Things didn't improve after that; they only steadily declined.
Only a single day had passed since Soren had sighed in the bathroom and told himself things might get better.
Now he sat in the cafeteria at his usual table, staring blankly at Esper as if she had just told him the sky had turned green and nobody else had noticed.
"What the hell…"
He had come here expecting, at worst, noise and chatter and maybe a few curious looks.
Lunch was supposed to be the one place where people were too busy eating and talking to commit to staring at him like he was a problem that needed solving.
Instead, he got this.
Esper rested her cheek in her palm, lips pursed.
Her usual playful tone had been muted into something closer to irritation, not aimed at him, but at the situation, at the academy, at whatever invisible hand had decided to make her morning annoying.
She had pulled him aside earlier, before they even sat down.
— Cutie? Uhm… I'm not sure how to say this, but I think something's going on.
— What now?
— You see… This morning, a group of my friends came up to me and told me that I should stop talking to you. I'm not going to, obviously, but this has been happening all morning…
Soren hadn't known how to answer her back then.
He still didn't know now.
He leaned back in his chair and exhaled, dragging the breath out like it could scrape some of the tension off his ribs.
"None of it makes sense…" he said, shaking his head, then glanced at the empty seats around them. "Where's everyone else?"
"No clue. I haven't seen them since yesterday," Esper replied, eyes narrowing slightly as she looked past his shoulder, like she was trying to spot familiar faces in the crowd and kept failing.
Ordinarily, their whole group would drift together by lunchtime.
It wasn't a fixed rule, just routine, the kind that formed naturally when people liked each other and didn't have to think about it.
Some days someone was busy, someone else arrived late, but there was always a cluster of familiar faces around this table, voices overlapping, trays clattering, Amelia stealing food off his plate without asking while Esper teased him about being a pushover.
Today, it felt hollow.
Only four of them sat there now: Soren, Esper, Amelia, and Lev.
Lev was picking at his food with a bored expression, posture loose, eyes half-lidded, pretending not to listen while clearly listening to everything.
Amelia sat beside Soren, eating silently, yellow eyes scanning the room in slow sweeps, as if she had decided the cafeteria was a battlefield and she was assessing threats with the same calm she used before a fight.
And surrounding them, from every side, were students.
Different years.
Different classes.
All of them at their own tables.
All of them staring at Soren's table.
Or, more specifically, at him.
"And with the stares come the whispers," Lev muttered under his breath, finally breaking his silence.
He wasn't wrong.
The cafeteria wasn't quiet by any means, but certain voices always slipped through, carried by the acoustics of stone and high ceilings, by the way people leaned together and forgot their volume when they thought they were among allies.
— Did you hear? He cheated in his duel against the Hero.
— I heard he's fooling around with other women while being engaged.
— How is that bastard engaged to Esper?
— Must be nice, getting carried by relics and connections.
— First a club with royalty, now this…
It wasn't just one rumour.
It was everything at once.
Every achievement, every relationship, twisted slightly and thrown back at him, wrapped in resentment like a gift nobody wanted to admit they had prepared.
Soren's fork pressed a little too hard into the food on his plate.
"I'm seriously going to lose it," he said, voice low, the words controlled but not calm.
"I'd tell you not to listen, but that seems impossible," Esper replied with a bitter laugh. "They're not even trying to be subtle."
"The hell did you do, President?" Lev added lazily, like he was complaining about a mild inconvenience. "Besides existing in a way that pisses everyone off, I mean."
"Trust me, I wish I knew…" Soren muttered, bringing a hand up to his forehead and rubbing between his brows as if he could physically push the annoyance out.
Amelia glanced sideways at him, then back at the room.
Her expression was flat, but the tip of her tail had started to twitch behind her chair, visible only to Soren at this angle, a small, repetitive movement that always meant the same thing.
She was irritated.
And she was holding back.
Something felt off.
Soren wasn't stupid.
His reputation had never been perfect; he knew that.
He had been the subject of rumours since the first week of school, he had gotten glares and whispers about his rank, his engagement, his connection to Lilliana, his friendship with Amelia, and he had learned to shrug it off because the academy was full of bored teenagers with too much ambition and too little emotional maturity.
But never like this.
This wasn't just dislike.
This wasn't a simple spike in gossip because he had beaten Alex.
The atmosphere felt wrong.
Too thick.
Too concentrated.
Like all the vague irritation and jealousy that had always existed under the surface had suddenly been dragged up and forced into focus overnight, sharpened into something deliberate.
He tapped the table with his finger, once, twice, as if the tiny sound could anchor his thoughts.
They didn't anchor.
They spun.
'This isn't normal.'
It wasn't just the students.
Even the professors had been giving him strange looks this morning, some staring a little too long in practical classes, others asking one too many questions about his growth over the summer, the frequency of his breakthroughs.
They hadn't accused him of anything, not directly.
They didn't have to.
He could feel the same emotion there, buried deeper under professionalism, but still present like a sour aftertaste.
'If it was just the duel, I'd get annoyance and suspicion, but this…'
It was all the same flavour.
Envy.
Everyone who glared at him seemed jealous of something, and that "something" changed depending on who was looking.
His win over Alex.
His strength.
His looks.
His engagement to Esper.
His friendships with people of high status.
The clubroom they had been granted.
The way professors treated him like a puzzle instead of a joke even though he was in Class F.
None of it was new information.
None of it should have suddenly exploded into this.
Soren lowered his head slightly, letting his hair shadow his eyes, and the words slipped out before he could stop them.
"No way…"
He felt the stares more keenly now that he had recognised what they were.
For a second, he considered just walking out, because leaving would be easy, and staying meant grinding his teeth until his jaw ached.
But running wouldn't change anything.
He closed his eyes, took in a slow breath, and opened them again.
His right eye trembled.
The crimson gradually faded, turning pale, then translucent as [Chimera] stirred and his vision shifted.
Threads of mana bled into view, overlaying reality like faint lines of light.
The cafeteria stayed the same, tables and chairs, trays and students, steam rising from food, sunlight slanting through tall windows, but on top of it all a second layer appeared in his right field of vision.
Lines of mana.
Faint colours clinging to people like mist, thick around some, thin around others, a messy, living map of energy and emotion.
And threaded through all of it was something else.
A dull, almost oily purple haze.
Thin wisps drifted through the air, coiling lazily around people's shoulders, pooling at the edges of tables, seeping into corners like smoke that refused to disperse.
It was so faint that even with [Chimera] active he had to narrow his eyes, focusing hard, making sure he wasn't imagining patterns because he desperately wanted an explanation.
"…Shit," Soren muttered under his breath.
Esper blinked at him, confused by the sudden shift in his expression, but he didn't explain.
His throat had gone tight, and not from stress, but because what he was seeing wasn't mana.
It wasn't divine power either.
It was [Dark Energy].
Only visible when he pushed his perception this far, but once he locked onto it there was no mistaking it.
The same filthy residue he had seen during the final exam.
The same colour that had clung to the Lunar Cult and demons in the game, the same wrongness that always looked out of place in a world built on mana and divine power.
And now it was draped all over the cafeteria.
It didn't control anyone, not directly.
But it nudged, poked, amplified the worst parts of what people already felt, like someone had taken the volume dial on their petty emotions and turned it up until they couldn't hear anything else.
Soren leaned forward slightly, resting his chin on his hand as he watched the purple haze cling to the students who were glaring at him the hardest.
It curled around them like a second skin, thin but persistent, and where it touched, the envy in their eyes looked sharper.
It made sense now.
Someone was feeding it.
'So that's it…'
The moment he acknowledged it, everything slotted into place with a sickening neatness.
There was only one person in Stellaris Academy who would be using [Dark Energy] like this at this point in the story, only one man who moved on whims and treated human lives like pieces on a board, shifting them around just to see what happened.
Morcant Calder.
Commander of the Fialovan knight contingent at the academy.
And a bishop of the Lunar Cult.
Soren closed his eyes briefly and rubbed at them with his thumb and forefinger, as if he could massage away the irritation, or the headache that threatened to form behind his eye, or the simple, exhausting fact that Morcant had noticed him.
'Why?'
He couldn't understand it.
Why now?
Why him?
There was no logical benefit in targeting Soren like this, no political gain, no strategic necessity.
All Morcant was doing was chipping away at his mood and his relationships, turning the academy into a place that felt hostile to walk through.
It was petty.
Wasteful.
Pointless.
Which, unfortunately, fit Morcant perfectly.
A memory surfaced, uninvited and clear, because Soren couldn't forget even if he wanted to.
The opening ceremony.
Thousands of students.
A massive stage.
Faculty and guests lined up like a display of status and power.
Soren had been half-bored, half-tense, scanning faces out of habit, cataloguing details because that's what he did when he didn't know what else to do with his mind.
And then, for a brief second, their gazes had met.
A man with gentle features and soft hair, a relaxed smile, and eyes that crinkled at the corners.
Morcant had looked at him, just him, and smiled.
Back then, Soren had written it off as coincidence, the way you did when you didn't want to believe the story was already reaching for you.
He grimaced now.
Apparently, it hadn't been.
It seemed he had been marked.
Somewhere between then and now, Morcant had decided that Soren was interesting enough to play with.
'Great,' Soren thought dryly. 'Just what I needed.'
Being marked by Morcant meant one thing: his life would steadily become more tedious.
The bishop's actions were never clean or simple.
He didn't kick in doors or march armies down streets, he didn't seek straight lines, he didn't chase obvious outcomes.
He dug into feelings.
Into doubts.
Into petty emotions that accumulated over time until they became something ugly.
In the original story, sometimes Morcant had taken Alex as his toy.
In that route, he pushed the student body's envy and resentment toward the Hero to the extreme, isolating Alex from everyone around him.
Friends stopped trusting him.
Classmates avoided him.
Rumours followed him like a shadow that thickened until it became a cage.
That was, according to Morcant's own words, his "test."
No grand ideology.
No elaborate plan.
Just curiosity.
He wanted to see what Alex would do when the world turned sour.
That was his point in coming to Stellaris Academy.
That was the point of every member of the Lunar Cult.
Chaos.
'They were always such a pain in the ass in the game…'
Soren had hated them as enemies.
Not because they were compelling, not because they had some tragic backstory you could sympathise with, but because they didn't.
They weren't villains you could understand or argue with.
They didn't want to build anything.
They just broke things, created chaos for fun, and moved on when it stopped being entertaining.
All the way until they were finally cornered and defeated in Alex's third year.
Soren exhaled slowly and let his vision return to normal, the translucence fading from his eye until his reflection in the glass of water on the table was just red again.
The cafeteria's second layer vanished, but the knowledge didn't.
He propped his cheek on his hand and stared at the table, voice quiet, almost flat with fatigue.
"What do I do now?"
Lev glanced sideways at him, eyes sharper than his posture suggested.
"Can you even do anything, President?"
"…Maybe?" Soren tilted his head, not fully committing, because committing meant taking responsibility for a problem he didn't want.
In the game, Alex hadn't been able to do anything for a long time.
He had endured it for weeks, sometimes months, depending on the route and how the random events rolled.
Morcant never moved on a clear schedule, he just kept applying pressure until he got bored or until his target snapped in an interesting way.
Alex had no information then.
No proof.
No status to act on his suspicions.
He had been treated like a paranoid hero until Morcant finally overplayed his hand.
Soren drummed his fingers lightly on the table.
'I think I'd die if I had to put up with this for months.'
Even now, with lunch almost over, the gazes around him hadn't let up.
He could feel them even without looking, heavy and sour, clinging to his skin like grime.
If this continued endlessly, he wasn't sure what would crack first, his patience, his mood, or his ability to pretend he didn't care.
"Well, whatever. I'll figure it out," Soren said finally, standing up with his tray.
"Are you going, Cutie?" Esper asked, her lips still pursed, her eyes flicking toward the students watching him like she wanted to bite someone.
"Yeah. It's too tiring here."
"Mmm, well, take care of yourself," she said, and the softness in her voice made the frustration underneath it feel more obvious.
"Thanks, Essy."
He turned to leave, then paused and looked back at the three of them.
Esper, still irritated but steady.
Lev, pretending he didn't care but clearly paying attention now.
Amelia, silent, tail twitching, ears slightly angled forward, gaze following Soren's face like she was trying to read what he wasn't saying.
Their faces, at least, were still normal.
He intended to keep it that way.
"You three," Soren said, voice low enough that it wouldn't carry. "Avoid Morcant Calder."
Esper blinked.
Lev's eyes sharpened.
Amelia's ears twitched almost imperceptibly.
Before any of them could ask what he meant, Soren turned and walked out of the cafeteria, the whispers following him all the way to the door like something alive.
————「❤︎」————