvous—an abandoned mill two miles out—before the first Imperial horns started sounding. Arden was already there, cloak dripping, a small medical team waiting under the leaking roof.
Rolien laid Lyra down on the blanket they'd spread over straw. Her breathing was shallow. Skin clammy.
"She's out cold," he said, voice rough. "Burns are bad. Shock, maybe worse."
Arden knelt, checked her pupils, felt her pulse. "She's tough. But we need to get fluids in her and clean those burns before infection sets." He looked up. "You?"
"Fine." Rolien peeled off the half-finished chest plate—it had cracked along one seam from the climb. Useless now. He tossed it aside. "Estate's half rubble. Workshop's gone. Luke won't salvage anything worth a damn."
Arden's eyes narrowed. "You sure?"
"I set the nullifiers myself. Anything that could be reverse-engineered is slag or dust. He'll dig for days and find nothing but scrap and questions."
A long silence while the medic worked on Lyra—cleaning burns, wrapping them in salve-soaked cloth.
Arden finally spoke, low. "You didn't go after him."
"No point." Rolien stared at the rain beyond the mill's broken door. "He's scratched up at best. Probably hiding under a table screaming for his mommy while the house comes down. Let him live with it. Let him wonder who did it and why they didn't finish him."
He looked down at Lyra. Her chest rose and fell—slow, steady now.
"She's alive," he said, mostly to himself. "That's enough for tonight."
Arden put a hand on his shoulder—flesh meeting metal. "Get some rest, nephew. We'll move her at first light. Somewhere safe."
Rolien didn't answer. He just sat beside her, mask off now, rain dripping from his hair, watching her breathe.
For the first time in six years, he let himself feel the ache without pushing it away.
She was here.
She was breathing.
And whatever came next, he wasn't facing it alone anymore.
The mill smelled of wet rot and old grain, the kind of place that hadn't seen a millstone turn in twenty years. Rain hammered the sagging roof in uneven rhythms, dripping through gaps to patter on the straw-strewn floor. A single lantern hung from a rusted hook, throwing long shadows that danced every time someone moved.
Rolien sat with his back against a cracked beam, knees drawn up, Jawbreaker arm resting heavy across them. The blue glow had dimmed to almost nothing; he'd pushed the core too hard tonight. Every joint in the thing ached in sympathy with his own flesh-and-blood shoulder. He kept his eyes on Lyra.
She lay on the blanket pile they'd made, wrapped in every spare cloak Arden could scrounge. The medic—a quiet woman named Seline who'd once stitched Rolien's thigh after a bad fall during training—worked in steady silence. She'd cleaned the burns with something that smelled sharp and herbal, then slathered them with pale green salve that hissed faintly when it touched raw skin. Lyra hadn't stirred once. Her breathing was shallow but even, chest rising under the wool like she was dreaming of somewhere warmer.
Arden crouched nearby, elbows on his knees, watching the same slow rise and fall. His silver hair stuck to his temples in dark streaks. He looked older tonight, lines carved deeper around his mouth.
"She's tougher than both of us put together," he said quietly. Not really to Rolien. More like he needed to hear the words out loud.
Rolien nodded anyway. "Always was."
A long beat passed. The rain kept falling.
Arden rubbed a thumb along the scar on his knuckles—the one he'd earned the day he taught Rolien how to throw a proper punch. "You could've ended Luke. One clean shot. Or just left him choking on his own steam. Nobody would've blamed you."
"I know."
"So why didn't you?"
Rolien stared at the lantern flame until it blurred. "Because killing him tonight would've made it personal. Quick. Clean. He'd be a martyr to his side—poor young duke cut down by the rebel ghost. They'd rally harder. Hunt harder." He swallowed. "I want him alive. I want him to wake up every morning in whatever's left of our house, walk past the rubble, smell the scorched metal, and know that everything he wanted—my secrets, my workshop, my name—he can't have any of it. Not one scrap. I want him to live long enough to understand what losing really feels like."
Arden let out a slow breath. "Cold."
"Practical."
Another silence. Seline finished the last bandage, tied it off with a neat knot, then stood and stretched her back. "She'll pull through. Burns are deep but clean. No fever yet. Give her two days of rest, fluids, maybe some broth when she wakes. She's lost blood, but not enough to kill her." She glanced at Rolien. "You should sleep too. That arm's going to seize up if you don't let the vents cool."
"I'll manage."
She didn't argue. Just gathered her kit and moved to the far corner to give them space.
Arden stood, joints popping. "We can't stay here past dawn. Patrols will sweep this sector by first light. I've got a safe house lined up—old crofter's cabin, fifteen miles north, past the ridge. Small, defensible, no one's used it in years."
Rolien looked up. "You're taking her there?"
"We're taking her there. You included."
Rolien's jaw tightened. "I've got—"
"Blackfort can hold without you for a week. The men know what to do. You've drilled them enough. Right now your place is with her." Arden's voice dropped. "She almost died thinking you were gone forever. Don't make her wake up alone."
The words landed like a fist to the sternum.
Rolien looked back at Lyra. Her face was slack in sleep, but even unconscious she looked stubborn—chin set the way it used to when he tried to skip lessons to tinker. He remembered her dragging him to the kitchen at three in the morning because he'd forgotten to eat again, setting a bowl of congee in front of him and saying, "Brains need fuel, idiot boy. Eat or I'll feed you myself."
He rubbed his human hand over his face. Felt the grit, the dried rain, the faint smear of her blood that had transferred earlier.
"Yeah," he said at last. "Okay."
Arden clapped him once on the shoulder—firm, brief. "Good. I'll wake you before we move."
He walked off to check the perimeter, boots crunching straw.
Rolien stayed where he was. The lantern flame guttered. Shadows slid across Lyra's bandaged arms.
He reached out slowly, hesitated, then brushed a strand of silver hair off her forehead with his flesh fingers. Her skin felt too cool.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. So quiet even the rain almost drowned it. "For all of it. For disappearing. For letting them get to you. For… everything after."
She didn't answer. Of course she didn't.
But her fingers twitched—just a little—against the blanket.
Rolien closed his eyes. Let his head tip back against the beam. Exhaustion rolled in like fog off the river, heavy and inevitable.
For the first time in six days he let himself stop moving.
Just for a minute.
Just until dawn.
Outside, the storm kept raging. Inside the mill, two broken people breathed in the same small circle of light—one awake and hurting, one asleep and healing—and for tonight, at least, that was enough.
Meanwhile back at the former Grey estate few hours earlier....
Luke Arcadia stood in the middle of what used to be the library, coughing into the crook of his elbow. The air tasted like scorched paper and hot metal. Lantern light flickered across shelves that had been ripped open like gutted fish—books torn, spines broken, pages drifting in the draft from the shattered windows. His rapier still hung loose in his hand, point down, forgotten.
He'd come in here expecting to find the boy's secrets laid bare. Instead he'd walked into a trap that smelled like steam and spite.
The first warning had been the hiss. Low at first, almost friendly, like a kettle left too long on the stove. Then the fog rolled in—thick, white, burning. It clawed at his eyes, filled his lungs with fire. He'd screamed—actually screamed, the sound ripping out of him before he could stop it. His men had howled beside him, clawing at their faces, swords clattering useless to the floor.
And through the haze, a shape. Tall. Masked. Blue eyes glowing cold behind tinted lenses. The White Wraith. No—not just the Wraith. Something in the way it moved, the precise economy of violence, the familiar tilt of the shoulders when it grabbed him by the doublet and slammed him against the wall.
Rolien.
The name had lodged in Luke's throat like a bone. He'd stared into those glowing slits and known. Six years of hate, of being second-best, of watching the magicless runt outshine everyone without even trying—and there he was. Alive. Stronger. Wearing armor made from their own house's scraps.
Luke had tried to speak, to spit something clever, something that would hurt. But the steam had burned his tongue raw. All that came out was a wheeze.
Then the boy was gone—vanished into the fog like smoke. Seconds later the world came apart.
The explosions weren't loud at first. More like deep, chewing coughs. One after another. The workshop core detonated in a bloom of white fire that ate through stone and steel alike. Beams cracked overhead. Plaster rained down. A section of the east wall buckled inward with a groan that shook Luke's teeth.
He'd thrown himself flat behind an overturned table as the ceiling came down in chunks. Dust choked him. Heat rolled over his back like a living thing. When the worst of it passed he crawled out, ears ringing, doublet torn, face streaked with soot and blood from a dozen small cuts.
The library was a ruin. Half the ceiling gone. Books burning in slow, sullen piles. His two guards lay crumpled near the doorway—one stirring weakly, the other still. Luke staggered to his feet, rapier scraping the floor.
Outside the broken windows, rain still fell in sheets. Lightning flashed once, turning the night bone-white.
And there—silhouetted against the storm at the edge of the treeline, maybe two hundred yards out—was a figure. Cloak whipping in the wind. Something small and pale cradled against his chest. Lyra. The old bitch was still alive.
Rolien paused for half a heartbeat. Turned just enough that the lightning caught the edge of his mask. Blue lenses flashed like distant stars.
Luke's hand tightened on the hilt until his knuckles popped.
Behind him, boots pounded up the corridor. Reinforcements—six men in Arcadia livery, swords drawn, faces pale under their helms.
"After him!" one shouted, already moving for the shattered window. "He's got the woman—cut him down before he reaches the woods!"
Luke lifted a hand.
"Stop."
The men froze mid-stride. Looked at him like he'd lost his mind.
Luke's voice came out hoarse, scraped raw by smoke and fury. "Don't. Let them be. For now."
He watched Rolien's shape melt into the trees, swallowed by darkness and rain. The boy didn't run. He walked. Steady. Unhurried. Like he knew no one would follow.
Luke's lips pulled back in something that wasn't quite a smile.
"I'll crush him later," he said, almost to himself. The words tasted like blood and promise.
He turned away from the window. His men were staring—confusion, fear, a flicker of something darker. Luke ignored it. He straightened his torn doublet as best he could, wiped soot from his cheek with the back of his hand.
"Send word to Grand Duke Vermorth," he told the nearest sergeant. Voice flat. Calm. The calm of someone who'd just decided how the rest of the game would play out. "Tell him we've found the magicless kid. Alive. And he's the White Wraith."
The sergeant blinked. "Sir… the Grand Duke will want proof. The boy's been dead six years. Everyone says—"
Luke's eyes cut to him. Sharp. Cold.
"Everyone says a lot of things. I saw him. I felt his hand around my throat. That's proof enough." He paused, tasting the next words. "Tell Vermorth the Grey line isn't extinct. It's just wearing a mask now. And if he wants the boy's head—and everything the little bastard built—then he'd better send real soldiers. Not the parade-ground trash we've been stuck with."
He looked back once more at the empty treeline. Rain blurred everything beyond twenty paces.
Rolien was out there. Carrying the woman who'd raised him. Carrying secrets Luke still hadn't pried loose.
But not for long.
Luke turned back into the ruined house. Smoke curled around his boots like obedient dogs.
"Get this mess cleaned up," he said to no one in particular. "And find me a dry room. I have letters to write."
To be continued…