After leaving the training hall, Soren did not head straight back to the clubroom.
His feet just… moved.
Across stone paths he had walked a hundred times already, past lamp posts that flickered to life one by one as the sky darkened, through patches of autumn air that bit lightly at his cheeks and fingers.
His hands stayed in his cloak pockets, shoulders loose, face blank.
It was the same expressionless mask he had used in front of Morcant.
Somewhere along the way, he had forgotten to take it off.
The campus felt different tonight, not because the buildings had changed or the layout had shifted, but because every time his gaze brushed past a window or doorway, he felt that same prickle at the back of his neck.
Envy.
Hostility.
A pressure that wasn't loud enough to be called danger, yet was persistent enough to be exhausting.
He ignored it and focused on the small, hard shape in his pocket instead.
The seed.
His fingers rolled it back and forth, the motion grounding, repetitive, something to do with his hands so his thoughts didn't eat him alive.
'Even if I got everyone involved, I'd still be fucked.'
His pace slowed.
Soren tilted his head up and looked at the sky.
The moon floated between thin clouds, pale and distant, and the contrast made his mind feel even louder by comparison.
It wasn't the kind of loud that came from panic, not exactly, but the grinding noise of thoughts overlapping, each one feeding the next.
Morcant was too big a target.
Too high up.
Too protected.
On paper he was "only" a bishop of the Lunar Cult, but that rank didn't match his strength at all.
If the position of Archbishop of Envy hadn't already been filled, Soren was certain Morcant would've claimed it by now without even trying.
On the surface, Morcant was a high-ranking officer in Fialova's army and a noble, a man whose status and battlefield achievements the country publicly acknowledged.
That meant connections, reputation, and trust.
You couldn't just walk up to someone like that and say, "He's secretly part of a chaos cult that uses [Dark Energy] to mess with people's heads."
Even if you were right, you would sound insane.
Comparatively, Soren was nothing.
An illegitimate child of the Arden family, barely acknowledged, pushed around between engagement talks and political deals like a piece of unwanted luggage.
The family that should've been his support was actively trying to pawn him off for connections, and the academy, which should've been neutral ground, was now starting to feel like a place that wanted him to fail just to prove its own assumptions correct.
On top of that, his reputation here had never been stellar.
At best, it had been strange.
At worst, outright bad.
And now, thanks to Morcant's little game, it was worse than ever.
[Dark Energy] couldn't create emotions out of nowhere.
It could only amplify what was already there.
That meant the envy in the student body hadn't appeared overnight; it had been sitting under the surface for a while, waiting for someone to grab it and point it in a direction.
Jealousy over his sudden growth.
Suspicion because of his relics.
Rumours about his engagement to Esper.
Whispers about the "weird" way he fought.
Envy over his appearance.
Resentment toward the way he seemed to collect high-status people around him without even trying.
Morcant had just twisted the knife.
Soren clicked his tongue softly.
Honestly, a small part of him wanted to run.
If he could just disappear from Morcant's sight for a month or two… go somewhere outside the field of view of that bishop's amusement… then eventually the story would correct itself.
Morcant would get bored and turn his attention somewhere else, and Alex would take the role he was meant to take in the original game.
That was what the "game" had shown, at least.
"But I don't know if it'll work out…" Soren muttered, the words dissolving into the cold air.
Morcant's actions already didn't match the script.
In the original, Alex had been the one forced into isolation.
The envy event was his problem, his growth point, the thing that carved him into a sturdier hero.
Now, before the story had even reached that stage, Morcant had chosen Soren instead.
That made him an anomaly.
An unpredictable one.
Soren didn't like that.
He didn't like not knowing where the next hit would come from, and he especially didn't like how quickly Morcant was moving, as if he had decided Soren's breaking point was worth speeding toward.
He was still thinking all of this when a familiar scent reached him.
Soft and fresh, a mixture of herbs and faint florals he had grown used to over the past months, the kind of scent that normally meant safety. His head lifted automatically.
"Lilly?" he called.
A small figure walking ahead on the path stiffened.
"Ah! …Ren?"
Lilliana flinched at the sound of his voice but turned around anyway.
Under the moonlight, her hair looked like a soft pink shadow, and her eyes were darker than usual, not in colour, but in the way they held less light.
Soren slowed as he approached, watching her carefully.
Up close, he noticed it immediately.
Her expression.
It wasn't fear.
It wasn't anger.
It was… off.
Her usual gentle gaze had something tight around the edges, like she was forcing herself to stand still rather than stepping back.
"Are you okay…?" he asked, tone careful, because the wrong tone could make people retreat, and right now he couldn't afford more distance.
Lilliana nodded quickly, lips stretching into a strained smile that didn't reach her eyes.
"Yes… Sorry, I've just been feeling strange," she said, voice small.
Her eyes slid away from his, dropping to the ground.
Her shoulders were slightly hunched, and her fingers fidgeted with the edge of her sleeve, worrying the fabric like it was the only thing keeping her anchored.
It was subtle.
But to Soren, who had leaned on that quiet presence for months, it felt like a wall.
As if she were trying to withdraw from him.
To escape the conversation as soon as possible.
His chest tightened.
On the outside, his expression didn't change much.
On the inside, something in him dulled, like a light being covered.
"…You should get some rest then," he said.
"Mmm…"
She nodded again.
Silence fell between them.
Usually it wouldn't have been uncomfortable.
He and Lilliana had spent plenty of time together without saying much, simply existing side by side in small spaces, but now the quiet felt brittle, as if one wrong breath could crack it.
"…I should go then," she murmured.
She didn't wait for his reply.
Lilliana dipped her head once, almost like a bow, then walked past him with quick, short steps, as if staying still beside him even a second longer would suffocate her.
The distance between them grew fast, and the sound of her footsteps seemed louder than it should've been on the stone path.
Soren watched her go.
He didn't call out to stop her.
He wanted to.
He wanted to ask, directly, what was wrong.
He wanted to reach out and grab her sleeve like she so often did to him when she needed reassurance, when she wanted him to slow down and stay.
Instead, he stayed in place, hands hanging limp at his sides, mind blanking out for a moment.
His heart twisted.
Then a thought flickered across his mind like static.
"…"
Soren's eye twitched.
He watched Lilliana's retreating back, then slowly let the world sharpen.
His right eye turned translucent as [Chimera] stirred, colours and lines layering over reality.
He didn't breathe for a second.
And then he saw it.
Around Lilliana's shoulders and upper back, the air was stained.
The purple haze he had seen in the cafeteria and around other students was present there too, but thicker, more concentrated.
It clung tighter to her than it did to most people, swirling slowly, almost lazily, in time with her steps, like smoke that had decided she was a convenient place to settle.
It wasn't subtle.
It wasn't accidental.
Soren gritted his teeth and shut his eye, letting it return to normal.
Rage coiled low in his chest, cold and tight, the kind that didn't explode but instead compressed until it became something dangerous.
He stood there under the moonlight for several seconds, forcing himself to inhale like breathing was a choice and not an instinct.
Then he lifted a hand and wiped his face, dragging his palm down from his forehead to his chin as if he could wipe away the sick feeling in his stomach along with the last remnants of heat.
His head tilted back, and he stared at the moon.
"…He's moving too quickly," Soren muttered.
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
The next day, Soren lay sprawled on the clubroom sofa, one arm tossed over his eyes.
He had come back a while ago, but he hadn't bothered turning on any extra lights.
The faint illumination from the window and the low glow from Lev's room next door were enough, painting the Sweetheart Society's living room in soft shadows.
It had become his home.
Cushions slightly out of place.
Books stacked on the coffee table.
A blanket half-folded at one end of the couch, as if someone had used it and then abandoned the idea of tidying.
It should have relaxed him.
It didn't.
He pressed his forearm harder over his face, as if pressure could erase the images repeating in his mind.
The way Lilliana had tried to escape him last night.
The way she avoided his eyes this morning during class.
"This sucks…" he muttered.
He could still hear her voice.
— Sorry, I've just been feeling strange.
The words hadn't been cold, but the distance behind them had been, and today had only confirmed that distance.
Every time their eyes almost met, she looked away first.
Every time a conversation might've naturally started, she clung to her duties as a professor instead of speaking to him directly.
Whenever it looked like the two of them might be left alone together, she conveniently found a reason to leave.
None of it was like her.
Of course, Soren knew Lilliana had her own insecurities, her own hesitations.
She wasn't fearless, she wasn't the type to bulldoze through awkwardness like Esper did, but avoiding him like that?
That wasn't normal.
He knew why.
He had seen the hazy purple clinging to her.
Morcant had started tainting those closest to him.
And he hadn't held back.
"It's only been a few days…" Soren said, choking out a weak laugh that sounded more tired than amused. "He's already going all out just to screw with me."
It wasn't only Lilliana.
Felix hadn't spoken to him since the day of the duel, and that silence had weight.
Felix could be flippant and irritating, but he wasn't the type to avoid someone without reason, which meant either he had been dragged into something or he was choosing distance, and Soren didn't know which answer felt worse.
Amelia, too, had changed.
She hadn't stopped talking to him.
She still sat beside him in training.
She still leaned on him when she was tired.
She still said things like, "Hurry up, I'm bored," in her usual blunt tone.
But the way she looked at him had shifted.
Whenever he laughed with someone else, whenever someone came too close, whenever Esper looped her arm around his like it was the most natural thing in the world, Amelia's expression twisted for a second, sharp and annoyed, then flattened again as if she had caught herself showing something she didn't want anyone to see.
There was something else in her eyes now.
Soren swallowed.
And then there was Esper.
He shifted his arm and stared up at the ceiling, counting the tiny cracks in the plaster just to keep himself from replaying the memory too hard.
Of everyone, she might have been the most affected.
Not long ago, she had been one of the people closest to him, laughter easy, teasing constant, fingers poking his cheek, voice bright enough to cut through whatever mood the room was stuck in.
Her presence had been unrestrained, like she didn't care what anyone thought because she had decided what she thought already.
Today, when their gazes met in the hallway, her lips had pressed into a thin line.
Her eyes had narrowed, full of irritation.
When they passed each other near the library, she had muttered, "You're awfully popular now, Cutie," in a tone that was more bitter than amused, then headed straight for someone else's table without waiting for his reply.
He replayed that look in his mind and exhaled, long and tired.
"How the hell did Alex deal with this for so long?" he asked the empty room.
In the original story, Alex had endured this for weeks, sometimes longer, depending on how things played out.
The envy, the rumours, the slow grinding isolation, like sandpaper dragged over skin until everything was raw.
The difference was that Alex had a kind of stubbornness Soren didn't.
And more importantly, Alex hadn't known what was happening.
Soren did.
He knew exactly who was pulling the strings, which meant every look and whisper didn't just hurt, it meant something, and that made it harder to ignore.
If there was a single silver lining, it was this:
"A few of them are still normal."
He could tell at a glance.
There was no purple haze clinging to them, no tugging bitterness when they looked at him.
Olivia still fussed over injuries, still scolded him whenever he trained too hard.
Alex still acted like usual, grinning at him during training, making ridiculous suggestions like, "Let's spar again, I want to test something," and cracking jokes at his expense without any venom.
Louise, too, was untouched.
Her care was too strong, her conviction too rigid.
Any negative feeling she might've been able to develop was drowned out by fierce protectiveness, and [Dark Energy] didn't stand a chance against that kind of devotion.
And then there was Lev.
Soren's gaze drifted toward the strip of light under the door to the next room.
Lev's workshop.
For some reason, Lev was another person who had come out unaffected.
Not because he was morally superior, not because he had special resistance, but because he simply had no reason to envy Soren.
Lev didn't care that Soren had relics.
Didn't care that he'd beaten Alex.
Didn't care that he was engaged to Esper.
He cared about materials.
Equipment.
Workspaces.
"Really," Soren murmured, the thought sour, "does that mean everyone else was jealous of me this entire time?"
It sounded absurd.
He had almost nothing.
No stable home.
No loving family.
No clear place in this world that wholly belonged to him.
The only things he could truly call his own were his abilities and the relationships he had slowly, painfully built since transmigrating, and now Morcant was taking a knife to those too, not by cutting directly, but by making people look at Soren through the worst possible lens.
"Seriously, this fucking Lunar Cult is the worst," Soren said, voice low.
Because of them, he was seeing sides of his friends he would have preferred never to see, envy they probably hadn't even realised they were harbouring.
He didn't blame them.
He blamed the cult.
Soren leaned forward and sat up, elbows on his knees, hands pressed to his face.
Outside the club building, among students in his year, upperclassmen, and even a portion of the professors, the general perception of him had plummeted from "strange but tolerable" to "suspicious, arrogant bastard" in the span of days.
Every time he stepped outside, he felt it.
Eyes following him.
Whispers trailing behind him.
Snide comments slipped just loud enough for him to hear, like people wanted the satisfaction of watching him react.
It was exhausting.
"But what can I even do?" he muttered.
He had no proof.
No solid evidence.
No way to point at Morcant and say, "He's the one twisting everything," without sounding like he had finally lost his mind.
He couldn't beat Morcant in a straight fight, that had been clear from a single [Shockwave].
He couldn't appeal to authority without something concrete.
So.
What should he do?
He had asked himself that question over and over, during class, while walking the paths, lying awake at night on the clubroom sofa.
Every answer he came up with was shot down by his own thoughts.
'What if it doesn't work?'
'What if I just make things worse?'
'What if I drag everyone down with me again?'
His anxiety clung to every possibility like mould, rotting it from the inside out, and he hated that he could recognise the pattern so clearly and still feel trapped inside it.
He had almost let his friends die during the final exam because of it.
He had spent weeks of his summer break shattered because of it.
He had wasted most of his first year here hovering between fear and avoidance because of it.
All because he let his mind control him.
He was tired.
Tired of panicking.
Tired of freezing.
Tired of watching his own thoughts yank him back like chains.
He wanted to move.
Freely.
Recklessly, if he had to.
Without his brain dragging him down at every step.
But it wasn't that simple.
A faint purplish-silver glow began to gather at his fingertips.
Soren blinked and looked down at his hand.
Divine power.
It flickered softly, pooling into his palm as if his body already knew what he wanted to do before he had consciously decided.
He hesitated for half a breath.
Then began to speak.
His voice was quiet in the empty room, but the words were clear.
"Quiet thy storm, still thy heart. Peace shall find thee. 「Mental Care」."
It was an incantation he had heard many times.
Olivia's voice usually carried it, gentle and steady, like she was wrapping someone in a blanket.
A soft light flared in his palm and spread outward, sinking into his skin.
Warmth flooded his body.
Not the burning heat of combat buffs or the sharp sting of healing magic, but something slower, deeper, like a hand smoothing wrinkles out of fabric one careful stroke at a time.
His thoughts, which had been buzzing and spiralling in all directions, began to settle.
It felt like thick curtains were being drawn across the inside of his mind, and on the other side of those curtains, the noise was still there, but contained.
His breathing evened out.
The weight in his chest eased.
The grinding sensation at the back of his skull quieted.
He let out a deep breath he hadn't realised he had been holding.
"…Hahhh."
The light slowly faded from his hand.
He stared at his palm, fingers flexing experimentally, then a strange thought drifted through his mind, honest and a little unsettling.
"It's sort of addicting…" he admitted.
The sudden lightness.
The peace.
The sense that, for once, he was actually in control of both his body and his mind.
It was intoxicating.
His shoulders relaxed.
His vision felt sharper, not in the [Chimera] sense, but in the simple way of being present rather than trapped in his own head.
"Dangerous," he muttered, though a faint smile tugged at his lips.
He knew he shouldn't overuse an incantation like this.
If he relied on it too much, he might stop trying to face the root of his issues and end up hiding behind a curtain of divine power instead of dealing with anything properly.
But right now, just this once, he needed it.
He needed to think without that constant dragging weight.
Soren leaned back against the sofa, eyes half-open, letting the last traces of warmth fade.
A thought surfaced.
A strange one.
No, an idea.
Maybe it was the sudden clarity.
Maybe it was the fact that he was freshly sick of his own hesitation.
Maybe it was simply that the curtain inside his mind had given him space to consider a path he normally refused to look at.
His mind, freed from its usual restraints, drifted in a direction it would usually avoid.
He followed it.
Step by step.
His breath hitched.
"…Wait."
He traced the path of the idea again, more carefully this time, and the pieces slotted together in a way they shouldn't have, like a puzzle snapping into place with a click that made his stomach drop.
If he did this…
If he really went through with it…
He pictured the fallout.
The risk.
The danger.
The way it would make him a much bigger target.
He stayed like that for several minutes, unmoving, letting the idea run laps around his head like it was testing the walls for weak points.
Was it stupid?
Yes.
Was it reckless?
Definitely.
A hollow laugh escaped him.
"…Fuck."
Soren let out a small laugh, covering his face with one hand as a grin he couldn't quite control pulled at his lips, equal parts disbelief and grim excitement.
"I must be insane."
————「❤︎」————