CHAPTER 41: Threads
Voss was still in the seventh training ground when Lucius found him.
The other students had left. The room was empty except for the instructor, who was reviewing notes at the far end of the floor with the focused quiet of someone who didn't need company and didn't miss it.
He looked up when Lucius entered.
He didn't look surprised.
"Van Venus."
Lucius crossed the floor at an unhurried pace and stopped a few meters away.
"Jax Rowan," he said. "B-Class. He requested access to the heavy density chambers for additional training after hours. His instructor declined."
Voss set his notes down.
"And you're here because?"
"Because the request was reasonable and the decline wasn't," Lucius said.
Voss looked at him for a long moment. His expression didn't change but something moved behind his eyes — the particular attention of someone recalibrating slightly.
"Rowan isn't your student," Voss said. "He isn't even in your class."
"No," Lucius said.
Voss picked his notes back up. Turned a page.
"I'll speak to the B-Class coordinator," he said. "No guarantees."
"Understood."
Lucius turned to leave.
"Van Venus."
He stopped.
Voss didn't look up from his notes.
"The student you're going out of your way for," he said. "Make sure he's worth it."
Lucius's expression didn't change.
"He is," he said simply.
He walked out.
---
The B-Class training session ran until the third bell of the afternoon.
Lucius knew the schedule. He had memorized every class timetable in the academy during his first week — not because he needed it immediately but because useful information had no expiry date.
He took the corridor that ran along the upper level of the northern wing.
A maintenance passage — narrow, poorly lit, used primarily by academy staff to move between sections without crossing the main halls.
It ran above the B-Class training ground with a series of narrow ventilation gaps in the floor that looked down into the space below.
He stopped at the second gap.
Below, the session was still running. Pairs sparring. An instructor calling corrections from the side. The usual controlled noise of people being pushed past their comfortable limits.
Lucius scanned the room.
He found Cael in four seconds.
Not because Cael stood out visually. He didn't. Medium height. Unremarkable build. Dark hair, kept short. He was sparring with a student twice his size — someone whose mana output was visible even from above, flickering around their arms in uneven bursts.
Cael moved simply. No flourish. No wasted motion.
His opponent threw a heavy overhead strike.
Cael stepped to the side. Let it pass. One short precise movement and his opponent's balance broke. The larger student hit the floor with a sound that echoed off the stone walls.
Four seconds. Exactly as Jax had described.
Lucius watched him reset to starting position.
That was when his Sensitivity caught it.
He kept his eyes on Cael and let his awareness expand slowly — not aggressively, just open. Reading the ambient mana in the room the way he had learned to read rooms, passages, and corridors over the past weeks.
Everyone in the room had a mana signature. Most were uneven, jagged at the edges — students still learning to control what they had. A few were smoother. The instructor's was the cleanest, the settled steadiness of someone who had been working with their ability for years.
Cael's was almost invisible.
Not weak. Not absent.
Invisible.
Like something very large sitting perfectly still behind a thin screen, careful not to breathe too loud.
Lucius's eyes narrowed slightly.
He had felt suppressed mana before. Students who hadn't fully awakened, people with low tier Talents running near empty. This wasn't that. Suppressed mana had a particular quality — a flatness, like a candle burning low.
What Cael was doing was different.
It was active. Deliberate. The kind of control that required more effort than simply using the ability openly. He was expending energy to appear ordinary.
Below, Cael glanced up.
Not toward the ventilation gap. Not toward Lucius specifically.
Just — up. A brief, casual movement. Eyes passing across the ceiling without stopping.
Lucius didn't move.
Cael looked back down and accepted his next sparring partner without expression.
Lucius straightened slowly. Stepped back from the gap. Moved along the maintenance corridor at the same unhurried pace he had arrived with.
His mind was already sorting through what he had observed.
The suppression was too refined for someone his age. The movement during the spar was too economical — not the efficiency of someone well trained but the efficiency of someone who had been fighting for a very long time and had stripped everything unnecessary away years ago.
And that brief glance upward.
He hadn't looked at the gap. But he had looked in the right direction.
He felt something, Lucius thought. He just couldn't locate it.
Which meant Cael's Sensitivity was high enough to register a presence through a floor of stone and a maintenance corridor. But not high enough to pinpoint it precisely.
Lucius filed that carefully.
Cael was not a student from a distant kingdom dealing with administrative delays.
Or rather — that might be true on paper.
But it wasn't the whole truth.
He reached the end of the maintenance corridor and descended the narrow stairwell back to the main level. The academy moved normally around him — students between sessions, instructors crossing the central courtyard, the general rhythm of an institution that believed itself safe.
Lucius walked through it without hurry.
Two threads pulled tighter today.
Jax would have his chamber access by tomorrow. That was handled.
And Cael — whoever he actually was, whatever he was actually doing in B-Class — was now on a very short list of things that required answers.
He turned toward the eastern wing.
There was still two hours before the evening meal. Enough time to extend his mapping of the academy's lower maintenance level — the section beneath the foundations that connected to the older parts of the building.
The Darkside used routes that avoided attention.
So did Lucius.
---
To Be Continued…..