The room was quiet.
Only the faint ticking of a clock and the occasional gust of wind brushing against the windows broke the silence, the kind of silence that didn't feel peaceful so much as measured, as if even the air had learned to hold its breath.
Two men sat opposite one another at a low table.
One was a young man dressed in a neat academy uniform, white hair tied loosely back, crimson eyes half-lidded in what could almost be mistaken for boredom.
His posture was relaxed, shoulders down, hands resting casually, but the stillness around him didn't read as comfort.
It read as restraint.
The other was a man in his thirties, wearing a black officer's coat and a gentle smile that made him look like any other well-meaning knight-commander entrusted with students' safety.
His features were soft in a way that made it easy to trust him at first glance, and he carried himself with polished ease, the effortless confidence of someone who had never needed to rush.
Both of them radiated a refined, noble air.
From the outside, through a keyhole or a cracked door, it would have looked like nothing more than a comfortable meeting between a first-year and a high-ranking officer.
Inside the room, however, the air felt thin.
Soren met the older man's gaze evenly.
Morcant Calder smiled back at him, elbows resting lightly on the armrests of his chair, fingers relaxed as if he were here for tea and pleasant conversation rather than whatever game he had decided to play today.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
The clock ticked.
The wind whispered.
Soren didn't move, and the fact that he didn't fidget at all was the only obvious sign that something was wrong, because Soren always fidgeted when he had nothing to do with his hands.
Eventually, Morcant broke the silence with an amused exhale, as if he had been waiting for Soren to blink first and was mildly disappointed.
"So," Morcant said at last, eyes narrowing slightly in interest, "let me get this straight."
His tone stayed light, polite, almost friendly.
But the way his gaze pinned Soren didn't match the softness of his smile.
"You're trying to threaten me?"
Soren's lips twitched.
His smile faltered for a brief second, then settled again, deliberate, practised, the kind of expression you wore when you didn't want the person across from you to see how much you were holding back.
"Isn't that obvious?" he replied calmly, voice smooth enough to sound casual.
Then he tilted his head slightly, as if he were correcting a small mistake in a conversation.
"Morcant Calder… bishop of the Lunar Cult?"
Silence.
The clock ticked twice.
Then Morcant burst into laughter.
"Hahaha! You're more fun than I thought!"
He laughed so hard his shoulders shook, one hand rising to wipe at the corner of his eye as if he had heard something genuinely delightful.
The sound filled the room, warm and bright, the laugh of a man who was enjoying himself.
Soren watched him quietly, expression unchanged.
'…He didn't even try to deny it,' Soren thought, eyes narrowing behind his polite smile, the realisation settling into him with an odd, cold clarity.
When Morcant finally calmed down, he leaned back in his chair again, smile still pleasant, as if nothing had happened, as if Soren hadn't just spoken a name that should have gotten him killed.
"So, what do you say," Soren said, voice almost conversational now. "Do you agree?"
••✦ ♡ ✦•••
A few days earlier.
Back before Soren had walked into Morcant's office with that insane plan sitting calmly in his chest.
At that time, he was still doing what he always did.
Walking.
From building to building.
From classroom to clubroom.
From one patch of hostile atmosphere to the next.
"Routine," he muttered once under his breath, though nothing about it felt routine anymore.
The glares hadn't lessened.
If anything, they had sharpened.
Every time he stepped into a corridor, it felt like walking through a storm of invisible needles, the kind you couldn't swat away because they weren't physical, they were just attention, just resentment pointed at him until it became a weight.
Snatches of conversation reached his ears whether he wanted them or not, carried by echoing hallways and people who didn't bother lowering their voices anymore.
— That's the guy who beat the hero, right?
— I heard it was all relics. Doesn't that mean he cheated?
— How is he engaged to Esper of all people…?
He kept his head angled slightly downward, eyes focused on the floor just ahead of him.
He didn't meet anyone's gaze if he could help it, because meeting it made it worse, made the hostility feel personal instead of ambient.
'It's so tiring,' Soren thought as he walked.
Just a week ago, he had been excited about the clubroom, talking about furniture and choosing decorations, thinking about how stupidly domestic it felt to argue about cushions and tea sets when the world was full of monsters and gods.
The memory already felt distant.
Now, the moment he stepped into the Sweetheart Society's space, the air dropped a few degrees.
No one greeted him.
No one lounged on the sofas.
No one popped their head out into the living room to ask what he wanted to eat, or complained about the lack of snacks, or dragged him into some pointless conversation just to kill time.
They just… stopped coming.
He had expected people to ignore him outside.
He hadn't expected them to abandon the one place he had actually started to think of as his.
The emptiness there felt worse than the whispers in the hallway, because the whispers were strangers, but the clubroom had been his proof that he could build something stable.
Now it was just a room again.
When he saw Lilliana in the hallway one morning, hugging a stack of books to her chest, his body moved on its own before his brain could decide whether it was a good idea.
"Lilly," he called, picking up his pace. "Those look heavy, do you—"
She froze.
For one second, her eyes met his.
Then her pupils shrank, and she turned abruptly on her heel, arms tightening around the books as if they were a shield.
"…Sorry," she mumbled, almost too quiet to hear, before walking quickly in the opposite direction, face pale.
The hand not holding the books pressed briefly against her chest, fingers trembling as though she were fighting nausea.
She didn't look angry at him.
She looked disgusted with herself.
Soren stood there for a moment, staring at her retreating back, his hand half-raised as if he could still take some of the weight from her arms if he tried hard enough.
It dropped uselessly back to his side.
He forced out a laugh that didn't sound like one.
"Right. Of course."
Amelia wasn't much better.
She didn't avoid him as blatantly as Lilliana did, but there was a distant alertness in her eyes whenever she looked at him from afar, like she was watching something she didn't understand and didn't like.
She still sat near him sometimes, still moved in the same spaces, but the ease wasn't there.
And he noticed.
He couldn't not notice.
Only Alex, Olivia, Lev, and Louise spoke to him like normal.
Even then, their normal felt strained around the edges.
Alex had to push through layers of social pressure just to sit beside him at lunch.
His shoulders stayed tense in a way they hadn't before, and his easy grin felt a little forced whenever he glanced at the surrounding tables, as if he was bracing for someone to pick a fight just for the spectacle.
Olivia wore a tired expression more often.
Her gentleness toward Soren never faded, but there was a new hardness in her eyes whenever she heard other students whispering.
More than once, her hand tightened around her fork hard enough to bend the metal slightly, the quiet violence of restraint.
Lev just watched everything with flat eyes, lips turned down in a permanent scowl.
Their relationship was contractual, and Lev made no effort to pretend otherwise.
As long as Soren paid him and gave him a workspace, Lev did his part.
Anything beyond that was extra, and lately it felt like the whole academy was trying to punish Soren for receiving any "extra" at all.
Louise was the only one who hadn't changed.
She spoke to him in the same soft tone, scolded him when he did something reckless, and occasionally ruffled his hair in an awkward attempt at comfort that made her look more like a confused older sister than a terrifying upperclassman.
But she was two years older, busy with her own classes and responsibilities.
And Soren… didn't want to burden her.
So they didn't meet often.
And then there was Felix.
Soren couldn't forget that first look after the duel, because forgetting wasn't something he could do even if he begged his brain for mercy.
Felix's eyes had locked onto him from across the courtyard, pupils hard, lips pulled back in something ugly, like Soren had done something unforgivable without even realising it.
Every time their gazes met after that, Felix's expression twisted as though Soren had stolen something precious from him and then stepped on it just to prove he could.
He made no effort to hide it.
That glare was suffocating in its hatred.
"As if I did any of this on purpose," Soren muttered once, pressing his tongue against the inside of his cheek until the faint sting kept him grounded.
Esper was worse in some ways.
She didn't bother hiding her hostility at all.
The moment she spotted him in the classroom, her face scrunched as if she had smelled something foul.
"Tch…" she clicked her tongue and looked away, heading straight to her seat without so much as a greeting.
The gossip that followed made his stomach twist.
— Did you really get engaged to that guy, Essy?
— Ugh, don't bring it up. I don't know what I was thinking.
— You should just call it off. It's embarrassing.
Soren forced himself to breathe.
In.
Out.
His throat felt tight, and not from panic, but from the exhausting effort of swallowing everything down and smiling anyway.
His engagement to Esper had spread through the first years like a virus.
The core story was more or less true, but every time it was retold, the details warped further.
Sometimes, he was the scheming illegitimate son forcing her hand.
Sometimes, she was the poor victim stuck with a creepy mage.
Sometimes, it was a political ploy.
Sometimes, it was a love triangle.
None of it mattered.
The result was the same: a thousand little cuts in the shape of voices and looks, a steady erosion of every space he had tried to claim as safe.
Soren clicked his tongue and raised his canteen, gulping down lukewarm water just to push the nausea back down.
A faint purplish-silver glow rose in his palm, hidden by the edge of the desk.
He lowered his head and whispered under his breath, keeping his voice soft enough that even if someone heard the words, they wouldn't connect them to anything.
"Quiet thy storm, still thy heart. Peace shall find thee. 「Mental Care」."
Warmth spread through his chest.
The noise around him softened, as if someone had dropped a wall of cotton between him and the world.
The whispers became distant.
The glares lost their sting.
The twisting in his stomach eased.
He exhaled slowly.
'…That's better.'
He didn't notice that what felt like clarity was actually a gentle numbness, that the spell was pressing down on his exhaustion and fear like a blanket slapped over a cracked window.
He still flinched sometimes when footsteps came too close behind him.
His hands still trembled from time to time.
His heart still spiked without warning.
He woke up each morning already tired, as if he had been running all night in his dreams.
None of it registered as strange.
He told himself he was "fine."
He told himself he was "acting normal."
He wasn't.
But he didn't see it.
He closed his eyes and leaned back against his chair, letting the last warmth of the spell linger like an aftertaste.
The plan he had come up with in the clubroom a few nights ago surfaced again.
At first, he had dismissed it the moment it formed, because the moment it formed his brain immediately screamed "no," reflexive and terrified.
Then it came back.
Again.
And again.
Until one night, he stopped pushing it away.
Instead of putting up with the situation until Morcant "got bored" and moved on, instead of trying to gather evidence no one would believe, Soren decided on a different route.
A route he never would've taken in the first semester.
A route that went against all of his habits.
To walk straight into the monster's den and put a knife to his throat.
To blackmail Morcant Calder.
Bishop of Envy.
— …Fuck, I must be insane.
Those had been the words he had said when he first thought of it.
He still agreed.
On paper, it was suicidal.
Morcant could defeat him with one half-hearted swipe of his sword; Soren had confirmed that with his own eyes.
Soren was alone.
The people closest to him were drifting away one by one, and the ones he still had either lacked the status, the strength, or the position to support him openly.
He had no proof.
No robe.
No documents.
No testimony.
Nothing concrete to shove in Dorothy's face and say, "Look. This is it."
And Morcant was careful.
He left no evidence of his affiliation with the Lunar Cult.
That was standard practice for bishops and above.
So, logically, the plan made no sense.
But whenever Soren thought of the other options, his mind spat them out like poison.
Hide and wait?
Hope things "fixed themselves" later?
He had done enough of that.
He thought of the way Lilliana had turned away.
Of Felix's glare.
Of Esper's voice, irritated and bitter, saying she didn't know what she had been thinking.
The idea solidified.
The source of the problem was Morcant.
Remove the source, and the rest would collapse.
No more whispers.
No more glares.
No more friends turning into strangers.
He no longer cared about the original story.
He just wanted to breathe.
By the end of the week, the decision sat in his chest like a stone.
So on that last day, he walked through the halls not with dread, but with a strange, steady calm, the purplish-silver warmth of divine power humming under his skin like a drug, dulling the sharp edges of his own fear.
He passed Felix on the stairs.
Felix's shoulder slammed into his as they crossed.
Soren's body tilted, a brief stumble that could've become more if he hadn't caught himself.
Felix didn't apologise.
He clicked his tongue and walked away, muttering something under his breath.
Soren didn't bother reacting.
He passed Amelia near the training fields.
She paused mid-step when she saw him, ears twitching, and for a moment it looked like she wanted to say something, like her body remembered closeness even if something else inside her resisted it.
Then she turned away, jaw clenched, and walked in the opposite direction.
He passed Lilliana in the halls later.
The moment she noticed him, her shoulders jumped.
Her eyes dropped.
Her fingers dug into her own wrist until her knuckles went white.
She didn't run this time.
She just stayed very still until he walked past, as if afraid that if she moved, something inside her would snap.
Soren clicked his tongue lightly.
'Whatever. It'll all be fixed soon.'
He didn't let himself dwell.
His steps quickened.
He had already made up his mind.
He was going to Morcant's office.
————「❤︎」————