"Isn't life short?" Softly, Isaac spoke.
Irine looked at him as if caught off guard. What he said was meant to build up his point, but she couldn't see how they would connect.
"We are, in a blink of an eye, eighteen in age. We are now legally adults, before we even realized."
He remembered how there were all sorts of values thrown in his ways. Things that he must upkeep. The rules that he must follow.
They were suffocating, but he nevertheless tried for years. None of them worked. He was branded a failure.
"I used to be miserable. It wasn't because others called me a failure, but because I let that affect me—because I tried to live up to others' expectations. Because I cared about their attention."
Then, he was disowned. There no longer existed a reason for him to care.
He still wondered up to this day, how he would've responded should he not awakened [The Prism]. [Condensation] alone serves barely any value as the society suggests.
"You asked how I managed to deal with those stares," he said. "I simply learned to ignore them. Waste of my time, I concluded."
He looked at the garden's far wall—the stone that still showed the faint mark of the fracture from that night, barely visible in the early morning light.
"People won't stop looking at you. They will judge you. Whisper about you from your back. The eyes will always remain. So, treat them as nothing but a background noise."
"…Background noise."
"No different from the sound of rain. Or the sound of the wind breezing."
Irine was quiet for a while, before she murmured, "that sounds lonely."
"Or, if you interpret it the other way around," he reasoned, "you gain the freedom."
She didn't respond visibly, simply listening silently. Isaac deduced that it perhaps wasn't the first time that she heard a similar statement as his. After all, in his perspective, his advice was rather generic.
The garden maintained its silence. The sun was slowly rising and lightening up the garden's morning. The black and white and grey environment began to restore its colors, signalling the start of the day.
"…Freedom," she said to herself.
She looked at the garden. At the morning light.
"I am not sure if I could do the same as you." Her voice was rather timid and honest. "I want to not care. But it's getting me. I dealt with rumors for years. They never disappear. They get worse over time."
She was no longer the rigid, bored woman who looked unapproachable to others. Isaac learned that the image she held upfront was her façade to protect herself in the public.
"Why do you think it's getting you?" He decided to be direct about it.
"…Because something entered my mind." Irine's delicate face stiffened, as if she was reluctant to even think about it.
She hesitated. Isaac didn't ask. He remained silent, giving her the time. Should she not want to talk about it, that was fine as well.
"My family and relatives are merchants. They go by the name of 'Ironway Merchants.' Wealthy, but limited in many ways by the status of commoner." At last, she spoke, having made up her mind. "To all merchants who operate within the Aetherion Kingdom, there is a certain route, a land that they must pass through to remain competitive. It is known as the Caldwin Pass, owned by the lesser noble house of Caldwin."
Isaac paused. This was directly relevant to what he just heard from Blanc.
House Caldwin.
"Dead childless."
Irine looked at him, surprised by his awareness.
"Yes." She nodded. Then grimaced. "House Zephyr and House Terra have been fighting over the ownership of the land, because of how the Caldwin Pass is geographically located between their territories."
Now, this was no longer about the attention. Perhaps, she didn't need his advice at all.
What she needed was someone to talk, to let her honest thoughts out.
"…Conveniently, this ongoing feud is relevant to Aldric Zephyr, who has been… trying to earn my attention for weeks. And Donaston Terra, who may have marked me as his enemy."
He looked at her.
"You believe they will go that far, to an extent of threatening you with your family."
"Not believe. It's a destined future." She smiled, bitterly. "I dealt with many nobles throughout years. If there is one thing I learned, it's that the majority of them abuse their powers."
That, Isaac agreed. As someone who was a part of the noble society—regardless of how shunned he was—he witnessed and experiences such tendencies.
Irine made a light laughter. At this point, her usual self—stoic, bored, unaware, and oblivious—those weren't present in her.
"…Thank you."
The exhaustion in her eyes had alleviated. Still there, but not as much.
"It looks like my advice was irrelevant to your situation."
"It wasn't the advice I was looking for, and you know that." She shook her head, "I needed someone to talk to. There was no one but you."
He didn't know what to say. He thought about her skill, D-rank: [Glamour]. It provided barely any combat value. Her status was that of commoner. She had wealth, but it meant nothing in front of those nobles who were the winners of the "skill gacha."
He realized that there wasn't much that she could do. Regardless of how she act, the situation likely won't change. He saw what she meant when she said the "destined future."
"…I won't ask you to help." After her laugh ended, she asked, rather timidly, "Will you just… let me talk to you again."
Isaac still remembered his first day in the Golden Repose, when she stepped in to help him deal with Camilla.
"Talk to me anytime," he said.
…
The sixteen higher class students assembled at the training ground at the morning bell with their newly issued weapons.
Isaac was no different, having arrived with the knife at his waist. Finding his position near the ground's eastern edge, he scanned the assembled group.
Lyra stood at the edge, away from the conversations that some were exchanging. She was patiently standing, waiting for the class to start. She was exactly the one whom he was looking for.
He walked toward her.
The training ground's ambient noise registered his movement before most students did. The specific quality of Isaac Nameless walking with a direction produced the reaction it always produced — the lateral awareness of people who had learned that when he moved with intention, it was worth noting.
He reached her.
Lyra looked up from the notebook with the expression of someone who had seen this coming and had decided to wait for it rather than prompt it.
"After school," Isaac said. "There's something I need to share with you."
Lyra looked at him for a moment. The fractional brightness of [Clairvoyance] at its lowest expenditure moved across her eyes.
"I know what it concerns," she said. "Yes."
Isaac nodded once. He turned to walk back to his position.
The training ground had produced the specific silence of sixteen students who had heard an exchange they hadn't expected and were running calculations about what it meant. The configuration — Isaac Nameless approaching Lyra Aetherion with a direction and receiving a single-word confirmation — didn't fit any existing framework most of them had for how those two interacted.
Vesper, from his position, had the expression of someone filing a data point with particular care.
Magnus opened his mouth.
"Don't," Vesper said, without looking at him.
Magnus closed it.
Maren Solke arrived at the training ground's platform with her ledger and the flat efficiency of someone who had a session to run and was not interested in the ambient social processing her students were engaged in.
"Weapon groups," she said. "Separate."
…
Sam's morning session ran in the way Isaac had expected.
The four of them—Isaac, Vesper, Randal, and Kaif—were assembled at the designated training space. Sam was already present, looking awake and sharp.
"Hold your knives. Watch."
Sam, holding a knife of his own, slowly made three simple sequences. Three simple swings that appeared, rather lackluster for an instructor.
"If you focused on the movement of my knife, that's a mistake. Knife is light. It offers the greatest freedom. There is no specific sequence for arms. The sequence that I am referring to, in this case, is the footwork."
He demonstrated the sequence once more, but with his knife swinging differently.
"Even footwork is irrelevant, because the greatest strength that knife offers is its unpredictability, and once you are read, its strength greatly diminishes. You can say that a good knife practitioner is someone who knows how to catch an enemy off guard. Then, stab. Job done."
His gaze swept across the four students.
"Any question?"
None of them had one.
"Well then, give it a try."
On the flat ground with wooden targets ahead, they began. The session's first hour was footwork and grip.
"Hold it like you mean it but not like you're afraid of losing it," Sam said to Kaif, who was gripping the handle with too much tension. "Remember that your primary weapon is not a knife, but your own skill."
Kaif adjusted, although the tension was still there. Sam watched the adjustment. Nodded once, knowing that it was impossible to fix it in one go.
Randal's footwork was impressive. He was clearly adept in physical work, as evidenced by his fit and muscular stature. He did say before that he the learned the knife before. Sam made an appreciative nod before moving on.
Vesper, who said he briefly tried a knife before, appeared more familiar than what his words suggested, moving cleanly in a way that made Sam raise an eyebrow.
"You are doing fine. I recall you saying 'briefly' yesterday."
"I've dealt with many types of weapons," replied Vesper, his motion not stopping, "my understanding of knife is mediocre. I am simply working based on my understanding of weapons in general, not the knife."
Sam rubbed his chin, humming. "Well… if that's how you think it is."
"…I wasn't expecting that."
"No point trying to argue with a perfectionist."
Vesper looked at Sam flatly. By then, Sam already moved to Isaac.
Isaac, in the world of his own, was slowly repeating the footwork that Sam demonstrated. Once he witnessed the demonstration, he perfectly remembered the specific details, thanks to [The Prism]. Analyzed their rationale. Intellectually, he understood.
The issue was that his body had not yet absorbed it.
"You know how to be efficient," commented Sam after inspecting his practice," and you learn awfully fast. Your footwork—it's slow, but has all the details that I didn't explicitly reveal."
He paused. Then, mumbled the name, "Isaac Nameless… that was your name."
"Yes," replied Isaac, as he continued the footwork, sweating.
"The way you hold the knife is efficient as well. You somehow have all this understanding without someone having taught you." Sam then said bitterly touching his shoulder that was missing an arm," We call someone like you a genius."
That's when Isaac paused.
"Genius?"
He felt like laughing.
"I've been called a failure for a decade. You know what the surname of 'Nameless' suggests."
Sam frowned, wondering if he heard it right, "What?"
Sam was a commoner. He appears to have served in the military for a long period of time as well. It was natural that he didn't hear much about Isaac.
"And you won against Silas Fulgur. I heard about that."
"Yes, I did."
"And—" Sam stopped, having realized that they were going out of the topic. "Whatever, forget it." His eyes swept over Isaac's form. "Your approach is right. Get the fundamentals of the footwork down. If you know how to do it, you can modify or apply it in a real-life scenario."
Stepping back, he allowed the four of them to practice. He walked around. Corrected any significant error that he found. He spoke, without stopping them.
"You'll graduate at the end of fourth year," he said, as he walked. "When you do, your Overload Risk will be stabilized to what the Academy's training has brought it to. You'll receive your deployment assignment within two months of graduation." He looked across all four of them. "The Kingdom is in a dire condition. Unless the war resolves by then, you will be required to do ten years of mandatory service. Active deployment. War zone for the case of the higher class."
The training space received this.
"There are, of course, exceptions. You can be dismissed for special circumstances," Sam continued. "Such as injury. Strategic reassignment. Or death." He said dully. "The Academy is mandatory. The military service is mandatory. What you do between those two mandatory things—that's the only part that was ever yours to decide."
"However," Randal spoke, "they come with rewards. Glories."
"Yes, they certainly do. If they didn't, the Kingdom's system would have long collapsed."
The others didn't react.
"I've seen students who figured that commoner class was safer," Sam said. "Supply chain. Infrastructure. Further from the front line." He shook his head. "War doesn't make that distinction when it reaches your location. It just reaches it. Numerous supply chains have been struck by their assaults over the years."
He let that sit for a moment.
"What higher class gives you is autonomy. You're not infantry. You're not a supply unit. You're not assigned a position and told to hold it. You're given the authority to think and act on behalf of the Kingdom. You are their one of the greatest cards at disposal."
He stepped back.
"Always remember what exists out there. Now, we move on."
…
The session concluded at the end of the day, far past the lunch time. There was no break.
Isaac walked with the sheathed knife at his side, physically exhausted.
However, his day wasn't over yet. There was a matter he had to address before the day concluded.
He stopped in front of the entrance into the Academy's grand library—which was arguably the biggest library in the entire kingdom.
Two guards were standing by the door. They checked his status. Recorded his entry on their ledger. Opened the door.
He walked in.
The inside was as enormous as expected. Large and wide bookshelves were placed in an orderly manner. Books neatly sat in their respective positions, just as orderly.
Although the library was filled with many students of varying years, the place was silent. This wasn't because they were disciplined, but because there were librarians who held the authority to expel them should a misconduct arise.
Isaac walked through the sound of papers flipping. Through the round tables that were occupied.
It wasn't difficult to locate Lyra, who was seated by the corner, on a couch, with barely any room behind her. After all, wherever she went, the eyes followed. He simply had to trace the eyes of the others.
She was reading a book. Upon inspection of its cover, he deduced its title: Interpretation and Realistic Depiction of the Life of the First King, Remian Aetherion.
"Isaac, you are here," she whispered upon his approach. Placed a marker between her current pages, closed the book, and brought out her notebook. Took out a pen.
He took a seat adjacent to her, on the same couch, for it was the only available seat nearby.
She flipped her notebook open. Wrote, we will communicate by writing. My [Clairvoyance] will serve as a monitor.
She passed her notebook and pen to him.
He inspected the items for a second. Then, began writing.
Donaston Terra is one of the assaulters during the night. Two others are his associates.
Underneath, Isaac wrote the thorough explanation of how he reached such conclusion—starting from Donaston Terra's second skill of C-rank: [Smog Expulsion] to his reaction to the letter that was written as a bait.
Lyra read this. Her face was pale.
"I…" She closed the notebook. Clasped her hand over her forehead as if she was undergoing a minor headache.
"I need to go."
Standing up, she stormed out of the library. It wasn't like her usual self.
Isaac watched her go.