## CHAPTER 47: Who Are You?
Lyra Valerius and Casel arrived at the edge of the clearing just as the dust began to settle. Elisa, sliding down from Casel's broad back, stumbled slightly, her eyes widening as she took in the scene.
Alium stood nearby, a statue of wounded pride and genuine shock. His teammates remained plastered to the oak tree, their muffled cries for help echoing through the woods. But the group's collective gaze was instantly pulled toward the center of the path.
Caspian stood over the carcass of the Cerebral Stalker. He was motionless, his back to them, the tip of his blade pointed toward the dirt. A thick, viscous blue fluid trailed down the length of the steel, dripping rhythmically onto the grass. He seemed unaware of their presence, lost in a cold, silent void that felt fundamentally different from the Commoner student they had joked with only hours before.
"Uh... man. We missed it," Casel said, his voice dropping to a low whistle. The sheer scale of the monster Caspian had brought down was enough to sour even Casel's stomach.
While Casel and Elisa rushed toward the tree to peel Alium's teammates out of their sticky prison, Lyra walked forward. Her boots crunched on the dry leaves, but Caspian didn't turn. She stopped ten feet away, her eyes raking over the monster's corpse—the precise, lethal puncture wounds in the central eye cluster were a testament to a level of skill that shouldn't exist in a student.
"Caspian," she called softly.
"Yes," he responded. His voice was flat, devoid of the warmth she was used to. He didn't look at her; his gaze remained fixed on the dead creature as if he were waiting for it to reveal a secret.
"You did this? Alone?" Lyra asked, stopping beside him. She stared at the monster's heavy exoskeleton, imagining the sheer force required to penetrate it with a standard-issue sword.
"Yeah," Caspian replied simply.
Lyra shifted her gaze from the corpse to him. Up close, the aura around him was suffocating. The suspicion she had been harboring since the bee encounter finally boiled over.
"Who are you?" Lyra asked. It wasn't a casual question. It was a whisper, sharp and laden with the weight of the Valerius name. "Truly. Who are you, Caspian?"
The question hit Caspian like a physical blow. He felt the familiar, agonizing struggle twist in his gut. Part of him—the part that valued the rare, fragile bond of this team—wanted to confess. He wanted to drop the mask and let them see the truth. But the memory of his Master's warnings echoed in his mind like a tolling bell.
"If it is leaked that a Grand is hiding within Althelgard Academia... the destruction would be absolute."
If the Valerius family, or any of the high nobility found out, Lyra wouldn't just be an heiress anymore; she would be a target. They would use her to get to him. They would burn the school to the ground to possess him or destroy him. He was protecting her by lying, but he could see in her sharp, intelligent eyes that his silence was becoming a wall between them.
---
High above them, perched on a branch that should have been too thin to support a human, a figure in a black cloak watched. Her hood was pulled low, but her lips were visible, curved into a sharp, dissatisfied frown. She looked down at the scene with a cold, analytical detachment.
In her gloved hand, she held a marble-sized sphere of deep blue glass that seemed to pulse with a dark, inner tide. She toyed with it for a moment before letting it slip between her fingers. As it fell, her lips shifted from a frown into a wide, devilish grin.
***
Caspian was still torn, the words "I am..." caught in his throat like a jagged stone. He took a deep breath, ready to speak, when his internal alarm went off.
Something had dropped onto the Stalker's corpse. It was silent, nearly invisible—a tiny blue bead that vanished into the monster's hard exoskeleton.
"I'm..." Caspian started, his voice wavering. "I... I'm th..."
His words were cut short. His eyes snapped back to the monster. Beneath the blue fluids and the torn armor, a black, oily discoloration was spreading through the creature's tissues at an impossible speed. The dead legs of the insect began to twitch—not a final spasm, but a rhythmic, purposeful movement.
The monster began to lift itself from the ground.
"What the—" Lyra's words were severed by Caspian's hand grabbing her arm.
"Back! Now!" he commanded. They both leaped backward, clearing twenty feet in a single bound as the monster lurched to its feet.
Elisa and Casel, who had just finished ripping the last of Alium's friends from the tree, froze in terror. Alium, still on one knee, stared up in horror as the creature he had just seen die began to rise like a puppet on invisible strings.
"This is not good," Casel said, his voice dropping an octave as he moved to shield Elisa. "It's coming back to life!"
Lyra reacted instantly, her hands weaving a complex pattern in the air. "**REGNOC!**" A massive, glowing red incantation square snapped into existence before her, humming with the heat of a thousand suns. "**CRIMSON—**"
"Don't!" Caspian barked, stepping in front of her and pushing her hands down.
"Wait, what?" she exclaimed, her eyes flashing with anger. "It's healing! I have to strike before it fully recovers!"
"Trust me," Caspian said, his voice absolute. "Don't fire."
Lyra hesitated. She looked at the incantation, then at the calm, terrifying certainty in Caspian's eyes. She had come to see him as an expert in the brutal mechanics of the forest. With a frustrated huff, she let the mana dissipate, and the square vanished.
*"Good. She listened,"* Caspian thought. He watched as the gaping hole he had made in the creature's head began to seal, the flesh knitting together with a sickening, wet sound.
"Why couldn't I shoot?" Lyra asked, her voice tight with adrenaline.
Caspian didn't look back as he explained, his eyes tracking every movement of the creature. "There are times during a forced revival where if the source doesn't provide enough energy for the process, the spell becomes a void. It absorbs everything in its surroundings to complete the circuit."
He narrowed his eyes. "If you had hit it with a fire attack, the quantity of energy in your Crimson spell wouldn't have destroyed it. It would have absorbed the heat, strengthened its core, and likely changed its elemental type to Fire. You would have turned the monster into a god."
Lyra's eyes widened. The technical depth of his knowledge was staggering. "How does he know these things?" she asked herself.
"Wait... if a monster can be revived like this, can humans...?" She shook the thought away, filing it for later.
Caspian reached for the hilt of his sword. The sound of the steel sliding against the sheath was like a death knell.
"The revival process is complete," Caspian said.
The Cerebral Stalker was no longer blue. Its entire body had turned a matte, obsidian black. Jagged red lines, pulsing like veins of molten lava, traced the edges of its exoskeleton. Its eyes had shifted from yellow to a deep, murderous crimson. It looked less like an insect and more like a demon carved from the heart of a volcano.
"It's back... but it looks different," Lyra whispered, stepping back.
Caspian didn't reply. His face had gone completely dull, a void of expression that chilled Lyra to the bone. She had never seen this side of him—the side that didn't just fight, but existed only for the kill.
"Then..." Caspian paused, his hand tightening on the grip.
"I'll just have to kill it again."